Fair play

Chwaere Teg means  'fair play' in Welsh - a good title for an organisation that is doing excellent work promoting equality issues in Wales.  I was in Newport last night giving a lecture for them on Paula (and chapeau to them - they aim to alternate female and male speakers in their lecture series, though the audience was 90% female). We had quite some discussion on careers.  Chwaere Teg produced last year an excellent report, A Woman's Place, on women in the Welsh workforce.  Welsh women are upping their learning - 55% have recently taken part in adult education or training, compared to just 39% in 1996, and a full…
Read More

Discrimination and networks

In the last couple of days I've done one of my last PP interviews, and had a lively discussion with members of the NHS Employers Forum.  Both brought up the question of the effects of networks on people's career prospects, and how difficult it is to draw the line between networks which are part of 'normal' working lives, and those which serve to exclude women. My interviewee, Olivia, is 30ish and works for a global branding agency.  She told me how in her first years there a middle-aged manager had put together a group of younger male colleagues, who went whisky-drinking together.  Olivia saw this as a rather desperate attempt…
Read More

Politicians, Peter and Paula

I was chatting recently to a friend who lives in France.  We were musing sadly over the state of a country which we both love - she as a long-term resident, me as a sometime resident and frequent visitor.  The French economy is in poor shape, they have major social fractures, French culture seems to have lost its cutting edge;  and the political situation is dire, from almost every angle. There was an interesting recent piece by a political journalist (I'm afraid I can't remember who it was) which argued that the French presidency was designed by de Gaulle for himself; more or less worked for him for most of…
Read More

Learners’ achievements

Today will be full of news about A level results and what is happening to student access to higher education.  I hope at least some attention will be paid to the continuing plunge in mature student enrolments, and especially to the way in which part-time higher education has been harshly squeezed over the last years, but the focus will be on school leavers.  My firm bet is that a count of the images used in the press reports on exam results will show a big majority of girls.  One reason of course is that papers find them more photogenic , and they probably smile more easily than boys;  but another…
Read More

Citizen’s Income and its relevance

I've just finished reading Money for Everyone by Malcolm Torry.  It's an exhaustive, and quite exhausting, account of the case for a Citizen's Income - a basic unconditional payment to be made to every citizen -  man, woman and child.  A simpler version of the case is available from www.citizensincome.org.uk. The CI would bring together our current tax and benefits systems - if they can be described as such.  Torry goes into gruesome detail on the complexities of the benefits system.  He shows how strong the incentives are for people to cheat.  The complexity and perversities of the 'system' are such that anyone with an unstable earnings record is likely to…
Read More

Wikipedia and (self-)promotion

I watched Jimmy Wales being interviewed on Newsnight last night.    They are aiming to increase the diversity of their contributors, on gender and other dimensions.  He said that only 9-14% of the contributors to Wikipedia are women.I found this figure surprisingly low, and wondered what the reasons for it might be.  The most likely seems to me to be to do with self-confidence:  women are less likely to consider themselves authoritative enough to provide an entry, or to correct others' entries - even though there is no entry barrier to contributing, as far as I know.           A few days ago I interviewed Ann Oakley.…
Read More

Competent cabinets

The cabinet reshuffle has hardly been an exercise in gleaming meritocracy: after much trailing that it would change the gender profile, just two women were added to the numbers of full cabinet members.  This is not, at all, a snide comment on the competences of those who have been promoted.   It is simply that the exercise seems to have been very largely to do with presentation, and not at all to do with competence.  And that's not only unhelpful to the supposed  beneficiaries but runs directly against the cause it's supposedly espousing - better recognition for women. It's good that David Cameron has been sparing in his reshuffles.  Whether…
Read More

C20 Peters

I've been reading Margaret MacMillan's highly informative The War That Ended Peace.  She shows how all the relevant countries - Germany, Russia, France, Austria-Hungary and Britain - were constantly feeling their way round each other, testing out existing alliances/ententes and sounding out new ones in a revolving set of courtship dances.  The single most striking account is of Kaiser Wilhelm's character.  Here was a playground bully totally used to getting his own way, an immature adolescent in charge of a country, and an army and navy.  MacMillan shows him blundering around in diplomatic exchanges  - at times laughably so, except that the consequences were dire;  not that she blames him exclusively…
Read More

Home working

I've been off-blog for a while attending to family business, of which the central feature was scattering my mother's ashes in her native Kincardineshire.   She was 98 when she died last year and ready to go, so there was no sadness.  We (me and my family, my brother and his family) used the opportunity to hook up with some cousins and second cousins whom we had either never met, or not seen much of.  My grandmother had 12 siblings, and my mother as a result had 64 cousins, so the family tree is a bit complex.  We filled in some gaps, but principally we just enjoyed exchanging family stories.…
Read More

Penelope Fitzgerald, late careers and low pensions

For my book group (all-male  - apparently book groups are powerful examples of our homophiliac tendencies, even more so for women than men) last night we had read Penelope Fitzgerald's The Beginning of Spring.  Everyone had enjoyed it, laughed at it, and marvelled at Fitzgerald's apparent capacity to get under the skin of Russian society without ever having been there.  (None of us knew much about Russia, but the descriptions were thoroughly convincing to us and to the critics who put the novel on the Booker shortlist.) Fitzgerald had a remarkable personal history.  She was the granddaughter of the Bishop of Lincoln and grew up surrounded by uncles and aunts of diverse talents. She…
Read More

Fair play

Chwaere Teg means  'fair play' in Welsh - a good title for an organisation that is doing excellent work promoting equality issues in Wales.  I was in Newport last night giving a lecture for them on Paula (and chapeau to them - they aim to alternate female and male speakers in their lecture series, though the audience was 90% female). We had quite some discussion on careers.  Chwaere Teg produced last year an excellent report, A Woman's Place, on women in the Welsh workforce.  Welsh women are upping their learning - 55% have recently taken part in adult education or training, compared to just 39% in 1996, and a full…
Read More

Discrimination and networks

In the last couple of days I've done one of my last PP interviews, and had a lively discussion with members of the NHS Employers Forum.  Both brought up the question of the effects of networks on people's career prospects, and how difficult it is to draw the line between networks which are part of 'normal' working lives, and those which serve to exclude women. My interviewee, Olivia, is 30ish and works for a global branding agency.  She told me how in her first years there a middle-aged manager had put together a group of younger male colleagues, who went whisky-drinking together.  Olivia saw this as a rather desperate attempt…
Read More

Politicians, Peter and Paula

I was chatting recently to a friend who lives in France.  We were musing sadly over the state of a country which we both love - she as a long-term resident, me as a sometime resident and frequent visitor.  The French economy is in poor shape, they have major social fractures, French culture seems to have lost its cutting edge;  and the political situation is dire, from almost every angle. There was an interesting recent piece by a political journalist (I'm afraid I can't remember who it was) which argued that the French presidency was designed by de Gaulle for himself; more or less worked for him for most of…
Read More

Learners’ achievements

Today will be full of news about A level results and what is happening to student access to higher education.  I hope at least some attention will be paid to the continuing plunge in mature student enrolments, and especially to the way in which part-time higher education has been harshly squeezed over the last years, but the focus will be on school leavers.  My firm bet is that a count of the images used in the press reports on exam results will show a big majority of girls.  One reason of course is that papers find them more photogenic , and they probably smile more easily than boys;  but another…
Read More

Citizen’s Income and its relevance

I've just finished reading Money for Everyone by Malcolm Torry.  It's an exhaustive, and quite exhausting, account of the case for a Citizen's Income - a basic unconditional payment to be made to every citizen -  man, woman and child.  A simpler version of the case is available from www.citizensincome.org.uk. The CI would bring together our current tax and benefits systems - if they can be described as such.  Torry goes into gruesome detail on the complexities of the benefits system.  He shows how strong the incentives are for people to cheat.  The complexity and perversities of the 'system' are such that anyone with an unstable earnings record is likely to…
Read More

Wikipedia and (self-)promotion

I watched Jimmy Wales being interviewed on Newsnight last night.    They are aiming to increase the diversity of their contributors, on gender and other dimensions.  He said that only 9-14% of the contributors to Wikipedia are women.I found this figure surprisingly low, and wondered what the reasons for it might be.  The most likely seems to me to be to do with self-confidence:  women are less likely to consider themselves authoritative enough to provide an entry, or to correct others' entries - even though there is no entry barrier to contributing, as far as I know.           A few days ago I interviewed Ann Oakley.…
Read More

Competent cabinets

The cabinet reshuffle has hardly been an exercise in gleaming meritocracy: after much trailing that it would change the gender profile, just two women were added to the numbers of full cabinet members.  This is not, at all, a snide comment on the competences of those who have been promoted.   It is simply that the exercise seems to have been very largely to do with presentation, and not at all to do with competence.  And that's not only unhelpful to the supposed  beneficiaries but runs directly against the cause it's supposedly espousing - better recognition for women. It's good that David Cameron has been sparing in his reshuffles.  Whether…
Read More

C20 Peters

I've been reading Margaret MacMillan's highly informative The War That Ended Peace.  She shows how all the relevant countries - Germany, Russia, France, Austria-Hungary and Britain - were constantly feeling their way round each other, testing out existing alliances/ententes and sounding out new ones in a revolving set of courtship dances.  The single most striking account is of Kaiser Wilhelm's character.  Here was a playground bully totally used to getting his own way, an immature adolescent in charge of a country, and an army and navy.  MacMillan shows him blundering around in diplomatic exchanges  - at times laughably so, except that the consequences were dire;  not that she blames him exclusively…
Read More

Home working

I've been off-blog for a while attending to family business, of which the central feature was scattering my mother's ashes in her native Kincardineshire.   She was 98 when she died last year and ready to go, so there was no sadness.  We (me and my family, my brother and his family) used the opportunity to hook up with some cousins and second cousins whom we had either never met, or not seen much of.  My grandmother had 12 siblings, and my mother as a result had 64 cousins, so the family tree is a bit complex.  We filled in some gaps, but principally we just enjoyed exchanging family stories.…
Read More

Penelope Fitzgerald, late careers and low pensions

For my book group (all-male  - apparently book groups are powerful examples of our homophiliac tendencies, even more so for women than men) last night we had read Penelope Fitzgerald's The Beginning of Spring.  Everyone had enjoyed it, laughed at it, and marvelled at Fitzgerald's apparent capacity to get under the skin of Russian society without ever having been there.  (None of us knew much about Russia, but the descriptions were thoroughly convincing to us and to the critics who put the novel on the Booker shortlist.) Fitzgerald had a remarkable personal history.  She was the granddaughter of the Bishop of Lincoln and grew up surrounded by uncles and aunts of diverse talents. She…
Read More

Fair play

Chwaere Teg means  'fair play' in Welsh - a good title for an organisation that is doing excellent work promoting equality issues in Wales.  I was in Newport last night giving a lecture for them on Paula (and chapeau to them - they aim to alternate female and male speakers in their lecture series, though the audience was 90% female). We had quite some discussion on careers.  Chwaere Teg produced last year an excellent report, A Woman's Place, on women in the Welsh workforce.  Welsh women are upping their learning - 55% have recently taken part in adult education or training, compared to just 39% in 1996, and a full…
Read More

Discrimination and networks

In the last couple of days I've done one of my last PP interviews, and had a lively discussion with members of the NHS Employers Forum.  Both brought up the question of the effects of networks on people's career prospects, and how difficult it is to draw the line between networks which are part of 'normal' working lives, and those which serve to exclude women. My interviewee, Olivia, is 30ish and works for a global branding agency.  She told me how in her first years there a middle-aged manager had put together a group of younger male colleagues, who went whisky-drinking together.  Olivia saw this as a rather desperate attempt…
Read More

Politicians, Peter and Paula

I was chatting recently to a friend who lives in France.  We were musing sadly over the state of a country which we both love - she as a long-term resident, me as a sometime resident and frequent visitor.  The French economy is in poor shape, they have major social fractures, French culture seems to have lost its cutting edge;  and the political situation is dire, from almost every angle. There was an interesting recent piece by a political journalist (I'm afraid I can't remember who it was) which argued that the French presidency was designed by de Gaulle for himself; more or less worked for him for most of…
Read More

Learners’ achievements

Today will be full of news about A level results and what is happening to student access to higher education.  I hope at least some attention will be paid to the continuing plunge in mature student enrolments, and especially to the way in which part-time higher education has been harshly squeezed over the last years, but the focus will be on school leavers.  My firm bet is that a count of the images used in the press reports on exam results will show a big majority of girls.  One reason of course is that papers find them more photogenic , and they probably smile more easily than boys;  but another…
Read More

Citizen’s Income and its relevance

I've just finished reading Money for Everyone by Malcolm Torry.  It's an exhaustive, and quite exhausting, account of the case for a Citizen's Income - a basic unconditional payment to be made to every citizen -  man, woman and child.  A simpler version of the case is available from www.citizensincome.org.uk. The CI would bring together our current tax and benefits systems - if they can be described as such.  Torry goes into gruesome detail on the complexities of the benefits system.  He shows how strong the incentives are for people to cheat.  The complexity and perversities of the 'system' are such that anyone with an unstable earnings record is likely to…
Read More

Wikipedia and (self-)promotion

I watched Jimmy Wales being interviewed on Newsnight last night.    They are aiming to increase the diversity of their contributors, on gender and other dimensions.  He said that only 9-14% of the contributors to Wikipedia are women.I found this figure surprisingly low, and wondered what the reasons for it might be.  The most likely seems to me to be to do with self-confidence:  women are less likely to consider themselves authoritative enough to provide an entry, or to correct others' entries - even though there is no entry barrier to contributing, as far as I know.           A few days ago I interviewed Ann Oakley.…
Read More

Competent cabinets

The cabinet reshuffle has hardly been an exercise in gleaming meritocracy: after much trailing that it would change the gender profile, just two women were added to the numbers of full cabinet members.  This is not, at all, a snide comment on the competences of those who have been promoted.   It is simply that the exercise seems to have been very largely to do with presentation, and not at all to do with competence.  And that's not only unhelpful to the supposed  beneficiaries but runs directly against the cause it's supposedly espousing - better recognition for women. It's good that David Cameron has been sparing in his reshuffles.  Whether…
Read More

C20 Peters

I've been reading Margaret MacMillan's highly informative The War That Ended Peace.  She shows how all the relevant countries - Germany, Russia, France, Austria-Hungary and Britain - were constantly feeling their way round each other, testing out existing alliances/ententes and sounding out new ones in a revolving set of courtship dances.  The single most striking account is of Kaiser Wilhelm's character.  Here was a playground bully totally used to getting his own way, an immature adolescent in charge of a country, and an army and navy.  MacMillan shows him blundering around in diplomatic exchanges  - at times laughably so, except that the consequences were dire;  not that she blames him exclusively…
Read More

Home working

I've been off-blog for a while attending to family business, of which the central feature was scattering my mother's ashes in her native Kincardineshire.   She was 98 when she died last year and ready to go, so there was no sadness.  We (me and my family, my brother and his family) used the opportunity to hook up with some cousins and second cousins whom we had either never met, or not seen much of.  My grandmother had 12 siblings, and my mother as a result had 64 cousins, so the family tree is a bit complex.  We filled in some gaps, but principally we just enjoyed exchanging family stories.…
Read More

Penelope Fitzgerald, late careers and low pensions

For my book group (all-male  - apparently book groups are powerful examples of our homophiliac tendencies, even more so for women than men) last night we had read Penelope Fitzgerald's The Beginning of Spring.  Everyone had enjoyed it, laughed at it, and marvelled at Fitzgerald's apparent capacity to get under the skin of Russian society without ever having been there.  (None of us knew much about Russia, but the descriptions were thoroughly convincing to us and to the critics who put the novel on the Booker shortlist.) Fitzgerald had a remarkable personal history.  She was the granddaughter of the Bishop of Lincoln and grew up surrounded by uncles and aunts of diverse talents. She…
Read More

Fair play

Chwaere Teg means  'fair play' in Welsh - a good title for an organisation that is doing excellent work promoting equality issues in Wales.  I was in Newport last night giving a lecture for them on Paula (and chapeau to them - they aim to alternate female and male speakers in their lecture series, though the audience was 90% female). We had quite some discussion on careers.  Chwaere Teg produced last year an excellent report, A Woman's Place, on women in the Welsh workforce.  Welsh women are upping their learning - 55% have recently taken part in adult education or training, compared to just 39% in 1996, and a full…
Read More

Discrimination and networks

In the last couple of days I've done one of my last PP interviews, and had a lively discussion with members of the NHS Employers Forum.  Both brought up the question of the effects of networks on people's career prospects, and how difficult it is to draw the line between networks which are part of 'normal' working lives, and those which serve to exclude women. My interviewee, Olivia, is 30ish and works for a global branding agency.  She told me how in her first years there a middle-aged manager had put together a group of younger male colleagues, who went whisky-drinking together.  Olivia saw this as a rather desperate attempt…
Read More

Politicians, Peter and Paula

I was chatting recently to a friend who lives in France.  We were musing sadly over the state of a country which we both love - she as a long-term resident, me as a sometime resident and frequent visitor.  The French economy is in poor shape, they have major social fractures, French culture seems to have lost its cutting edge;  and the political situation is dire, from almost every angle. There was an interesting recent piece by a political journalist (I'm afraid I can't remember who it was) which argued that the French presidency was designed by de Gaulle for himself; more or less worked for him for most of…
Read More

Learners’ achievements

Today will be full of news about A level results and what is happening to student access to higher education.  I hope at least some attention will be paid to the continuing plunge in mature student enrolments, and especially to the way in which part-time higher education has been harshly squeezed over the last years, but the focus will be on school leavers.  My firm bet is that a count of the images used in the press reports on exam results will show a big majority of girls.  One reason of course is that papers find them more photogenic , and they probably smile more easily than boys;  but another…
Read More

Citizen’s Income and its relevance

I've just finished reading Money for Everyone by Malcolm Torry.  It's an exhaustive, and quite exhausting, account of the case for a Citizen's Income - a basic unconditional payment to be made to every citizen -  man, woman and child.  A simpler version of the case is available from www.citizensincome.org.uk. The CI would bring together our current tax and benefits systems - if they can be described as such.  Torry goes into gruesome detail on the complexities of the benefits system.  He shows how strong the incentives are for people to cheat.  The complexity and perversities of the 'system' are such that anyone with an unstable earnings record is likely to…
Read More

Wikipedia and (self-)promotion

I watched Jimmy Wales being interviewed on Newsnight last night.    They are aiming to increase the diversity of their contributors, on gender and other dimensions.  He said that only 9-14% of the contributors to Wikipedia are women.I found this figure surprisingly low, and wondered what the reasons for it might be.  The most likely seems to me to be to do with self-confidence:  women are less likely to consider themselves authoritative enough to provide an entry, or to correct others' entries - even though there is no entry barrier to contributing, as far as I know.           A few days ago I interviewed Ann Oakley.…
Read More

Competent cabinets

The cabinet reshuffle has hardly been an exercise in gleaming meritocracy: after much trailing that it would change the gender profile, just two women were added to the numbers of full cabinet members.  This is not, at all, a snide comment on the competences of those who have been promoted.   It is simply that the exercise seems to have been very largely to do with presentation, and not at all to do with competence.  And that's not only unhelpful to the supposed  beneficiaries but runs directly against the cause it's supposedly espousing - better recognition for women. It's good that David Cameron has been sparing in his reshuffles.  Whether…
Read More

C20 Peters

I've been reading Margaret MacMillan's highly informative The War That Ended Peace.  She shows how all the relevant countries - Germany, Russia, France, Austria-Hungary and Britain - were constantly feeling their way round each other, testing out existing alliances/ententes and sounding out new ones in a revolving set of courtship dances.  The single most striking account is of Kaiser Wilhelm's character.  Here was a playground bully totally used to getting his own way, an immature adolescent in charge of a country, and an army and navy.  MacMillan shows him blundering around in diplomatic exchanges  - at times laughably so, except that the consequences were dire;  not that she blames him exclusively…
Read More

Home working

I've been off-blog for a while attending to family business, of which the central feature was scattering my mother's ashes in her native Kincardineshire.   She was 98 when she died last year and ready to go, so there was no sadness.  We (me and my family, my brother and his family) used the opportunity to hook up with some cousins and second cousins whom we had either never met, or not seen much of.  My grandmother had 12 siblings, and my mother as a result had 64 cousins, so the family tree is a bit complex.  We filled in some gaps, but principally we just enjoyed exchanging family stories.…
Read More

Penelope Fitzgerald, late careers and low pensions

For my book group (all-male  - apparently book groups are powerful examples of our homophiliac tendencies, even more so for women than men) last night we had read Penelope Fitzgerald's The Beginning of Spring.  Everyone had enjoyed it, laughed at it, and marvelled at Fitzgerald's apparent capacity to get under the skin of Russian society without ever having been there.  (None of us knew much about Russia, but the descriptions were thoroughly convincing to us and to the critics who put the novel on the Booker shortlist.) Fitzgerald had a remarkable personal history.  She was the granddaughter of the Bishop of Lincoln and grew up surrounded by uncles and aunts of diverse talents. She…
Read More

Fair play

Chwaere Teg means  'fair play' in Welsh - a good title for an organisation that is doing excellent work promoting equality issues in Wales.  I was in Newport last night giving a lecture for them on Paula (and chapeau to them - they aim to alternate female and male speakers in their lecture series, though the audience was 90% female). We had quite some discussion on careers.  Chwaere Teg produced last year an excellent report, A Woman's Place, on women in the Welsh workforce.  Welsh women are upping their learning - 55% have recently taken part in adult education or training, compared to just 39% in 1996, and a full…
Read More

Discrimination and networks

In the last couple of days I've done one of my last PP interviews, and had a lively discussion with members of the NHS Employers Forum.  Both brought up the question of the effects of networks on people's career prospects, and how difficult it is to draw the line between networks which are part of 'normal' working lives, and those which serve to exclude women. My interviewee, Olivia, is 30ish and works for a global branding agency.  She told me how in her first years there a middle-aged manager had put together a group of younger male colleagues, who went whisky-drinking together.  Olivia saw this as a rather desperate attempt…
Read More

Politicians, Peter and Paula

I was chatting recently to a friend who lives in France.  We were musing sadly over the state of a country which we both love - she as a long-term resident, me as a sometime resident and frequent visitor.  The French economy is in poor shape, they have major social fractures, French culture seems to have lost its cutting edge;  and the political situation is dire, from almost every angle. There was an interesting recent piece by a political journalist (I'm afraid I can't remember who it was) which argued that the French presidency was designed by de Gaulle for himself; more or less worked for him for most of…
Read More

Learners’ achievements

Today will be full of news about A level results and what is happening to student access to higher education.  I hope at least some attention will be paid to the continuing plunge in mature student enrolments, and especially to the way in which part-time higher education has been harshly squeezed over the last years, but the focus will be on school leavers.  My firm bet is that a count of the images used in the press reports on exam results will show a big majority of girls.  One reason of course is that papers find them more photogenic , and they probably smile more easily than boys;  but another…
Read More

Citizen’s Income and its relevance

I've just finished reading Money for Everyone by Malcolm Torry.  It's an exhaustive, and quite exhausting, account of the case for a Citizen's Income - a basic unconditional payment to be made to every citizen -  man, woman and child.  A simpler version of the case is available from www.citizensincome.org.uk. The CI would bring together our current tax and benefits systems - if they can be described as such.  Torry goes into gruesome detail on the complexities of the benefits system.  He shows how strong the incentives are for people to cheat.  The complexity and perversities of the 'system' are such that anyone with an unstable earnings record is likely to…
Read More

Wikipedia and (self-)promotion

I watched Jimmy Wales being interviewed on Newsnight last night.    They are aiming to increase the diversity of their contributors, on gender and other dimensions.  He said that only 9-14% of the contributors to Wikipedia are women.I found this figure surprisingly low, and wondered what the reasons for it might be.  The most likely seems to me to be to do with self-confidence:  women are less likely to consider themselves authoritative enough to provide an entry, or to correct others' entries - even though there is no entry barrier to contributing, as far as I know.           A few days ago I interviewed Ann Oakley.…
Read More

Competent cabinets

The cabinet reshuffle has hardly been an exercise in gleaming meritocracy: after much trailing that it would change the gender profile, just two women were added to the numbers of full cabinet members.  This is not, at all, a snide comment on the competences of those who have been promoted.   It is simply that the exercise seems to have been very largely to do with presentation, and not at all to do with competence.  And that's not only unhelpful to the supposed  beneficiaries but runs directly against the cause it's supposedly espousing - better recognition for women. It's good that David Cameron has been sparing in his reshuffles.  Whether…
Read More

C20 Peters

I've been reading Margaret MacMillan's highly informative The War That Ended Peace.  She shows how all the relevant countries - Germany, Russia, France, Austria-Hungary and Britain - were constantly feeling their way round each other, testing out existing alliances/ententes and sounding out new ones in a revolving set of courtship dances.  The single most striking account is of Kaiser Wilhelm's character.  Here was a playground bully totally used to getting his own way, an immature adolescent in charge of a country, and an army and navy.  MacMillan shows him blundering around in diplomatic exchanges  - at times laughably so, except that the consequences were dire;  not that she blames him exclusively…
Read More

Home working

I've been off-blog for a while attending to family business, of which the central feature was scattering my mother's ashes in her native Kincardineshire.   She was 98 when she died last year and ready to go, so there was no sadness.  We (me and my family, my brother and his family) used the opportunity to hook up with some cousins and second cousins whom we had either never met, or not seen much of.  My grandmother had 12 siblings, and my mother as a result had 64 cousins, so the family tree is a bit complex.  We filled in some gaps, but principally we just enjoyed exchanging family stories.…
Read More

Penelope Fitzgerald, late careers and low pensions

For my book group (all-male  - apparently book groups are powerful examples of our homophiliac tendencies, even more so for women than men) last night we had read Penelope Fitzgerald's The Beginning of Spring.  Everyone had enjoyed it, laughed at it, and marvelled at Fitzgerald's apparent capacity to get under the skin of Russian society without ever having been there.  (None of us knew much about Russia, but the descriptions were thoroughly convincing to us and to the critics who put the novel on the Booker shortlist.) Fitzgerald had a remarkable personal history.  She was the granddaughter of the Bishop of Lincoln and grew up surrounded by uncles and aunts of diverse talents. She…
Read More

Fair play

Chwaere Teg means  'fair play' in Welsh - a good title for an organisation that is doing excellent work promoting equality issues in Wales.  I was in Newport last night giving a lecture for them on Paula (and chapeau to them - they aim to alternate female and male speakers in their lecture series, though the audience was 90% female). We had quite some discussion on careers.  Chwaere Teg produced last year an excellent report, A Woman's Place, on women in the Welsh workforce.  Welsh women are upping their learning - 55% have recently taken part in adult education or training, compared to just 39% in 1996, and a full…
Read More

Discrimination and networks

In the last couple of days I've done one of my last PP interviews, and had a lively discussion with members of the NHS Employers Forum.  Both brought up the question of the effects of networks on people's career prospects, and how difficult it is to draw the line between networks which are part of 'normal' working lives, and those which serve to exclude women. My interviewee, Olivia, is 30ish and works for a global branding agency.  She told me how in her first years there a middle-aged manager had put together a group of younger male colleagues, who went whisky-drinking together.  Olivia saw this as a rather desperate attempt…
Read More

Politicians, Peter and Paula

I was chatting recently to a friend who lives in France.  We were musing sadly over the state of a country which we both love - she as a long-term resident, me as a sometime resident and frequent visitor.  The French economy is in poor shape, they have major social fractures, French culture seems to have lost its cutting edge;  and the political situation is dire, from almost every angle. There was an interesting recent piece by a political journalist (I'm afraid I can't remember who it was) which argued that the French presidency was designed by de Gaulle for himself; more or less worked for him for most of…
Read More

Learners’ achievements

Today will be full of news about A level results and what is happening to student access to higher education.  I hope at least some attention will be paid to the continuing plunge in mature student enrolments, and especially to the way in which part-time higher education has been harshly squeezed over the last years, but the focus will be on school leavers.  My firm bet is that a count of the images used in the press reports on exam results will show a big majority of girls.  One reason of course is that papers find them more photogenic , and they probably smile more easily than boys;  but another…
Read More

Citizen’s Income and its relevance

I've just finished reading Money for Everyone by Malcolm Torry.  It's an exhaustive, and quite exhausting, account of the case for a Citizen's Income - a basic unconditional payment to be made to every citizen -  man, woman and child.  A simpler version of the case is available from www.citizensincome.org.uk. The CI would bring together our current tax and benefits systems - if they can be described as such.  Torry goes into gruesome detail on the complexities of the benefits system.  He shows how strong the incentives are for people to cheat.  The complexity and perversities of the 'system' are such that anyone with an unstable earnings record is likely to…
Read More

Wikipedia and (self-)promotion

I watched Jimmy Wales being interviewed on Newsnight last night.    They are aiming to increase the diversity of their contributors, on gender and other dimensions.  He said that only 9-14% of the contributors to Wikipedia are women.I found this figure surprisingly low, and wondered what the reasons for it might be.  The most likely seems to me to be to do with self-confidence:  women are less likely to consider themselves authoritative enough to provide an entry, or to correct others' entries - even though there is no entry barrier to contributing, as far as I know.           A few days ago I interviewed Ann Oakley.…
Read More

Competent cabinets

The cabinet reshuffle has hardly been an exercise in gleaming meritocracy: after much trailing that it would change the gender profile, just two women were added to the numbers of full cabinet members.  This is not, at all, a snide comment on the competences of those who have been promoted.   It is simply that the exercise seems to have been very largely to do with presentation, and not at all to do with competence.  And that's not only unhelpful to the supposed  beneficiaries but runs directly against the cause it's supposedly espousing - better recognition for women. It's good that David Cameron has been sparing in his reshuffles.  Whether…
Read More

C20 Peters

I've been reading Margaret MacMillan's highly informative The War That Ended Peace.  She shows how all the relevant countries - Germany, Russia, France, Austria-Hungary and Britain - were constantly feeling their way round each other, testing out existing alliances/ententes and sounding out new ones in a revolving set of courtship dances.  The single most striking account is of Kaiser Wilhelm's character.  Here was a playground bully totally used to getting his own way, an immature adolescent in charge of a country, and an army and navy.  MacMillan shows him blundering around in diplomatic exchanges  - at times laughably so, except that the consequences were dire;  not that she blames him exclusively…
Read More

Home working

I've been off-blog for a while attending to family business, of which the central feature was scattering my mother's ashes in her native Kincardineshire.   She was 98 when she died last year and ready to go, so there was no sadness.  We (me and my family, my brother and his family) used the opportunity to hook up with some cousins and second cousins whom we had either never met, or not seen much of.  My grandmother had 12 siblings, and my mother as a result had 64 cousins, so the family tree is a bit complex.  We filled in some gaps, but principally we just enjoyed exchanging family stories.…
Read More

Penelope Fitzgerald, late careers and low pensions

For my book group (all-male  - apparently book groups are powerful examples of our homophiliac tendencies, even more so for women than men) last night we had read Penelope Fitzgerald's The Beginning of Spring.  Everyone had enjoyed it, laughed at it, and marvelled at Fitzgerald's apparent capacity to get under the skin of Russian society without ever having been there.  (None of us knew much about Russia, but the descriptions were thoroughly convincing to us and to the critics who put the novel on the Booker shortlist.) Fitzgerald had a remarkable personal history.  She was the granddaughter of the Bishop of Lincoln and grew up surrounded by uncles and aunts of diverse talents. She…
Read More

Fair play

Chwaere Teg means  'fair play' in Welsh - a good title for an organisation that is doing excellent work promoting equality issues in Wales.  I was in Newport last night giving a lecture for them on Paula (and chapeau to them - they aim to alternate female and male speakers in their lecture series, though the audience was 90% female). We had quite some discussion on careers.  Chwaere Teg produced last year an excellent report, A Woman's Place, on women in the Welsh workforce.  Welsh women are upping their learning - 55% have recently taken part in adult education or training, compared to just 39% in 1996, and a full…
Read More

Discrimination and networks

In the last couple of days I've done one of my last PP interviews, and had a lively discussion with members of the NHS Employers Forum.  Both brought up the question of the effects of networks on people's career prospects, and how difficult it is to draw the line between networks which are part of 'normal' working lives, and those which serve to exclude women. My interviewee, Olivia, is 30ish and works for a global branding agency.  She told me how in her first years there a middle-aged manager had put together a group of younger male colleagues, who went whisky-drinking together.  Olivia saw this as a rather desperate attempt…
Read More

Politicians, Peter and Paula

I was chatting recently to a friend who lives in France.  We were musing sadly over the state of a country which we both love - she as a long-term resident, me as a sometime resident and frequent visitor.  The French economy is in poor shape, they have major social fractures, French culture seems to have lost its cutting edge;  and the political situation is dire, from almost every angle. There was an interesting recent piece by a political journalist (I'm afraid I can't remember who it was) which argued that the French presidency was designed by de Gaulle for himself; more or less worked for him for most of…
Read More

Learners’ achievements

Today will be full of news about A level results and what is happening to student access to higher education.  I hope at least some attention will be paid to the continuing plunge in mature student enrolments, and especially to the way in which part-time higher education has been harshly squeezed over the last years, but the focus will be on school leavers.  My firm bet is that a count of the images used in the press reports on exam results will show a big majority of girls.  One reason of course is that papers find them more photogenic , and they probably smile more easily than boys;  but another…
Read More

Citizen’s Income and its relevance

I've just finished reading Money for Everyone by Malcolm Torry.  It's an exhaustive, and quite exhausting, account of the case for a Citizen's Income - a basic unconditional payment to be made to every citizen -  man, woman and child.  A simpler version of the case is available from www.citizensincome.org.uk. The CI would bring together our current tax and benefits systems - if they can be described as such.  Torry goes into gruesome detail on the complexities of the benefits system.  He shows how strong the incentives are for people to cheat.  The complexity and perversities of the 'system' are such that anyone with an unstable earnings record is likely to…
Read More

Wikipedia and (self-)promotion

I watched Jimmy Wales being interviewed on Newsnight last night.    They are aiming to increase the diversity of their contributors, on gender and other dimensions.  He said that only 9-14% of the contributors to Wikipedia are women.I found this figure surprisingly low, and wondered what the reasons for it might be.  The most likely seems to me to be to do with self-confidence:  women are less likely to consider themselves authoritative enough to provide an entry, or to correct others' entries - even though there is no entry barrier to contributing, as far as I know.           A few days ago I interviewed Ann Oakley.…
Read More

Competent cabinets

The cabinet reshuffle has hardly been an exercise in gleaming meritocracy: after much trailing that it would change the gender profile, just two women were added to the numbers of full cabinet members.  This is not, at all, a snide comment on the competences of those who have been promoted.   It is simply that the exercise seems to have been very largely to do with presentation, and not at all to do with competence.  And that's not only unhelpful to the supposed  beneficiaries but runs directly against the cause it's supposedly espousing - better recognition for women. It's good that David Cameron has been sparing in his reshuffles.  Whether…
Read More

C20 Peters

I've been reading Margaret MacMillan's highly informative The War That Ended Peace.  She shows how all the relevant countries - Germany, Russia, France, Austria-Hungary and Britain - were constantly feeling their way round each other, testing out existing alliances/ententes and sounding out new ones in a revolving set of courtship dances.  The single most striking account is of Kaiser Wilhelm's character.  Here was a playground bully totally used to getting his own way, an immature adolescent in charge of a country, and an army and navy.  MacMillan shows him blundering around in diplomatic exchanges  - at times laughably so, except that the consequences were dire;  not that she blames him exclusively…
Read More

Home working

I've been off-blog for a while attending to family business, of which the central feature was scattering my mother's ashes in her native Kincardineshire.   She was 98 when she died last year and ready to go, so there was no sadness.  We (me and my family, my brother and his family) used the opportunity to hook up with some cousins and second cousins whom we had either never met, or not seen much of.  My grandmother had 12 siblings, and my mother as a result had 64 cousins, so the family tree is a bit complex.  We filled in some gaps, but principally we just enjoyed exchanging family stories.…
Read More

Penelope Fitzgerald, late careers and low pensions

For my book group (all-male  - apparently book groups are powerful examples of our homophiliac tendencies, even more so for women than men) last night we had read Penelope Fitzgerald's The Beginning of Spring.  Everyone had enjoyed it, laughed at it, and marvelled at Fitzgerald's apparent capacity to get under the skin of Russian society without ever having been there.  (None of us knew much about Russia, but the descriptions were thoroughly convincing to us and to the critics who put the novel on the Booker shortlist.) Fitzgerald had a remarkable personal history.  She was the granddaughter of the Bishop of Lincoln and grew up surrounded by uncles and aunts of diverse talents. She…
Read More

Fair play

Chwaere Teg means  'fair play' in Welsh - a good title for an organisation that is doing excellent work promoting equality issues in Wales.  I was in Newport last night giving a lecture for them on Paula (and chapeau to them - they aim to alternate female and male speakers in their lecture series, though the audience was 90% female). We had quite some discussion on careers.  Chwaere Teg produced last year an excellent report, A Woman's Place, on women in the Welsh workforce.  Welsh women are upping their learning - 55% have recently taken part in adult education or training, compared to just 39% in 1996, and a full…
Read More

Discrimination and networks

In the last couple of days I've done one of my last PP interviews, and had a lively discussion with members of the NHS Employers Forum.  Both brought up the question of the effects of networks on people's career prospects, and how difficult it is to draw the line between networks which are part of 'normal' working lives, and those which serve to exclude women. My interviewee, Olivia, is 30ish and works for a global branding agency.  She told me how in her first years there a middle-aged manager had put together a group of younger male colleagues, who went whisky-drinking together.  Olivia saw this as a rather desperate attempt…
Read More

Politicians, Peter and Paula

I was chatting recently to a friend who lives in France.  We were musing sadly over the state of a country which we both love - she as a long-term resident, me as a sometime resident and frequent visitor.  The French economy is in poor shape, they have major social fractures, French culture seems to have lost its cutting edge;  and the political situation is dire, from almost every angle. There was an interesting recent piece by a political journalist (I'm afraid I can't remember who it was) which argued that the French presidency was designed by de Gaulle for himself; more or less worked for him for most of…
Read More

Learners’ achievements

Today will be full of news about A level results and what is happening to student access to higher education.  I hope at least some attention will be paid to the continuing plunge in mature student enrolments, and especially to the way in which part-time higher education has been harshly squeezed over the last years, but the focus will be on school leavers.  My firm bet is that a count of the images used in the press reports on exam results will show a big majority of girls.  One reason of course is that papers find them more photogenic , and they probably smile more easily than boys;  but another…
Read More

Citizen’s Income and its relevance

I've just finished reading Money for Everyone by Malcolm Torry.  It's an exhaustive, and quite exhausting, account of the case for a Citizen's Income - a basic unconditional payment to be made to every citizen -  man, woman and child.  A simpler version of the case is available from www.citizensincome.org.uk. The CI would bring together our current tax and benefits systems - if they can be described as such.  Torry goes into gruesome detail on the complexities of the benefits system.  He shows how strong the incentives are for people to cheat.  The complexity and perversities of the 'system' are such that anyone with an unstable earnings record is likely to…
Read More

Wikipedia and (self-)promotion

I watched Jimmy Wales being interviewed on Newsnight last night.    They are aiming to increase the diversity of their contributors, on gender and other dimensions.  He said that only 9-14% of the contributors to Wikipedia are women.I found this figure surprisingly low, and wondered what the reasons for it might be.  The most likely seems to me to be to do with self-confidence:  women are less likely to consider themselves authoritative enough to provide an entry, or to correct others' entries - even though there is no entry barrier to contributing, as far as I know.           A few days ago I interviewed Ann Oakley.…
Read More

Competent cabinets

The cabinet reshuffle has hardly been an exercise in gleaming meritocracy: after much trailing that it would change the gender profile, just two women were added to the numbers of full cabinet members.  This is not, at all, a snide comment on the competences of those who have been promoted.   It is simply that the exercise seems to have been very largely to do with presentation, and not at all to do with competence.  And that's not only unhelpful to the supposed  beneficiaries but runs directly against the cause it's supposedly espousing - better recognition for women. It's good that David Cameron has been sparing in his reshuffles.  Whether…
Read More

C20 Peters

I've been reading Margaret MacMillan's highly informative The War That Ended Peace.  She shows how all the relevant countries - Germany, Russia, France, Austria-Hungary and Britain - were constantly feeling their way round each other, testing out existing alliances/ententes and sounding out new ones in a revolving set of courtship dances.  The single most striking account is of Kaiser Wilhelm's character.  Here was a playground bully totally used to getting his own way, an immature adolescent in charge of a country, and an army and navy.  MacMillan shows him blundering around in diplomatic exchanges  - at times laughably so, except that the consequences were dire;  not that she blames him exclusively…
Read More

Home working

I've been off-blog for a while attending to family business, of which the central feature was scattering my mother's ashes in her native Kincardineshire.   She was 98 when she died last year and ready to go, so there was no sadness.  We (me and my family, my brother and his family) used the opportunity to hook up with some cousins and second cousins whom we had either never met, or not seen much of.  My grandmother had 12 siblings, and my mother as a result had 64 cousins, so the family tree is a bit complex.  We filled in some gaps, but principally we just enjoyed exchanging family stories.…
Read More

Penelope Fitzgerald, late careers and low pensions

For my book group (all-male  - apparently book groups are powerful examples of our homophiliac tendencies, even more so for women than men) last night we had read Penelope Fitzgerald's The Beginning of Spring.  Everyone had enjoyed it, laughed at it, and marvelled at Fitzgerald's apparent capacity to get under the skin of Russian society without ever having been there.  (None of us knew much about Russia, but the descriptions were thoroughly convincing to us and to the critics who put the novel on the Booker shortlist.) Fitzgerald had a remarkable personal history.  She was the granddaughter of the Bishop of Lincoln and grew up surrounded by uncles and aunts of diverse talents. She…
Read More

Fair play

Chwaere Teg means  'fair play' in Welsh - a good title for an organisation that is doing excellent work promoting equality issues in Wales.  I was in Newport last night giving a lecture for them on Paula (and chapeau to them - they aim to alternate female and male speakers in their lecture series, though the audience was 90% female). We had quite some discussion on careers.  Chwaere Teg produced last year an excellent report, A Woman's Place, on women in the Welsh workforce.  Welsh women are upping their learning - 55% have recently taken part in adult education or training, compared to just 39% in 1996, and a full…
Read More

Discrimination and networks

In the last couple of days I've done one of my last PP interviews, and had a lively discussion with members of the NHS Employers Forum.  Both brought up the question of the effects of networks on people's career prospects, and how difficult it is to draw the line between networks which are part of 'normal' working lives, and those which serve to exclude women. My interviewee, Olivia, is 30ish and works for a global branding agency.  She told me how in her first years there a middle-aged manager had put together a group of younger male colleagues, who went whisky-drinking together.  Olivia saw this as a rather desperate attempt…
Read More

Politicians, Peter and Paula

I was chatting recently to a friend who lives in France.  We were musing sadly over the state of a country which we both love - she as a long-term resident, me as a sometime resident and frequent visitor.  The French economy is in poor shape, they have major social fractures, French culture seems to have lost its cutting edge;  and the political situation is dire, from almost every angle. There was an interesting recent piece by a political journalist (I'm afraid I can't remember who it was) which argued that the French presidency was designed by de Gaulle for himself; more or less worked for him for most of…
Read More

Learners’ achievements

Today will be full of news about A level results and what is happening to student access to higher education.  I hope at least some attention will be paid to the continuing plunge in mature student enrolments, and especially to the way in which part-time higher education has been harshly squeezed over the last years, but the focus will be on school leavers.  My firm bet is that a count of the images used in the press reports on exam results will show a big majority of girls.  One reason of course is that papers find them more photogenic , and they probably smile more easily than boys;  but another…
Read More

Citizen’s Income and its relevance

I've just finished reading Money for Everyone by Malcolm Torry.  It's an exhaustive, and quite exhausting, account of the case for a Citizen's Income - a basic unconditional payment to be made to every citizen -  man, woman and child.  A simpler version of the case is available from www.citizensincome.org.uk. The CI would bring together our current tax and benefits systems - if they can be described as such.  Torry goes into gruesome detail on the complexities of the benefits system.  He shows how strong the incentives are for people to cheat.  The complexity and perversities of the 'system' are such that anyone with an unstable earnings record is likely to…
Read More

Wikipedia and (self-)promotion

I watched Jimmy Wales being interviewed on Newsnight last night.    They are aiming to increase the diversity of their contributors, on gender and other dimensions.  He said that only 9-14% of the contributors to Wikipedia are women.I found this figure surprisingly low, and wondered what the reasons for it might be.  The most likely seems to me to be to do with self-confidence:  women are less likely to consider themselves authoritative enough to provide an entry, or to correct others' entries - even though there is no entry barrier to contributing, as far as I know.           A few days ago I interviewed Ann Oakley.…
Read More

Competent cabinets

The cabinet reshuffle has hardly been an exercise in gleaming meritocracy: after much trailing that it would change the gender profile, just two women were added to the numbers of full cabinet members.  This is not, at all, a snide comment on the competences of those who have been promoted.   It is simply that the exercise seems to have been very largely to do with presentation, and not at all to do with competence.  And that's not only unhelpful to the supposed  beneficiaries but runs directly against the cause it's supposedly espousing - better recognition for women. It's good that David Cameron has been sparing in his reshuffles.  Whether…
Read More

C20 Peters

I've been reading Margaret MacMillan's highly informative The War That Ended Peace.  She shows how all the relevant countries - Germany, Russia, France, Austria-Hungary and Britain - were constantly feeling their way round each other, testing out existing alliances/ententes and sounding out new ones in a revolving set of courtship dances.  The single most striking account is of Kaiser Wilhelm's character.  Here was a playground bully totally used to getting his own way, an immature adolescent in charge of a country, and an army and navy.  MacMillan shows him blundering around in diplomatic exchanges  - at times laughably so, except that the consequences were dire;  not that she blames him exclusively…
Read More

Home working

I've been off-blog for a while attending to family business, of which the central feature was scattering my mother's ashes in her native Kincardineshire.   She was 98 when she died last year and ready to go, so there was no sadness.  We (me and my family, my brother and his family) used the opportunity to hook up with some cousins and second cousins whom we had either never met, or not seen much of.  My grandmother had 12 siblings, and my mother as a result had 64 cousins, so the family tree is a bit complex.  We filled in some gaps, but principally we just enjoyed exchanging family stories.…
Read More

Penelope Fitzgerald, late careers and low pensions

For my book group (all-male  - apparently book groups are powerful examples of our homophiliac tendencies, even more so for women than men) last night we had read Penelope Fitzgerald's The Beginning of Spring.  Everyone had enjoyed it, laughed at it, and marvelled at Fitzgerald's apparent capacity to get under the skin of Russian society without ever having been there.  (None of us knew much about Russia, but the descriptions were thoroughly convincing to us and to the critics who put the novel on the Booker shortlist.) Fitzgerald had a remarkable personal history.  She was the granddaughter of the Bishop of Lincoln and grew up surrounded by uncles and aunts of diverse talents. She…
Read More

Fair play

Chwaere Teg means  'fair play' in Welsh - a good title for an organisation that is doing excellent work promoting equality issues in Wales.  I was in Newport last night giving a lecture for them on Paula (and chapeau to them - they aim to alternate female and male speakers in their lecture series, though the audience was 90% female). We had quite some discussion on careers.  Chwaere Teg produced last year an excellent report, A Woman's Place, on women in the Welsh workforce.  Welsh women are upping their learning - 55% have recently taken part in adult education or training, compared to just 39% in 1996, and a full…
Read More

Discrimination and networks

In the last couple of days I've done one of my last PP interviews, and had a lively discussion with members of the NHS Employers Forum.  Both brought up the question of the effects of networks on people's career prospects, and how difficult it is to draw the line between networks which are part of 'normal' working lives, and those which serve to exclude women. My interviewee, Olivia, is 30ish and works for a global branding agency.  She told me how in her first years there a middle-aged manager had put together a group of younger male colleagues, who went whisky-drinking together.  Olivia saw this as a rather desperate attempt…
Read More

Politicians, Peter and Paula

I was chatting recently to a friend who lives in France.  We were musing sadly over the state of a country which we both love - she as a long-term resident, me as a sometime resident and frequent visitor.  The French economy is in poor shape, they have major social fractures, French culture seems to have lost its cutting edge;  and the political situation is dire, from almost every angle. There was an interesting recent piece by a political journalist (I'm afraid I can't remember who it was) which argued that the French presidency was designed by de Gaulle for himself; more or less worked for him for most of…
Read More

Learners’ achievements

Today will be full of news about A level results and what is happening to student access to higher education.  I hope at least some attention will be paid to the continuing plunge in mature student enrolments, and especially to the way in which part-time higher education has been harshly squeezed over the last years, but the focus will be on school leavers.  My firm bet is that a count of the images used in the press reports on exam results will show a big majority of girls.  One reason of course is that papers find them more photogenic , and they probably smile more easily than boys;  but another…
Read More

Citizen’s Income and its relevance

I've just finished reading Money for Everyone by Malcolm Torry.  It's an exhaustive, and quite exhausting, account of the case for a Citizen's Income - a basic unconditional payment to be made to every citizen -  man, woman and child.  A simpler version of the case is available from www.citizensincome.org.uk. The CI would bring together our current tax and benefits systems - if they can be described as such.  Torry goes into gruesome detail on the complexities of the benefits system.  He shows how strong the incentives are for people to cheat.  The complexity and perversities of the 'system' are such that anyone with an unstable earnings record is likely to…
Read More

Wikipedia and (self-)promotion

I watched Jimmy Wales being interviewed on Newsnight last night.    They are aiming to increase the diversity of their contributors, on gender and other dimensions.  He said that only 9-14% of the contributors to Wikipedia are women.I found this figure surprisingly low, and wondered what the reasons for it might be.  The most likely seems to me to be to do with self-confidence:  women are less likely to consider themselves authoritative enough to provide an entry, or to correct others' entries - even though there is no entry barrier to contributing, as far as I know.           A few days ago I interviewed Ann Oakley.…
Read More

Competent cabinets

The cabinet reshuffle has hardly been an exercise in gleaming meritocracy: after much trailing that it would change the gender profile, just two women were added to the numbers of full cabinet members.  This is not, at all, a snide comment on the competences of those who have been promoted.   It is simply that the exercise seems to have been very largely to do with presentation, and not at all to do with competence.  And that's not only unhelpful to the supposed  beneficiaries but runs directly against the cause it's supposedly espousing - better recognition for women. It's good that David Cameron has been sparing in his reshuffles.  Whether…
Read More

C20 Peters

I've been reading Margaret MacMillan's highly informative The War That Ended Peace.  She shows how all the relevant countries - Germany, Russia, France, Austria-Hungary and Britain - were constantly feeling their way round each other, testing out existing alliances/ententes and sounding out new ones in a revolving set of courtship dances.  The single most striking account is of Kaiser Wilhelm's character.  Here was a playground bully totally used to getting his own way, an immature adolescent in charge of a country, and an army and navy.  MacMillan shows him blundering around in diplomatic exchanges  - at times laughably so, except that the consequences were dire;  not that she blames him exclusively…
Read More

Home working

I've been off-blog for a while attending to family business, of which the central feature was scattering my mother's ashes in her native Kincardineshire.   She was 98 when she died last year and ready to go, so there was no sadness.  We (me and my family, my brother and his family) used the opportunity to hook up with some cousins and second cousins whom we had either never met, or not seen much of.  My grandmother had 12 siblings, and my mother as a result had 64 cousins, so the family tree is a bit complex.  We filled in some gaps, but principally we just enjoyed exchanging family stories.…
Read More

Penelope Fitzgerald, late careers and low pensions

For my book group (all-male  - apparently book groups are powerful examples of our homophiliac tendencies, even more so for women than men) last night we had read Penelope Fitzgerald's The Beginning of Spring.  Everyone had enjoyed it, laughed at it, and marvelled at Fitzgerald's apparent capacity to get under the skin of Russian society without ever having been there.  (None of us knew much about Russia, but the descriptions were thoroughly convincing to us and to the critics who put the novel on the Booker shortlist.) Fitzgerald had a remarkable personal history.  She was the granddaughter of the Bishop of Lincoln and grew up surrounded by uncles and aunts of diverse talents. She…
Read More