Interesting example of the way the problem is with all religions, not just one of them: according to a piece on Women’s eNews, Coptic women in Egypt are fleeing to Islam, in the embrace of which they can find more freedom than in Christianity:

“A key reason for the so-called ‘kidnappings’ is that Coptic women have no right to divorce,” said Nahed Abul Komsan, head of the Cairo-based Egyptian Center for Women’s Rights, which is the leading women’s rights group in the country.
“This means that if their parents tell them they are going to marry their cousin, they have to submit to this and have no choice . . . So they turn to Islam, not because of a spiritual belief in the religion but because it gives them more of an opportunity to choose their life’s path,” she said.

It seems you are not allowed to crack a joke if you are a female politician. That’s the claim of this article, focused on Hillary Clinton:

If there’s anything that can hinder a woman’s credibility faster than becoming visibly pregnant or getting caught watching Lifetime, it’s revealing the ability to be genuinely funny.

Is that true, I wonder? Maybe it is true for all politicians to some degree, since most good jokes carry some degree of offence within them. But perhaps women who do make jokes find it harder to get taken seriously – I’m thinking Mo Mowlam here – if they show themselves to have any wit.

Contrast perhaps with Charles Kennedy – his comedy turns – could a female politician do them? I suspect not.

From this morning’s reading: I didn’t quite fall of my chair, but it is a close-run thing. The Tory party is “risking a dispute with some of its staunchest supporters in business” by talking of making illegal contract clauses preventing work colleagues from telling each other their salaries. The theory is this will allow women to find out just how badly they are paid in relation to male colleagues.

Research by the Chartered Institute for Personnel and Development shows that about one third of employers stipulate that staff do not discuss pay and conditions with their colleagues. The Tories want to consult on outlawing confidentiality clauses, arguing that they contribute to the pay gap and “inhibit effective and informed pay bargaining”. While the Equal Pay Act requires that men and women receive equal pay for doing the same or similar work, the party says that identifying a pay gap can be made more difficult by such clauses.
…The Conservatives will also announce plans to hold an Equal Pay Day on July 17 to hammer home its message and urge employers to do something about it, in a move which will chime with leader David Cameron’s “big idea” of social responsibility.

Also in the same Guardian story is some data about how women graduates are poorly paid: “the proportion of women graduates who are in the lowest-level jobs has increased from 5.4% to 13.2% since 1995.”

Meanwhile, the judges are having to make common law since the Blair government is too cowardly to make law to deal with the breakdown of de facto relationships. It can only be hoped that when Blair goes lots of the fundamentalist Christian influence in the Cabinet will go too, and this might be dealt with.

From The Times, women being murdered in China to be “ghost brides” for dead peasant men.

The men preyed on the superstitions of ill-educated farmers eager to ensure that a dead son was happy in the afterlife. It is not uncommon in rural parts of China for a family to seek out the body of a woman who has died to be buried alongside their son after the performance of a marriage ceremony for the deceased pair.

I’ve never been a great believer in claims about the “good old days”, and romantic visions of peasants as close to the land. This sort of thing only helps to confirm that view.