New Zealand’s prime minister Jacinda Ardern gave birth yesterday to a beautiful baby girl. Mother, baby, and soon to be stay-at-home Dad are reportedly all doing well. She will take six weeks’ maternity leave, and her husband will take over childcare duties after that. The overwhelming reaction online was ‘Woman gives birth. So what?’. But it’s [...]
I spent almost three years of my life researching gender quotas, and there were times I thought I'd never want to see the word feminism again. But over the past few months I've been rehabilitated, and I'm back to reading again with a bang. As part of my (over-enthusiastic) purchasing for International Women's Day, I bought [...]
Last year I finished a piece of research on women in politics in Rwanda after almost three years spent researching how the tiny African country has managed to top the league tables on women's representation. I first embarked upon what became my MSc as a newspaper feature for the Sunday Business Post on gender quotas in [...]
I don't normally do very personal blog posts here, but quite a bit of my op/ed stuff over the past year related to personal experiences, so I feel I should bring it all together a bit here. It's late January, and I am only now getting into 'January mode', the mode of healthy eating and exercise, [...]
The World Gender Gap Report 2014 has been released today. Here's a very nifty map of the report showing where the biggest disparities exist and also mapping progress over time using the slider. Rwanda (my area of interest in this regard) comes one step ahead of Ireland due to its enormous success in involving women in [...]
https://soundcloud.com/fergalbarry/chicken I'm currently presenting a phone-in radio show on Cork's 96m while my colleague, PJ Coogan, suns himself in Santa Ponsa. The difference in callers to a female presenter has been interesting, with my favourite one so far being Diarmuid... who called to ask me how to cook a chicken. Diarmuid said he wouldn't have [...]
Today is UN Day of Remembrance of the Victims of the Rwanda Genocide. The country’s President Paul Kagame has just completed a European tour, including a visit to Aras an Uachtarain last week. While in Ireland, he donated €50,000 to help build a robot for Cork’s Joanne O’Riordan. When Kagame’s RPF ended the genocide by invading [...]
As the 20th anniversary of the Rwandan genocide approaches, the country’s President Paul Kagame is on a tour of Europe commemorating what is known as Kwibuka 20. Since 1994, Rwanda has been synonymous with genocide. In a planned action which began 20 years ago this month, approximately 800,000 Rwandan Tutsis and moderate Hutus were massacred [...]
Mary Lou McDonald had to fight for maternity leave from the Dail - there is currently no provision for this. (Photo credit: Wikipedia) I wrote this piece in March after a trip to Rwanda to meet women politicians there, and after spending about four months shadowing and interviewing women politicians in Ireland. I just [...]
I wrote this piece for the Herald on Thursday as "lapgate" began spreading on social media. The reason I'm posting it here as well is this article by Stephen Collins in today's Irish Times. Collins is right on Dail reform but he is utterly out of step on this issue; an incident of sexual harassment in [...]
