Long ago our economic system structured women out of the economic frame of reference: this is how it happened, and why it is so problematic. — When the economic frame of reference was defined, it excluded and de-valued the role of women. Yet it has remained completely unchanged to this day. Now, women’s work all over the world remains invisible. …

Your run of the mill entrepreneur creates a business selling a new product, new service, or new technology. A feminist entrepreneur does this, and more. They don’t just have something new to share with the world; they have a wider social purpose. — When you want to think beyond what you are selling, to why you are selling it, how you are selling it, and what difference it could make to the world, then it is important to get clear on four additional aspects of the business: its purpose, its structure, its processes…

I worked in Afghanistan during 2010s and found it to be a country that is beautiful, interesting and complex. The work I undertook there has been some of the most rewarding that I have ever done, and so I watched, with growing dread, the news that Taliban had taken control of the country. In the days leading up to takeover of the capital, Kabul, Afghan women in newly occupied territories asked the international community to pray for them. Now, it was clear that their worst fears had come to pass.

Criminal law, from the outset, was a man’s game. — It was a mechanism by which our rulers could exert their bellicose authority, and those rulers were rarely female. The English word “law” was brought to England by the Danes — the Vikings — during 7th-8th century. The actual word for law was “doom” which meant judgment and the old, wise, men of the folk, knew and passed down these dooms to everyone else. …

This Halloween let’s remember our ancient healer: the witch — Once upon a time the word witch was not a negative title. Although the etymology is somewhat unclear, it most likely came from the verb wit “know” (as in wit and witty). And this makes sense, because we know that witches were our wise women. They were our healers, our carers, and the custodians of knowledge. Halloween, otherwise known as Samhain, marking the decent into winter, is the first of eight Sabbats in the witches’ calendar; the ancient Celtic Wheel of the Year.

How did one sex come to dominate the other in virtually all areas of the world, and for so long? The response to the coronavirus, leading, in weeks, to the lock down of over half the world’s population, holds some clues. Because, of course, half of the world’s population has been confined before. — When I watched what seemed like extreme behaviour from the Chinese government, quarantining 60 million residents in their homes in Wuhan in January 2020, I was laughably naïve. It was something that seemed to have very litttle bearing on my own freedom. March 2020 changed everything.

There is nothing so heart-breaking as interviewing a boy in prison with ’99 years’ written by his name. I can still see him: hazy, and unsure of himself and the draconian sentence he had just received, as I interviewed him in a Youth Offending Institution, back in 2010. — I was undertaking a detailed study of young people in England and Wales who had been given long-term sentences for the Youth Justice Board. One of the things I had to establish was if the young people understood the ‘nature and implications of their sentence’. This boy sticks out because…

When Frederick Laloux wrote Reinventing Organizations, he described the historical modus operandi of organisational structures well. The only thing missing was that he didn’t connect it with patriarchy. — In his brilliant and inspiring book, Laloux describes eloquently how our organisational structures are directly related to the development of the people that create them. Taking us on a colour coded journey of different organisational models, he describes the evolution of organisational structures from the beginning of human kind, until…

The recent case of PN, who was blocked from boarding her flight back to the UK after being unlawfully deported, shines a light on the long standing, contradictory, and hypocritical relationship between the UK and Uganda over homosexuality. In this historical tragedy, the LGBTQI+ community have suffered as pawns in a game of law. — It started long ago, in 1533, with Britain’s Buggery Act. This Act, part of the centralising legal reforms of King Henry VIII, enshrined the state illegality of homosexual sex, and made it punishable by execution. Sapphic, or lesbian, sex was not criminalised, not because it was accepted, but because it…