2013-05-22T08:45:40-04:00 Julie Tomlin http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/author/index.php?author=julie-tomlin Copyright 2008, HuffingtonPost.com, Inc. HuffingtonPost Blogger Feed for Julie Tomlin Good old fashioned elbow grease. tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.2722848 2013-02-20T05:28:31-05:00 2013-04-22T05:12:01-04:00

Julie Tomlin http://www.huffingtonpost.com/julie-tomlin/
In Greece, where people have been on the receiving end of severe austerity measures and lived through six years of recession, it's a question that politics, as we know it, seems incapable of addressing.

The Greek government may have succeeded in imposing the spending cuts required by the IMF and Eurozone countries to secure financial bailouts, but changes have been set in motion that are rarely measured when it comes to determining economic policy.

So to an outsider, today's (20 February) general strike in Greece might look like just another in a long line of protests, but to many Greeks it will feel very different to those that took place in the years immediately following the debt crisis in 2009.

The austerity measures have been presented as unavoidable, but growing unemployment, cuts in salaries and pensions to name just a few of their effects, have had an impact on Greek people that is difficult - and uncomfortable - to comprehend.

Not only should we be concerned about the actions of an increasingly authoritarian government and the advance of far right extremists, the crisis facing Greece must surely prompt questions about how people might respond in the face of a failing political and economic system.

Amid a growing sense of hopelessness and despair - and fear - it's unlikely that the union organised strike will attract anything like the numbers matching the half million who turned out in Athens during the the October 2011 protests.

Even if the strike succeeds in shutting down state services for a day, the optimism and organisations that formed spontaneously in the city squares during those early protests are largely gone.

Former high school teacher and aid worker Theodora Oikonomides aka @IrateGreek who now works on a volunteer basis at a citizen journalism news operation in Athens named Radiobubble, points to distrust in the unions and also the severity of the police crackdown on past demonstrations:

"There is too much repression", says Oikonomides. "During the sit ins, it was something entirely new. You had thousands of people spontaneously answering a call by other citizens, not by unions or political parties. But it's when you had this unstructured movement developing when the repression was most fierce. We had the hell beaten out of us".

It's not only fear that's keeping away, however. Uncertainty in every sphere of life means that people lack the motivation to take part in demonstrations, or be involved in building alternative structures.

"This is not a time for people being creative, they are too busy surviving", says Oikonomides. "People are tired. They just want it to stop, if only just for one day."

But with no end to the economic hardship in sight, where can the Greek people find hope?

The continuing work of the assemblies that were formed during the demonstrations across Greece two years ago, the creation of bazaars where people can exchange items or give them away, a worker takeover at Viomichaniki Metalleutiki (Vio.Me), a building materials factory in Thessaloniki, may be positive that a shift is taking place, says Oikonomides.

"Two years on I'm still saying it's too early to tell", she says. "The Greek Left is like the Life of Brian, we have the Liberation Front of Judea, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Judea, you name it, but one positive that is happening is that these people are arguing maybe a little bit less among themselves."

The thousands of people flocking to see Our Great Circus, a play staged at Thessaloniki's National Theatre of Northern Greece, suggests there is a desire for experiences that unite people, says Oikonomides.

"People have stopped going to the cheap, show-off shows and instead are going to see plays and concerts, perhaps because they don't have a political colour, but like Greek music, it's something that everyone can appreciate", says Oikonomides.

As many Greeks experience desperation that conventional politics, and certainly politicians, seem unable to challenge, then perhaps small, simple creative solutions are needed.

"Right now I'm very pessimistic and fear everything will fall apart and there will be riots in the streets, but at other times I see things that give me hope", says Oikonomides. "I think that if on 20 February there could be something to give people hope, anything, even something quite small and very simple like a musical band going around the square could change the mood. But somebody has to do it."]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.2007323 2012-10-24T04:45:52-04:00 2012-12-23T05:12:01-05:00

Julie Tomlin http://www.huffingtonpost.com/julie-tomlin/
For many Arab women, however, this constant assessment of their lives and experiences within the revolution raises old questions about who gets to speak for them.

While media-savvy, English speaking women are given a platform, there are many women who not only feel excluded by their analysis, but are angered that the views of one woman are somehow taken to reflect the views of women across the country, if not the region.

Visual communicator Muiz, whose Nuclear Nuqta exhibition is headlining the Nour Arts Festival at Leighton House Museum in London this month, focuses on the Muslim and Arab identity in the post 9/11 and revolutionary era.

Among his work is an Arabic morse code series which gives a prominent position to Khadija, the first wife of Muhammad. By doing so, he not only reinterprets Arabic in a way that is different to how people are used to seeing it, but also to how women are perceived.

At a pre-Islamic time when women were characterised as being very low status, Khadija the first wife, was significantly older than Muhammad, a widow who had inherited a business and gone on to become a very successful businesswoman. She was not only affluent, but well-respected in society, independent and wise.

"I felt it was important to include her in the series to make a statement," says Muiz. "Arguably, she was the first Muslim because she accepted the first revelation that was revealed to Muhammad, at a time when he was too traumatised to even accept it himself, which was a sign of her strength, compassion and intelligence. It was important to have her name placed alongside the others in the series."

Women in the Middle East now face men in and outside the Middle East telling them what they should be doing, says Muiz. On the flip side, there are women outside the Middle East, including those who originate from there, who are attempting to force an identity onto the women actually living in the region, by saying what they should be doing, including how they should dress.

"The only people that really have a right to say who the women in the Middle East are and what they should be doing are the women actually in the Middle East, who have grown up within that culture, and who have been life long members of that region, who understand the nuances of the community make up and how it has shifted and conflicted over the decades. They are the only ones we should be listening to regarding this issue, in my opinion."

As well as challenging the issue of how Arab women are perceived, Muiz also raises the question of who is in a position to address the Arab woman's identity, with a magazine that examines women's cultural and theological interpretation of the head scarf.

With a striking photo of a woman wearing a hijab on the cover, Intellectual Lifestyle Magazine, or ILM, which also means 'knowledge' in Arabic, featured largely un-edited, firsthand commentary from women that allowed them to tell their story to counteract the "contesting" of Arab women's identity that goes on both within the communities and globally.

"The idea was to give women from various backgrounds an opportunity to share their experiences and perspectives on the issue," says Muiz. "The 'Arab Muslim woman' isn't a singular entity, they are not a homogeneous group."

The magazine featured women who grew up in families where the veil was worn and took it off in later life, and also to those who adopted the veil later. There were also features examining how wearing the veil differs throughout the region and the issue of covering the hair with a Christian nun and a Jewish woman.

"When we hear about the Middle Eastern women, who do we hear about them from, mainly?
We rarely hear from women actually in the Middle East and that's not because they don't have a voice, that they are repressed to the point of becoming mute clichés requiring a 'voice for the voiceless'," he says.

"They are just not given a prominent enough platform to say what they want to say, because often what they have to say is too raw for most people to accept and doesn't fit into most politically branded narratives that exist in the mainstream media discourse today."]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.1736913 2012-08-05T09:14:22-04:00 2012-10-05T05:12:04-04:00

Julie Tomlin http://www.huffingtonpost.com/julie-tomlin/
In general the mainstream media presents Britain as the world's good guys, but our policies are so often out of sync with the rhetoric that it should not be a surprise that others around the world charge our leaders with hypocrisy.

While the failure of the United Nations to agree an arms trade treaty that would for the first time impose tough rules on the sales of arms was blamed on the United States, Russia and China, Britain in the meantime will continue to sell arms to governments like Syria and Libya who will use them to repress the democratic demands we claim to champion.

During Sierra Leone's civil war of 1991 to 2002 an estimated that 64,000 women, or close to 50 per cent of the entire female population, suffered from sexual violence at gunpoint. Weapon-aided rape has also occurred in the conflicts of the Darfur region, northern Uganda, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Liberia and the former Yugoslavia.

Until all the countries that benefit from this multi-billion arms trade are prepared to stop selling arms knowing that they are likely to be used to perpetrate sexual violence, women worldwide have little cause to trust leaders from Britain, Europe or the United States who make claims about the importance of women's security.

Iranian women who are enduring hardship because of sanctions imposed by Europe and the United States also have reason to question the West's commitment to women's rights when their calls for talks instead of sanctions fall on deaf ears.

Amid fear that sanctions are being used by the West to de-stabilise their country, a recent report Killing them Softly: The Stark Impact of Sanctions on the
Lives of Ordinary Iranians shows that Iranian women are bearing the brunt of harsh economic sanctions. As repression at the hands of a government able to exploit the resulting state of emergency increases, it's little wonder that a previously pro-Western population, considers the sanctions "immoral" and counterproductive and question the West's commitment to improving women's security worldwide. The same is true of Bahraini human rights activists who have been targeted by advanced surveillance technology sold to their government by a British company.

The opening ceremony of the 2012 Games was an exuberant display of the freedom, liberty and idiosyncratic qualities we celebrate as a nation, but unless our actions towards the rest of the world line up we will be open to frequent charges of hypocrisy. Our history already complicates our standing in the world in ways that we appear to little comprehend.

When Maryam Alkhawaja spoke in London last year she echoed what many women who took part in the Arab Spring have said, that it is harder to push a women's rights agenda because of associations with the West.

When India was named the worst place in the world to be a woman, a Guardian article angered women's rights activists because of its sweeping generalisations based around what was indeed a terrible incident when onlookers filmed a woman as she was being assaulted and no one stepped in to help.

The incident of course angered women in India, but the voices of activists who are are working to bring change in the country are rarely heard in the British media, which seems stuck in a rut of portraying women as helpless victims while expressing horror and outrage at the awful patriarchal cultures they live in.

In the case of Afghanistan we apparently went to war to rescue women from the Taliban, but instead of supporting the vocal and active women who wanted to be involved in forging peace we seem to prefer to wringing our hands in public whenever there is a microphone near, about the terrible state of affairs.

Not only do we alienate the women whose struggles we should be supporting, we also leave ourselves open to criticism that we are not prepared to tackle questions that might tell us less savoury things about ourselves.

When nine men in Rochdale were found guilty of the sexual exploitation of young vulnerable girls there was a great deal of discussion about Asian men and their predatory nature. Yet in recent months seven white men found guilty of similar crimes in Derby, did not provoke widespread discussion about the cultural reasons behind the white men's crime of why it was happening in that area of the country.
Nor did it spark a great deal of discussion about what could perhaps be the most important issue of all - what should be done to protect vulnerable girls.

If we want to continue to celebrate our rich cultural history then we will have to take more notice of what our leaders are doing around the world in our name and insist that policies line up with the values we cherish.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.1710348 2012-07-29T15:25:10-04:00 2012-09-28T05:12:10-04:00

Julie Tomlin http://www.huffingtonpost.com/julie-tomlin/
Only in May this year, the British government announced a new initiative that would help prevent sexualised violence in war.

Around the world, however, there are countless women whose experiences of British, European and United States' governments are very different from the image of defender of women's rights that the leaders of these countries seem so keen to project.

Women in Afghanistan are frustrated that their demands to be included at peace talks with the Taliban have consistently fallen on deaf ears. Women who want restrictions of the sales of arms which they believe contribute to the escalation of sexualised violence in conflicts around the world were also disappointed when month-long talks failed to reach a United Nations arms trade treaty, let alone one that acknowledged their concerns.

Part of the problem is that we get few opportunities to hear from those people around the world who, because they are at the receiving end of our government's policies, are in a position to challenge the rhetoric.

A new report by the International Civil Society Action Network sets out in blistering detail the impact that sanctions imposed by the US and the EU are having on Iranian women. It also highlights growing scepticism about Western governments' claims to be supportive of women's rights worldwide:

"The US and EU have been strong proponents of the global women, peace and security agenda with the development of priorities and action plans to ensure women's empowerment. But sanctions undermine and contravene these policies," the report says.

The "contradictory" nature of US and EU rhetoric and its policies and actions increase the Iranian public's suspicion about them, and gives credence to charges of hypocrisy, it goes on.
From increased unemployment, to girls being taken out of school so that they can work and increasing numbers of young girls being married off at a young age by families who can no longer afford to feed them, it's clear that as the EU's oil embargo begins to bite, women are feeling the effect in almost every aspect of their lives.

No strangers to sanctions, Iranian women see a similar pattern emerging as took place in Iraq during 13 years of sanctions that devastated the country following its invasion of Kuwait in 1990. There are fears too that conservative forces in the Iranian government will be able to exploit the situation to ensure women are further squeezed out of public life.

Many of these are the same people who took to the streets in the Green Revolution whose demands for democracy were brutally put down by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's government: the same people whose demands for democracy our government cheered on.

But sanctions aimed at halting Iran's nuclear programme and talk of a preemptive strike by Israel only succeed in creating conditions in which the authorities can impose a "state of emergency" and use it to justify a further crack down on dissent.

What's more, with food and fuel prices spiralling and medicines scarce, the majority of Iranians expend so much of their energy on daily survival that participation in civil society is on the decline.

The Iranian women who contributed to the report again point to Iraq as proof that sanctions are not an effective means of preventing conflict.

This view is backed up by former British diplomat Carne Ross who, while working at the United Nations, was responsible for maintaining the UN Security Council's support for sanctions against Iraq - a job he at first relished, despite becoming aware that the justification for those sanctions was "flimsy".

Considered an expert despite never having set foot in the country, Ross describes in his book The Leaderless Revolution how, when writing speeches for ambassadors to the Security Council, he made use of information that supported the British narrative while sifting out facts and judgements that contradicted "our" version of events.

When confronted with the harm it was causing ordinary people, it was Ross's job to say that the government was doing all that it could to ease the suffering of sanctions and to maintain the line that any harm they caused was a necessary cost to avoid nuclear conflict.

It was only later that he was convinced by the accounts of Iranian citizens that the sanctions were causing "undoubted human suffering in Iraq of a quite appalling scale".

The women who speak in the report aren't the stereotypical suffering - and voiceless - woman who so often inspires the 'rescuing' nations. Instead they are part of a women's movement that is still thriving despite the odds. It's vital that their voices are not filtered out.

Iranian women, the report says, want an end to the sanctions: "They reject the official narratives that often pose the problems in the terms of good and evil, just and unjust, and call on all sides - including their own government - to engage in constructive dialogue rather than the rhetoric of war and threats instead engage in constructive dialogue."

If we care about women's rights and don't want our government to get away with hypocritical claims that they do too, isn't it time we make sure their opinions are heeded?]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.1692117 2012-07-22T19:00:00-04:00 2012-09-21T05:12:13-04:00

Julie Tomlin http://www.huffingtonpost.com/julie-tomlin/
Unlike the Rwanda genocide and the war in Bosnia in the 1990s, allegations of atrocities have emerged in Syria - and Libya before it - in close to real time, or as soon as images and videos could be uploaded.

The proliferation of information from areas of conflict raises important questions about sexualised violence. One of them is addressed by the New York City-based Women Under Siege Project, which in recent months has been carrying out the vital task of gathering and verifying data from Syria.

In this way, the Women's Media Center-run project has been able to confirm what Facebook posts and YouTube videos, as well as accounts picked up by foreign journalists, suggest - that "sexualised violence in this conflict, as in nearly every other recorded conflict, is being used as a weapon of war".

Women Under Siege director Lauren Wolfe presented the initial findings gleaned from the crowdmap of sexualised violence in Syria to the UN last week ahead of the Security Council vote on international sanctions that was vetoed by Russia and China last Friday.

But as the organisation has also discovered, reporting on rape in war involves walking a difficult tightrope.

Under Wolfe's careful scrutiny, claims made by Senator Joseph Lieberman that rape in Syria was "widespread" in a column urging the U.S. to step up its support for the Syrian opposition were shown to be based on flimsy evidence.

No one is suggesting that rape is not being carried out by soldiers and paramilitaries loyal to the embattled government of Syrian President Bashar Assad.

But it's clear that independent monitoring has an important role to play if rape is to be kept out of what Wolfe describes as the "delicate propaganda war being played by all sides".

The CIA 'Red Cell' memo leaked by WikiLeaks suggesting using Afghan women's stories to bolster support among European women should be a warning to us.

But we should also be concerned that after allegations that Muammar Gaddafi's troops were being supplied with Viagra and committing mass rape proved to be unfounded, some journalists have tended to view all allegations of rape in that conflict as suspect.

While it is probably true that the Viagra story was exploited to shore up support for NATO intervention in Libya, the true extent to which rape was carried out remains extremely difficult to verify because of the stigma that surrounds the subject.

The issue of rape and sexualised violence is too important to allow it to become just another weapon in the propaganda war.

We should ask ourselves why the response to atrocities in DRC has been far more muted and insist that no one, irrespective of whether they are "goodies" or "baddies" in the eyes of the West is able to commit rape with impunity.

Rather than knee jerk reactions to allegations of rape, we could look at long term solutions including addressing the link between the arms trade and sexualised violence.

How is it that the global trade in arms currently has fewer regulations than exist in international trade for consumer goods? The Gender Action for Peace and Security (GAPS) report suggest "legally binding criteria" in the Arms Trade Treaty to ensure that arms don't get into the wrong hands would be an effective way of beginning to tackle the problem.

Women who are raped by Assad loyalists deserve justice, but so do the women whose rapists are the so-called 'goodies' including Libyan rebels who Human Rights Watch allege committed rape.

Their victims - and any victims of Syrian rebels who commit rape - are equally deserving of justice. Yet this fact can get lost if we allow it to get caught up in a narrative of goodies versus baddies.

What about women who allege they have been raped by American or British soliders? Or women in the armed services who have been raped by their comrades?

The conviction of U.S. Air Force instructor Staff Sergeant Luis Walker for the rape and sexual assault of female trainees at Lackland Air Force Base in Texas is claimed to be just the tip of the iceberg in a culture that places almost insurmountable barriers to women seeking justice.

Social media is undoubtedly giving us more real time insight into how rape is used systematically during conflict. But if the global phenomenon of rape is to be challenged, we can't allow it to be used in the propaganda war either.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.1672155 2012-07-15T19:00:00-04:00 2012-09-14T05:12:02-04:00

Julie Tomlin http://www.huffingtonpost.com/julie-tomlin/ discussion in London on women and the Arab Spring about what people in the West could do to help, her answer was immediate and direct:
"You could stop your politicians selling arms to the people who are shooting us."

Said spoke from experience: she was hospitalised after being shot during protests that followed the Port Said football stadium tragedy that left at least 74 people dead.

A masked man on an armoured personnel carrier (APC) shot at her, Said claimed, leaving her with over 30 pellets in her legs and more in her stomach and face - one narrowly missed her eye.

For the men and women who have found themselves up against the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, (SCAF) the risk of losing an eye is high - Ghada Shahbender of the Egyptian Organisation for Human Rights claims to have heard a high-ranking CSF officer instructing soldiers to aim at the protesters' heads.

Said goes to the heart of the issue when she rejects Western concerns about human rights that are not backed up by hard policy.

Hers is an on the ground experience resulting from what the joint committees on arms export controls referred to in their report last week as "an inherent conflict between strongly promoting arms exports to authoritarian regimes whilst strongly criticising their lack of human rights at the same time".

The 158 arms licenses that had to be withdrawn because of fears that British equipment could be used for human rights abuses in the region during the Arab Spring suggests that, for the present government and its predecessor, it was arms exports that came out on top in that conflict.

"Whilst the government's statement that 'respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms are mandatory considerations for all export licence applications' is welcome, those considerations do not appear to have weighed sufficiently heavily on either the present government or its predecessor," is how the report puts it.

For those who endured the oppressive regime of Hosni Mubarak for so many years, the suggestion that it was his response to the Arab Spring uprisings that alerted the British Government to the need to restrict arms sales must beggar belief.

Yet it was after Mubarak's downfall that Said, and thousands like her, have encountered armoured vehicles and other weaponry that the British Government has been criticised for calling "crowd control goods".

Amid concerns that SCAF is refusing to relinquish power, the fact that there are still 124 licenses for exports of arms to Egypt will be a cause for further alarm.

These licences are among 600 still in existence in the Middle East and North Africa where government crackdowns on the uprisings have been extremely brutal.

The government is still granting licences for the export of armoured 4x4 vehicles to Syria and in all, 97 licences were granted for sales to Bahrain for equipment including sniper rifles, body armour and small arms ammunition.

People who want democracy in these countries need the British Government to abide by the committees' recommendations that it "apply significantly more cautious judgements" when considering arms export licence applications for goods to authoritarian regimes intent on using them for internal repression.

What they don't need is more of what Prime Minister David Cameron demonstrated when he stopped off in Tahrir Square in a show of support to the revolutionaries at the same time as he was travelling with representatives of eight defence firms.

This gap between the rhetoric and policy in practice is what makes women like Said distrust expressions of concern about women's rights from people in the West.

The plight of women in Afghanistan was, of course, part of the sabre rattling that preceded the invasion of the country in 2001.

But 10 years on, 70 international leaders who met in Tokyo in Japan to discuss billions of dollars in aid for Afghanistan did little to alleviate the concerns of women's rights campaigners that their interests are being sold down the river as NATO now seeks to negotiate a withdrawal in 2014.

Consistently denied a place at the negotiating table, women were disappointed that the aid was tied to conditions about corruption, but not to firm commitments about safeguarding women's rights.

The outrage expressed at the execution of a woman named Najiba in Afghanistan accused of adultery, and more recently, at the assassination of Hanifa Safi, need backing up by commitments to ensuring that women's voices are heard when it comes to deciding the future of the country.

The fact that women's rights have been hijacked for the purposes of liberal interventionists should be a concern to women in the West. We should therefore tread carefully when supporting politicians who make pronouncements about democracy and human rights, ensuring that we always read the small print. In this respect, the arms trade is a feminist issue.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.1593175 2012-06-14T19:00:00-04:00 2012-08-14T05:12:09-04:00

Julie Tomlin http://www.huffingtonpost.com/julie-tomlin/
The number who keep 'part time' out of their job title rises to 67% among those who earn £75,000 or more.

The fact that so many people keep their part time status secret and that one in seven respondents said they let colleagues assume they work full time hours is partly a reflection of negative attitudes towards part time work, says Karen Mattison MBE, founder of part time recruitment organisation Timewise, which published the report.

"The stereotype of 'part time means low skilled, unreliable' still exists, as does the view that you can't do a senior role part time, says Mattison, who has launched a search for the Top 50 Part Time leaders. "The perception that part time 'can only work' for lower skilled persists, because employers don't see examples that show otherwise. This is what we want to challenge."

Negative views about part time work persist despite the fact that 650,000 people in the UK hold down senior roles but work less than five days a week - that's about one in 10 of all part time employees working in jobs such as marketing managers, finance directors and chief executives.

Among the respondents, 41% felt there were negative stereotype surrounding the words
'part time' and nearly a quarter worry about being unfairly labelled uncommitted with nearly one in 10 fear it could affect their chance of promotion.

Despite this the majority of the respondents said they thought they were carrying out their work successfully and that there were benefits to the employer allowing them to work part time.

When it comes to being ahead of the game as far as offering senior part time jobs, the voluntary and public sector, IT, creative industries and services sectors had the most vacancies and there were more jobs on offer for people living in London, Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds and Liverpool.

The Top 50 list will be judged by Steve Varley, Ernst and Young's managing partner for the UK and Ireland and Emma de Vita of Management Today magazine and Mattison, who hopes that it will help create a more positive attitude towards part time work.

"We need to lead by example, there's no doubt about it," she says. "Importantly, I think we need to reclaim the words 'part time' rather than talk about 'flexible' working, which can mean a range of things. Part time should mean: 'I'm in the office, less than five days a week. But my role and commitment here, are solid'."

If you want to nominate a part time worker, go to the Timewise website.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.1323314 2012-03-07T19:00:00-05:00 2012-05-07T05:12:02-04:00

Julie Tomlin http://www.huffingtonpost.com/julie-tomlin/ complaining and bragging about who was ranked higher than who when it was published last week, some women on Twitter like Nat Guest pointed out that "only one woman made it into the top 20 at all."

That honour went to campaigner and wife of former prime minister Gordon Brown, Sarah Brown, who came second, after Virgin boss Richard Branson.

The Independent's Laura Davis addressed the fact that Brown was in fact the only woman in the top 25 - and there were only 18 women who made it onto the list at all.

Davis points to Guardian research that shows public life is dominated by men and that they write 78% of all newspaper articles.

In the absence of any research into Twitter use, Davis looked at her own list of followers. Looking at those who retweeted her and were most supportive, she suggested that women were not only less likely to follow other women, but less willing to support each other.

To this, novelist Jo Jo Moyes responded on Twitter: "I disagree with pretty much this entire article."

Other critics looked at the process of selecting the 'titans' of Twitter, suggesting that it wasn't entirely true to say, as Davis did, that the selection was not "opinion based."

Describing the process, the Independent's Ian Burrell, the Independent's media editor, writes that it was "compiled with the help of the social media monitoring group, PeerIndex, with additional input from a panel of experts."

On the five-strong expert panel was Azeem Azhar, founder of PeerIndex; Elizabeth Varley, CEO of TechHub; Ian Burrell; Rhodri Marsden, Independent technology columnist; and Jack Riley, head of digital audience and content development for the Independent, i, and the Evening Standard.

This prompted Helen Lewis of the New Statesman to tweet; "um, the Independent Twitter 100 list *was* opinion-based - the raw peer index scores were 'filtered' by a panel of men."

The list overall is dominated by celebrities and sporting figures and, perhaps not surprisingly women dominated the fashion list. But what does it say that only Louise Mensch made it onto the politics list?

Journalists Laura Kuenssberg, India Knight and Laurie Penny who made it onto the list and with businesswoman Lucy Marcus and the entrepreneur Hermione Way, were possibly the only ones whose influence was because of their expertise and opinions.

In many ways the issue of influence on Twitter mirrors the debate in newspapers and broadcasting about women as experts. A campaign was launched recently to encourage broadcasters to aim for at least 30 per cent of female experts on the programme - and to break away from the trend of having only women as case studies or victims.

Lis Howells of City University joined with Broadcast magazine to launch the campaign after she realised that she went for more than 20 minutes listening to the Today programme before hearing the voice of a woman.

Howells argues that women should be prepared to stick their neck out and agree to take part in radio and TV programmes and speak as experts when they are asked.

"I think it's to do with power, and power is seen to be a male preserve, unless you are a very eminent politician," said Howells. "Men appear to find it easier to speak for everybody and it's very rare that women speak on generic subjects."

While the Twitter 100 list doesn't only measure expertise, it does demonstrate that few women are considered authoritative on subjects outside of traditional areas. Although important, they are often considered 'niche' and were not represented on the Twitter list.

But what of the subjects that men dominate, such as economics and politics? Does it matter that in these areas women have so little influence?

The writer and philosopher Simone de Beauvoir wrote in The Second Sex of the difficulty women face in assuming an authoritative position in the world - of viewing the universe "as one's own".

She encouraged women to develop a philosophical and ethical "art of living" that would inspire and encourage other women to move from the position of the "other".

Dialogue and writing were important tools for women if they were to develop a new place in relation to the world, she argued. If she was writing now, would she have included Tweeting?]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.1280296 2012-02-15T18:12:10-05:00 2012-04-16T05:12:01-04:00

Julie Tomlin http://www.huffingtonpost.com/julie-tomlin/
Figures for October to December last year show not only that unemployment among women is at its highest for 23 years, but that many of the new jobs created were part time posts.
This brings the total number in part time jobs to 7.87m and the number of people who say they are doing them because they have no alternative rose by 83,000 to 1.35m.

But while on the surface these figures point to women bearing the brunt of unemployment and the shortage of full time positions, it's worth bearing in mind that having a part time work isn't viewed negatively by everyone.

What of the remaining 78 percent, or 5.13 million who are not, as the Daily Telegraph's jobs editor Louise Peacock wrote 'forced' take part time jobs but actually wanted or sought out part time hours?
Emma Stewart MBE of Women Like Us, a recruitment service that specialises in matching women to part time roles in the London area, believes the underemployment story is "less across the piece than is made out" and that there is a large proportion of women - and men - who are actively seeking part time work.

Their reasons for doing so are varied -- many women want to work part time while they are bringing up young children, others have elderly parents they care for. With recent research by the Harvard Business School showing that Generation Y place a high value on work-life balance, part time jobs take on a new dimension.

Stewart recognises that part time work isn't for everyone, but says of those that are in part time work, even those that say they would prefer full time positions, it depends on the questions you ask:

"If you ask someone who wants to earn more money and the only option they have is to do more hours rather than doing a better quality part time job, then clearly they are going to choose more hours," she said.

It's difficult to know what's going on in the part time jobs market because the Office for National Statistics doesn't gather data on vacancies. Only Jobs Centre Plus collects those figures and they tend to be the lower end of the job market.

Anecdotally, however, Stewart can vouch for the fact that there is a real lack of "quality" part time jobs. The idea for Women Like Us came after Stewart and her business partner Karen Mattison MBE found they were frequently asked if there were more women "like them" who would take on part time roles.

But the final push came when they met a woman who before she had her children had worked as a web editor for a leading publisher and was seriously considering taking a job as a school meals superviser because it was the only work that fitted in with her children's school hours.

The creation of a "quality" part time jobs market would not only provide women with the means of getting jobs that match their skills and open up jobs for women at the lower end of the market, they would also be good for business too, argues Stewart, who adds that part time work needs a "rebrand".

"Many businesses are realising that in times of austerity, when you haven't got the budget, but still need to access good quality talent, you can really open up your candidate pool if you think about part time because you can get really good candidates and manage your budget more effectively."]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.1266511 2012-02-09T16:33:15-05:00 2012-04-10T05:12:01-04:00

Julie Tomlin http://www.huffingtonpost.com/julie-tomlin/
Using Twitter and Facebook, the campaign attracted worldwide attention last year when it called on women who held an international driver's licence to film themselves as they drove to work, or other places.

Facebook page, Honk for Saudi Women, encouraged women around the world to show their support.

Such worldwide support and interest was credited with having prompted the release of Manal al Sharif whose arrest after she posted a video of herself driving on Youtube prompted the day of protest on 17 June last year.

Another woman, Shaima Jastaniah who faced 10 lashes after driving a car, also had her sentence revoked by Saudi King Abdullah after a massive response from people on Twitter and Facebook.

Gradually, perhaps as interest in the campaign waned, the women driving movement was driven underground under pressure from the authorities. Would the Women2Drive campaign would face the same fate as another one in 1990 when four women paid a high price after driving around the capital of Riyadh?

"Prison, lashings and Interior Ministry phone threats, fines and pledges drove the women driving movement underground again," wrote Eman Al Nafjan, author of the Saudi Woman Blog. "This time around though, unlike in 1990, it was only for a few months before Saudi rights activists geared up again to call for this basic right of no gender discriminations in who gets to drive their cars."

With the support of lawyers, royal family members and religious scholars, the women driving movement is now "getting louder and more sophisticated" writes Al Nafjan.

Saudi Arabia does not have a written law banning women driving, but they are forbidden to do so under a fatwa or religious edict issued by senior clerics in the country.
Manal Al Sharif and another prominent activist Samar Badawy have now taken their fight to the courts; they have separately filed law suits against the authorities demanding that they be granted drivers' licences.

"These lawsuits cannot be dismissed in the same way that the women who went out in the streets and actually drove were. The ball is in the government's court now. It's unlikely and unwise that they'll punish women for filing lawsuits," wrote Al Nafjan.

The attention the campaign has attracted worldwide appears to have influenced the King who Al Nafjan says is reported to have ruled that women who drive should not be prosecuted in the general courts.

A lawyer is quoted on her blog saying: "The most important benefit of this decision is to ease the burden on the judges in issues unrelated to the Sharia and that might cause embarrassment to the judiciary and judges of the Kingdom abroad."

The extremely focused Women2Drive campaign shows how social media can be effectively harnessed, even when a determined regime with an arsenal of tactics at its disposal can drive movements underground, if only for a time.

In its annual report the Committee to Protect Journalists said that while social media has created the means by which people in oppressive countries can get their stories out to the rest of the world, "the technology used to report the news has been matched in many ways by the tools used to suppress information".

In a recent interview during her visit to London, the activist Maryam Elkhawaja said that government in her native Bahrain and in Syria had tried to use the internet to their advantage: " They have launched online attacks of defamation, spreading misinformation, and targeting activists," she said. "These attacks happen on many different levels, whether they're direct death threats, spreading false information to discredit protesters, spam hashtags on twitter, and to track down activists."

In his recent book Revolution 2.0, Google executive Wael Ghonim said the authorities at first under-estimated the power of social media. Nonetheless, by the time he had set up his We are all Khaled Said Facebook page he suspected that the National Democratic Party's well-paid team known as the Electronic Committee was leaving comments on the page to discredit the young man whose savage beating became the focus of protests in Egypt.

This reinforces what Tim Eaton argued in a recent report on the Arab Spring for New Diplomacy Platform - that social
 media
 tools are crucial
 "for
 the
 conduct of
 political
 campaigns in
authoritarian
contexts".

But he also points out that regimes are unlikely to be caught off guard by online movements again:

"There
 have
 already
 been
 signs
 that
 Arab
 regimes
 have
 recognised
 the
 threat
 that
 faces
 them,
becoming
adept
at
monitoring and undermining online movements and online activists," he wrote.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.1243470 2012-01-31T05:37:48-05:00 2012-04-01T05:12:01-04:00

Julie Tomlin http://www.huffingtonpost.com/julie-tomlin/
Events in the Arab world over the past year have showed that "the genie is out of the bottle", said the 84-year-old who has devoted his life to telling people how to liberate themselves from dictators.

People now know that there are alternatives to violence that they can use to free themselves from repressive regimes, he said at London's Frontline Club last night:

Most significantly, people have "thrown off" fear, said Sharp, the author of From Dictatorship to Democracy who has drawn up a list of 198 methods of non-violent resistance, from rude gestures to mock funerals that have been acted out in some of the most successful non-violent uprisings of recent years.

By showing that they were no longer afraid, people in places like Egypt and Syria had shown an "audacity" that was impossible to counter in the long term, said Sharp:

"This audacity - this is something tyrants cannot tolerate, if people are no longer afraid of them," said Sharp, adding that he had previously thought maybe Gandhi was "too extreme" when he wrote that people needed to cast off fear:

"I thought maybe you could only control fear. But in Syria and country after country, people are saying 'I am not afraid any more'."

Sharp told Ruaridh Arrow, journalist and director of the award-winning documentary How to Start a Revolution that he has been "pleased and shocked and surprised" at the numbers of countries where people have have risen up and maintained non-violent discipline and believes this kind of strategy is now more likely to happen than he had thought:

"If people lose their fear and use their brains and plan skilfully and act bravely, and maintain non-violent discipline and you have a wise, grand strategy, carefully thought through and planned, you have a good chance of succeeding," said the man whose office at his Boston home is constantly visited by revolutionary leaders of non-violent struggles.

But people in countries like Iran, where his book is banned, should not be surprised by the extremity of the repression used by the regime:

"Regimes do terrible things when they are frightened and non-violence is more frightening to regimes than anything else because it's more difficult to crush and deal with," said Sharp who said that it was a mistake to think that violence was justified because people were being killed.

"It's a suicidal step you take because your enemy always has greater power for violence than you do, so don't be stupid, don't do the thing he wants you to do, because he knows he can crush you if you go into violence," said Sharp. "It's a trick."

Sharp said he suspected such tactics were used in Libya, where the opposition had started off non-violently, but quickly became military when a Libyan general of Gaddafi regime, Abdul Fattah Younes, defected and took with him his soldiers and guns.

"Two weeks before Gaddafi and his sons had predicted that the struggle would end in civil war," said Sharp. "My hypothesis is that this was a high level agent provocateur planted specifically to get the rebel movement to shift to a violent struggle that the Gaddafi regime, with its superior military capacity, was confident they could control."

The idea that violence can be used as a tool of liberation is "nonsense" said Sharp, who concluded that From Dictatorship to Democracy had been so successful because people have been "quietly desperate" to find an alternative to fighting for so long.

Now that the knowledge of how people can free themselves has escaped "the genie" can't be put back again, said Sharp: "It can be crushed here and there, you can slaughter those people here and there, but the knowledge of how people can be free is there and spreading throughout the world."]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.1230468 2012-01-25T19:00:00-05:00 2012-03-26T05:12:01-04:00

Julie Tomlin http://www.huffingtonpost.com/julie-tomlin/
Parastoo Dokouhaki a journalist and women's rights activist, who was one of the first women bloggers in Iran, and journalist Marzieh Rasouli were arrested on 15 January, just one week after two other journalists, Fatemeh Kheradmand and Ehsan Houshmandzadeh were detained.

Today, it has been reported that another reformist journalist Saeed Razavi Faqih was also detained on arrival in Tehran from France.

Human rights campaigners claim the arrests reflect the government's concern that the 2 March elections could spark fresh protests like those that took place in the wake of the 2009 presidential elections.

Hadi Ghameni, executive director of the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran, said the recent arrests indicate that the government is aware of the "resilient popularity" of the Green Movement. It is preemptively imprisoning journalists and bloggers, irrespective of whether they are currently involved in politics, he said.

"They are intimidating dissidents not to dare to get mobilised and pre-emptively putting many journalists and online writers, relevant or irrelevant to political activism, behind bars to prevent potential of re-emergence of a protest movement."

Dokouhaki, whose blog Zan Nevesht or "Written by a Woman" was awarded Best Blog by an Iranian journalist by Deutsche Welle, has not been involved in politics or activism for the past three years and has been treated for depression following her father's death.

Around 80 women's rights activists have been arrested since 2009 in Iran and it was estimated in June last year that at least 34 were being held in Tehran's notorious Evin prison. Their arrests were part of a wider campaign against the Green Movement and its potential allies following the 2009 election.

According to figures released by the Committee to Protect Journalists last year, Iran already has the worst record for imprisoning journalists, with 42 behind bars.

Ghameni said he feared a "fresh wave" of arrests appeared to be just starting: "It certainly demonstrates extreme nervousness of security and intelligence forces over losing control during upcoming elections," he said.

The crackdown comes amid vicious infighting between conservative camps in the run-up to the elections, which reformist political parties have already boycotted. The government also faces deepening economic pressures that are likely to worsen following the announcement by the European Union of a ban on all new oil contracts in a growing row over the country's nuclear programme.

Network problems and restricted access to social media sites such as Twitter also suggest the government is also seeking to prevent the internet being used to fuel protests in a repeat of 2009.

The government has imposed new rules on Iran's Internet cafes and, inspired by China's internet restrictions, also appears to be pushing ahead with plans to launch a domestic network that it intends to replace the global web.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.1212787 2012-01-18T09:26:55-05:00 2012-03-19T05:12:01-04:00

Julie Tomlin http://www.huffingtonpost.com/julie-tomlin/ a panel discussion in London last night.

"Everybody should stop making excuses for SCAF", said Soueif, who was taking part in a discussion focusing on what comes next after a year of military rule. "They have had an opportunity every minute of every day since 11 February and they have abused it."

A counter revolution has been going on since then, said Soueif, adding it has been getting more critical as time goes on because somebody has to win.

"So you get more people killed on the streets, or more eyes taken out", said Soueif, who argued that the military rulers are resorting to the same "menu of oppression" as was used by the Mubarak regime, and that their tactics are becoming even more brutal.

The author's determination that the military should hand over power contrasts with the cautious hope she felt back in February and March last year that the military would honour their promises and seize a "historic opportunity to go down in history as a military that actually saved their country."

She had argued then that the people really had no other option, because they had failed to provide a civil alternative that was strong enough to stand up to the military and take hold of power.

"I believed that the military would honour their word that they would never attack the Egyptian people, that every person who signed up for the military forces in Egypt had to swear an oath that they would never raise their weapon in the face of an Egyptian", said Soueif, adding that it was also because the army was a part of Egyptian society and were "our brothers, our husbands and sons" that the Egyptian people decided they were going to trust them.

"But our trust was misplaced", said Soueif, who nonetheless felt that it was was significant in and of itself that in Mubarak they had got rid of the head of "a bloody and tenacious regime".

Egypt's revolutionary forces - the people on the streets and the labour movements have settled in for the long haul, said Soueif, whose memoir of the revolution is published this week.

While there are differing views as to how much faith or trust could be put in the elections that took place in recent weeks, many young people are questioning if democracy is enough to deliver the kind of society people want:

"The thoughtful among the young people in Egypt, and they are many, are actually questioning whether democracy per se is enough because it's quite clear that democracy on its own, ie going through an electoral process, is not enough. It's not enough [to ensure] governments are completely transparent and take only decisions that the people want, we see that in the UK and in the United States."

Young people are currently looking at what more can happen, said Soueif, who has a number of activists in her family, including her son Omar Robert Hamilton, her nephew Alaa Abd El-Fatah and niece Mona Saif.

"They are looking at the models of society that will be useful for the future," she said. "They are looking at Brazil, they are looking at what happened in South Africa, they are exploring structures like cooperatives, different types of unionising and syndication, they are very interested in decentralising power as much as possible."]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.1195906 2012-01-10T04:22:28-05:00 2012-03-10T05:12:01-05:00

Julie Tomlin http://www.huffingtonpost.com/julie-tomlin/
There were 36,016,664 Facebook users in Arab countries by November 2011 - almost double the number in the same month in 2010 and over 652,000 people were signed up to Twitter, according to a new report published by the Dubai School of Government late last year.

But despite the prominence of women during the Arab Spring, both in the protests and in online activism, one social media statistic remained unchanged; men in the Arab world remain twice as likely to use social media than women, who still only made up just over 33 per cent of users in the Arab world. Worldwide, they make up half of all social media users.

There was a strong belief among the women who took part that social media could enhance women's participation in economic, political life, allowing them increased self-expression and the means of promoting social change.

Those Arab women who use social media are certainly part of a broader shift that has taken place in how it is used, according to the report. In the past year, social media has become more than a tool for social networking and entertainment, it "now infiltrates almost every aspect of the daily lives of millions of Arabs, affecting the way they interact socially, do business, interact with government, or engage in civil society movements".

Most men and women in the Arab world primarily use social media to access information and connect with people, but 60% of all those who took part said they used it for community and political activism.

Marginally more men than women believed that social media promoted political equality between the sexes, although women were slightly more optimistic that the tools would make it easier for them to express themselves, enable them to participate in civil society and be role models for social change, and improve their rights and economic status

But the "real life" social and cultural barriers women face will have to be overcome if more women are going to participate in social media and see it impact their lives, the report concludes.

Some of the barriers women face such as ICT literacy, confidence in using social media for communication and lack of education could be overcome by practical measures including training.

But the most significant barriers are the social constraints women face in everyday life, the report says. Some women pointed out that reliance on social media alone was not enough to challenge discriminatory attitudes and practices:

"I believe the Arab women should not depend on the social media cover to express their opinion or produce role models, it starts out in the interaction with the people not behind the screen," one respondent said.

Two examples show how for some women, social media is so embedded in their lives that they use it seamlessly in their campaigns:

Egypt-based Harassmap, launched in 2010 to raise awareness of and tackle sexual harassment. The group initiated a day of blogging and tweeting against sexual harassment last year using the hashtag #endsh and also launched an initiative against sexual harassment for a safe Eid holiday in August and a 'catch a harasser' day on 2 November.

In Saudi Arabia, Women2Drive, a campaign launched by Manal Al Sharif calling for women's right to drive attracted worldwide support.

Both of these projects also show there is a balance to be struck - none of them focus solely on raising awareness, or communicating online. They recognise the importance of physical actions such as taking to the streets or getting in the driving seat of a car and of speaking out against practices that have long been held taboo.




]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.1152992 2011-12-16T04:50:13-05:00 2012-02-14T05:12:02-05:00

Julie Tomlin http://www.huffingtonpost.com/julie-tomlin/
The strengthening of Islam, division among secular and Islamic women and a widespread belief that the quest for women's rights should be put on hold until after the revolution all could pose a threat to women's status in countries like Egypt, Tunisia and LIbya, says Tahmasebi, who is working with the International Civil Society Action Network (ICAN) to encourage discussions between women in the region.

Tahmasebi, who was active in the women's rights movement for 10 years from 1999, understands the impact on women of the systematic abolition of their rights when the country became an Islamic state following the 1979 revolution.

A founding member of the award-winning One Million Signatures Campaign challenging discriminatory laws against women in Iran, Tahmasebi believes there are already signs that women in Egypt, Tunisia and Libya need to be vigilant to prevent their rights being undermined.

ICAN has recently published its first issue brief on the Arab Spring and the implications for women. While it shows that women's rights differ from country to country, Tahmasebi is concerned that the emergence of a strong Islamic identity could have a negative impact women's rights in the region. She is optimistic that the demands of Islamic women will eventually become more aligned with those of secular women, however:

"I think Islamic women will come to understand, maybe in 10 years, that their vision, when implemented through male-devised laws is not going to be as ideal as they anticipated and they are going to be left behind closed doors far too often," says Tahmasebi.

A breakdown of communication between Islamic and secular women's groups is another key factor in the erosion of women's rights in Iran that Tahmasebi is concerned that women in the Middle East and North Africa should avoid.

Relationships between women in Egypt are already showing signs of dividing on Islamic/secular lines says Tahmasebi, but she has warned women in Egypt particularly that they should start working together on less ideologically charged issues such as education or early marriage to maintain a constructive relationship.

Because they failed to do so in Iran, it was the mid 1990s before the Islamic and secular groups were able to begin to work together, says Tahmasebi, who has urged Egyptian and Tunisian women to avoid making the same mistakes:

"I have told them that they can't afford to lose 15-20 years because they can't stand each other. Once the Islamist women get out there they are going to start realising all the roadblocks that are in their way and that these so-called ideals they are following are just intent on excluding them."

Tahmasebi is also concerned that some of those women who were involved in the Arab Spring are showing a similar reluctance as Iranian women did to put women's rights at the centre of the reform agenda.

"We've seen this happen in Iran, we've seen it happen everywhere where people are fighting for reform," she says. "Women are told that to talk about women's rights is divisive, that women should be using their energies to fight for reform and democracy and when we've achieved democracy, then we can achieve women's rights."

It was during the elections of 2005 that women's groups decided for the first time to articulate their own agenda no matter who was in power. It was then that women took part in the first protest since the early days of the revolution, demanding women's rights and equality in the constitution. And although the election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was followed by a period of repression, it was a time when the women's movement became stronger, says Tahmasebi:

"I think a big part of this was because women separated their agenda from the political agenda and they decided they are going to press for their agenda and press for their rights no matter who is in power and that they are not going to tie it to the reformers.
This is an important lesson for the region. It's critical that the women's movement has it's own political agenda that is not tied to other political groups."

Women's rights should not be sacrificed at this time because they are at the centre of the transition to modernity and the transition from dictatorship to democracy, argues Tahmasebi.

"Unless women realise that women's issues are a really big part of what defines the collective identity and that much of this transition is really fought on women's bodies they are going to lose a lot."

Sussan Tahmasebi will be speaking in London tonight at #FCBBCA: Women of the revolution
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