Women's Views on News |
- Two female tech experts move to LSEG board
- Can ad agencies help women love their bodies?
- Is female foeticide practiced in the UK?
| Two female tech experts move to LSEG board Posted: 23 Jan 2014 07:54 AM PST
The London Stock Exchange Group (LSEG) appointed two leading female tech entrepreneurs to its board last week, which means there are now only two FTSE 100 companies with no women on their boards. The two are Joanna Shields and Sherry Coutu. Shields is currently chief executive of Tech City, the government-backed initiative to help new technology companies. She is changing her role there, and will now be chair. She has over 25 years of experience building global technology businesses, having held senior executive roles at Facebook, AOL and Google. In 2013, she created the UK government backed ‘Future Fifty’ acceleration programme which is to nurture and support high growth businesses in the UK. She also serves as a non-executive director of TalkTalk Telecom Group Plc and as a member of Mayor Boris Johnson’s London Smart Board. Shields told the Independent she would continue to champion the UK's digital industry as chairman of Tech City UK and in her role as business ambassador. Sherry Coutu is on the board of computer firm Raspberry Pi, Artfinder, Cambridge University's finance board, Cambridge Assessment and Cambridge University Press, as well as on advisory boards to Linkedin and Care.com and a number of not-for-profit companies in the technology and education sector. She has more than 20 years of experience leveraging technology to drive companies from their earliest entrepreneurial stages through to global expansion, and has made angel investments in more than 50 companies and holds investments in 3 venture capital firms. Voted by TechCrunch as the best CEO mentor/advisor in Europe in November 2010, in May 2011, she was voted by Wired magazine as one the top 25 ‘most influential people in the wired world’, and one of the top ten most influential investors and women. The London Stock Exchange said it was bringing the two in particularly for their IT sector experience, "reflecting the group's continued focus on delivering innovative technology solutions to its customers around the world". And the business world is increasingly looking to women to fill the gap in science and technology expertise and to keep the economic recovery going. For example, in November Sir John Perkins, chief scientific advisor to the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills published A Review of Engineering Skills. Perkins called for a high profile campaign to reach out to young people, especially girls aged 11-14, with inspirational messages about engineering and diverse role models, to encourage more diversity in apprenticeships and a change to the gendered stereotypes associated with technical sectors. The review also recommended that the government should continue to support schools to increase progression to A-level physics, especially among female students. The review also drew attention to the actions being taken regarding engineering skills in the Devolved Administrations. The Scottish Government, for example, is supporting the Scottish Resource Centre for Women in Science, Engineering and Technology (SET) to create sustainable change for women in SET sectors throughout Scotland, and the CareerWISE Scotland campaign to support girls and women to take up and retain jobs in STEM occupations. It has also encouraged Scottish universities to sign up to diversity schemes such as Athena SWAN. The Welsh Government’s National Science Academy (NSA) and sector work fund activities to engage young people in STEM, e.g. supporting Airbus to run an all girls cohort of Industrial Cadets. Currently only around one in ten engineers in the UK are women.  |
| Can ad agencies help women love their bodies? Posted: 23 Jan 2014 03:49 AM PST
The magazine Marie Claire recently challenged advertising agencies to create an advertisement that inspired women to love their bodies. The idea came after a study that found that the average woman only learned to like her body when she was 45, Marie Claire Australia then set leading ad agencies Airborne, DDB Group, M&C Saatchi, OgilvyOne, Publicis Mojo, and Whybin/TBWA the task of designing body-positive pieces. The striking results can all be viewed here. The advertisement produced by OgilvyOne, which is especially thought-provoking, features a photo of a baby with the following wording written underneath: 'She's Perfect. Until we teach her otherwise.' 'Flabby arms. Podgy tummy. Double-chin. Puffy eyes. Wispy hair. All the traits we love in her little body, we hate when we see in the mirror. Why? ‘No really, ask yourself why? ‘The truth is body issues are unnatural. They're learned. ‘We teach them to our daughters, reinforce them with our girlfriends and punish ourselves with them – every day. ‘But there is good news. Because what's learned can be unlearned. Take the pledge to end the vicious cycle – for her sake and yours.' Remarking on their work, the creators of the piece said: “You're not born hating your body, it's something that you're taught. “We wanted to send an optimistic message – that these sorts of learned behaviours can be unlearned. “It's just something we need to think differently about.” These ads form part of Marie Claire's 'Why Wait?' campaign, which readers have been asked to participate in by uploading their photo to the magazine's Facebook or Twitter using the hashtag #WhyWait.  |
| Is female foeticide practiced in the UK? Posted: 23 Jan 2014 01:09 AM PST
A study by the Independent newspaper has sparked debate over female foeticide in the UK – the practice of aborting a baby because it is a girl. The investigation claims to have uncovered evidence that sex-selective abortions are affecting the male–female ratio of babies being born within some ethnic groups, and the practice has led to the ‘disappearance’ of between 1,400 and 4,700 girls in both England and Wales. The newspaper reported ‘widespread discrepancies in the sex ratio of children in some immigrant families, which can only be easily explained by women choosing to abort female foetuses in the hope of becoming quickly pregnant again with a boy’. The preference for boys above girls is prevalent in many cultures where girls are seen as a burden, primarily because of their dowry systems, which can cost families significant sums of money. The report has prompted an investigation by the Department of Health into the practice of female foeticide in the UK. Sex-selective abortions are illegal in Britain, and campaigners are calling for restrictions to help curb the practice, including withholding information on the sex of the baby until much later in the pregnancy. Conservative MP Sarah Wollaston, a GP who sits on the House of Commons health select committee, said: "There should be a consultation on whether it is suitable to withhold information about gender during those early scans. "It would be excessively draconian to say that a woman cannot know at all but the idea of postponing that information needs to be part of the discussion." The idea of sex-selective abortion is absolutely awful and utterly wrong; it is another form of discrimination which girls have to face before they are even born, but it should not be used as an excuse for the pro-life camp to call for further restrictions on women’s reproductive rights. You can’t combat one form of gender discrimination with another. Writing in the Huffington Post, the director of external affairs at the British Pregnancy Advisory Service (BPAS), Clare Murphy, said: ‘We need to think hard about where we go next with this. ‘Misogynist attitudes which value boys over girls must always be challenged… but problems arise for women when claims about sex-selective abortions are used to pave the way for restrictions on access to information about their pregnancies and abortion services. ‘You don’t tackle discrimination against women by placing greater restrictions on their reproductive choices. ‘The idea that women should be denied information about their pregnancy on the basis that they cannot be trusted with it is quite appalling.’ Murphy also challenges the findings of the study, saying that BPAS has found no evidence of gender imbalance in any community in the UK. "The British Pregnancy Advisory Service provides a third of all abortions in the UK and it simply isn’t our experience that women from any community are coming into our clinics, anywhere in the UK, seeking to abort girls," she said. Jasvinder Sanghera, founder of the charity Karma Nirvana and a campaigner on forced marriages and honour violence against women, told the Independent: “There is absolutely no doubt that these terminations… are taking place within the South Asian population in Britain. “I think almost any Asian woman you talk to would say she feels a pressure to have a male child. There will be many, many Asian women out there who are pregnant and who are thinking, ‘please, please let it be a boy’. “If you have a daughter, these women will tell us, they feel they have let their husband or in-laws down. In those circumstances, women are seeking abortions if they can find out that the child is a girl.” Female foeticide is already well-documented in India, where millions of girls are thought to have been lost to sex-selective abortions despite laws designed to stop the practice. Making access to reproductive health services more difficult in the UK will only drive women abroad, or, worse, to underground for scans and abortions. It will not change the deep-rooted beliefs and attitudes that have brought us to this tragic point in the first place. Of course we need to let everyone know that sex-selective abortions are unacceptable in the UK, but we also need to work to change mindsets that believe having a baby boy is better than having a girl, even if the reality is completely different.  |
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