Yesterday to mark International Women’s Day, the OECD published a report comparing the amounts of leisure enjoyed on average per day by men and women in the developed world. The report found that, on average, women enjoyed less leisure than men, a finding that led it to conclude that ‘governments and firms need to do more to tackle the gender equality gap’.
I wonder how keen the OECD would have been to make such a call had the methodology it employed to compute the quantities of leisure enjoyed by the two sexes not been quite so obviously flawed.
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An infatuation with various teenage boy bands, combined with aspirations to become the next big concert pianist, made for a tricky case of parental censorship when I requested the score of the latest ‘Hanson’ album for my eleventh birthday.
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We were informed this week that Jon Venables, one of James Bulger’s murderers, has violated his parole and is back behind bars. We don’t know what he did, we don’t know how long it’s been since his return to prison, and we don’t know how long he will remain there.
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The unlikely subject of potatoes has recently captured headlines across Europe. No, this is not another bizarre EU directive on “wonky vegetables”, but rather the return of the Genetic Modification (GM) debate, writes Natalie Hamill.
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Civitas, in conjunction with The Guardian, has today released figures obtained from PCT board papers that show, while the NHS is forecasting a surplus of over £1bn for the year, a number of PCTs – that buy care on behalf of patients – are currently in deficit in the year to-date. While not threatening the NHS’s overall financial position at present, the lack of financial control in PCTs is of serious concern ahead of tighter financial times.
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‘For someone from my background, parliament is like a foreign institution and that needs to be changed…. We need to stop discriminating in favour of… white middle-class lawyers… Parliament is 20 per cent Oxbridge PPE graduates who come out of the City and law… [We] should require decision-makers to explain and publish information. We can crack this by talking about it and being transparent about the numbers…’
Thus reportedly said equalities tsar Trevor Phillips recently about what he claims to be the unduly narrow and unrepresentative character of the House of Commons in terms of race and class.
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