Travels of a Fish Nut

James O'Brien has a podcast called Full Disclosure in which he "hosts a series of compelling conversations with fascinating people". According to the blurb on Apple Podcasts ,  These are revealing interviews with people who rarely give in-depth interviews, be it from politics, entertainment or news. It sounds like a great podcast and I began listening when it started back in March of 2019. The first interview was with Tony Blair, not exactly someone who shies away from the limelight but certainly a coup. Then it was Ricky Gervais, a comedian who seems to thrive on controversy. Then it was Simon Amstell, another comedian and TV presenter. The fourth interview was with Dragon's Den "dragon" Deborah Meaden and I realised that this was the first interview with a woman. Four interviews and only one woman. Huh. That sort of gender imbalance is getting increasingly noticeable and not in a good way. But maybe it's just a case of scheduling and there'll be m...

As I was getting ready for bed last night a friend shared a tweet that immediately caught my attention. https://twitter.com/sbattrawden/status/1143465003409915905 The tweet was of a paper that has just been published online, titled "Does physician gender have a significant impact on first-pass success rate of emergency endotracheal intubation?" and showed the abstract which began, It is unknown whether female physicians can perform equivalently to male physicians with respect to emergency procedures. Understandably, this got the backs up of a lot of people, myself included. Who on earth thinks that's a valid question to be researching in this day and age? Are we really still having to battle assumptions of female inferiority when it comes to things like this? Who on earth gave this ethics approval, let alone got it though peer review? I then took a deep breath and asked myself why a respected journal, The American Journal of Emergency Medicine , would publish ...

Over the last few years I have become increasingly interested in feminism. I have always been a feminist, even if I may not have called myself as such. I finished school in the late 1990s (class of 2000, to be precise) and I believed I could have it all - career and family (not that I ever wanted kids but that's not relevant to this discussion). What is, is that when I left school I slowly began to realise that the story I'd been sold was a pack of lies. Having it all is hard, some might say impossible. There's always compromise and it soon became apparent to me that the bulk of the compromise seemed to fall on women. That's not true, of course, but the compromise falls differently for men and women. Men are supposed to compromise by putting their work first - but working late at the office and being always on call so that their family takes second place. Women, on the other hand are supposed to always put their family first, above and beyond their job or even their ow...