Gender equality is rarely out of the news. From Women\u2019s Week celebrations in Ghana to London City\u2019s \u2018shocking gender pay gap\u2019 and a call by the Australian Sex Discrimination Commissioner for local councils to improve representation of women within local government, the debate about women\u2019s rights rages as much now as ever. One of the latest initiatives is a one-stop-shop for gender issues in astronomy and science. A new initiative called She Is An Astronomer (SIAA) has been launched, with a website of the same name. The site has a list of female astronomers over the ages, which begins with Hypatia of Alexandria who is credited with the charting of celestial bodies and the invention of the hydrometer. As one who lives with 5 females, not counting the dog, goat, chickens and other sundry farm animals, I may have a slightly jaundiced view of where the line for equality should be drawn. But a friend recently confided how he was delighted when a female engineer came to fix his washing machine. Initially she said it was going to be too expensive to repair, but after my friend\u2019s wife veered towards a ballistic fit the engineer came back five minutes later to say she had magically fixed it. \u2018Don\u2019t know how\u2019 she said \u2018but it\u2019s working now\u2019. It strikes me that we\u2019re missing a trick here. Since the first Chancellor of the Exchequer took office in 1316 we have never had a female Chancellor. Isn\u2019t now the time for that magical fix that can only come about with a woman\u2019s touch?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Gender equality is rarely out of the news. From Women\u2019s Week celebrations in Ghana to London City\u2019s \u2018shocking gender pay gap\u2019 and a call by the Australian Sex Discrimination Commissioner for local councils to improve representation of women within local government,<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"cybocfi_hide_featured_image":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[13],"class_list":["post-249","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-editorials","tag-fergus-byrne"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.marshwoodlife.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/249","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.marshwoodlife.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.marshwoodlife.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.marshwoodlife.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.marshwoodlife.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=249"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.marshwoodlife.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/249\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.marshwoodlife.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=249"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.marshwoodlife.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=249"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.marshwoodlife.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=249"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}