Lee's random blog

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 [...]

20 years after attending my first political conference, I find myself sitting in the audience for the launch rally at the Lib Dems spring conference.  After being welcomed by a plethora of prospective parliamentary candidates, a quarter of whom I gladly noted were women, the big guns of party come out to inspire us, to [...]

By now you will have seen that India’s parliament approved a bill on Tuesday 9th of March to reserve a third of all state legislature and parliamentary seats for women.  You would think from reading the UK press that this is an exceptional move but actually around 40 nations have some form of quota system [...]

Kira Cochrane has written a good article in the Guardian today celebrating 40 years of women’s liberation.  What really struck me was the list of causes that the women were fighting for back then, “the family, motherhood, delinquency, women and the economy, the concept of ‘women’s work’, [and] equal pay” These are largely still the [...]

I’m giving a talk on the above topic at the Hoxton Apprentice on Thursday 18th March for a 12.45pm start.  Do come along. “Do Women Really Want to be Leaders?” with Lee Chalmers Much is made if the low numbers of female senior leaders in UK companies but what is the real problem? Is it [...]

Full version: http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/leftvright_US.html David McCandless and Stephanie Posavec have made this beautiful infographic of right/left politics in the US.  Check out the book for more details and McCandless’s website http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/2009/left-vs-right/

You’ve probably read the interview in Total Politics with Sir Nicholas Winterton by now. Sir Nicholas was elected a Tory MP in 1971, the year I was born, which makes him a veteran of the party.  However, those at Conservative HQ are no doubt shaking their heads over his somewhat ill considered remarks about MP’s [...]

Laurie Penny has written a great piece on the Guardian Comment is Free about the motivations of the Millennials, those born between 1980 and 1999.  She says that the millennial generation is typecast as a narcissistic, shallow, carefree generation, not nearly as worthy or spiritual as Gen X or baby boomers.  This seems to be [...]

Revealed: David Cameron’s ‘Obama Army’, ready to change the face of the Conservative Party Only the Daily Mail could make such a positive move by the Conservatives into a cringe-worthy headline.  Rather than trying to present the stream of usual suspects the Tories have actually decided to put forward women and black and ethnic minority candidates at [...]