Women have crashed through prejudices in the last 25 years, but some of us have chosen happiness over hard-won careers.
Aung San Suu Kyi knows all too well how Buddhism has played a major political role throughout Asia, both for good and bad.
Back in the heady days of 1970s feminism there was an argument that once women achieved political power, there would be no more war.
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/ 13 December 2010
A campaign to clean up electronic companies’ mineral supply chains may ameliorate the chaos of ungovernable mining.
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/ 22 September 2010
The US secretary of state’s pledge to invest in cleaner fuel-efficient stoves will save lives and protect the environment.
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/ 17 September 2008
The Ugandan minister for primary healthcare tells Madeleine Bunting of his ambitions for the country.
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/ 22 February 2008
The figures tell their own extraordinary story. In 1974 an economics lecturer at the University of Chittagong, Bangladesh, lent $27 to a group of impoverished villagers. He went on to set up Grameen Bank to ensure that the poor had access to loans and, over the next 34 years, it disbursed $6,6-billion in millions of tiny loans to those living in poverty. Last year there were 7,4-million borrowers, 98% of whom were women.
The swearing-in of Nicolas Sarkozy as French president on May 18 may mark, as he claims, a dramatic break with France’s political past; but less heralded was the equally stark break with the conventions of Catholic France as his family arrived on the red carpet. The five offspring in France’s first family make a fascinating line-up.
Atheism sells. Richard Dawkins has been in the bestseller lists on both sides of the Atlantic since The God Delusion came out last autumn following Daniel Dennett’s success with Breaking the Spell. Sam Harris, a previously unknown neuroscience graduate, has now clocked up two bestsellers, The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation.
Here’s a dream. It’s the 2009 G7 summit and the photo call of the seven world leaders. All eyes are trained on the trio of women at the centre of the group: the United States president, the French president and the German chancellor. To mark this moment of female achievement, these three world leaders have invited the Chilean and Liberian presidents to the summit as observers.