[Miscellany] IWD 2024: Women spies, Barbie v Oscars, and online gender harassment

In honour of International Women’s Day 2024, I thought I would share with you the links to three really interesting stories about women.

1 The secret lives of MI6’s women spies

A FT Weekend podcast episode about what it’s like for women to work in espionage. 

It discusses how difficult it is to be taken seriously as a female in espionage, despite many women having distinguished themselves during the wars. This is not just because of women being historically overlooked for positions of power, but also because of the misogyny of popular spy novels such as James Bond. 

However, it is also an interesting example of the value of diversity and the importance of specialism.

I found this episode really fascinating. There is also an accompanying article, here.

2 What Barbie at the Oscar’s says about gender inequality in the film industry

The Barbie vs Oppenheimer battle, that started in the summer with the simultaneous release of these two films continued through the film awards’ season. Barbie’s box office success did not translate into significant award nominations, while Oppenheimer did. 

More than a matter of taste, Finola Kerrigan shows, this is a reflection of the lack of gender equality in the film industry. Check the Facebook reel and blog post, where Finola explains why this is the case.

3 Enduring online gender harassment

While the world of work may be getting better for women, the online world definitely isn’t. Women regularly face harassment online, particularly those who engage in some form of activism. Harassment not only reduces women’s ability to participate in only spaces and voice issues of interest to them, but also has effects on their offline lives – through reduced visibility and access to opportunities, anxiety and even in-person violence.

What’s more: gender based online harassment is very difficult to reverse. My colleague Lilith Whiley and her co-authors, Lukasz Walasek and Maire Juanchich, designed an intervention inspired my methods that have been shown to reduce racist harassment and to improve attitudes towards homeless people and those living with HIV, but were unable to make any changes to violent messages targeted at female Twitter users – neither in volume of messages, nor in content.

You can read the paper, here; or my blog post, here.