Women

Last Saturday was International Women’s Day, but we celebrated early in Helmsley when my Yorkshire home town was featured in national news last month as a beacon of recession-beating female entrepreneurship: 60 per cent of our new ventures have female owners. This is shaping up to be a good year for women in business generally, what with Vince Cable voicing support for all-women shortlists for directorships of FTSE 100 companies with a view to achieving 25 per cent representation by 2015, up from 20 per cent today. The Business Secretary has been busy behind the scenes, too. ‘We had a letter from Vince telling us we should appoint a female

A couple of years ago, I was put on the third-generation contraceptive pill Yasmin. ‘It’s good for your skin and stabilises your weight,’ the doctor said. And it’s true. I’ve found it to be wonderful. Most of my friends are on similar types of third–gen pill, like Femodene and Marvelon; many swear by them. Out of the 3.5 million women in the UK using the combined contraceptive pill, 1 million are on third–gen versions. But things aren’t all rosy. In the past week, all British GPs have been ordered to warn anyone taking these popular pills that they are at risk of developing potentially fatal blood clots. The statistics make for

The Daily Mail has got itself into a bit of a lather over a “young mum” who was asked not to breast feed her baby at a swimming pool in Ashford, Kent. The story is here. As you can see, she apparently got her fecund baps out in the pool itself, before being censured by the pool manager. I think I’m sort of with the pool authorities on this, which perhaps just underlines my lack of modernity and general reactionary nature. Truth be told, I’m not terribly happy about seeing an infant breastfed in a café either. But I suppose the women are right when they reply well, we don’t

I’ve been racking my brains to think what I might have in common with Kim Jong Un and Piers Morgan. But apart from owning a spectacularly tiny penis, I simply cannot think. Certainly, when Kim is getting it in the neck for having one of his ex-girlfriends executed by firing squad to please his wife, or whenever Morgan is being criticised for being just the worst thing ever, I never find myself seized with some sudden hormonal urge to rush to their defence on account of the fact that we’re all part of the Brotherhood. Maybe, though, we’re missing a trick. Maybe we chaps of the world could enjoy so

The Director of Public Prosecutions, Keir Starmer, yesterday declared that it was right not to prosecute doctors who authorised abortions which, according to a Telegraph investigation, were requested because of the gender of the foetus. It seems that the women mentioned more than one reason for the abortions so it wasn’t possible to isolate the gender selection element from the other factors. ‘The only basis for a prosecution would be that although we could not prove these doctors authorised a gender-specific abortion, they did not carry out a sufficiently robust assessment of the risks,’ he said. And just what might a ‘robust’ assessment of risk amount to? As Mr Starmer made clear it’s

The hunt, since you ask, is on for one of Stuart Wheeler’s three very pretty daughters – Jacquetta is a well-known model – to opine about their father’s off-message remarks about women being ‘nowhere near as good as men’ at chess, bridge and poker. This was in response to a question about why there are so very few women on company boards. Stuart Wheeler, UKIP treasurer and Douglas Hurd lookalike, went on to explain that both sexes are good at different things and ‘you don’t necessarily want to impose a minimum of either sex at the top of any profession or at the top of any board’. Here Wheeler showed

Listen, this story is moving so quickly stuff will almost certainly have happened in between me writing it and you reading it. I hate the idea that you might be left behind the curve, but I just don’t know how to get around that. An outrage occurs and of course we try faithfully to report it, so that you can be outraged vicariously, but time moves on; the outrage spreads out, like a fast-moving conflagration, and begins to affects us all and we all of us feel unclean and traduced. Already, with the outrage I’m about to describe, the Guardian has decided it was not one outrage but two conjoined

I was away last week, filled with joy and love following the birth of our child, but just occasionally I’d check the multi-character psychodrama that is Twitter to stop myself getting too soppy. I sort of agree with Caitlin Moran’s stance in principle; if people are behaving appallingly on Twitter, Twitter should kick them out. If I ran a pub and people were driving away women with foul language, I needn’t call the police, but I’d have every right to bar them. What is problematic is that the organisers of Trolliday do not see this as a question of manners, but of misogyny – hate crime, in other words. Considering

‘Where do you stand on Syria?’ asked my stepson. Tricky one. Clearly, the Assad regime is loathsome and the West should exert more pressure to end the bloodbath, but on the other hand I’m not convinced we should be doing anything at all to help the divided rebels, not least because the faction that takes over will have lots of scary chemical weapons at its disposal. My steppy’s eyes glazed over. I didn’t have a view at all. That’s what he was thinking as he reverted to his iPhone for a far more stimulating exchange than anything I was offering. How wrong he was. My position is as clear and