After reading The Wicked of the Earth, I wanted to understand some of the history behind the stories. Why were women⁰ accused of being witches? What really happened in those trials? What are the modern consequences of those events?

This is the story of the Scottish Witch Trials - with brief forays into England and abroad. It examines the central tension of whether witchcraft was real to the accusers, or just a convenient means to oppress troublesome women. The descriptions of the imprisonment, torture, and state-sanctioned murder is visceral and horrific.

It's also rather stark in its modern assessment of the historic context:

Nonetheless, it’s important to remember it was a proper legal trial, with evidence being put forward and the judge assessing it and carrying out legal tests. Some people think that witchcraft trials were carried out by angry peasants waving pitchforks. Perhaps this is a more acceptable way for a modern person to think about it. No one wants to think that a judicial system can get it so wrong. But it did, with catastrophic consequences for those accused.

The book is mostly good, it's a spin off from the Witches Of Scotland podcast and that's reflected in the writing. As with any parasocial¹ entertainment, it attempts to centre the authors and bring the audience along for the ride - so there's lots of descriptions of the libraries the authors visit, how things make them feel, how enamoured they are with their podcast guests. I found it a little distracting, but it's obviously right for their main audience.

Similarly, there's an attempt to bring the past to life by imagining a little monologue from various historic figures. I found that a little unconvincing; I dislike putting words in peoples' mouths. But with sparse primary documentation, that may be the best way to bring these characters to life. It's also well illustrated. Too many books eschew pictures - but this has a nice collection of woodcuts and portraits to contextualise what we're reading about.

One little nitpick, the book makes the claims:

Life was hard and life expectancy was around 35

and

Lilias was an old woman, at least 60 years old and possibly as old as 80. At a time when life expectancy was much lower than it is now, even the lower estimate was still a considerable age.

That's not quite right. Although the average life expectancy was low, that's the average at birth - with a large number of infant mortalities dragging down the average. When you look at the full data, you'll see people used to live long lives even in the distant past.

In a way, it reminds me of Invisible Women. A national tragedy hidden from view.

It builds to a rousing end. There are parts of the world where witchcraft is still taken seriously - with devastating consequences. The febrile atmosphere which led to unfounded accusations against women is still prevalent even in modern societies.

I'm fascinated by the evolution of feminist discourse in 20th Century UK. I read Myself When Young (1938) which is a series of mini-autobiographies of prominent women. One of them was Dame Caroline Haslett - an electrical engineer who led a long and fascinating life. One of her crowning achievements was advocating the use electricity to relieve household drudgery. Technology as a tool of feminist liberation.

As part of her battle for equality, she wrote a book called Problems Have No Sex. Sadly, there are no 2nd hand copies for sale, no scans, and very little written about it. There's one contemporary review and that's about it.

So I made a request to the British Library and, a few days later, sat down in their reading room with the dusty tome.

All books writing from 2020 will be in the shadow of Covid19. This book, published in 1949, is written in the shadow of the atomic bomb. It starts with the terrifying realisation that a woman has the same physical capability as a man when it comes to pressing the button which drops a bomb. While men and women may have different levels of strength, technology is the great leveller.

The influx of women into traditionally male environments allowed for a practical demonstration of feminism. It's all very well theorising that women are as capable as men but, as every engineer knows, you need to be able to prove it.

Sir Robert Watson Watt, the discoverer of radiolocation, speaking of the way in which women without previous experience in science had taken up this vital work, said: "The question I asked myself was, if these girls could reach such heights in the comparatively short period during which they had contact with physics, what would they have done with a decent education in technical, scientific and engineering studies?"

It is evident, however, that in addition to the revision of the school syllabus there will need to be a change in the attitude held up to boys as the correct one to adopt towards girls and their capacities.

There are signs that this is occurring spontaneously. A boy reproached by his father for being beaten in class by a "mere" girl, remarked thoughtfully, "You know, father, I don't think girls are so very mere nowadays."

The book spends a decent amount of space on pregnancy and its effects on women in the workplace. This was written pre-pill but in an era with relatively easy access to contraception. Haslett talks frankly about the realities of menstruation - which surprised me somewhat - and whether reproduction is compatible with employment (spoiler alert; yes).

In amongst some slightly tedious legal matters of the day are some forthright pleas for cheaper electricity so that women can be released from manual labour at home. There's also the realities of what it means to place people in a radically upgraded situation. You can't expect anyone to suddenly know how to operate:

Women must see that the vast amount of talk which there has been about kitchen planning is translated into action and that properly planned kitchens are included in all the new houses built. In addition to the importance of good design and lay-out and the provision of proper equipment as a sine qua non, there is much scope for education of the housewife in planning her housework along labour-saving lines; and in the teaching of the principles of motion study in the home so that the maximum benefit can be gained from the use of the equipment provided.

Haslett is undoubtedly technocratic but, above all, she is realistic. She has an excellent and provable theory of change. This isn't a rant nor a call to arms. She is calm, methodical and ruthlessly determined to set out the problems and solutions.

The sense of having prove herself equal to a male colleague sometimes makes a woman self-assertive and over-aggressive; while the fear of loss of personal prestige or of social or economic insecurity arising from admitting women to full equality makes some men unco-operative and unjust towards women working outside the home. As Miss Hilda Martindale remarks in her book From One Generation to Another: "I found that opposition to working with women on equal terms seldom came from the man who was first class at his work; it was the man who was not sure of himself who objected."

In manual as opposed to professional types of work the fear "If I show her how to do my job, the boss may sack me because he need not pay her so much" is a cogent argument for equal pay.

Equal pay is a battle which is still being fought, unfortunately.

There is also just a hint of radical politics lurking under the sometimes-bland prose. Should tariffs be imposed? Are trade-barriers a good way to promote equality? Should women be more self-assured about entering politics and agitating for change?

There's also an undercurrent of rage directed at the women who helped bring about the war.

The rise of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy was made possible by the individual man delegating his personal responsibility to a Fuehrer or a Duce —and by the individual woman abandoning her responsibility towards mankind in general and devoting herself entirely and unquestioningly to child-bearing, and the routine work of the home. This wholesale shirking of individual responsibility was the one thing which made possible the creation of the Nazi system with its concomitants of the concentration camp, the mass crematorium and the battlefield.

Prophetically, she notes that the next 20 years should be one of the most interesting periods of history to live in. I'd certainly say that the change from 1949 to 1969 was just that!

Unlike some other books, this is realistic about the timeframes involved in wholesale cultural change. She sets out how many years of vigilance will be needed to ensure that schools are equipping their female students with the knowledge, ambition, and advice to help them survive in the future. Similar Government, which is lambasted as being far too slow, is shown as needing to embrace radical change. It should be remembered that Churchill, only recently deposed as Prime Minister, was an ardent anti-feminist. He repeatedly stymied the attempts of women to gain the vote - an attitude which is often conspicuously overlooked in the 21st century. I imagine that left a bitter taste in the mouths of Haslett and her contemporaries.

Women's organisations are also the recipient of Haslett's unsentimental gaze. They need to step up their game, raise more money, and set realistic goals. Similarly, women MPs must make sure not to concern themselves only with women's issues. And, for that matter, women have to stop lollygagging and start using their vote. Finally, she sets out ways in which society has to guard against a backlash to feminism.

There is a whole discussion about the structural ephemera which causes resentment. The slow build up of unjust laws and customs hurts everyone.

Now, obviously, people are the product of their time. The book is strongly focused on the UK and isn't too dodgy on race. There's an occasional mention of the USA and a brief sceptical look at the USSR's claims of feminist equality. She does go a little further. Here's a sample from the chapter "Citizens of the World":

Although in Great Britain and the United States women have achieved not only a considerable measure of “equality” but also a very considerable store of experience in the political, economic, and scientific fields: yet there are still countries where women have no rights at all.

Just as different races have reached different stages of civilization so that the primitive tribes of New Guinea co-exist with the highly civilized European races; so different races have reached different stages in their attitude towards women. This latter difference bears no obvious relation to their general level of technical or cultural development. There may in fact be a much greater equality of contribution towards the common life (which is the fundamental basis of equality between the sexes) among some primitive races than among some very highly civilized ones.

While these differences and inequalities persist, trained women will have a continuing obligation towards those who are striving to become politically articulate or who, by reason of the inferior status conferred upon them by their own community, are in danger of exploitation.

It is necessary also to have a realistic appreciation of the differences that may underlie a superficial equality.

The women of Japan were enfranchised almost simultaneously with the women of France, but the women of Switzerland still remain without voting rights.

Yet to deduce from the equality of political rights conferred on the women of France and Japan alike that the women of these two countries possessed indeed comparable opportunities and status would be fantastic.

The traditional Japanese woman, educated from birth to consider herself of no account and completely subservient to the men of her family, will need many years of education and opportunity before she is capable of political responsibility. To expect her to derive maximum advantage at the present time from her enfranchisement would be as logical as to suppose that a woman from the Middle Ages, could she be miraculously transported through time and placed in a modern labour-saving house, could be expected to know just what would happen if she turned certain knobs and switches; and to understand the part that electrical power plays in the modern community.

The adoption of Western democratic machinery by nations of other cultural traditions implies that we have a continuing obligation to these peoples until education has made plain the fundamental principles underlying our way of life.

Some of the Eastern nations are tackling their problems themselves with considerable energy. China with its great drive to stamp out illiteracy has done much to remove the burden of ignorance which has held that great country in economic thralldom for so long. It may well be that the imitative genius of Japan, which derived so much from the influence of China upon its art and culture in the past, will draw from Chinese sources more readily than from the West a new concept of the status of women in human society. The work of Mme. Chiang Kai Shek and her sisters may be the keystone of women’s emancipation in the East.

In this age we are setting up the pattern for life of succeeding generations. Women must see that the mistakes which our own nations made in their development are not through ignorance or greed perpetuated in other lands.

She is curiously circumspect on the issue of disability. Post-war, I imagine many people wanted to ignore the horrors which rent bodies asunder. The only mention is:

Yet even in Britain a very great number of people lead unnecessarily cramped and limited lives, and the social conscience of the country is awakening to their needs. It is being recognized, for example, that it is not sufficient to give disabled people a weekly pension to keep them from actual hunger or to provide institutions in which they can be housed. The disabled person has as much right to a full and useful life, within the limits of his or her disability, as anyone else.

Ultimately, this book is about what we owe to each other. Women won the war, then they rightly demanded to win the benefits of peace.

"Problems Have No Sex" is far better than many other feminist books I've read simply because of its lack of academic pretentiousness. Other than the occasional Latin phrase, the book is written in plain English - designed to be read and understood as widely as possible. As an engineer, Dame Haslett has an engineer's approach to problem solving - identify the issue, determine the cause, suggest solutions, investigate what works and what doesn't, repeat until fixed.

Every feminist should read this book. I'm annoyed that it has never been reprinted and that there's no eBook available. Under UK copyright, it should enter the public domain in 2028. Hopefully a scan will be released which will allow everyone to read this important work.

Some of the language is pure poetry:

the boundary between science fiction and social reality is an optical illusion

It doesn't actually mean anything. You have to be able to parse unexplained concepts like "an oedipal calendar" and deal with interminable footnotes which blithely declare "postmodernism release heterogeneity without a norm, and we are flattened". Quite.

If you take a drink every time postmodernist theory is mentioned, you'll be blotto within a few pages. Tragically, I read it sober - so I've got no excuse not to understand it.

It is so wound up in theory that it becomes an uncuttable Gordian Knot of unrelated concepts.

I do find value in the way that it skewers (what was then) modern feminism:

King criticizes the persistent tendency among contemporary feminists from different ‘moments’ or ‘conversations’ in feminist practice to taxonomize the women’s movement to make one’s own political tendencies appear to be the telos of the whole. These taxonomies tend to remake feminist history so that it appears to be an ideological struggle among coherent types persisting over time, especially those typical units called radical, liberal, and socialist-feminism.

But the author doesn't appear to be self-aware enough to realise that they're involved in yet another schism.

There are occasional snatches of clarity in amongst the verbiage:

Microelectronics mediates the translations of labour into robotics and word processing, sex into genetic engineering and reproductive technologies, and mind into artificial intelligence and decision procedures. The new biotechnologies concern more than human reproduction.

And there are some stunningly precisent predictions:

ironically corporate executives reading Playboy and anti-porn radical feminists will make strange bedfellows

We are there now; the co-opting of feminism into corporate sanitisation seems almost complete.

But whatever sense there is, in hopelessly intermingled with a laundry list of seemingly unrelated complaints.

The culture of video games is heavily orientated to individual competition and extraterrestrial warfare.

The writing is, at times, exquisite:

Cyborg gender is a local possibility taking a global vengeance. Race, gender, and capital require a cyborg theory of wholes and parts.

There is, of course, no explanation about what that cyborg theory might be. Perhaps we are meant to wait for it to be revealed to us in a dream?

If you're prepared to enjoy the rhythm of the words which are almost devoid of context, it it stunning.

Cyborg imagery can suggest a way out of the maze of dualisms in which we have explained our bodies and our tools to ourselves. This is a dream not of a common language, but of a powerful infidel heteroglossia. It is an imagination of a feminist speaking in tongues to strike fear into the circuits of the supersavers of the new right.

An almost a total parody of academic writing - words written not to be read, not to be understood, not to advance an argument, not to form the basis for a discussion. Just an endless stream of automatic-writing that, ironically, sounds like a rogue Markov chain.

What is feminism?

This is an out of print, and somewhat obscure, attempt to answer that question. Out of the shadow of the Great War and barely a decade after universal suffrage in the UK, one woman decided to catalogue the autobiographies of prominent women in society.

Margot Asquith, Countess of Oxford and Asquith, was the wife of former Prime Minister H. H. Asquith. She was a socialite and knew simply everyone worth knowing. She asked her many friends to write a short autobiography of their formative years. The results were… eclectic.

Of course, the writers were all white Christian women who had achieved significant notability. Among them are women still remembered today and others who have long faded into obscurity. They (mostly) had fascinating lives which led them to the pinnacle of society. It is only when you read their Wikipedia biographies that you discover which were to become Nazi collaborators and eugenicists.

The women come from a range of backgrounds - we hear about the abject poverty of some childhoods and the stultifying luxury of others. The slang is outdated, and the name-dropping will send you scurrying for a search engine. A large number of the women complain about modernity, and how modern feminism has lost its way. Such complaints, it seems, will never be extinguished.

Of particular interest are the autobiographies of Sylvia Pankhurst and Coco Chanel. Pankhurst's is long and fascinating - Chanel's is hilarious and heartfelt. I've previously written about Caroline Haslett and her impact on the electrification of the British home - here she is in her own words. Similarly, Amy Johnson writing a few years before her disappearance is equally entertaining.

Of course, there are a number of biographies which are entirely skippable. The Marchioness of Londonderry spends about a hundred pages boring on about fox hunting and little else!

Times change, and reading this will expose you to some racism - both casual and explicit - as well as very outdated ideas on feminity, fidelity, and family. Some of the authors clearly feel that women can do anything as well as a man - others seem to advocate for women playing to their traditional strengths. The political spectrum is fairly well represented - although some of the arguments are now somewhat esoteric. One thing is for sure, there has never been any great consensus on what feminism means.

One of the things I found most interesting is the constant refrain from these women that they would rather have been men. Here's a sample;

Is that the frustration of women born in an unjust society, or something deeper?

This is a truly marvellous book. Both in terms of the ladies it portrays, and the arguments it espouses. It is also illustrated with a photograph and autograph of all its subjects. Although the book still appears to be in copyright, I'll attempt to non-destructively scan what I can for inclusion on Wikipedia.

The full list of contributors are:

• The Countess of Oxford and Asquith
• Margaret Campbell (Marjorie Bowen)
• Gabrielle Chanel
• Elizabeth Sloan Chesser, MD
• Caroline Haslett, CBE
• Ethel Levey
• The Marchioness of Londonderry, DBE
• Mary, Countess of Minto, CI
• Sylvia Pankhurst
• Edith Picton-Turbervill OBE
• Irene Vanbrugh
• Ellen Wilkinson, MA, MP

Dame Caroline Haslett was an electrical engineer who foresaw the way that electricity could be used to remove domestic drudgery from women's lives. There is a slim biography of her, written by her sister, which is sadly out of print.

Luckily, the book is available for free on Archive.org.

It is a curious book. It dwells on her faith as much as her technical prowess. Her waistline is the subject of wry amusement. There's also the (naturally) dated views of the day to contend with along with an odd segue into spiritualism.

And, of course, you'll see nothing much has changed in the last 100 years.

With the Women's Engineering Society safely launched, Caroline found that she had two recurring types of problem with which to contend. The first was to deal with the difficulties that arose at factory floor level from the intrusion of women into what had been traditionally a masculine preserve, difficulties which she herself had area to admirably tackled by the enlightened management of the Cochran Boiler Company. The second, and probably the more important task, was dealing with the problem posed by the steadily increasing number of highly trained women competing with men for managerial posts in the world of engineering. She was not interested in the problems merely for their own sake, but in the people behind the problems and in the whole field of industrial relationships.

It isn't enough to merely launch a product or service. It takes years to embed knowledge, experience, and desire into users. Haslett's power was recognising that the advantages of electricity weren't self-evident. It took a sustained campaign of education to get the public to understand the why and how of a new invention.

There's also some delightful name-dropping:

If you want to understand how the development of domestic electricity use in the UK happened, this is an interesting and useful book. It perfectly demonstrates how one headstrong person can influence the world.

It is a stunning look at how feminism directly influenced industrial policy.

Caroline herself wrote a book - "Problems Have No Sex" - which is completely unavailable as far as I can see. If any readers know where I can obtain a copy, please leave a comment.

I hope it is obvious that I am pro universal suffrage. What amuses me about these cards is how emotional they are! These aren't dispassionate arguments designed to calmly influence the rational man. It is all pure emotion! Looking through the archives of anti-suffragette postcards it's clear that men can't be expected to follow a logical argument; they have to be frightened of humiliation in order to make a decision.

I assume the copyright for these has long since expired - so feel free to enjoy some high quality scans - with bonus view of their backs.

Click to download

10MB:

6MB

I worked in a hip office. Everyone was trendy and right-on. It was a heavily female dominated industry and the office politics were biased towards intersectional feminism. Which I regarded as a good thing. I'd rather have a natter about reproductive justice than who won the football last night.

The office also had a swear jar. Say a word on the banned list, put a quid in the tub, with all proceeds going to charity. Nice. One of the "swear" words was... "guys". Not everyone sees guys as a gender neutral term.

"Hey guys, could you all..." BZZT Brian puts a quid in the jar!

"We've got a great team of guys working on this..." BZZT Get your purse out Davina!

All pretty good natured. Everyone slips ups occasionally, and it was fun hearing people change gear mid-sentence. "OK gu-gu-gu-gang! How are we?"

And then the Australians arrived.

Kylie (not that one) was from the Australia office and was starting a 6 month secondment with us. At her first all-staff, she was asked to say a few words.

"HEY GUYS!" She gushed, in the way only Australians can, "What a bonza office you guys have!! I can't wait to tells the guys back home about the work you're doing!!!"

Half-way through an exclamation mark, someone raised their hand. Barry, or maybe Mike, possibly Rav. "Ummm... Just so you know, we don't use the term 'guys' here..."

"What are you guys talking about?"

"Only... it's just... not all of us are guys. So..."

"Are you guys joking?"

"No. We've got a swear jar and everything."

At which point, the Australian let forth a torrent of swearwords - including a few I'd never heard before - about how men had no right to police a woman's tone. Which seemed fair.

Whereupon Gillian (or Niki, or Kanda) interjected to say that Kylie's debt to the swear jar was closing in on bankruptcy levels and, for the sake of international relations, this should probably be discussed over a pint.

A few months ago, I had a similar experience. Someone invited me to speak at their conference. I turned them down because I don't speak on all male panels, and politely informed them of that. The organiser - perhaps not unreasonably - took me to task on this. While she valued my input, it wasn't my place to tell her how to run her business. She was - as it happened - a young woman of colour, trying to make an impact in a PSM environment. And, maybe, I should stop telling women what to do?

It's a tough one. Cultures butt up against these fault-lines all the time. What seems polite to me, seems rude to you. What's commonplace in your culture, is a bit of a shock to mine. Some times it is good to stick up for your principles and defend those who might be marginalised. Some times it is best to keep your big nose out of things.

In both cases, we mutually de-ruffled each other's feathers. Turns out, by talking to other people and understanding their perspective, you can learn a lot about the world beyond your own experiences.

Every day, extraordinary inventions and innovative ideas are side-lined in a world that remains subservient to men. But it doesn't have to be this way.

Instead, ingrained ideas about men and women continue to shape our economic decisions; favouring men and leading us to the same tired set of solutions. For too long we have underestimated the consequences of sexism in our economy, and the way it holds all of us - women and men - back.

This is a cracking book. Similar in scope to Invisible Women and Feminist City, it takes (justified) aim at the way the world has deliberately excluded half the population from consideration.

It's a quick and entertaining read - if a little infuriating at times. I'm sure the book could have been ten-times as long and still not covered half the problems. It brings home just how many "simple" inventions are ignored because they don't fix problems for "real men".

Some of the examples were familiar to me - but all of them were shocking. The patriarchy has a real inability to grasp the utility of anything outside its narrow concerns.

I'm going to pick one little nit - as I love following footnotes. I think Marçal is being slightly unfair to former President George W Bush (not a sentence I'd previously considered typing). I think she mischaracterises his speech "Islam is Peace". Marçal contends that Bush called on the American people to "go shopping’. In the context of his speech, he was specifically referencing that Hijabis were being abused when going shopping:

I've been told that some fear to leave; some don't want to go shopping for their families; some don't want to go about their ordinary daily routines because, by wearing cover, they're afraid they'll be intimidated. That should not and that will not stand in America.

It ends with a good rant about the long term consequences of this thinking. While it is true that 妇女能顶半边天, we are currently holding back half the potential of society. This is something which needs to radically change.

A few clicks later and the book was on my eReader waiting for me to sober up. Isn't the future spectacular?

Tatar's book takes issue with Joseph Campbell's monomyth of the hero's journey as described in his classic work "The Hero with a Thousand Faces". Campbell, and most other writers about "heroes", almost completely exclude women from their studies. This deliberate sexism means that only half the story is being told.

Female gods and tricksters abound in classic mythology - but they've slowly been written out of history. Folklore and "old-wives tales" have been deliberately excised from the collection of "literature". As Tatar points out, there seems to be a…

deep need to secure the boundary separating the printed eloquence of educated men from the mere chatter of women

And so we go into a deep dive of the heroines who are ever present - though somewhat obscured - in folk literature. Some you will be familiar with, some you will want to read more about. There is a vast collection of tales which both mirror and subvert the "classic" hero's journey. It isn't quite as lengthy as Scheherazade's 1,001 tales - but it is an excellent overview of those who've been overlooked.

The book ends with this question:

Are our new heroines nothing but a carbon copy of Campbell’s hero, fighting battles in dark places from which they emerge covered in blood but victorious? Are we installing a new model that mimics the old rather than creating an archetype that is in tune with the values we embrace today: empathy, care, and connection?

And that, sadly, is the slight flaw with this book. It never quite lands on whether these heroines are significantly different from their male counterparts. There are certainly different types of heroes, and their journeys deviate widely from the path laid down by Campbell. But they all find the courage, strength, or resourcefulness to change their seemingly-inevitable fate.

We need more diverse myths and stories. The book mostly focuses on the European tradition of folklore - with occasional dips into Native American and African tales. It would have been interesting to read about how the monomyth takes shape in other cultures.

But, over all, it is an excellent look at how those who collect stories can effectively shape the narrative of society - and how we can begin to correct their limitations.

This is a story about how modern masculinity is killing the world, and how feminism can save it. It's a story about sex and power and trauma and resistance and persistence. It's a story about how you can track the crisis of democracy against the crisis of White masculinity, and how the far right is rising in response to both. It's a story about a social change. And at the centre of that story is one simple idea: we are in the middle of a sexual revolution. Laurie Penny charts how, in our era of crisis, we are also witnessing a productive transformation: profound and permanent changes in how we define gender, sex, consent and whose bodies matter. These changes threaten the social and economic certainties that form our world. They threaten existing power structures, and they undermine the authority of institutions from the waged workplace to the nuclear family. No wonder the far right is fighting back so hard. Sexual Revolution is a hand grenade of a book: both a manifesto for social change and a story of how feminism can save us.

This is a difficult and unrelenting book.

If you're already tapped-in to the modern feminist movement, there's little here that's new. But, if this is all new to you (welcome!), it's an excellent starting point. Although sprinkled with footnotes, it isn't a dense academic tome. As with many modern books, it blends together the author's personal experiences with more a more objective history.

I found some of the themes it discussed deeply uncomfortable. That's, in part, by design. There's no easy way to talk about sexual and emotional assault. But it also reflects my obliviousness to some of the things that feminism is fighting.

Sadly, I don't think it quite hits the mark on tying the fight for feminism as the fight against fascism. It makes several large logical leaps which I found difficult to follow. Yes, there is a pervasive strand of sexism within the far right. And the book touches on why some women are attracted to that. But it doesn't quite make the case for embracing feminism to vanquish fascism.

There's an excellent chapter focussing on men, and how we're often socialised into sexism as a default. But, weirdly, the chapter ends by exonerating men as individuals and blaming the culture we're raised in. I found that an unhelpful and (dare I say it) slightly patronising viewpoint. Yes, we all live in a patriarchy and suffer the consequences. But there has to be some level of personal responsibility - both to change ourselves and the wider society.

I doubt you'll agree with all of it. It may even make you angry. But this is important. It is a rallying cry for the profound - and sometimes scary - freedom that feminism promises. It is clear that the hyper-machismo world-view we're stuck in isn't working for the majority of people. I hope this book convinces you that change is coming. It is inevitable, slightly messy, sometimes confusing, and utterly liberating.

Bomb-throwing suffragettes. The pioneer of the refuge movement who became a men's rights activist. Forget feel-good heroines: meet the feminist trailblazers who have been airbrushed from history for being 'difficult' - and discover how they made a difference. Here are their stories in all their shocking, funny and unvarnished glory.

It is a cliché that well behaved women seldom make history. It is, nevertheless, true. None of the women who changed the world did so in a polite and easy manner. Indeed, the whole book is a salient reminder that rights are never given to us - we have to take them.

It's a bit relentless, to realise that your history lessons in school never covered what really happened and who was really responsible. But it is good to look at the somewhat-unseemly side of our heroines to understand them more completely as people.

The book is, perhaps, a wee bit narcissistic - but then, the personal is political. With the greatest of respect to the author, does anyone care about her divorce other than the parties involved? It makes for a slightly contrived hook upon which to hang the essays. I understand the trauma of "Twitter spats" and how overwhelming a pile-on can be - but it seems odd to bring it up while talking about striking workers.

The subjects are mostly UK women - and the resultant limitations on diversity that occasionally brings - but that's a welcome relief from books which attempt to explain the world from a USAin perspective. It correctly identifies that some of the biggest barriers to intersectional feminism are feminists themselves. Lots of people would rather be "pure" and "correct" rather than effective. When looking at marriage equality, for example, I'd have loved a big-bang which made gay weddings the norm the day homosexuality was decriminalised. Sadly, it seems a lot more practical to introduce things like Civil Partnerships first to gently introduce an idea into society. The end result is that we get what we want a little later and after some refinement. Some extremists (on all sides) don't get this - and think any compromise is cowardice. It isn't.

It isn't a flawless book. And I don't think even the author would claim that she is without controversy. I recommend reading it in conjunction with A History of Women in Men’s Clothes for some more balance on how we ascribe modern definitions to historical figures. But it does a sterling job of uncovering some of the disturbing aspects of the women who changed the world.

The inclusion of a comment from rabid transphobe is troubling. While he has a cogent and moving argument about the need for abortion law reform in Ireland, his mere presence sours the chapter. The book itself doesn't appear unsympathetic to the Trans community - but it brings to the fore the limitations of those who were chosen to be included.

And, perhaps that's the point. It doesn't matter whether you like someone. Whether their motives were honest or their heart was pure. It doesn't matter if you'd hate to have them as a friend, or would gladly see them tarred and feathered. No one lives up to our ideals. No one from history meets our modern standards of ethics. These women were human - and there's nothing more problematic than that.

It is a revelatory book which should be read with a critical eye.

I'm reminded of the lyrics from the Into The Woods song "Last Midnight":

You're not good, you're not bad,

You're just nice.

I'm not good, I'm not nice,

I'm just right.

I'm the witch.

A deconstruction of gender through the voices of Siri, HAL 9000, and other computers that talk

Considering Star Trek, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Her, and more, Liz W. Faber explores contentious questions around gender: its fundamental constructedness, the rigidity of the gender binary, and culturally situated attitudes on male and female embodiment. Going beyond current scholarship on robots and AI to focus on voice-interactive computers, The Computer’s Voice breaks new ground in questions surrounding media, technology, and gender.

I did not care for this book. I think I'm too stupid to have understood it properly. I thought this was going to be about why the current crop of domestic-droids have (mostly) female coded voices. Perhaps looking at the seismic shift from the attitudes of German drivers who once rejected a female voice giving them GPS directions to the near universal acceptance of audible gynoids.

Instead, it's a media studies book which focuses exclusively on American TV and film. I'm not fully versed in modern critical theory, so lots of it went completely over my head. I can appreciate that people might interpret the female-voiced starship Enterprise as a pastel-coloured womb, and the male-voiced HAL9000 as a cold and sterile phallus. But the stuff about phallic-mothers castrating their Oedipal offspring in a Freudian-frenzy was alien to me.

A large portion of the book is simply reciting the plot of slightly obscure movies. There is some slight analysis of what having a female- or male- voiced computer might tell us about the psyche. But it doesn't go in to any depth. Some of the over-analysis seems a little far fetched to me. Is Picard really regressing inside his mother when he enters the holodeck? Does HAL cutting a life-support cable represent a father snipping his child's umbilical cord? Maybe, but it's all a bit wishy-washy. You can read anything you like into invented symbolism. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, and sometimes the colour red is for danger - not for representing the ship's uterine lining.

I suppose I was expecting more of a rigorous analysis of whether the media has influenced the way in which humans expect their robots to behave. Given the wealth of movies and TV shows with speaking-machines, it felt limited to focus on so few examples. I get that Star Trek and 2001 cast a long shadow over everything - but there's so much more to synthetic voices than them.

There was also nothing about the history of acousmatic voices. The very earliest ones were male-ish - if only by virtue of being low pitched.

Is the only difference between male and female voices their pitch? When did the female voice become preferred for recorded announcements? What does constantly barking orders to a disembodied female servant do to your psychology? None of these questions are answered.

It is obvious that I was expecting a different book. Either a history of vocal-interactions with machines, or a look at how speaking to machines (and having them speak back) affects us. Perhaps even what the implications are for modern feminism. Instead, it's a limited psychoanalysis of an interesting modern phenomenon.

I'm sure the book is great, if you already understand and accept the theories that it is based on - but it was wasted on me.

Traditionally, historic women have been seen as bound by social conventions, unable to travel unless accompanied and limited in their ability to do what they want when they want. But thousands of women broke those rules, put on banned clothing and travelled, worked and even lived whole lives as men. As access to novels and newspapers increased in the nineteenth century so did the number of women defying Biblical and social restrictions. They copied each other’s motives and excuses and moved into the world of men. Most were working-class women who either needed to or wanted to, break away from constricted lives; women who wanted to watch a hanging or visit a museum, to see family or escape domestic abuse, some wanted to earn a decent living when women’s wages could not keep a family. The reasons were myriad. Some were quickly arrested and put on display in court, hoping to deter other women from such shameful behaviour, but many more got away with it.

This book is hilarious and horrifying. Did you know that women were banned in France from wearing trousers? If they wanted to wear "male" clothing they had to apply to the police and pay for a permit. The ban was overturned in... 2013!

The whole book is full of maddening little anecdotes about the way society treated (and still treats) women who deviate from societal expectations. At times, all you can do is to laugh to stop yourself crying. The book sometimes feels like a catalogue of Fragile Masculinity - as men of the age rage against women encroaching into "their" territory". The fear that a woman might do as good a job as a man - as an employee or as a lover - is seen as an existential threat which must be crushed.

It is difficult to place modern attitudes on historic figures. Our notions of people's gender and sexuality don't always fit with how they thought of themselves. Are these "gal-pals" or lesbians? Is this person wearing men's clothes out of economic necessity or because they are Trans? We can't ever know their lived experience, but the author uses great care and sensitivity to describe all those involved.

Because the book is drawn from contemporary news reports, it can get a little repetitive. Tiny glimpses of a life told through a paragraph in a provincial newspaper. But it only serves to reinforce the message that women have always worn men's clothes. And almost always been subject to ridicule or punishment for it.

The book mostly draws from English-language reports, so is firmly tied to the Anglosphere - with occasional forays into France, Germany, and China. It is meticulously referenced, and contains some images of news cuttings to peruse.

Much like Miranda Kaufmann "Black Tudors", it is a fascinating book which uncovers a facet of history which is often conveniently ignored.

Thanks to NetGalley for the review copy. The book is released later this year and can be pre-ordered using the links below:

In Feminist City, through history, personal experience and popular culture Leslie Kern exposes what is hidden in plain sight: the social inequalities built into our cities, homes, and neighborhoods. Kern offers an alternative vision of the feminist city. Taking on fear, motherhood, friendship, activism, and the joys and perils of being alone, Kern maps the city from new vantage points, laying out an intersectional feminist approach to urban histories and proposes that the city is perhaps also our best hope for shaping a new urban future. It is time to dismantle what we take for granted about cities and to ask how we can build more just, sustainable, and women-friendly cities together.

This is an important book - but I was frustrated at its lack of practical solutions. Let's start at the beginning.

Philip Larkin famously discovered sex in 1963. Some women only discover feminism once they become pregnant. Because if you're a cis/het/white/rich/abled woman, then your privilege may insulate you from the worst aspects of sexism. And so the book begins, looking at the city from the vantage point of a new mother.

Kooky cafes down a flight of stairs are fun to visit when you're young and carefree - but a nightmare to navigate with a baby in a buggy.

I sometimes wonder why anyone gets pregnant deliberately. Surely they've seen just how poorly the urban environment is for women with kids? Surely their friends have moaned about the realities of navigating the city? Surely they remember the struggles of their own mother? But somehow they don't think it'll apply to them.

But that's unfair of me. The city should cater to its citizen's needs. Especially the needs of those performing the necessary labour of child rearing.

The first quarter of the book seems exclusively focused on maternal needs - which is an important (but not universal) aspect of womanhood. The next part of the book seems to argue that we should design away the ability to make the "wrong" choices. Think of it like an urban "Nudge Unit". That sort of makes sense - we can design cities not to have dark alleyways and blind corners. But designing a city where nothing bad can ever happen is problematic in three key areas.

1. Part of the fun of the city is that it is full of new and - sometimes - scary sensations. We could create a city in the same way as we design bland corporate malls. As the book acknowledges, a wipe-clean city isn't an interesting city.
2. Learning how to operate in dangerous environments and recognise danger are useful skills. Not everywhere in the world is safe, and understanding risk is important.
3. Who is being protected and who is being excluded? We could put a policeman on every corner. But there are many women - and others - who would find that a scary and threatening prospect.

Kern does make some excellent points about how urban "safety" is usually for white cishet women, at the expense of others. Over-policing drives out (some) women. Not everyone is comfortable being surveilled on CCTV.

While I agree with the overall sentiment of the book - that urban spaces are rarely designed with women in mind, and they do not allow them to thrive - the book proposes very few solutions.

For example, there's a good discussion on the problems with toilet access. There aren't enough toilets for women, and they're usually of poor quality. The book has some discussion of local activism without saying what that entails. If we accept that more toilets are necessary (and I do) then how do we get them? Is it something which can be solved with tax relief for shops opening up more loos? Can an economic argument be made that more toilets attract more customers? Should people piss over the steps of City Hall until more loos are made available? What about sticking a 🚺 on every men's toilet door so that blokes know what it is like to have to desperately search for a public convenience?

I'm reminded of how the Rolling Quads smashed up the pavement to install ersatz dropped curbs. What concrete actions can people take to change the urban environment?

Similarly, there's a brief discussion about how bus fares often don't cater to women's needs. A single ticket is fine if you're heading directly to work - but if your journey around the city involves dropping a kid at school, then off to work, then running an errand, then picking a kid up, then taking them to an event, and then home via a shop - the ticket prices can become prohibitively expensive.

Again, there are practical solutions which aren't mentioned in the book. Hopper fares let people take multiple journeys within an hour on the same ticket. But how do we convince transit authorities to offer these fares?

While the book draws on a great deal of theory - and is meticulously referenced - it doesn't contain many personal stories. The ones it does are mostly directly from the author. I don't expect her to exploit people's grief and tragedies - but a few more stories of lived experiences about where city design fails would have been useful.

Every time I cross the road, I'm reminded of the horrific case of Raquel Nelson. She exited a bus with her children, there was no crossing available, so they attempted to cross a busy road in the dark - her child was killed and she was charged with vehicular homicide!

It's such a powerful story because it contains all the elements of why feminist city design is important. This event could have been avoided if:

• Bus services were more regular and more reliable. There was only 1 bus per hour - they missed their intended bus and so it was dark by the time they arrived at their stop.
• Crossing points were installed by bus stops. That's the norm in most cities I've visited - they are deliberately designed to make it easy to cross safely.
• Cities were designed to minimise the need to drive. The person who struck the child with their car was visually impaired and appeared to be intoxicated.
• Road speeds were calmed. Slower speeds result in fewer accidents.
• Public transport was encouraged across all classes. Apparently, none of the jurors on the case had ever taken a bus. One supposes they had little empathy with the defendant's situation.

And so on. All practical things which can be designed or retrofitted into the city.

I suppose I'm being so critical of this book because it has such a powerful and important message. We need to design cities (and everything else) to be as inclusive as possible.

The eBook of Feminist City is currently 40% off from Verso Books and I highly recommend it.

For the past decade, Richard Herring has been answering sexist trolls on International Women’s Day when they ask ‘when is International Men’s Day?’ in the mistaken belief there isn’t one. If only the trolls had learned to use Google they would realise that there is an International Men’s Day – it’s on November 19th. In The Problem with Men Richard expands on his Twitter discussions and tackles some of the big questions surrounding the problems of toxic masculinity – for women, but also for men.

A cheap cash-in on the global phenomenon that is International Men's Day. I suspect it is designed as a (male) stocking filler - a handy present your maiden aunt can get you while you celebrate being an international man.

It is a delightfully funny read. Gently describing the author's (self-inflicted) descent into madness as he battles the trolls who feign ignorance around the need for International Women's Day.

What does it mean to be a man in the modern age? The book doesn't really answer that - but it does raise some interesting questions about why (some) men prefer to tear down others rather than build for themselves. There's nothing stopping us from celebrating International Men's Days. So why do men refuse to face up to the real issues which affect them?

I don't know the answers to that. It isn't just the institutions which surround us - there's something ingrained in the male psyche which finds solace in opposition. Changing that will take more than a comedy book. But it is a start.

It's a short book - and only 99p on Kindle - well worth reading.

Why do we find it so hard to say 'No'? What does poker teach us about power structures? How can feminism be more inclusive? The Guilty Feminist will challenge you, reassure you and empower you to see the world differently.

A fantastic book. Even if you've listened religiously to The Guilty Feminist Podcast, or seen the author's solo shows, there's plenty of new material in here.

It's a powerful and inclusive piece of work. Even if you think you know everything there is to know about modern feminism, I guarantee you'll find something new - and breathtaking - in there.

It'll get you angry, fired-up, and hopeful for the future.

I stopped highlighting passages halfway through, because it feels like every other sentence could be pasted on a t-shirt. This is the one which resonated the most for me:

If you’ve been raised with running water and had it every day of your life, you will feel entitled to it. Hot and cold water from a tap doesn’t occur in nature, so this is a privilege you’ve always known that’s come to feel like a right. If your water got turned off today, you’d phone the council. If it wasn’t back on in forty-eight hours you’d be tweeting, and if it wasn’t restored in a week you’d be writing angry letters. At no point would you think, ‘Well, I guess we don’t have running water any more. Where’s the closest river? I guess I’ll have to walk down there with a jug on my head.’ Although many people around the world live like that every day, it would almost certainly never be acceptable to you because running water is your standard, your normal, your expectation. Entitlement is the residue of privilege.

Discover the shocking gender bias that affects our everyday lives. Imagine a world where your phone is too big for your hand, where your doctor prescribes a drug that is wrong for your body, where in a car accident you are 47% more likely to be seriously injured, where every week the countless hours of work you do are not recognised or valued. If any of this sounds familiar, chances are that you're a woman.

What can I say about this award winning book which hasn't already been said?

It has helped change the way I work. When given data or user research - I now always ask about the gender ratio. I've already given up speaking on all-male panels - but it's shocking how often I'm asked to.

Perhaps the only criticism is that some of the examples feel a little well-worn. I don't know how many times I've read the "crash test dummies are only modelled on men" story - but that doesn't make the outcome any less shocking.

Anyway, read this book. Have a rant. Then take some action.

Taking us on an eye-opening journey through science, Inferior challenges our preconceptions about men and women, investigating the ferocious gender wars that burn in biology, psychology and anthropology. Angela Saini revisits the landmark experiments that have informed our understanding, lays bare the problem of bias in research, and speaks to the scientists finally exploring the truth about the female sex.

Women - they're like men, but worse. If we (rightly) assume man as the default, then women will always be sub-par. In fact, they only really evolved thanks to men. That's basically what science teaches us, right?

Angela Saini's look through the history of science is remarkable when viewed through the lens of feminism. How much science has simply been missed because (male) scientists weren't interested in viewing what female monkeys were doing? What advances have we lost by men deciding that female animals are too inconvenient to study?

An excellent book which should help shape how you view scientific developments and the limits of understanding our own place in culture.

Ultimately it never quite answers the question of whether we're really all that different. Broadly we're similar - and many of our differences are due to social and environmental factors. But it is a breath of fresh air when it comes to discussing the short-sightedness of our scientific fore-fathers.

We all nodded dutifully - and applauded the women who had pushed back the boundaries of science and science communication.

All was going well, until one of the presenters displayed a slide talking about gender-specific toys. In amongst the chemistry sets, Lego, and computing toys, was this monstrosity:

There was a collective intake of breath. Is this what people want for their daughters? Not to be the next Madam Curie, but merely to be Mrs Mopp the office char?

As a society, do we stifle ambition at birth by saying to girl children "Cleaning is the profession for you, m'dear!"?

I'm not so sure. Children like imitating adults and adult work. While it's true that most of the cleaning toys are associated with girls, there are some aimed at boys.

If a child wants to imitate what their parent are doing, should we prevent that?

We also have to accept that some people will become cleaners. There's nothing shameful about doing honest and useful work. Not everybody gets to be an astronaut.

It was the psychologist Stephen Pinker, I think, who coined the phrase "the how to be a human kit". We tell children stories and give them toys which socialise them into our world. Toys which are meant to teach the virtues we value in society. Cleaning is a social good. We need people to make life nice and tidy.

Finally, how do you create a child's toy that represents some of the more aspirational careers? It's easy to make a doctor's uniform - but what does "My First Web Design Toolkit" look like? There's no "Junior Lawyer" toys, nor "Petro-chemical Engineering Starter Kits" that I know of.

That said, I'm fully behind Pink Stinks' campaign against the rigid genderisation of children's toys. We have to be careful not to stifle children's imagination and potential.

I guess what I'm trying to do is find where the line is between "You're only good enough to be a cleaner" and "You can do anything you want - including being a cleaner."

This is further complicated by the power dynamic between domestic servants and their employers. The French psychologist Pascale Molinier wrote a wonderful paper which I found in The Commoner called "Of Feminists and Their Cleaning Ladies". In it she describes the tension of being a feminist and outsourcing traditional female domestic roles to other women:

... [T]he relationship with the cleaner displays a psychological tension between the desire to be served without needing to think about it – in which we find what Joan Tronto refers to as the "irresponsibility of privileged people" – and the desire to create a reciprocal link which "domesticates" this relationship.

This tension is not specific to the relationship between female employers and their domestic employees, it interrogates our relationship with care more widely, in that we all benefit from it.

P. Molinier, Of Feminists and their Cleaning Ladies: caught between the reciprocity of care and the desire for depersonalisation, Multitudes 2009/3-4, no. 37-38, p. 113-121

It was quite obvious that the audience (myself included) felt disgust at the thought of promoting domestic work as a valid career path to a young girl. I wonder if part of that disgust was cognitive dissonance around the desire to be served and have a clean environment, and the crushing realisation that necessitates the restriction of someone's ambition so that they may fulfil the role for us? That domestic work is somehow seen as a desirable form of subjugation?

That's enough feminist theory for now. I took a look at toy cleaning trolleys on Amazon and the results weren't pretty. If this blog were a Tumblr, it'd all be like:

If you look in her eyes closely, you can see all her hopes and dreams of being a CEO have been crushed under the patriarchy.

If you thought the previous trolley's colours were too gender-neutral, why not go for this stunning pink number?

That look of scepticism says "Well, that glass ceiling isn't going to clean itself, is it?"

Over time, you'll learn to suppress the bitter feelings of disappointment. Just like men have been suppressing women for centuries.

Fashion pro-tip: always, always, always match your top with your vacuum cleaner.

Of course, the female experience isn't just about cleaning. The Early Learning Centre knows women can even work on a supermarket checkout!

"Dammit, Sandra! You'll burn that top. Is it so hard to iron while I'm making important business calls?"

At least... I think that's how I feel.

Most people believe that they are rational and live up to their own ideals. But can we ever really know our own subconscious biases?

The Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media have released a series of study about gender biases. One of the more interesting findings was that when the male:female ratio in a group is 70:30 - both genders think the group is at parity. This is due, in part, to popular entertainment sticking almost rigidly to these gender ratios.

I honestly believe that I follow a roughly equal number of men and women on Twitter. I certainly see a lot of women in my feed. But that's just a feeling - what do the data say?

I decided to look at two different aspects of my Twitter usage.

1. How many women do I follow? (i.e. I choose to see their tweets).
2. What's the ratio of male:female tweets that I see? (i.e. if Alice tweets twice and Bob only tweets once, it's 2:1)

Limitations

The most obvious limitation is that not every tweeter is a person - some are faceless corporations. Some company accounts are definitely gendered - take Cosmo magazine for example - but I think it's easiest to separate them out.

Those tweeters who are people may not choose to reveal their gender - or it may not be immediately obvious. I don't intend asking people directly what their gender identity is.

Finally, there are many other ways I could slice this pie. I could look at race, gender, political leaning, etc - but gender is the most visible and therefore easiest to identify.

I'm basing my assessment on the user's name and their photo. In this example, I've no easy way of knowing whether @Lateral is male or female. Sorry!

I did consider using computer vision recognition and running the names through a stochastic model - but I'm off sick today so decided to manually count each follower. For something like this, the human brain is faster than installing and configuring software!

So, for this investigation, I'm dividing the tweets that I see into Male, Female, Unknown, Corporate.

Followers

As of now, I follow 1,158 Tweeters. At first glance, that's a ridiculous number. There's no way I can have any form of meaningful interaction with that many people. What that doesn't reveal is that many of those accounts are dormant or seasonal. Some, no doubt, I have no need to follow. But since Twitter killed TwitCleaner it's impractical to go through all those old accounts and remove the deadwood.

I manually looked through the 300 accounts I most recently followed. I was fairly confident that it would show want an equal opportunity tweeter I was. You're welcome to look at my Twitter friends directly, if you'd like to verify the data.

Youch. I follow more corporate accounts than women. And the M:F split? 62: 38. Not too far off the 70:30 split.

How depressing! There I was, thinking that I was breaking the mould - when instead I am, basically, a little better than average.

Because Twitter doesn't let me retrieve all my followers at once, I had to split my research into batches of 300. After looking at my 600 most recent friends, I was even more depressed.

Exactly the bloody same ratio! True, some of the corporate accounts are likely to be run by women... but I think that's just clutching at straws.

I think the m:f ratio here is interesting because it's accounts I've chosen to follow. For some reason, my brain only finds women about half as worthwhile following as men. I think that's troubling.

After going through all 1,158 accounts I follow (I was off sick today - what else was going to fill my time?) here are the final results.

Oh. Em. Gee. Honestly, I didn't fiddle the data - take a look at my friend list. But that's a Male:Female ratio of exactly 70:30.

I've gone from thinking I was a new wave feminist man to realising I'm just part of the patriarchy. Ok, maybe not that dramatic, but I honestly thought that I was following a much more gender balanced crowd than that.

I may not be following lots of women - but perhaps I'm seeing lots of their tweets?

What Do I See

Of course, these women could be tweeting a lot more than the men. And, perhaps, men could be retweeting a lot of women.

Perhaps.

Twitter's tools only let me download the last ~800 Tweets I've seen. Twitter have no interest in letting you travel further back in time than that, which is a shame. Today - a Monday - that's around 4 hours worth of Tweets. Normally I don't read them all, nor do I scroll back extensively through my timeline to catch up on what I've missed.

With more time - and a more cooperative Twitter API - I could take a look through the last month. But it is what it is.

No need to grab a pocket calculator. That Male:Female ratio is stuck at a stubborn 72:28.

I've no way of knowing how representative a sample this is. Obviously the ratio will ebb and flow depending on the time of day and what's happening in the world. I could also de-duplicate the results and try to find out how many unique voices I hear.

Thoughts

Firstly, these data are really only representative of me. I've not included anyone else in this investigation.

Secondly, it's really important to take an impartial look at your own behaviours. I would have sworn up and down that I followed a a better ratio than 70:30.

Thirdly, there are many different ways to measure bias. For example, looking at who people retweet - although, even by Twee-Q's measure I'm still a 70:30 guy.

Fourthly, men and women both use Twitter in roughly equal numbers - so I can't blame the platform for my performance.

We can't control gender equality in politics, TV, education, or employment - but we can control the number of distinct voices we choose to expose ourselves to.

Take a moment to look at your social circle - whether it's online or not - and see if you could make some adjustments to increase your daily dose of diversity.

In the meantime, here's a funny video with Geena Davis.