gender | this is lemonade

I wanted to celebrate the fact that Getty has made millions of images free to use and that WordPress has done some tweaks to make it easy for us to do this…but the site is probably overrun by enthusiastic bloggers because it was not available for ages!

I thought it would be interesting, on the back of International Women’s Day, to see what kind of photos would come up when I searched for “women“.

Embed from Getty Images

The images that emerged gave a far from “international” representation, and so many were of young women shopping, having coffee together, working out or partying! You can draw your own conclusions from that, I can’t claim to have trawled through all 10492 pages resulting from my search and I most certainly did not take scientific statistics based on the pages I did look at.

I can only say I did quite enjoy looking through the site, and will be enjoying it in future I believe. I’ve always enjoyed visiting Getty images exhibitions when I’ve had the chance to drop by. The debate over them making images so readily available for free use is a hot one… I’m not going to enter into any discussions or assert any opinions on anything mentioned above under the pretext that raised blood pressure would not be beneficial to me right now… any excuse to be lazy. But feel free to say your piece 😉

I’d just like to know whether anyone did this while they were pregnant (see below)? I must say, having started my antenatal classes recently, I was really relieved that the other couples don’t seem to have swotted up too much on all the available (overwhelming) information out there…

I’m preferring trying to up my R&R quota… but does that mean I’m in denial? I think today, the baby has mainly been listening to BBC News on repeat in the background whilst I’ve been continuing my attempts at organising my life doing lots of filing and tidying my desk… an ongoing losing battle perhaps…

Happy International Women’s Day!

I don’t know whether you feel there is a lot to celebrate with regard to women’s standing in society where you are. In recent news, it has become all too apparent that in terms of equal rights, women do not enjoy the same status as other women all over the world, let alone the same status as men. Incidentally, let us also not forget the men. To my understanding, feminism is not about treading men underfoot, far from it.

Here are a couple of articles that caught my eye in today’s news videos that just go to show how important it is, that we don’t work separately but together, towards resolving all the issues we face:

I hope you don’t think I’m sharing these links flippantly, they are actually some issues I care about immensely that I do not wish to write about on the blog at the moment. Despite the effectiveness with which many people tackle deep and difficult issues online, it’s not something I can devote time and energy to doing properly right now.

Are you celebrating International Women’s Day? In the UK, it is followed directly by Mothering Sunday. Recently, I asked my mum to tell me a potted history of her life. I’ve listened, enchanted, to many stories over the years but this was the first time she told me some of the details and in one sitting. I have to say I am in even more admiration of her than I was before. She is a much more courageous woman than I have ever realised. I guess that I have been blessed with some very humble, inspiring and generous women in my life who have won out in spite of their circumstances. Who are (or have been) the important women in your life?

Weather Forecast London

I have the news on right now. Emily Maitlis just handed over to the weatherman with the words “honestly, it looks revolting”. Nuff said. Hope you have some inner sunshine reserves for the weekend, even if it’s horrible, rainy, cloudy and cold outside.