Free Republic

The Government has confirmed a referendum on gender equality will be held later this year. Proposals for constitutional amendments are to be published by the end of June, with the referendum due to take place in November. The Government’s intention to hold this referendum follows recommendations made by the Citizens’ Assembly on Gender Equality two years ago. The recommended amendments to Articles 40 and 41 of the Constitution included the “women in the home” reference—be deleted and replaced. It was also recommended that the Constitution should refer explicitly to gender equality and non-discrimination. …

Gates Foundation donated at least $319 million to fund media projects at hundreds of organizations including CNN, NBC, NPR, PBS and The Atlantic, raising questions about those news outlets’ ability to report objectively on Gates and his work. Up until his recent messy divorce, Bill Gates enjoyed something of a free pass in corporate media. Generally presented as a kindly nerd who wants to save the world, the Microsoft co-founder was even unironically christened “Saint Bill” by The Guardian. While other billionaires’ media empires are relatively well known, the extent to which Gates’s cash underwrites the modern media landscape is...

oe Biden and Kamala Harris have no clue how to deal with the many crises their administration has created, exacerbated, or failed to get under control, but as of last Friday they now have a 42-page gender strategy. Gender strategy? Yes, the “National Strategy on Gender Equity and Equality,” the first-ever such declaration because in the near-quarter millennium of this country’s existence no one ever thought we needed one, lays out a list of goals and aspirations and solutions to alleged problems whose existence keeps being asserted without evidence. “Health care,” for instance, is a strange action item to list...

Co-chaired by France and Mexico, UN Women’s Generation Equality Forum in Paris will take place from June 30 to July 2 and feature 100 discussion panels, more than 700 speakers and delegates from 150 countries. The roundtables will revolve around four main topic areas: economic justice, sexual and reproductive rights, gender violence, and how to defend women’s rights. Gary Barker, one of the forum’s panelists and the CEO of the Brazil-based NGO Promundo, which engages men as allies for gender equality, told DW that the binding agreements from the forum would have an impact on people around the world. “For...

The phrase “gender equality” has been removed from the declaration on social issues to be adopted by EU leaders at their social summit in Porto later on Friday (7 May) after Poland and Hungary opposed the expression. The phrase was replaced by a reference to a previous document, the European Pillar of Social Rights, which includes “gender equality”. The latest compromise is part of a trend that has been going in the EU, with mostly Hungary and Poland, sometimes joined by Slovakia, Bulgaria, pushing for “gender equality” to be deleted from different EU texts. The nationalist-conservative governments in Budapest and...

What really predicted fertility, the authors find, are attitudes about work and family.The world’s richest countries typically have the world’s lowest birth rates. The highest-income people in those wealthy countries on average have the smallest family sizes. Those two facts conflict with the broad perception, especially among lawmakers, that Americans aren’t having babies because they’re worried about how expensive kids are. So may the results of a new study out today, which finds that the more career-oriented individuals and wealthy societies become, the more their fertility declines. “Highly work-focused values and social attitudes among both men and women are strongly...

The imbecilic derangement of the so-called “woke” culture warriors is shown perfectly by their politically correct focus on the gender reassignment of a plastic potato. Some say move on, it is just a toy and its maker, Hasbro, is merely trying to rebrand its iconic toy by removing the sexist “Mr.” from in front of “Potato Head” on the toy’s marketing and packaging. I would argue that it is more than that. As a toy, it is a way of reaching, and brainwashiung, our children, of continuing the left’s attack on the nuclear family, of fundamentally transforming society in a...

Dr. Anthony Fauci just announced the Biden administration’s commitment to “advance gender equality at home and around the world.” This is underscored by President Joe Biden’s executive order allowing biological males to compete in girls’ and women’s sports and removing justification for female spaces in schools. We are watching the deliberate deconstruction of biological distinctions before our eyes. But there is much more at stake here than women’s privacy or women’s sports, though those concerns remain vital.

France’s public service ministry has fined the Paris city authorities for employing too many women in senior positions in 2018. The appointments breach a law passed to maintain a gender balance. The city hall has been fined €90,000 ($109,408) for appointing 11 women and 5 men — representing just over 30% — to top posts in 2018. […] According to the 2013 rule, one sex cannot account for more than 60% of nominations to senior positions. It was aimed at getting women better access to top jobs in the civil service. Currently, about 47% of all civil servants in senior...

“No, I totally don’t mind that girls get in for free. It’s only fair with all of the sh-t you have to deal with!” exclaimed a freshman boy while debriefing his night at an NYU fraternity party. I have heard so many variations of this statement from different people across campus, which all boil down to the same concept: it is okay that girls do not have to pay to get in at parties and clubs because it makes up for the gender inequality we face in our day-to-day lives. Frankly, this line of thought is ludicrous. The reason men...

Gender equality is an issue for men, not just women, Chancellor Angela Merkel said in her weekly video podcast published on Saturday. “Because we can only achieve equal participation of women in working life if men are involved with homemaking, support, care and also the upbringing of children,” she said. Merkel stressed that enforcing equality remains a major issue in Germany, noting the gap between working men and women. “Today, 76% of working-age women are employed,” Merkel said. “That is significantly more than a few years ago, but still less than that for men of the same age. It is...

Navy Pelsoi first became Speaker of The House on January 3rd 20 years ago. How many women in American history have had as much or more power as she has had? Has she used it well? Compared with the likes of AOC has she been reasonable? Has Pelosi empowered or constrained the Democrat left?

Last week School District 65, which serves the racially, ethnically, and religiously diverse Evanston and Skokie, Illinois communities, went whole hog on disseminating a controversial ideology to captive audiences of other people’s children who came to school with open minds and hearts into which “progressives” poured poison masquerading as inarguable truth. District 65’s celebration of “LGBTQ+ Equity Week” offers a glimpse into the kind of pernicious indoctrination that the cunningly named “Inclusive Curriculum” bill signed into law by Governor J. B. Pritzker will bring to Illinois school children.

A controversial new law in California, the first of its kind in the U.S., requires publicly traded companies headquartered in the state to include at least one woman on their board of directors by the end of 2019. But are quotas are the best way to bring women’s voices to the table? Legislators in New Jersey have already indicated they think so. Garden State lawmaker Nancy Pinkin (D-NJ) proposed a bill that would require women on state-based corporate boards. The measure has been sent to its first committee for hearing. Colorado, Illinois, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania have also moved the needle...

Annual statistical report from Department of Labor. Men suffered 4,761 of the 5,147 job-related fatalities in 2017 or nearly 93% of the total.

Women filmmakers, activists and actors congregated outside the hub of the Toronto International Film Festival on Saturday in a series of impassioned speeches on gender inequality in the movie industry and the power of female voices to overcome it. The “Share Her Journey Rally,” attended by hundreds on a chilly Toronto morning, followed similar events at earlier film festivals. Ahead of the gathering, Cameron Bailey, co-head of the Toronto Film Festival, signed an inclusivity pledge to achieve gender parity in the festival’s executive ranks and on its board of directors by 2020, a pledge that has been signed other festival...

Celebrities including Oprah Winfrey, Meryl Streep, and Natalie Portman have signed an open letter calling for an end to gender inequality. The stars are among 140 signatories from the entertainment industry, which also include Reese Witherspoon, Ryan Reynolds, Amy Schumer and Thandie Newton, who have shown their support for the campaign, spearheaded by international charity ONE. The letter is addressed to world leaders, who are told they have been put "on notice" to take action to put an end to the inequality, claiming that it leaves 130 million girls without an education and one billion women without access to a...

On Sunday, the German government’s equality commissioner made headlines by suggesting that it was time to make the national anthem less macho. So will erasing the word “fatherland” do the trick? Kristin Rose-Möhring, equality commissioner in the Federal Family Ministry, believes it is high time that Germany changes the wording of its national anthem to make it more gender equal, newspaper Bild am Sonntag reported. The word Vaterland (fatherland) should be replaced by Heimatland (home land) and the word brüderlich (brotherly) should be replaced by couragiert (courageous), she suggested in an internal government letter seen by the tabloid. “Why don’t...

Women bear the heaviest brunt of global warming, and are less empowered to contribute to solutions. A new action plan agreed at the Bonn climate talks aims to reverse this inequality. The women of the Marshall Islands and the Pacific have been fighting colonialism and injustice for a long time. They bore the brunt of the long term effects of nuclear testing, and women leaders like Lijon Eknilang and Darlene Keju-Johnson brought these issues to the international stage. For women, fighting for justice – including climate justice – can be downright dangerous. Last year was one of the deadliest for...

Wolf-whistling and repeatedly asking for a woman’s telephone number could soon be made illegal as part of a French government crackdown on the longtime scourge of street harassment. French and foreign women alike will all have stories of being pestered or harassed as they walked down a street in France. One survey that made headlines revealed that 100 percent of all female respondents said they have experienced being harassed on public transport, with half saying they alter their clothes to avoid it. Now France’s secretary of state for gender equality, Marlène Schiappa, is attempting to address the issue head on...