Reality Check: Work Life Balance

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Women don't need to risk their

health with egg donation

Katrina George | The Age, November 18, 2009

Three years after embryonic stem cell cloning was legalised in Australia, advocates are finally facing up to the critical issue: where will all the eggs come from? Cloning or somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT) is impossible without a continuous – and large - supply of women's ova. In South Korea, the now discredited Dr Hwang used 2061 eggs taken from 169 women and failed to produce a single cloned embryo.

Loane Skene from the Melbourne Law School at Melbourne University has suggested we should open debate on whether women should be paid for their eggs. This is somewhat surprising given that she was the deputy chairwoman of the 2005 Lockhart committee review into stem cell research that advised against payment for eggs. The committee argued that "the healthiest eggs would be those from young women . . . the potential exists for coercion of young women to donate eggs", pointing to social disadvantage, family or workplace pressures.

So what's changed since then that's put egg payment back on the agenda? Certainly not the health risks of egg extraction. Research shows that up to 10 per cent of women who undergo this process experience ovarian hyper stimulation syndrome (OHSS). More serious symptoms of OHSS include renal failure, intrauterine polyps, ovarian cysts, thromboembolism, adult respiratory distress and haemorrhage from ovarian rupture and infertility...

What possible justification could there be to ask Australian women to take on the serious health burdens of egg extraction, the risk of cancer later in life, and the commodification of their bodies? Once upon a time scientists might have believed in good faith that this was necessary because embryonic cloning was the only way to obtain pluripotent stem cells. Women's eggs, they thought, were needed for therapies and cures.

But that was before November 2007. That's when what one analyst called the "earthquake for both the science and ethics of stem cells" rocked the world. Two teams of scientists published a new technique of reprogramming adult cells like skin cells to an embryonic state without using a single egg or a single embryo...

Read the full article here

Spinning Around

Jane Cadzow | Good Weekend, December 12 2009

...Whether it’s art or a flimsy excuse for scantily clad women to writhe around phallic symbols, pole dancing is a booming business. Five years ago, fewer than 10 dance studios around the country offered pole classes. Now the number is reported to be closer to 100...

“’Raunchy’ and ‘liberated’ are not synonyms,” wrote Ariel Levy in Female Chavaunist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture, a book that examined the apparent widespread belief amoung young women that dressing and haveing as sex objects is an expression of freedom. “Why is labouring to look like Pamela Anderson empowering?...And how is imitating a stripper or a porn star – a woman whose job it is to imitate arouns in the frist place – going to render us sexually liberated?”...

Katrina George, chair of Women’s Forum Australia, doesn’t get it, either. “The definition of empowered sexuality represented by pole dancing is a sexuality that imitates red-light entertainment..This is a caricature of female of empowerment.” From her point of view,”the popularity of pole dancing is just one example of the mainstreaming of porn...”

“Pole dancing is essentially different to athletics or acrobatics. When an audience is watching an athlete or an acrobat, they are primarily focused on the skill and athleticism, not the sexual value of the sportsperson. But that is the whole point of pole dancing.”...

Read the full Good Weekend article here

National Strategy on Body Image

doesn't go far enough

The Age| October 29, 2009 

We didn’t need Karl Lagerfeld’s recent ‘‘nobody wants to see curvy women’’ clanger to highlight the urgent need for action on body image dissatisfaction. About one in 100 adolescent girls develops anorexia, the third most common chronic illness within that group in Australia. About one in five students suffer bulimia nervosa and up to 19 per cent of these young Australians will die from the condition. The proposed National Strategy on Body Image released this week is a welcome step forward. But it doesn’t go nearly far enough.

The strategy adopts a broad approach that recognises the important role of schools, tertiary institutions, families and community organisations in addressing body image dissatisfaction. But from the outset, the advisory group’s terms of reference were focused on government working in partnership with the media, fashion and advertising industries. The chairwoman of the National Body Image Advisory Group, Mia Freedman, has called  on the industries to use their ‘‘power for good’’ and ‘‘portray a more realistic, attainable and diverse image of women and men’’.  Noble aspirations. But how realistic are they?...

Read the full article here

National Strategy on Body Image - More Resources

Read the National Advisory Group's Proposed National Strategy
Read the National Advisory Group's Information Paper
Read the the Consultation on Body Image Findings

Media

Media Release: Government has little to say about the sexualisation of children

August 21, 2009

Independent women’s think tank Women’s Forum Australia welcomed the Government’s encouragement to develop a healthy relationships education program, but is not surprised at the Government’s overall status quo response to the Senate inquiry into the sexualisation of children in the media.

In the paper handed down last night, the Australian Government noted the recommendations made by the Senate Committee, but did not announce any major initiatives to address the issue.

Lynne Pezzullo, director of Women’s Forum Australia said “We welcome any Government encouragement to get our children to learn to build healthy relationships, but the response is not surprising. Unfortunately, the original Senate Inquiry’s recommendations that were tabled in June 2008 were not strong enough. The Senate committee had an opportunity to lay the foundations for industry to demonstrate greater corporate social responsibility. Instead, their report and recommendations watered down the concern reflected by the community and the evidence presented by child development experts.”

Read the full press release here.

Reality Check: Work Life Balance

In our upcoming research Reality Check: Work Life Balance, we're addressing the hot topic of work/life balance, specifically looking it how it impacts women. Our research will address:  

•  What are core goals that women want to achieve?

• How and to what extent do these goals conflict? 

• What are the personal, social and economic impacts of this conflict? 

• What policies and community initiatives are in place in Australia to  assist women in resolving the tensions? 

• How could policies and initiatives be improved?

If you'd like more information on this project, email us at: This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it