You have probably heard of Dr Kariko by now. Katalin Kariko is one of the big heroes of Covid-19 vaccine development. She is the Hungarian-born scientist who spent decades working on mRNA which has become the foundation for the vaccines made by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna.
This week the New...
I have been thinking a lot about the fact that the British government apparently thought it was a good idea to host a major international climate change summit using an all-male team.
It really was one of these genuinely puzzling decisions.
As you know Britain is the host of the...
A male friend of mine once threw an epic fit at work. He shouted at his editor for over an hour about the placement of a semicolon. The whole newsroom was watching.
Now there are two things I admire about this episode. First of course that my friend knows about semicolons. I personally still...
You might remember Leonardo DiCaprio in “The Wolf of Wall Street”. It was a three hour long film where the financial sector was portrayed as a storming sea of cocaine, sex workers and testosterone.
Martin Scorsese the director tried SO HARD to make the characters in the film...
Chastity belts are a myth. There was no “once upon a time in medieval Europe…” when knights going out on crusades locked their wives up in belts of metal to keep them chaste .
The whole story was invented hundreds of years later to make medieval people seem backward. My...
Anni Albers was a trailblazing artist who created modernist masterpieces.
After finishing one of her best works she gave it to her mother. Her mum was very grateful and immediately draped it over the piano and plonked a vase of flowers on top of it.
You see, Anni Albers happened to be...
Around 4000 years ago a group of businesswomen wrote down their trials and tribulations on small tablets made from clay. The tablets were not bigger than the size of your hand. For millennia they survived hidden in the ground.
Today they have been found and translated.
The women were part of...
ABBA’s costumes were all about the ruffles, the sequined jumpsuits, the sparkly dungarees, the tassels, the shiny fabrics, the platform shoes and the animal prints.
But there’s actually an economic story behind it.
That’s right. The look CAN NOT be blamed solely on the general...
A woman on stage with a microphone is a woman who has already overcome many barriers to simply being there.
Then she has to deal with the technology….
This week the World Trade Organization appointed Nigerian economist Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala as its director-general. She is the first...
For over 24 years Kristine Bartlett had worked as an age-old carer on Te Ika-a-Māui, the north Island of New Zealand.
The year was 2011 and she loved her job. But she was earning just above minimum wage. The male gardeners cutting the grass outside the care homes were routinely paid more than the...
It was Harry Styles’ birthday this week, which is why I am going to tell you about the time I met him, and what it taught me about a phenomenon called “gender contamination” in business.
This is what happened:
It was a few years ago at the press junket...
Charles Darwin hated peacocks. Even just one of the colourful feathers in the tail of the male peacock made the English biologist “sick whenever I gaze at it”.
Why on earth would a male bird need to make such a colourful spectacle of himself?
Eventually Darwin came up...
