Governments are constructing social policy based on misrepresentations and stereotypes about poor people and welfare claimants, rather than by reference to the structural inequalities that affect everyone, argues Kate Donald
The push to police the way that women dress continues across Africa on the pretext that it causes sexual harassment and violence against women. What really underlies this censorship of women’s expression? asks Bibi Bakare-Yusuf
It’s not an individualist but a collective feminism that we need, one that measures success not by how high a woman can climb, but by the condition in which most women remain, says Shereen Essof
More than a hundred women's seminaries have been set up by the Iranian state since the 1979 revolution. Yet the number of women candidates standing in next month's parliamentary election is the lowest for twenty years, Mirjam Künkler explores why this may be so
With so many families in Britain struggling in the face of the Coalition's austerity measures, wage inequalities between men and women seem low down on almost everyone's agenda. But as increasing numbers of households depend on women’s wages, equal pay for equal work is a more pertinent demand tha
Sylvia Walby’s ‘The Future of Feminism’ makes the case for gender mainstreaming as a successful mechanism for integrating feminist principles into institutions. But doing so runs the risk of subordinating feminist goals to other agendas, a contradiction that Walby never entirely resolves.
Feminism needs to recapture the state from the neoliberal project to which it is in hock in order to make it deliver for women. It must guard against atomisation and recover its transformative aspirations to shape the new social order that is hovering on the horizon, says Rahila Gupta
Writing has come to mean place and presence, and presence gives us power to force those who don't acknowledge our existence to admit that they can hear the sound of our breath, says the young Egyptian writer Zainab Magdy
With only nine women senators representing 54 million women in Nigeria, international support should focus on the broader political cycle and the numerous obstacles to women's political participation, rather than on the election moment, says Lisa Denney
Feminist experience and input into the theory and practice of nonviolence has much to offer a new generation of grassroots Occupy activists. Rebecca Johnson reflects on the lessons of the successful Greenham Common protest
Storytelling, in itself, will neither eliminate sexual violence nor entirely heal PTSD. But it can help shift the conversation to a narrative that avoids shaming survivors, carving out a space for understanding.
The dominant HIV intervention response assumes that HIV transmission only occurs in contexts of danger and violation. It is time to take into account young women’s actual sexual experiences and recognise that sex is also a positive and joyous experience, however unsettling this may be for the HIV
