Lee's random blog

As part of a new (as yet secret project) I want to create a list of the intellectual, thinking women in the world. My own tiny mind will not get very far so I’m soliciting your ideas. Who do you consider to be the great thinking women of our times? They must be alive, can [...]

David Cameron measuring ‘wrong type of happiness’ | Politics | guardian.co.uk. Apparently the guy who influenced David Cameron to measure the nations happiness now thinks we should measure ’flourishing’ instead. This is a no brainer. Way, way back Aristotle had it right when he said that people need to flourish, to live the good life. Happiness is just a mood, an emotion [...]

Women of the World Festival Conference 11 – 13 March If you are free this weekend then get yourself down to the Southbank. Women of the World launches its first year with speakers from across five continents. It brings together amazing stories of triumph, action, challenge and enterprise from girls of 14 to women of [...]

For International Womens Day, 007 gets asked this question by M. Are we Equals?

As I’ve been watching what has happened in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya alongside the UKs anti-tax avoidance movement, I can’t help but wonder if we are witnessing a moral revolution. In the Middle East it’s plain to see the causes. These regimes have been run by dictators for years, squashing freedom of expression and collective [...]

I was recently contacted by Dr Catriona Burness, a researcher in the field of women in politics. She has published a report on Women and Parliaments in the UK.  She says: The report presents a factual snapshot of the current position in each elected parliamentary chamber in the UK. All elected women are listed alongside [...]

There have been a couple of articles in the press recently which have prompted me to write about a curious tale alive in our midst. It’s this: There is such a thing as the ‘womens vote’ and politicians are attending to it. Recently David Milliband announced that he’ll “be a leader for women”.  There is [...]

The new Liberal Democrat/Conservative coalition government has four women in its cabinet.  This is a very small number and does not compare well with other countries. But, much as the commentary would have you believe, this is not a simple issue to fix. Broadly, there are three areas that need to be looked at in order to [...]

Being a woman is an interesting thing.  It’s an accident of birth, a slip in a chromosome, from XX to XY, that makes a man a man and an absence of this move that makes a woman a woman. There certainly are some differences between the two genders. One has external sex organs, the other [...]

A few of you have asked what I said at my talk earlier in the week.  Here are some of the themes. Women make up 60% of all graduates in Europe and the US this year. In January 2010, for the first time, there were more women in employment in the US than men.  Women [...]