Europe

Cyprus
  • How to Stop Losing Female Talent. [Financial Mirror, Cyprus] Although 50% of PWC's new recruits are female, only 22% of new admissions to partnerships are women, only 12% of all partners are women and only 8% of the company leadership is female. PWC's internal studies show that it tends to lose women between the 6th and 8th years in order to work for someone else.

England
  • The Future Could be Female. [Online Recruitment, UK] Over the next 10-15 years Artificial Intelligence (AI) is likely to be incorporated in several products to make users’ lives easier, but also cause male-dominated industries requiring muscle power to disappear. With their strong social interpersonal skills, females will be better equipped than men to succeed in the workplace of the future creating a new ‘Women’s Economy’. 

  • Equal Pay? Women Will Have to Wait 150 Yrs. [Rediff, India] Women would earn less than men for the next 150 years owing to discrimination and ineffective government policies, according to a British study. Thirty years after equality laws began to reduce the disparity between male and female pay, the narrowing gap has now almost stalled, the report by the Centre for Economic Performance at the London School of Economics, said.

  • Women 'Closing the Business Gap'. [BBC News] Women are continuing to slowly break through the glass ceiling of UK business and help male colleagues boost profitability. Females now make up 23% of all UK directors, a rise of just one percentage point on 2005's figures.
  • Firms Guilty of ‘Sartorial Discrimination’ as Research Finds. [Paypershop.com] As women cool down in spaghetti-straps and flip flops in offices around the country this week, employers failing to enforce gender neutral dress code policies could be at risk of sex discrimination claims from men forced to swelter in suits, according to research by UK experts in workplace issues.

  • Curtain Up on Theatre's Pay Battle of Sexes. [Leeds Today, UK] Bosses at the theatre - currently closed for the first phase of a £31.5m renovation - are facing claims including failure to pay equal wages for equal value work and sex discrimination from nine women. The women, who work in the box office or as cleaners, argue that their work is comparable with that done by male stage-door staff, but the men get better overtime terms.

  • Paying Women Less is Not Always Sexist. [American Thinker] The All England Lawn Tennis Club (AELTC) has several legitimate reasons for paying higher awards to its men’s champions. Most importantly, officials at the AELTC claim that the women carry less “box office appeal” and, therefore, don’t earn as much money for the club as the men do.

  • Memorial Marks World War II Women. [BBC News] A memorial to the role women played in World War II is being unveiled at the National Memorial Arboretum. The seated figure of a young woman in Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS) uniform will be unveiled during a service at Alrewas in Staffordshire.

  • WAGs are the UK's New Female Role Models. [New Zealand Herald] Rejecting the "have it all" mantra of previous generations, most young women between 21 and 25 appear to aspire to being a WAG (footballer's wife or girlfriend) rather than a powerbroking executive, according to a survey.

  • Female QCs at Record High. [BBC] Record numbers of women have achieved the legal rank of Queen's Counsel under a new appointments scheme. In the first year of an independent system, 68 women, more than ever, applied to be QCs, with 33 succeeding.

  • 'Honor' Murders Leave Thousands of Women Living in Fear. [Guardian Unlimited, UK] Thousands of young women in Britain are living in fear of the "hidden scourge" of so-called honor killing, a conference of police, Home Office staff and victim support groups was told yesterday.
  • British Buzz: Winter Wins First Female Masters Title. [SecondsOut] Juliet Winter from Derby became the inaugural winner of the female British Masters super-flyweight on Sunday when she out-pointed local favourite Shanee Martin over eight rounds at the Goresbrook Leisure Centre, Dagenham, Essex.

  • Women Use Mobiles to Give Men the "Cold Shoulder". [Contractor, UK] British women are using mobile phones to give male admirers the cold shoulder by being glued to their handsets when really they’re not speaking to anyone at all. Research due out this week will lift the lid on how mobile devices are arming females with an effective prop to cool the burning gaze of male passers by, through pretend speaking or texting.

  • British Police Working To Stop FGM. [All Headline News] An estimated 3 million women and girls suffer genital mutilation every year. The practice of FGM has been going on for centuries, especially in Africa. Now immigrants are bringing the practices to Western countries such as England, and the British police have been working on an awareness campaign this summer.
  • Tories Play Down Failure to 'Recruit Female Candidates'. [24dash.com, UK] The Tories dismissed claims today that David Cameron's bid to increase its number of women MPs had been rocked by the rejection of two priority hopefuls. Local landowner Richard Drax was selected over two females from the leader's "A-list" last night to fight the winnable Dorset South constituency at the next election.

France
  • Frenchwoman Wins Wimbledon With Style. [San Francisco Chronicle] In becoming the first French woman to win Wimbledon since the great Suzanne Lenglen in 1925 (the last of her six titles), Mauresmo upheld a fine tradition.

Ireland
  • Minister Hails Moves to Attract More Women into Forces. [Irish Examiner, Ireland] Minister for the Defense Forces Willie O’Dea officiated at an army commissioning ceremony in Co Kildare where a fifth of the cadets were women. As he announced over the weekend that the minimum restrictions for the Defense Forces were being lowered, the minister said: “I am very pleased to note that over 20% of these cadets are women.”

  • Female Consultant Wins Contract Case. [Irish Medical News, Ireland] A female consultant in the Cork area has won her case before a rights commissioner for a contract of indefinite duration, the IMO has stated.

  • Why Irish Women Just Love Their Bikini. [Belfast Telegraph, UK] Irish women are more likely to shed their clothes and bare all in a bikini than women in the UK, a survey has found. According to the findings, only 7.7% of Irish women reported that they don't hate anything about wearing a bikini - yet more women here are happy with putting one on compared to their counterparts across the UK.

  • Call for Abortion to be Legalized. [RTE News, Ireland] The Alliance for Choice has called for abortion to be legalized in Ireland following the publication of statistics from the UK Department of Health which show that an average of 15 Irish women per day travel to Britain to have an abortion.

  • Women Account for 31% of Directorships. [Facts Ireland] The number of female directors in Ireland has risen by over 50% since 2000, with women now accounting for 31% of directorships held in Irish registered companies. These figures were unveiled today by Experian, the global information solutions company.

Germany
  • Sex Losing Out to Drinking. [New York Times] To the list of pernicious things that did not happen at this World Cup, add one more: the widely predicted explosion of the sex trade. While clubs have been busier than usual after games, the tournament has not generated anywhere near the surge in demand for prostitution - or the influx of sex workers from Eastern Europe and Asia - that many expected.

  • Bush Massage Rubs Some the Wrong Way. [SeattlePI.com] It's not exactly "Presidents Gone Wild!" but for the normally staid Group of Eight Summit, a video of President Bush sidling behind German Chancellor Angela Merkel and delivering an impromptu neck rub is, well, as wild as it gets.
Italy
  • Italian Female Haka. [Newstalk ZB, New Zealand] Fiat is using female actors to perform the haka in a television commercial which has just started screening in Italy. Foreign Affairs spokesman Brad Tattersfield says the Maori want the haka to either be performed by a Maori group, or to have a new haka designed for the women to perform.

  • Forcing Wife to Kneel is a Crime, Says Court in 'Macho' Italy. [news.scotsman.com] Forcing your wife to kneel down and scrub the house floor clean is a crime because it amounts to mistreatment, Italy's highest appeals court ruled. The court upheld a conviction for ill-treatment handed down to a man who was left by his wife after what she said were years of abuse and threats.

Scotland
  • Hungry Men Find Big Women Sweet. [Scotsman, UK] A team of psychologists established that men who are hungry are attracted to plumper women, but the researchers found that, once they had eaten, men's taste in women reverted to those with slimmer figures.The academics suggest the phenomenon arises from primeval associations between larger body sizes and health and survival.

  • Scots Female Deaths From Alcohol Climb to Record High. [Scotsman, UK] The number of women dying from alcohol-related diseases reached a record high in Scotland last year, figures revealed today. Statistics showed that drink was responsible for the deaths of 492 females in 2005.

Spain
  • Women in Spain Moving from Bulls to Boardroom. [International Herald Tribune] Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero is promoting equal rights for women throughout Spanish society, where a recent study of social attitudes found that just 13% of men share laundry chores with their wives. Increasing the number of women on corporate boards will make Spanish companies more competitive.

Sweden
  • 'Rabid Superfeminist’: It's a Man. [International Herald Tribune] When Claes Borgstrom called on Sweden's soccer team to boycott the World Cup as a protest of prostitution in Germany, the uproar proved that the politics of gender can stir strong feelings even in a country with one of the world's narrowest gender gaps. Borgstrom, Sweden's equal opportunities ombudsman and the first male to hold the job, was derided as a cynic and a lunatic, and was pressed to resign.

  • Root Causes of Violence Against Women Remain. [UN News Centre] Describing the "gender equality experience" in Sweden as being a "contradictory process," a United Nations rights expert has said that the root causes of violence against women in the country have remain unchallenged.

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