Now You See Them… Now You Don’t – Trumpland Is a Man’s World
Focusing on Noem and Bondi, however, misses the larger point. This first year of Trump 2.0 has seen women, one after another, summarily gone from their posts (some fired, some resigning) as part of a larger DEI purge. As I pointed out in a TomDispatch piece in January, the military has led the way with a full-scale attack on women. And that trend started on the administration’s very first day in office when Trump removed Linda Fagan, the first female commandant of the Coast Guard.
Fagan was, in fact, the first woman ever to serve as a military service chief and, among other things, she had exposed “Operation Fouled Anchor,” a previously covered-up investigation into sexual harassment and assault in the Coast Guard. Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to lead the Navy, was fired as well. Both have now — no surprise — been replaced by men.
Women Leaders and Trump 2.0
Karen J. Greenberg Tom Dispatch, May 10, 2026, https://tomdispatch.com/now-you-see-them-now-you-dont/
It’s been a tough couple of months for women officials in Washington — or, more accurately, in Trumpland. In early March (Women’s History Month, by the way), in a Truth Social post, the president fired Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem, the second woman ever to hold that title. Weeks later, also in a social media post, he fired Attorney General Pam Bondi, the third woman ever to serve as head of the Department of Justice.
While in the first year of his first presidency, Trump 1.0 had fired numerous officials, this time around, Bondi and Noem, who ran the two largest law enforcement agencies in the country, were the first cabinet officials to be dismissed. Both — no surprise — were replaced by men. And just as I was writing this piece, Trump removed another female cabinet official, Secretary of Labor Lori Chavez-DeRemer. Meanwhile, speculation lingers about the possible firing of a fourth female cabinet member, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, the second woman to hold that job. And whether or not Gabbard is formally dismissed, she has recently been effectively sidelined, as her absence from White House meetings on the war in Iran suggests.
Notably, Noem, Bondi, Chavez-DeRemer, and Gabbard are, of course, all women. As Jasmine Crockett, a Democratic House of Representatives member from Texas, recently tweeted, “Well… first it was Kristi Noem, now it’s Pam Bondi… it would be too much like right that Pete [Hegseth] be next. I see a theme. He [Trump] will throw the incompetent women under the bus a lot faster than the incompetent men.”
Equal Opportunity Failure
Crockett has a point. Pete Hegseth’s leadership at the Department of Defense (now all too appropriately retitled the Department of War) has erased time-honored rules and norms in staggering ways. He has, for instance, drastically reduced media access to the Pentagon, purged employees who disagreed with him, as well as those he deemed to be DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) appointees, and is now exerting his leadership in a war against Iran for which the exit strategy seems elusive at best, despite his assurance that, as the Guardian reported, “the U.S. would not get bogged down in the conflict.” The U.S. operation, he insisted, was not a “democracy-building exercise,” adding that ‘this is not Iraq. This is not endless.’”
Hegseth’s behavior has led Arizona Democratic Representative Yassamin Ansari to file articles of impeachment against him on six charges. They include the commission of war crimes, especially the killing of at least 165 people, including many children, at a girls’ primary school in Iran hit by a U.S. missile; negligence with sensitive information; and conducting an unauthorized war without congressional approval. In the Senate, Massachusetts Democrat Elizabeth Warren has followed up with a letter to U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Paul Atkins asking for an investigation into whether Hegseth attempted to profit from his financial investments in the run-up to the war in Iran.
Crockett might just as easily have highlighted the wayward behavior of FBI Director Kash Patel, recently exposed in a piece in The Atlantic describing “excessive drinking” that interfered with his job (an article over which Patel immediately filed suit for $250 million in damages), or the trashing of health standards by Health and Human Resources Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
But whatever the future of those reprehensible men in cabinet positions, it’s unfortunately difficult to defend either Bondi or Noem for their actions while in office. Like their male counterparts, both defiantly tossed professionalism and decency to the winds. Under Noem, with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) leading the way, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was weaponized and transformed into President Trump’s version of a homeland militia. It’s hardly a stretch to make the comparison to Hitler’s Brownshirts.
So far, in Trump’s second term in office, ICE has terrorized schools and businesses, while cruelly imprisoning migrants without due process of any sort. It has held children in detention centers under abhorrent conditions, attacked peaceful protesters, and killed citizens on the streets of America. Worse yet, Noem appropriated tens of millions of dollars to cover the costs of a pro-ICE ad featuring herself riding a horse in front of Mount Rushmore saying, “Break Our Laws, We’ll Punish You.” (Nor should we imagine that things will get any better without her.)
Bondi’s ouster followed failures of a different order — namely, her stumbling, wildly inept efforts to fulfill Trump’s agenda. She proved unable even to make the case of Trump pal Jeffrey Epstein go away, while what she had to say when releasing documents related to him led to accusations that her statements were riddled with falsehoods. Meanwhile, prosecutions under her watch of New York State Attorney General Letitia James and former FBI Director James Comey, high-priority items for the president, fell apart.
And when called before Congress to explain herself, her rank lack of civility resembled the behavior of a spoiled teenager berating her teacher, knowing that, since her parents wielded power over the school, she should fear no reprisals. Under Bondi, the sacrosanct mission of the Department of Justice as an agency independent of the White House was summarily tossed aside (as the roof-to-ground-floor Trump banner that hung from its office building demonstrated).
Female Purges
Focusing on Noem and Bondi, however, misses the larger point. This first year of Trump 2.0 has seen women, one after another, summarily gone from their posts (some fired, some resigning) as part of a larger DEI purge. As I pointed out in a TomDispatch piece in January, the military has led the way with a full-scale attack on women. And that trend started on the administration’s very first day in office when Trump removed Linda Fagan, the first female commandant of the Coast Guard.
Fagan was, in fact, the first woman ever to serve as a military service chief and, among other things, she had exposed “Operation Fouled Anchor,” a previously covered-up investigation into sexual harassment and assault in the Coast Guard. Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to lead the Navy, was fired as well. Both have now — no surprise — been replaced by men. As it stands, there are no longer any four-star women generals in the military. And only this month, we learned that Secretary of War Hegseth had reportedly removed two women from a promotion list to become one-star Army generals.
Outside of the Department of Defense, the resignations or firings of women in leadership positions have abounded across agencies ranging from the National Labor Relations Board to the Federal Trade Commission and the CDC.
This widespread purge of women stands in stark contrast to their presence in office during the Biden years. Under President Joe Biden, women held just under 50% of all cabinet or cabinet-level positions. And let’s not forget Kamala Harris, the first female vice-president in American history. It’s worth noting as well that, under Biden, the Deputy Attorney General and the Deputy Secretary of Defense were both women.
Trump is not unmindful of those statistics. Last year, he boasted about the presence of eight women among his 24 cabinet officers, or a third of his cabinet. As Business Insider reports, he was “thrilled to say that we have more women in our Cabinet than any Republican president in the history of our country.” Following the removal of Noem, Bondi, and Chavez-DeRemer, however, women occupy just over one-fifth of the cabinet positions — admittedly an improvement on his first term when, after two years of resignations and firings, women held only 13% of all cabinet-level positions.)
Project 2025
It’s worth noting that the path to the current backlash against women, including all the purges and punishments we’re now witnessing in real time, didn’t come about by mere happenstance. In the run-up to the 2024 election, the conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation published a Project 2025 report entitled Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, a 900-plus page blueprint for overhauling the federal bureaucracy. It called for gutting DEI programs, eliminating and reducing the size of any offices that didn’t serve a conservative agenda, and enhancing the powers of the president. Among its many recommendations, Project 2025 touted an anti-female message, including removing “gender equality” language from government websites, emphasizing “family planning,” and recommending limitations on access to contraception and cuts to federal funding for abortions.
Although Trump repeatedly distanced himself from Project 2025, many of its recommended policies have indeed become our new reality, including matters affecting women. In the first months of Trump’s second term, images of women, as well as persons of color and LGBTQ+ individuals, were systematically erased from government websites. So, too, protections for women’s health were tossed to the winds. As the abortion rights group Reproductive Freedom for All has reported, as of January 2026, “53% of [Project 2025’s] policies attacking reproductive freedom are completed or in progress.”
And now, there is a brand-new Heritage Foundation report devoted to the need to counter the declining birth rate and the fragility of the American family. “Saving America by Saving the Family: A Foundation for the Next 20 Years” calls for the restructuring of incentives to promote childbearing and “revive the institution of marriage.” Signaling its message, the report makes the case for privileging marriage and children over career advancement and less traditional family arrangements caused by divorce and single-parenthood. While the report underscores the family roles incumbent upon both men and women, the fact is that reforms aimed at incentivizing childbearing will fall primarily on women, while those aimed at privileging childrearing over career choices would likely fall most heavily on women as well.
MS NOW’s Ali Velshi and “Velshi” Segment Producer Amel Ahmed summed up the report well, pointing out that its overall takeaway is: “the freedoms fought [for] and won by America’s women aren’t progress; they are the problem.”
Of course, in the era of Donald Trump, none of this should come as a surprise, not when you consider the histories of the men who are now running the show: a president who, in addition to once touting the fact that he could “grab them by the pussy,” has been convicted in E. Jean Carroll’s civil suit over accusations of sexual abuse and defamation to the tune of $83.3 million in damages, a decision upheld by an appellate court. And let’s not forget that Trump’s first nominee for Attorney General, Matt Gaetz, withdrew his name from consideration under a cloud of accusations of wrongful behavior, including sexual misconduct. Not to mention the shadow cast by the number of individuals within the current administration whose names are said to appear in the Epstein files. While no formal charges of sexual misconduct have been issued against them, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick is reportedly being pressured to resign over his alleged ties to Epstein.
A Future Government Without Women?
It’s hard to predict which women will come under the axe from Trump and crew in the coming months. But the onslaught has understandably led women from both sides of the political spectrum to sound the alarm. Months before she announced her resignation from Congress, former Trump supporter Marjorie Taylor Greene had already expressed her own misgivings about the misogyny of the Republican leaders in Congress.
When Trump rescinded New York Congresswoman Elise Stefanik’s nomination to be the U.S. Representative to the United Nations and replaced her with Michael Waltz (who had embarrassed himself by adding a reporter to a private Signal chat about possible future strikes against the Houthis in Yemen), Greene saw it as a sign of a general trend of sidelining women. She summed it up as a case where Stefanik “gets shafted,” while Waltz “gets rewarded.” For Greene, it was proof of an overwhelming Trump administration mood of: “She’s a woman, so it was OK to do that to her somehow.”
Greene’s dissatisfaction wasn’t just over Stefanik but over the general trend that has led to only one Republican woman chairing a committee in Congress. Notably, alongside Greene, Republican representatives Nancy Mace and Laurent Boebert signed a petition pressuring the Department of Justice to release information on the Epstein files.
The signs are everywhere. Expectations are disappearing that women will hold leadership positions inside the Trump administration or in the halls of Congress (unless the Democrats win decisively in November). If you didn’t realize it before, you really can’t hide from it now. The attack on diversity in government has become pervasive and (at least as yet) is undeterred, targeting with abandon females, as well as people of color, immigrants, and critics of the president. In other words, the fate of women leaders should provide us with an insight, however dispiriting, into just how quickly the values and assumptions that guided this nation’s progress in matters of race, gender, and ethnicity for decades have disappeared.
What once amounted to progress is indeed now seen as the problem. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the exorcising of women from the halls of government.
Karen J. Greenberg is a future studies fellow at New America, a non-resident research fellow at the NYU Reiss Center for Law and Security, and co-host of the SpyTalk podcast. She is the author of many books, including Subtle Tools: The Dismantling of American Democracy from the War on Terror to Donald Trump.
Mother’s Day Pivots to Peace
Jodie Evans & Marie Goodwin, 10 May 26, https://scheerpost.com/2026/05/10/mothers-day-pivots-to-peace/
In 1870, Julia Ward Howe penned her “Mother’s Day Proclamation,” calling for peace. Her words still ring with truth, calling us not to raise our children to kill another mother’s child but rather to gather together to “promote the alliance of the different nationalities, the amicable settlement of international questions, the great and general interests of peace.” She wrote this following the ravages and violence of the Civil War, a war like the wars today waged for the needs of the rich. Now the War Economy has consolidated in the hands of the rich to a level never seen in history.
We live deep inside the War Economy — the extractive, destructive, oppressive economy founded upon greedy capitalism and imperialism. With the years-old genocide in Gaza ongoing, the continued dehumanizing blockade of Cuba, and the inhumane and strategically disastrous war on Iran all coinciding, we see how war serves the War Economy. Proof of this violence is served up, ubiquitous and relentless, via our phones, those devices we hold so near and dear to us. The War Economy has mesmerized us into participating in its cynical lullaby: we accept domination, dehumanization, demoralization, cynicism, and apathy as normal and natural, allowing War Economy thinking to pervade everyday interactions with our families, communities, and even our relationship to ourselves. The War Economy knows that, individually, we have little power to stop it. Convincing us that we are alone and powerless is its greatest trick.
These, however, are lies. We know this intuitively. We can understand that the War Economy is trying to lull us into a fugue of forgetfulness of our own nature. How do we remember what care and connection feel like? How can we begin to practice something other than the addictions the war economy forces on us? What experiences that we perceive as normal and natural are just internalized War Economy thinking and behaviors?
The Peace Economy is how humans have survived for millennia; it is how we have served each other and the world since humanity began tens of thousands of years ago. It is how people across the ages and the globe have learned to survive and thrive through the experience of community, collaboration, and connection. It is showing up for the needs of each other with generous and caring hearts. It is the giving, sharing, caring, thriving, relational, resilient economy that serves all life on this planet. Whether we know it or not, it is fundamental to serving life and cultivating peace. We can’t end war until we end the War Economy, so we who desire peace must create a future built on the habits of peace.
The Peace Economy is rooted in maternal care. When we are born, most of us experience love and connection effortlessly. We are provided for without the need for transactional thinking and relationships. The War Economy lies to us and says we can find love and connection through the purchase of things and transactional relationships. An insidious lie.
Think about it. How do you experience connection and care in your life? How do you experience joy and creativity? How do you play? How do you give of yourself to others and to things that matter to you? When you disconnect from phones and computers and walk out into the more-than-human world, how do you relate to what surrounds and sustains you? None of those things has a purchase price. They are freely given, like a mother’s love.
The War Economy forces addictions on us to survive its abusive thrall. We can break those addictions just by practicing habits of peace and walking through life with the care and connection of a mother’s love. Habits of peace, which we like to call “Pivots to Peace,” build muscles that will help us thrive and participate in the creation of a more beautiful future. It is a way to “mother” the world. A pivot is a commitment you can make on this Mother’s Day, a day hijacked by the War Economy to be one of consumption. Let us be as committed to peace as the war mongers are to war; they all do it for transaction and money — together let us build a future that serves life with love.
Here are some Pivots to Peace.
Pivot from Transactional Relationships to Relational Connections: Our relationships are what keep us alive and thriving. One of the ways our War Economy has isolated us from each other is by turning our relationships into transactions. Transactions do not support life and relationships. Instead, transactional interaction steals what nourishes you and your community. Because our culture is based on transactions, this pivot can be especially challenging. It will require some self-honesty to witness what drives you. This will take a lifetime of practice, and the reward is life itself. How might you decrease transactionality in your everyday interactions with your family, friends, and neighbors?
Pivot from Feelings of Scarcity to Abundance: The War Economy takes those things that were once free — food, water, land, entertainment, etc. — and monetizes them, forcing us to experience them as scarce. The War Economy also forces us to think we need an excess of things that are not essential to life; these things don’t really bring us true joy and pleasure, but rather distract us. How do you experience scarcity in your life? What feels out of reach to you? Which of your needs are unmet? What always feels out of your reach, and how does that make you feel? Ideas to pivot to abundance: Start with defining what is “enough.” What is it that you really need? What do you already have? What can you share with others who have less than you? Give something away every day this week — not as a transaction but as a way of relating.
Pivot from Self-Oriented to Community-Engaged: It’s easy to see why we’re all alienated from each other when we live in a society that emphasizes individual achievement and self-directed actions over community care and engagement with those around us. What if our culture valued community care and engagement with those around you as the highest virtue? What are some ways you retreat into self-directed actions and individual achievement? Reflect on what nourishes you when you are community-engaged. Take some opportunities to see those who are caring for and creating your community — the teachers, healers, caretakers, nurses, essential workers, gardeners, etc., who enrich all of our lives. Thank them.
Pivot from Reactionary to Investigative: In the War Economy, the corporate elites and warmongers control the media and the cultural narrative that is so pervasive in our lives. They capture your heart and mind to support their goals of domination and control. Often, they are weaponizing you to serve their goals, maneuvering you into a reactive stance. Mainstream media relies on us becoming reactive so that we will support the agenda of the War Economy. Instead of swallowing what the media is serving up, begin to practice investigating. What stories are seeking a reaction? What stories are investigative and nuanced? Begin to pay attention to who is benefiting. Where do you notice informed journalism that is not serving the War Economy? Notice what changes when you practice investigative and discerning media intake.
Pivot from “Us vs. Them” to All of Us: Have you noticed that in most movies, the solution to the problem is to kill the villain? From an early age, we are fed the “good guy vs. bad guy” narrative. What are some ways this has permeated your own life and thinking? Where do you hold on to an “us vs. them” attitude? How does this serve your life? Can you transform your idea of separation from “them” into a more complex understanding of how relationships to the larger systems are affecting all of us — instead of placing blame on an individual or particular group of people? The War Economy thrives on divide and conquer, and people are the power if we stay connected.
Pivot from Consumption to Creativity: The War Economy is fueled by consumption. Through the lifestyle the War Economy creates, we are forced into an addiction to consuming — be that the consumption of material goods, media, entertainment or something else. Most of the things we consume are not what we need but what we are taught to need. Often, they distance us from joy and pleasure, creating a cycle of dissatisfaction and emptiness. Creativity is usually the way to truly fill the void we are seeking to fill through consumption. We are fulfilled through connections. We are fulfilled when we create avenues for feeling, art, expression and for life to thrive. How can you create space for creativity in your life?
Pivot from Limitation to Imagination: Limitation of ourselves is one of the great crimes of the War Economy; it gets us locked into transaction, productivity, and patterns of comfort that sever us from free thinking, creative action, and imagination. The War Economy convinces us that we need to stay narrow to survive, and often, we don’t even realize how narrow our bandwidth for creative thought, wild expression, and imagination has become. Where in your life does your imagination find expression and value? Take time each day to let your mind wander beyond what feels safe or familiar. Gather with your community and discuss what frustrates you. Then start a free flow of ideas that could address the frustrations. The more “out there” the idea, the better. Being in relationship with new pathways and new potential realities is a great way to expand creativity and birth the future.
Pivot from Restraint to Pleasure: The War Economy shakes in its boots because the things that bring us joy and pleasure are free and abundant — a secret they don’t want us to realize. What would you be doing with your time and energy if you made decisions based on a feeling of deep, erotic yes? Often, the first thing we need to remove to find pleasure is transaction. Where do you experience restraint in your life? How is it imposed on you? By your habits? By self-limiting beliefs? By the culture? What scares you about pleasure? What excites you? Even when we do things we think will give us pleasure, we are sometimes so lost in transaction and productivity that instead we find emptiness and frustration. What were some times, have you sought pleasure and it has been beyond your reach? What were the circumstances? What one thing can you do today that will make you feel joy without having to purchase something?
These are a few of the 23 pivots you can find at peaceeconomy.org. They are offerings to serve you as you take your life away from serving the War Economy and cultivate a future on the foundation of a peace economy. It all starts small and local. Peace-making starts with our circle of influence right around us — in our families and communities — and that is where our personal actions and their impacts are felt and create effect. What can you choose to practice this week, right where you live? How might you care for others the way a mother might care for her child?
What would it look like if peace came alive in your community, connection by connection, family by family, and eroded the grip of the War Economy habits? What if we all remembered the connection and unconditional love given to us as our birthright by our mothers? Remember, we may be just one drop in an ocean of our culture, but oceans are made, drop by drop, little by little, to become the most powerful force in nature. Together, let us be an ocean of peace.
“No matter what you do it will never amount to anything but a single drop in a limitless ocean. What is an ocean but a multitude of drops.” ― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas
Jodie Evans is a co-founder of CODEPINK, creator of the PeaceEconomy.org project and editor of the upcoming book, China Is Not Your Enemy.
Marie Goodwin Marie Goodwin is CODEPINK’s Local Peace Economy Coordinator.
Women Deliver Conference. Glimmers of hope amid the doom and gloom?
by Aleta Moriarty | May 4, 2026
The Women Deliver conference in Melbourne exposed the global decline in humanitarian aid amid escalating conflict. Aleta Moriarty was there.
Women Deliver is the largest gathering of women leaders, rights advocates and activists anywhere in the world, bringing together 6,000 people from 189 countries.
Alongside the activists were former leaders Julia Gillard, Jacinda Ardern, Helen Clarke and Justin Trudeau, who confronted the defining crises of our time: a world at war, the global rise of authoritarianism, the unchecked power of corporations, and the systematic erosion of the multilateral system.
Out of it came the Melbourne Declaration for Gender Equality, a global commitment to rebalance power, resources and accountability for girls, women and gender-diverse people.
A world at war
Conflict was front and centre, with representatives from almost all conflict-affected regions and countries, including Myanmar, Palestine, Lebanon, and Afghanistan.
According to the Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP), 61 active state-based conflicts were recorded in 2024, the highest number since records began in 1946. The International Committee of the Red Cross puts the total number of armed conflicts at 130, double the figure of fifteen years ago. The Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project (ACLED) estimates
“one in eight people worldwide is now exposed to conflict.”
The burden falls disproportionately on women and girls. UN Women reports that in 2024, approximately 676 million women and girls, 17% of the global female population, lived within 50 kilometres of active conflict zones, the highest share since the 1990s.
Sexual violence remains one of the most systematic features of contemporary warfare. During the Bosnian War, rape was widely used as a weapon. Women were systematically detained, forcibly impregnated, and held captive until they gave birth, denied abortion by design, their bodies conscripted as instruments of ethnic cleansing. The erasure of a people, all delivered through the bodies of women.
The UN Secretary-General’s 2025 Report on Conflict-Related Sexual Violence documented an 87% increase in cases since 2022, widely acknowledged as a significant undercount, given the stigma, fear of reprisal and restricted humanitarian access that prevent reporting.
In the Democratic Republic of Congo alone, 38,000 cases were reported by service providers in North Kivu in the first months of 2025. In Sudan, UN Women reported a 288% increase in demand for lifesaving support following rape and sexual violence in April 2025.
These are not mere statistics; they are women, each one a universe of relationships and possibilities,
“unmade by atrocity and crime.”
“(We need) a little reflection of what is happening and what it does, conflict. What conflict does to an actual human being, right? said Afghan woman and refugee Zohra Mousavi from Bridge to Safety.
“We always forget about that, we forget about the lives of people. We talk about numbers. It becomes just incredibly difficult to then narrow it down to remember that we’re talking about humans.”
A flood of people
Conflict uproots lives on a vast scale. UNHCR recorded more than 123 million forcibly displaced people in 2024, approximately one in every 67 people on Earth.
Among the most acute situations is Cox’s Bazar in Bangladesh, a country where the average income is around $2000 a month. It is the world’s largest refugee camp, home to around 1.3 million stateless Rohingya refugees, approximately three times the population of Canberra, with more than 75% of them women and children.
The camp is one of the most desperate and densely populated places on earth, with 47,000 people crammed per square kilometre and residents living in bamboo and tarpaulin shelters, acutely vulnerable to landslides, flooding, fires and cyclones.
“Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh…are living in such horrible conditions. I was there last year. Six thousand five hundred learning centres have shut. When I went, there were children roaming around in every single street trying to look for things to do when they should be at school, said Noor Azizah, survivor of the ongoing Rohingya genocide and co-executive director of the Rohingya Women’s Collaborative Network.
“We need funding to make sure our people are not just surviving. They need food. People are living on seven dollars a month now… And because people are not able to live with these short stipends, women are looking for jobs in really dangerous jobs, you know, leaving the camps, young children are doing sex work.”
Candy over human aidAt the very moment need has surged, the humanitarian system has been eviscerated. The withholding of support itself becomes a weapon, as deliberate and as deadly as any other. In addition, broader aid cuts have systemically targeted programming that supports women, whether this be for sexual and reproductive health or to support women’s rights.
Between 2024 and 2025, more than 30% of global humanitarian funding disappeared, driven primarily by cuts to USAID, but triggering wider contraction from other major donors, including Germany and Sweden.
Council on Foreign Relations reported that total humanitarian funding had dropped to 2016 levels, with agencies now forced to
“cut food from the hungry to preserve dwindling resources for the starving.“
Data from the Council on Foreign Relations starkly demonstrate this.
A paper published in The Lancet forecast that global aid cuts could result in between 9.4 and 22.6 million additional deaths by 2030. This is comparable to the number of deaths attributed to COVID-19, yet receives a fraction of the attention.
“This erosion of multilateralism is not part of efficiency, it is part of militarisation, it is not a reform or a merger, it is an attack and all of it must be resisted,” said Kate Gilmore, former United Nations Deputy High Commissioner for Human Rights, adding, “The most critical impacts of the deliberate dismantlement are being borne by ‘we the peoples….
“(this) death march is not austerity, it is atrocity.”
The obscenity of the richest man in the world, holding a chainsaw, celebrating these cuts that have led children to die or enter sex work, should plague all our minds. According to Forbes, Elon Musk’s net worth reached $800 billion in February 2026, exceeding the GDP of Sweden, Norway and Singapore. In 2025 alone, he added approximately $194 billion to his personal wealth.
Australia’s aid declining
Australia’s aid budget tells a story of quiet retreat. While nominal figures appear to be rising, the aid budget is going backwards once adjusted for inflation or measured against Gross National Income.
In 2025–26, aid represented just 0.63% of the federal budget, small by international standards, and it keeps falling.
Australians grossly overestimate our aid contributions. A 2015 survey found that 19% of Australians believed aid made up at least 5% of the federal budget, around 8 times more than the actual figure of 0.63%.
It hasn’t just been humanitarian funding that has been targeted, but the frontline humanitarian workers themselves, in numbers we have simply never seen before.
The last two years have been the deadliest consecutive years for humanitarian workers ever recorded. In 2024 alone, a record 383 aid workers were killed, more than double the annual average of the previous decade, driven primarily by the war in Gaza and the civil war in Sudan, which together accounted for the majority of deaths.
The Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement lost 38 staff and volunteers in 2024 alone, while 289 UN personnel were killed in Gaza, the largest loss of UN staff in any single crisis in history. Likewise, among them was Australia’s very own Zomi Frankcom, struck by an Israeli drone while delivering food for World Central Kitchen in clearly marked vehicles. We still await the results of the official investigation.
“We are in the midst of a complete breakdown of the international system, said Agnes Callamard, Secretary General of Amnesty International. “In the past, we warned of the imminent possibility of the breakdown. Right now, what we are saying we’re past warning. We’re in the middle of it
“We have found that there are predators who are intent on destroying the system through violations of international law and of the multilateral system. But it’s not just that they violate it, that they are insisting that these (systems) are dead.”
Ushering in the preventable death of millions has left many asking how a system so fundamental to the world’s most vulnerable could be destabilised so rapidly and easily by so few.
This was one of the central questions at Women Deliver, and the answer many participants kept returning to was that the international multilateral system needs to decentralise. Get the money, the power, and the decision-making out of institutions that can be captured overnight, and into the hands of the grassroots actors already doing the work.
Connecting every crisis discussed at Women Deliver 2026 is not complexity; it is choice. The big question is whether governments like ours will make more humane choices, with real resources, real leadership. real accountability, and the political will to match.
Greenham Women’s Peace Camp: The forgotten protest against nuclear weapons that lasted 19 years
Writing her novel Fallout – set against the backdrop of the Greenham Women’s Peace Camp – turned Eleanor Anstruther into an anarchist
Eleanor Anstruther, The Big Issue, 16 Apr 2026,
You’d have thought a protest that lasted 19 years, involved hundreds of thousands of people, achieved its aims through non-violent direct action and was women-only would already be assured of its place in history. If not in the story of women, then surely as a module in a political degree, or on the school curriculum alongside the suffragettes, apartheid, Gandhi and the American civil rights movement.
Yet throughout all my research and the many conversations I’ve had since writing Fallout, I’ve only met one – yes, you read that right, one – person under the age of 30 who’d heard of it, and she was a journalist who’d studied politics at university and consciously sought out the missing pieces in the history of British civil disobedience.
.
Even those of us who knew about Greenham from seeing it on the news as young people ourselves in the Eighties are surprised when I tell them how long it lasted. “Nineteen years?” They say, incredulously. “Yes,” I reply,“ and in the signing of the INF treaty which marked the removal of the cruise missiles from RAF Greenham Common, Reagan and Gorbachev cited Greenham women as part of their inspiration.
The leaders of America and Russia, locked for so long in a deadly battle of mutually assured destruction (or MAD for short) found it in themselves to namecheck these women who refused to give in to bullying, not only from the government but consistently from the British media. Yet, the history books? Barely a whisper. A level politics? Forget it. Primary school dress-up days? You can’t move for Emmeline Pankhursts, but Greenham women are nowhere to be found.
Can you hear the outrage in my voice? You’d be right in thinking Fallout is more to me than a book. I thought I knew about Greenham until I started researching it and I thought I had a pretty good handle on the history of protest until I started talking to Greenham women. I’ve been holding up banners and holding up the traffic for much of my adult life, but writing Fallout turned me into an anarchist, and I mean that in the true sense of the word; a belief in the goodness of people to organise themselves around caring for one another.
Because more than a political action which got rid of the bombs and reclaimed the land, Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp was living proof of our ability to share space with conflicting opinions. Greenham was not one-size-fits-all. It was an idea, not an ideology, and no one, as far as I know, was thrown out of camp for failing to comply. There was no dogma to comply with, and not everyone who came to Greenham was there for political reasons…………………………………….
The women who did leave home to take up space at Greenham did so at their peril – not only physically at the hands of the police but also reputationally throughout their towns and villages. They weren’t held up as icons by their children and husbands; they were lambasted for failing their families.
And this weapon was liberally used by state and media too, shaming them into returning home and if they refused, shaming them on the front pages of national newspapers.
Yet they persisted. Through biting winters and heatwave summers, through prison and beatings and bailiffs and the nighttime assaults by local vigilante groups who tore through camp on motorbikes hurling buckets of blood and maggots.
Despite every effort by the government to get the women to give up and go home, they stood firm. They crawled through brambles, bolt cutters down their boots to cut the fence, proving how poorly the bombs were defended. They threw carpets over barbed wire and danced on the silos. They sang and weaved and fought and held hands and were funny and refused to back down, and they won.
When young people, overwhelmed by the challenge before them, ask me what can be done, I point them towards Greenham. Look, I say. Look what they did. Never underestimate the power of being consistently and creatively annoying. Believe in your rage. There is nothing so powerful as an idea whose time has come. Greenham women are all of us and we are everywhere. https://www.bigissue.com/news/activism/greenham-womens-peace-camp-eleanor-anstruther/
HerStory: Feminism is the Route to Peace
feminism is about equality, dignity, and shared power–not just for women, but for everyone.
By H. Patricia Hynes for Informed Comment, February 2, 2026, https://scheerpost.com/2026/02/02/herstory-feminism-is-the-route-to-peace/
Jane Goodall, the renowned primatologist and impassioned advocate for nature, founded in her later years an institute through which she launched Roots and Shoots. Young people in more than 60 countries were taught about preserving nature and how to work for environmental good in their communities. Because of her passionate mission to protect from the twin threats of the loss of biodiversity and climate change and her goal to “inspire hope and spark action in others,” especially young people, she was honored as a United Nations Messenger for Peace. Like Goodall, many young women’s groups across the United States have emerged as beacons of hope and are sparking action in others.
In Amherst, Massachusetts, a teen feminist group called Generation Ratify was launched to help endorse the Equal Rights Amendment and advance gender equality. They organized many rallies, three school walkouts, banner drops, film and art shops and lobbied at the state house. In July 2025, they joined with Young Climate Action Now to host Little Leader Convention for 10-to-13 -year-olds with the goal of empowering a new generation of ecofeminists. Recently they partnered with a national youth-led organization Feminist Front to form Feminist Generation. Their generation has lost the secure right to bodily autonomy; they inherit an Earth in climate failure and a country enroute to fascism. In 2026 the Amherst chapter of Feminist Generation will launch an initiative to promote youth voter engagement in the 2026 elections, research gender-based wage gaps in local government, and work with Planned Parenthood to implement a comprehensive sex education curriculum at Amherst Regional High School.
Behind the 2025 progressive wins in the states of Virginia and Pennsylvania were hundreds of young feminist organizers, mobilized and trained by Vote for Equality, the political arm of Feminist Majority. They organized on campuses in both states. Abigail Spanberger, a strong advocate for reproductive freedom, won as Virginia’s first woman governor, with 65% women voting for her and an unprecedented shift in the House of Delegates to a large majority of Democrats. In Pennsylvania, 3 progressive Supreme Court Justices who were instrumental in “safeguarding reproductive rights for Medicaid recipients through Pennsylvania’s Equal Rights Amendment” retained their seats. These young feminists are ready to build on their 2025 victories in 2026.
One of the newest young feminist groups is HerStory at Deerfield Academy in Deerfield, Massachusetts. Katie Kim a junior at the academy, re-named her women’s empowerment group of which she is president HerStory because she “can’t really think of a story in history where there’s no her in it.” All of the HerStory group concur that “a lot of social media influence the branding of feminism” as merely groups of women meeting to express “hatred of men” when that’s “totally not what we do,” they said. It’s more about supporting each other in our community and trying to have local impact. HerStory members see the true history of humankind, as one of partnership, gender partnership.
Bright Yang, a sophomore from China, explained his reasons for joining HerStory, namely that he “recognized how powerful women are.” He gave a “shout out to his mom” who has “played a great, great role” in developing his personality, guiding him through the isolation one can feel in boarding school, giving him ideas and “just happiness in general.” Drawn to Middle Eastern Studies and religion, he noted a similarity in Islam as practiced in Afghanistan and Christianity as practiced by Catholicism, the 2,000 year-old religion “that has so much difficulty merely recognizing women as equals” to make them priests, bishops, and ultimately Pope, though he stated, Afghanistan is much worse.
I asked Herstory members to explain their convictions about the statement, “Feminism is the route to peace” with which they ended my last meeting with them. They responded that at its core, feminism is about equality, dignity, and shared power–not just for women, but for everyone. The link to peace comes from a few main ideas. Equality reduces violence. Societies built on strict hierarchies (men over women, some groups over others) often normalize domination and force. Without embracing feminism, “our rights and voices remain disparaged, creating challenges and disputes,” responded Peggy Huang. Feminism promotes cooperation instead of control, dialogue instead of coercion, and respect instead of fear. These values are strongly associated with lower levels of violence—at home, in communities, and between nations.
Research consistently shows that countries with higher gender inequality tend to have more internal conflict, more authoritarian leadership, and higher rates of violence overall, explained Katie Kim. Inclusive leadership leads to more peaceful outcomes. When women and marginalized groups are included in decision-making, peace agreements last longer, policies focus more on social well-being (health, education, stability), and conflict resolution emphasizes compromise rather than escalation. This isn’t because women are “naturally peaceful,” she added, but because diverse perspectives improve problem-solving.
Currently, Katie is organizing a poetry anthology project with local women empowerment organizations in Amherst. Through poetry–a simple, accessible literary form–she hopes to bring the current youth activists together fighting for the same cause and to foster tighter bonds with one another.
HerStory members are true Messengers for Peace.
H. Patricia Hynes is a retired professor of environmental health, directs the Traprock Center for Peace and Justice in western Massachusetts. She has written and edited 7 books, among them The Recurring Silent Spring (nominated for the Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Award) and Justice. Her most recent book is Hope but Demand Justice. She writes and speaks on issues of war and militarism with an emphasis on women, environment, and public health.
‘Radioactive patriarchy’ documentary: Women examine the impact of Soviet nuclear testing
During the time of the detonations, approximately 1.5 million people lived near the sites, despite Soviet claims that the area was uninhabited.
In the ensuing decades, diagnoses of cancers, congenital anomalies and thyroid disease affected the surrounding communities at an alarming rate, particularly for women.
November 17, 2025, Rebecca H. Hogue, Assistant Professor, Department of English, University of Toronto https://theconversation.com/radioactive-patriarchy-documentary-women-examine-the-impact-of-soviet-nuclear-testing-256775
Following recent comments on nuclear testing by United States President Donald Trump and Russian leader Vladimir Putin, it’s more important than ever to remember that nuclear detonations — whether in war or apparent peace time — have long-lasting impacts.
Over a 40-year period, up to 1989, the Soviet Union detonated 456 nuclear weapons in present-day Kazakhstan (or Qazaqstan, in the decolonized spelling)
During the time of the detonations, approximately 1.5 million people lived near the sites, despite Soviet claims that the area was uninhabited.
In the ensuing decades, diagnoses of cancers, congenital anomalies and thyroid disease affected the surrounding communities at an alarming rate, particularly for women.
A new independent documentary, JARA Radioactive Patriarchy: Women of Qazaqstan, examines the impacts of nuclear weapons in Qazaqstan. Jara means “wound” in the Qazaq language.
The film is directed by Aigerim Seitenova, a nuclear disarmament activist with a post-graduate degree in international human rights law who co-founded the Qazaq Nuclear Frontline Coalition. Seitenova grew up in Semey (formerly called Semipalatinsk), Qazaqstan.
Close to Semey is the Semipalatinsk nuclear test site, also known as The Polygon, in Qazaqstan’s northeastern region. It’s an area slightly smaller than the size of Belgium — approximately 18,000 square kilometres — in the former Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic.
Nuclear Truth Project
Seitenova introduced her film in March 2025 at the United Nations headquarters in New York, hosted by the Nuclear Truth Project. The documentary premiere was a side event at the Third Meeting of States Parties to the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.
As a literary and cultural historian who examines narratives of the nuclear age, I attended the standing-room-only event alongside many delegates from civil society organizations.
Nuclear disarmament activist
Seitenova, who wrote, directed and produced JARA Radioactive Patriarchy on location in Semey, aims to bring women’s nuclear stories to Qazaqstan and international audiences.
The 30-minute documentary features intimate interviews with five Qazaq women. The film shares the women’s fears, grief and the ways they have learned to cope, as well as reflections from Seitenova filmed at the ground-zero site.
For Seitenova, it was essential that the film be in Qazaq language.
“Qazaq language, like Qazaq bodies,” she said in an interview after the premiere, “were considered ‘other’ or not valuable.” Seitenova acknowledged it was also important to show a Qazaq-language film at the UN, as Qazaq is not an official UN language like Russian.
Women consensually share experiences
One of Seitenova’s directorial choices was not just what or who would be seen, but specifically what would not be seen in her film.
“I’m really against sensationalism,” said Seitenova. “If you Google ‘Semipalatinsk’ you will see all of these terrible images of children and fetuses.”
Seitenova accordingly does not show any of these images in her film, and instead focuses on women consensually sharing their experiences.
Seitenova explained how narratives regarding the health effects in Semey are often disparaged. When others learn she is from Semey, Seitenova shared, some will make insensitive jokes like “are you luminescent at night?” — making nuclear impact into spectacle, instead of taking it as a serious health issue.
These experiences have propelled her to take back the narrative of her community by correcting misconceptions or the minimization of harms. Instead, she brings attention to the larger structural issues.
“Everything was done by me because I did not want to invite someone who would not take care of the stories of these women,” said Seitenova.
Likewise, Seitenova only interviewed participants who had already made decisions to speak out about nuclear weapons. She did this so as not to risk retraumatizing someone by asking them to discuss their illnesses, especially for the first time on camera.
Global legacy of anti-nuclear art, advocacy
Seitenova also wanted to show a genealogy of women speaking out about nuclear issues in Qazaqstan, contributing to a global legacy of anti-nuclear art and advocacy.
The film features three generations of women, including Seitenova’s great aunt, Zura Rustemova, who was 12 at the time of the first detonations.
As part of this genealogy of nuclear resistance, the film includes footage of a speech from the Qazaq singer Roza Baglanova (1922-2011), who rose to prominence singing songs of hope during the Second World War.
Effects felt into today
JARA Radioactive Patriarchy shows how the impacts of nuclear weapons are felt intergenerationally into the present.
“Many women lost their ability to experience the happiness of motherhood,” interviewee Maira Abenova says in the film. Abenova co-founded an advocacy group representing survivors of the detonations, Committee Polygon 21.
Other interviewees shared how often men left their wives and children who were affected by nuclear weapons to begin a new family with someone else.
Seitenova looks at the roles of women and mothers not just as protectors, but also as those who have launched formidable advocacy.
The film highlights the towering monument in Semey, “Stronger than Death,” dedicated to those affected by nuclear weapons.
The Semey monument depicts a mother using her whole body to protect her child from a mushroom cloud. Just like the monument, Seitenova and the women in her documentary use the film to show how women have been doing this advocacy work in the private and public spheres, with their bodies and with their words.
“I want to show them as being leaders in the community, as changing the game,” Seitenova said.
While the film brings a much-needed attention to the gendered impact of nuclear weapons in Qazaqstan, she makes clear that this is, unfortunately, not an issue unique to her homeland or just to women.
“The next time you think about expanding the nuclear sector in any country” Seitenova said, “you can think about how it impacts people of all genders.”
Trump’s new radiation exposure limits could be ‘catastrophic’ for women and girls.
it has since been widely documented that women and young girls are significantly more vulnerable to radiation harm than men—in some cases by as much as a ten-fold difference………… Those most impacted by weaker exposure standards will be young girls under five years old
By Lesley M. M. Blume, Chloe Shrager | November 14, 2025, https://thebulletin.org/2025/11/trumps-new-radiation-exposure-limits-could-be-catastrophic-for-women-and-girls/
In a May executive order, aimed at ushering in what he described as an “American nuclear renaissance,” President Donald Trump declared moot the science underpinning decades-old radiation exposure standards set by the federal government. Executive Order 14300 directed the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) to conduct a “wholesale revision” of half-a-century of guidance and regulations. In doing so, it considers throwing out the foundational model used by the government to determine exposure limits, and investigates the possibility of loosening the standard on what is considered a “safe” level of radiation exposure for the general public. In a statement to the Bulletin, NRC spokesperson Scott Burnell confirmed that the NRC is reconsidering the standards long relied upon to guide exposure limits.
Now, some radiology and policy experts are sounding alarm bells, calling the directive a dangerous departure from a respected framework that has been followed and consistently reinforced by scientific review for generations. They warn that under some circumstances, the effects of the possible new limits could range from “undeniably homicidal” to “catastrophic” for those living close to nuclear operations and beyond.
“It’s an attack on the science and the policy behind radiation protection of people and the environment that has been in place for decades,” says radiologist Kimberly Applegate, a former chair of the radiological protection in medicine committee of the International Commission on Radiological Protection (ICRP) and a current council and scientific committee member of the National Council on Radiation Protection (NCRP)—two regulatory bodies that make radiation safety recommendations to the NRC. According to Applegate, current government sources have told her and other experts that the most conservative proposed change would raise the current limit on the amount of radiation that a member of the general public can be exposed to by five times. That would be a standard “far out of the international norms,” she says, and could significantly raise cancer rates among those living nearby. The NRC spokesperson did not respond to a question from the Bulletin about specific new exposure limits being considered.
Kathryn Higley, president of the NCRP, warns that a five-fold increase in radiation dose exposure would look like “potentially causing cancers in populations that you might not expect to see within a couple of decades.”
“There are many things that Executive Order does, but one thing that’s really important is that it reduces the amount of public input that will be allowed,” says Diane D’Arrigo, the Radioactive Waste Project Director at the Nuclear Information and Resource Service, a nonprofit group critical of the nuclear energy industry. In a statement to the Bulletin, the NRC said that once its standards reassessment process is completed, the NRC will publish its proposed rules in the Federal Register for public comment.* The NRC spokesperson did not respond to questions about when the proposed new standards would be made public and whether or how the general public would be further alerted to the changes.
Once the proposed policy change hits the Federal Register, the final decision will likely follow in a few days without advertising a period for public input, Applegate adds.
“I’m not sure I know why the loosening is needed,” says Peter Crane, who served as the NRC’s Counsel for Special Projects for nearly 25 years, starting in 1975. “I think it’s ideologically driven.” He points out that the probable loosening of the standards is set to coincide with increased pressure to greenlight new nuclear plants and could weaken emergency preparedness in case of leaks or other accidents: “I think it’s playing with fire.” (The NRC’s Office of Public Affairs did not respond to questions about the rationale for loosening the standards and the timing of the reconsideration.)
Possible shorter timelines for building nuclear power plants, coinciding with weakened radiation exposure standards, could spell disaster, warn other experts. It would be “undeniably homicidal” of the NRC to loosen current US exposure standards even slightly, adds Mary Olson, a biologist who has researched the effects of radiation for over 40 years and published a peer-reviewed study titled “Disproportionate impact of radiation and radiation regulation” in 2019. Olson cites NRC equations that found that the current exposure standards result in 3.5 fatal cancers per 1,000 people exposed for their lifetimes by living near a nuclear facility; a five-fold rate increase in allowable radiation exposure could therefore result in a little over 17.5 cancers per 1,000 people. Expressed another way, that means “one in 57 people getting fatal cancer from year in, year out exposure to an NRC facility,” she says.
The NRC’s Office of Public Affairs did not respond to questions about whether the NRC could guarantee the current level of safety for the general public or nuclear workers if adopting looser radiation exposure standards, and about whether new protections would be put into place.
Are women and children more vulnerable? According to Olson, increased radiation exposure could be even more “catastrophic” for women and children. Exposure standards have long been determined by studies on how radiation affects the “reference man,” defined by the ICRP as a white male “between 20-30 years of age, weighing around 70 kilograms [155 pounds].”
But Applegate, Olson, and other experts say that it has since been widely documented that women and young girls are significantly more vulnerable to radiation harm than men—in some cases by as much as a ten-fold difference, according to Olson’s 2019 study. Olson and Applegate cite another 2006 review assessing and summarizing 60 years of health data on the survivors of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombings; the study showed that women are one-and-a-half to two times as likely to develop cancer from the same one-time radiation dose as men.
Young girls are seven times more at risk, they say. Those most impacted by weaker exposure standards will be young girls under five years old, Olson says. Her 2024 study of the A-bomb bomb survivor data for the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research, titled “Gender and Ionizing Radiation,” found that they face twice the risk as boys of the same age, and have four to five times the risk of developing cancer later in life than a woman exposed in adulthood.
“Protections of the public from environmental poisons and dangerous materials have to be focused on those who will be most harmed, not average harmed,” Olson says. “That’s where the protection should be.”
Infants are especially vulnerable to radiation harm, says Rebecca Smith-Bindman, a radiologist and epidemiologist who is the lead author of a just-released major study in the New England Journal of Medicine documenting the relationship between medical imaging (such as X-rays and CT scans) and cancer risk for children and adolescents; more than 3.7 million children born between 1996 and 2016 participated and have been tracked. Smith-Bindman contests the idea that women are overall more vulnerable to cancer than men, saying that “in general, maybe women are a little bit more sensitive, …[but] women and men have different susceptibilities to different cancer types,” with women being more vulnerable to lung and breast cancers, among other types. But it is “absolutely true that children are more susceptible,” she adds. With children under the age of one, “the risks are markedly elevated.” While these findings are sobering, she points out that with medical imaging, “there’s a trade-off…it helps you make diagnoses; it might save your life. It’s very different from nuclear power or other sources of radiation where there’s no benefit to the patient or the population. It’s just a harm.”
“We’ve known for decades that pregnancy is [also] more impacted” by radiation exposure, says Cindy Folkers, radiation and health hazard specialist at Beyond Nuclear, a nonprofit anti-nuclear power and weapons organization. “Radiation does its damage to cells, and so when you have a pregnancy, you have very few cells that will be developing into various parts of the human body: the skeleton, the organs, the brain,” and exposing those cells to radiation during pregnancy can impact the embryo’s health, she says. Smith-Bindman and her team are also studying the impact of radiation exposure on pregnancy, and while their results are not yet in, “we do know that exposures during pregnancy are harmful,” she says, “and that they result in elevated cancer risks in the offspring of those patients.”
For children, lifetime cancer risk will be increased not only because of the “sensitivity and vulnerability of developing tissues, but also partly [because] they would be living longer under a different radiation protection framework,” adds David Richardson, a UC Irvine professor who studies occupational safety hazards.
Several experts noted the irony that these changes are being mandated by the same administration that is also overseeing a policy of “Make America Healthy Again” (MAHA), an effort being spearheaded by Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. “In terms of general [public] knowledge, I think there has not been very large coverage or acceptance of the idea that radiation affects different people differently on the basis of both age and biological sex,” says Olson. “But we now have enough reviews, enough literature to say that the biological sex difference is there. I don’t think MAHA mothers know this because it’s been underreported, [and] they would be concerned if they knew it.”
The NRC’s Office of Public Affairs did not respond to questions about concerns being raised by radiologists and epidemiologists about possible health consequences—especially for children—as a result of increased radiation exposure.
Continue readingRemembering the radical anti-nuclear Greenham Women’s Peace Camp
Huck Mag 18th July 2025, https://www.huckmag.com/article/anti-nuclear-greenham-womens-peace-camp-life-fence-janine-wiedel
Life at the Fence — In the early ’80s, a women’s only camp at an RAF site in Berkshire was formed to protest the threat of nuclear arms. Janine Wiedel’s new photobook revisits its anti-establishment setup and people.
Coming of age in the shadow of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, Janine Wiedel remembers the “duck and cover drills” of her childhood years, where students hid under school desks, head in hands, practicing quiet surrender to nuclear Armageddon.
By the ’80s, Wiedel was living and working as a photographer, documenting working-class life in the UK. With Ronald Reagan in the White House, Cold War tensions reached a fevered pitch. Across the pond, Margaret Thatcher, Reagan’s “comrade-in-arms”, welcomed the NATO bequest of 96 US-manufactured, nuclear “cruise missiles”, which were to begin arriving at RAF Greenham Common in 1983.
As NATO and the USSR ran up their arsenals, a grassroots resistance movement sprouted in Greenham, in the English county of Berkshire, taking the shape of a “women’s only” peace camp in 1982. Despite evictions, fences, and spies organised to bring them down, the resistance stayed the course until the American forces packed up their weapons and went home following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.
Their struggle made headlines, with even the Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev paying homage to the ‘Greenham women and the peace movement of Europe’ at the signing of the 1987 Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty. But those initial media reports, Wiedel remembers, were ultimately disparaging of the women, so she decided to visit the camp for herself in 1983.
“I was fascinated by the community that had evolved as a result of it being ‘all women’ – there were no leaders,” Wiedel says. “The women built homes out of wood they collected, and they lit and tended the fires. They attended and spoke at conferences. They represented themselves in court when they were arrested. Everyone had an equal voice. Confidence grew. The actions were spontaneous and flexible; the authorities and police never knew what they would do next.”
The lesson became clear: don’t stop until the job is done. Now, Wiedel revisits this historic chapter of protest history with Life at the Fence: Greenham Women’s Peace Camp 1983 – 84 (Image & Reality). Through transportive imagery and interviews conducted at the time, the book brings together Wiedel’s masterful reportage as she takes us through the camps, which were built along the nine-mile perimeter of the RAF base, while paratroopers perched in lookout towers, binoculars in hand. Against the backdrop of gnarly barbed wire, the women sorted themselves out among different camp sites, each named for a different colour of the rainbow. It was a world of striking contrasts.
Drawn to women who had given up everything to live in primitive, volatile conditions, Wiedel listened to the women, recording their testimonies, songs, and remembrances which she weaves alongside documentary, portraits, landscape, still life, and reportage of non-violent direct actions.
“At the time, as a ‘women only’ protest, it was subjected to every form of abuse and ridicule by the media,” says Wiedel. “Its presence at the base also became an embarrassment to the Thatcher government. The women, however, managed to remain at the base for 19 years. Everyone I spoke with said it had transformed their lives.”
Life at the Fence: Greenham Women’s Peace Camp 1983 – 84 by Janine Wiedel is published by Image & Reality.
Greenham Common women urge new generation to ‘rise up’ against nuclear threat
Those who set up protest camp in 1980s hope its spirit can be revived to oppose UK’s plan to buy nuclear-carrying jets
Alexandra Topping, https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/jun/27/greenham-common-women-urge-new-generation-rise-up-nuclear-threat
In August 1981, 36 people, mainly women, walked from Wales to RAF Greenham Common in Berkshire to protest against the storing of US cruise missiles in the UK. They were alarmed about the imminent threat the weapons posed for themselves and for their children, they later said.
More than 40 years on, the prospect of American nuclear weapons stationed on British soil has returned with urgent focus. And for some of the women who were at the Greenham Common women’s peace camp, it is time for dissenting UK citizens to rise up again.
In the wake of the UK government’s announcement this week that it plans to significantly expand its nuclear arsenal by buying a squadron of American fighter jets capable of carrying US tactical warheads, key figures at Greenham hope a new generation of campaigners will take up the baton.
Ann Pettitt, now 78, devised the original idea for a march that led to the formation of the camp. At its height, more than 70,000 women were there and it became the biggest female-led protest since women’s suffrage. It was, as Pettitt says, “actually successful” in managing to hugely raise awareness of the presence of US nuclear warheads in the UK – the last of which left RAF Lakenheath in 2008. The camp went on after the Greenham Common missiles had gone in 1991 and the base was closed in 1992. The remaining campaigners left Greenham Common after exactly 19 years.
Pettitt said this week’s news had left her “disillusioned” but she was hopeful that a younger generation would protest. “It certainly calls for protest, because it’s so stupid,” she said. “Nuclear weapons are like the emperor’s new clothes, they can’t be used and if they are they backfire because of radiation spreads and they target civilians. We should simply not have them.”
The decision to buy 12 F-35A jets, which are capable of carrying conventional arms and also the US B61-12 gravity bomb, a variant of which has more than three times the explosive power of the Hiroshima bomb, has energised the anti-nuclear movement, said Sophie Bolt, the general secretary of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.
The group has organised a protest on Saturday at RAF Marham in Norfolk, and Bolt said Greenham women – many of whom are in their 70s – still form the “backbone” of the resistance.
“These are women who have got a huge history and totally understand how high the stakes are,” she said. “Their determination, creativity and strategic thinking is just really incredible. They are a massive inspiration and so enriching to the campaign.”
One of those women, Angie Zelter, 74, went on to found the civil disobedience campaign Snowball and the anti-nuclear weapons group Trident Ploughshares. In 2019, aged 68, she was found guilty of a minor public order offence for protesting with Extinction Rebellion. “We had a saying, ‘carry Greenham home’, and from the moment I was there that’s what I’ve done,” she said.
But Zelter said it was also time for a new generation of Greenham women. “I think we need a new women’s movement, but I think actually we need everybody to rise up, quite frankly. All we can do as elders is support younger activists and give advice, solidarity and support.”
There was no time for squabbles in despondency, she added. “I hope it is a moment of mass realisation when we come together now and say, look, enough is enough … It is a moment of hope that people will realise that they’ve got to come together and protest loud and clearly.”
Pettitt said those not ready to man the barricades could still join the struggle – by the simple act of writing a letter to MPs to protest about the “outrageous” decision to buy the jets without parliamentary debate. “The way to get it discussed in parliament is to write your MP a letter,” she said. “Parliament is still very archaic … the humble letter is part of that kind of archaic functioning that is surprisingly effective.”
Another original walker, Sue Lent, now 73 and a councillor on Cardiff council, said the general public had lost sight of the anti-nuclear movement, but she hoped that a silver lining from the news this week was that younger and older activists would start “joining the dots”.
“1981 is a long time ago,” she said. “But hopefully the spirit still lives on and can be revived.”
The nuclear divide: Why are women cautious of nuclear energy?
Women are consistently more skeptical than men, and not just marginally so. The gender divide is greater for nuclear technology than for any other energy source.
Their concerns are justified. Studies show women are twice as likely to develop radiation-related cancers, yet safety regulations often rely on the so-called “Reference Man” standard, ignoring biological differences.
by Emma Fackenthall, May 19, 2025, https://nbmediacoop.org/2025/05/19/the-nuclear-divide-why-are-women-cautious-of-nuclear-energy/
As many countries scramble toward a net-zero future, some are betting on nuclear energy to reach their goal. However, a quiet but profound gender divide is growing around nuclear energy.
While nuclear power is often hailed as a critical tool in the climate fight, a growing body of research suggests that fewer women than men support nuclear power. This divide can be explained by safety concerns, ecofeminist ethics of care, and the nuclear industry’s macho culture.
The striking gender divide is another reason to question the viability of nuclear energy to attain climate justice and energy democracy.
Despite the foundational contributions of female scientists to the nuclear field (think Marie Curie, Lise Meitner, and Chien-Shiung Wu) the industry is currently male-dominated. According to a recent international report, women make up only 25 per cent of the nuclear workforce. Among new hires, 28.8 per cent are women, reflecting slow progress. Of that, a mere 18.5 per cent hold leadership roles.
Meanwhile, public opinion surveys spanning 20 countries show a persistent gender difference in support for nuclear energy. Women are consistently more skeptical than men, and not just marginally so. The gender divide is greater for nuclear technology than for any other energy source. Women cite safety risks and the potential to delay the rollout of renewable energy as primary reasons for their lack of support for nuclear energy.
Their concerns are justified. Studies show women are twice as likely to develop radiation-related cancers, yet safety regulations often rely on the so-called “Reference Man” standard, ignoring biological differences. Initiatives like the Gender and Radiation Impact Project are now working to redefine safety metrics using the “Reference Girl,” highlighting the systemic underrepresentation of women in regulatory science.
Indeed, more and more attention is being placed on the lack of female representation in science and society. Books like Unwell Women, Invisible Women, and Feminist City recount these enduring systemic misrepresentations.
The nuclear industry has noted the low female support. A 2023 report by the Nuclear Energy Agency declared the gender gap an “existential challenge” for achieving climate targets. One of its key recommendations? Attract more women through targeted communication campaigns.
The response has been… complicated. Enter the “nukefluencers”: social media-savvy women – many of them models and beauty queens – paid by the nuclear industry to tout the supposed benefits of nuclear power on Instagram and TikTok.
Posts often blend lifestyle content with pro-nuclear messaging, echoing the corporate “girl boss” ethos. But while these accounts aim to appeal to women, a brief analysis reveals that most engagement comes from men. It raises the question: who is this campaign really reaching?
Ecofeminist ethics offer another possible explanation for women’s reluctance to support nuclear energy. This perspective ties environmental degradation to systems of patriarchy and domination, arguing that the same forces that exploit nature also marginalize women, Indigenous peoples, and racialized communities.
Women, therefore, may be more attuned to nuclear energy’s ethical and social implications. Research shows women are 2.5 times more likely to demand climate action and that women-led companies tend to have stronger climate performance.
The “macho mentality” embedded in nuclear culture is another reason. Nuclear power is often portrayed in the media as powerful and dangerous, tapping into masculine ideals. From post-apocalyptic video games to radioactive superheroes, pop culture reinforces the narrative of nuclear as bold and aggressive.
In contrast, renewable energy is frequently associated with care, sustainability, and cooperation – all traits traditionally coded as feminine and therefore undervalued in male-dominated spheres.
Even nuclear industry branding can reflect this gender divide. Some nuclear companies employ harsh, bold typography and stark color schemes that psychological and communications studies believe subconsciously project strength and authority, often masculine traits.
Others, like the nuclear companies in New Brunswick, are attempting to greenwash their image with soft fonts, green logos, and lowercase letters, perhaps in a bid to court a more gender-diverse audience. Ironically, this might alienate men, who may perceive these aesthetic cues as less aligned with masculine identity.
You might think a simple change of font would not have the power to deter men, but studies have shown that men are more concerned with gender-identity maintenance than women and simple things like fonts can deter men due to the risk of harming masculine perception.
Nuclear energy’s gender divide is interwoven in many different ways, but the implications remain far-reaching. If nuclear expansion continues to ignore gendered perceptions and safety concerns, it risks exacerbating conflicts rather than resolving them. Climate justice and social justice are interlinked, ignoring one will equally harm the other.
If we want real change, we need women and other marginalized groups at the decision-making tables. If women are reluctant to support nuclear energy, their reasons need to be understood. Their voices against nuclear energy are important and need validation.
More than just a public opinion gap, the nuclear gender divide is a signal that the future of energy must be inclusive, equitable, and just. Without considering the concerns of women, no technological solution, however potentially powerful, will be truly sustainable.
Emma Fackenthall is a research assistant with the CEDAR project at St. Thomas University. She will be presenting a version of this research in Montreal this May at The Great Transition event.
I’ve got a rocket for these space cadets and their pantomime of feminism
They do not operate the spaceship. They dress sexy for the spaceship flight.
pseudo-feminism.. which wrinkles its nose if you look grey, ugly or old
The Age, Jacqueline Maley, April 20, 2025
“……………………………………………………………….. We didn’t want to look but we found we couldn’t look away when, on Wednesday, Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin – a space technology company – launched an all-female, B- and C-list celebrity crew of six into space, wearing skintight designer spacesuits and heavy make-up. It was the first fully-lady-mission since Russian astronaut Valentina Tereshkova’s solo space flight in 1963.
The team consisted of the billionaire Bezos’ fiancée, the television journalist and children’s book author Lauren Sanchez; pop star Katy Perry; television host and Oprah-bestie Gayle King; former NASA rocket scientist Aisha Bowe; activist, sexual assault survivor and scientist Amanda Nguyen; and film producer Kerianne Flynn.
“I was like, ‘What am I going to wear?’” Perry told Elle of her initial reaction to the invitation. “But seriously, I have wanted to go to space for almost 20 years.”
In terms of publicity for space tourism for the rich and (dubiously) famous, it was a bonanza. But the heavily girlified nature of the rhetoric around the mission (if we can call it that – the trip lasted for 11 minutes), and its explicit branding as an exercise in empowering girls to aspire to careers in space exploration, well, that made it a very dark day for feminism.
The whole exercise was emblazoned with such drippy femininity and lame girlboss-ery that all womankind was implicated. It was a test of the implicit feminist pact to Support Women. I suspect I failed it.
It’s not something that Virginia Woolf or Betty Friedan ever prepared us for – an all-woman space crew which served quotes like: “I think it’s so important for people to see … this dichotomy of engineer and scientist, and then beauty and fashion. We contain multitudes. Women are multitudes. I’m going to be wearing lipstick.”
Despite not having any direct link to the Trump administration, it all felt so very Trumpy – a symbol of the dark end-days of American democracy; the great American project of aspiration and exploration reduced to a commercialised stunt, obscenely wasteful and vulgar beyond words. …………..
… the moral emptiness of the mission was underscored by leaked documents showing the Trump administration plans to gut key science programs funded by the federal government.
Under the leaked plans, NASA’s science budget for the fiscal year 2026 would be nearly halved. As Nature reported: “At risk is research that would develop next-generation climate models, track the planet’s changing oceans and explore the Solar System.”
Separately, NASA’s Diversity, Equity and Inclusion chief Neela Rajendra was sacked, in compliance with Trump’s executive order to “terminate” all people employed under “DEI” programs.
Business Standard reported Rajendra “played a key role in national initiatives like the Space Workforce 2030 pledge, aimed at increasing representation of women and minorities in STEM fields”.
Sure, but did she put the glam into space? The girlstronauts represent a pantomime of feminism found everywhere across Trump-land.
It’s in the robotically doll-like women who sit behind the men of the administration, nodding and smiling as they announce powerful new assaults on the rule of law.
It’s in the milquetoast “Be Best” initiatives of first lady Melania Trump.
It’s in the administration’s persecution of trans people in the name of “women’s rights”, and in its rollback of abortion rights…………
But at least the women are on stage, right? Women can be treated as a special category as long as they uplift and adorn – that seems to be the message the girl crew have absorbed and then promoted. But there is little point in them being on view if they are not looking “glam”.
Such women equate a certain kind of physical presentation with self-respect, and they defend it as their “right”. They fail to realise, or are too rich to care, that the companies which sell them their version of beauty are exploiting them. They do not operate the spaceship. They dress sexy for the spaceship flight.
It is a nihilistic form of pseudo-feminism that insists on women’s right to “take up space” (as the astronaut women chanted when they reached the zero-gravity part of their adventure), but which wrinkles its nose if you look grey, ugly or old while doing so.
It is a way of reducing women to the status of a pretty distraction, while insisting, straight-faced, that at least that means we are being “seen”. https://www.theage.com.au/politics/federal/i-ve-got-a-rocket-for-these-space-cadets-and-their-pantomime-of-feminism-20250417-p5lslv.html
Gender Stunts in Space: Blue Origin’s Female Celebrity Envoys
April 15, 2025 Dr Binoy Kampmark, https://theaimn.net/gender-stunts-in-space-blue-origins-female-celebrity-envoys/
Indulgent, vain and profligate, the all-female venture into space on the self-piloted New Shepard (NS-31) operated by Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin was space capitalism and celebrity shallowness on full show, masquerading as profound, moving and useful.
The crew consisted of bioastronautics research scientist and civil rights activist Amanda Nguyen, CBS Mornings co-host Gayle King, pop entertainer Katy Perry, film producer Kerianne Flynn, former NASA scientist and entrepreneur Aisha Bowe and Lauren Sánchez, fiancée of Jeff Bezos. The journey took 11 minutes and reached the Kármán line at approximately 96 kilometres above the earth.
Blue Origin had advertised the enterprise as an incentive to draw girls to pursue careers in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). It also shamelessly played on the background of some of the crew, with Nguyen promoted as “the first Vietnamese and south-east Asian female astronaut” whose presence would “highlight science as a tool for peace” and also project a potent “symbol of reconciliation between the US and Vietnam.”
Phil Joyce, Senior Vice President of New Shepard, thought it a “privilege to witness this crew of trailblazers depart the capsule today.” Each woman was “a storyteller” who would “use their voices – individually and together – to channel their life-changing experience today into creating lasting impact that will inspire people across our planet for generations.”
What was more accurately on show were celebrity space marketers on an expensive jaunt, showing us all that women can play the space capitalism game as well, albeit as the suborbital version of a catwalk or fashion show. Far from pushing some variant of feminism in the frontier of space, with scientific rewards for girls the world over, we got the eclipsing, if not a wholesale junking, of female astronauts and their monumental expertise.
It hardly compared, at any stretch or by any quantum of measure, with the achievement of Russian cosmonaut, Valentina Tereshkova, who piloted a Vostok 6 into earth’s orbit lasting 70 hours over six decades prior. To have Sánchez claiming to be “so proud of this crew”, tears cued for effect, gave the impression that they had shown technical expertise and skill when neither was required. It was far better to have deep pockets fronting the appropriate deposit, along with the necessary safe return, over which they had virtually no control over.
Dr Kai-Uwe Schrogl, special advisor for political affairs at the European Space Agency, offered a necessarily cold corrective. “A celebrity isn’t an envoy of humankind – they go into space for their own reasons,” he told BBC News. “These flights are significant and exciting, but I think maybe they can also be a source of frustration for space scientists.” How silly of those scientists, who regard space flight as an extension of “science, knowledge and the interests of humanity.”
The Guardian was also awake to the motivations of the Bezos project. “The pseudo progressiveness of this celebrity space mission, coupled with Bezos’s conduct in his other businesses, should mean we are under no illusion what purpose these flights serve.” With Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic and Elon Musk’s SpaceX, the space tourism market, marked by its bratty oligarchs, is becoming competitive. In an effort to corner the market, attractive gimmicks are in high demand.
The cringingly superficial nature of the exercise was evident in various comments on the fashion aspect of the suits worn by the crew. Here was branding, and the sort that could be taken to space. As Sánchez stated: “Usually, you know, these suits are made for a man. Then they get tailored to fit a woman. I think the suits are elegant, but they also bring a little spice to space.” Blue Origin had capitalised on NASA’s own failings in 2019, which saw the abandoning of an all-female spacewalk for lacking appropriately fitting spacesuits.
On their return, the female cast performed their contractual undertakings to bore the press with deadly clichés and meaningless observations, reducing space travel to an exercise for the trivial. “Earth looked so quiet,” remarked Sánchez. “It was quiet, but really alive.” King, after getting on her knees to kiss the earth, merely wanted “to have a moment with the ground, just appreciate the ground for just a second.” (Surely she has had longer than that.) Perry, on her return after singing What a Wonderful World during the trip, overflowed with inanities. She felt “super connected to life”, as well as being “so connected to love.”
On the ground were other celebrities, delighted to offer their cliché-clotted thoughts. “I didn’t realise how emotional it would be, it’s hard to explain,” reflected Khloé Kardashian. “I have all this adrenaline and I’m just standing here.” From a family of celebrities that merely exist as celebrities and nothing else, she had some advice: “Dream big, wish for the stars – and one day, you could maybe be amongst them.”
Amanda Hess, reflecting on the mission in The New York Times, tried to put her finger on what it all meant. “The message is that a little girl can grow up to be whatever she wishes: a rocket scientist or a pop star, a television journalist or a billionaire’s fiancée who is empowered to pursue her various ambitions and whims in the face of tremendous costs.” Just not an astronaut.
Australia’s MUMS FOR NUCLEAR – propaganda wheels within wheels.
March 30, 2025, https://theaimn.net/australias-mums-for-nuclear-propaganda-wheels-within-wheels/
I’ve only just discovered “Mums for Nuclear” – and they sound just so lovely. They are an Australian offshoot of “Mothers for Nuclear”, which is a very lovely global organisation, full of joy and delight in nature, and of course – all are lovely ladies with lovely children. Here’s a sample of their philosophy:
“I personally went from a fear of nuclear to understanding how many of my assumptions about it were astonishingly far from the truth. The more I read, the more I realized that we direly need more nuclear power to help solve some of the greatest threats to the environment and humanity, including mitigation of climate change, protection of natural resources, reductions in air pollution, and lifting people from poverty. I joined Mothers for Nuclear because I want to help leave a better world for our children.”
That was written by Iida Ruishalme – A Finnish mother, and one of nine women featured on the Mothers for Nuclear website She works as a science writer, and by the way, is the only one who is not directly involved with the nuclear industry. Most of the others are nuclear engineers.
Anyway, the website is beautiful – and it’s easy to come away from it with enthusiasm for nuclear power.
Those nine women represent the USA, Finland, Germany, and the UK. You don’t learn how many members the organisation has, nor where it gets its funding.
From their website:
“In 2022 Mothers for Nuclear became a fiscal sponsor of Stand Up for Nuclear. Stand Up for Nuclear is the world’s 1st global initiative that fights for the protection and expansion of nuclear energy. We are long-term partners who have worked together on multiple campaigns including in California, Europe, Kenya, and many others.”
Mmm..mm – I wondered – “What is a fiscal sponsor“?
“Fiscal sponsorship refers to the practice of non-profit organizations offering their legal and tax-exempt status to groups – typically projects – engaged in activities related to the sponsoring organization’s mission. It typically involves a fee-based contractual arrangement between a project and an established non-profit.”
Mmmmm – sounds as though Mothers for Nuclear is a real help to the nuclear industry, and quite useful to its own members. Though I don’t for a moment doubt their sincerity.
Now we come to the new – and what a timely newness – Australian version – the more relaxed sounding “Mums for Nuclear“. It has joined the “charity” nuclear front group Nuclear for Australia.
Once again, I’ve found it hard to discover just how many members are in Mums for Nuclear. And also – where it gets its funding.
I have found one member, Jasmin Diab, who is the face of the outfit, but doesn’t call herself a CEO or anything formal like that: “Hi, I’m Jaz! I’m a mum of one human and two dogs.”
However, Jaz does have another role, which is quite a bit more formal.
Jasmin Diab is a nuclear engineer and is the Managing Director for Global Nuclear Security Partners (GNSP) in Australia. Global Nuclear Security Partners is a world leading nuclear management consultancy:
“We work with partners, clients and relevant authorities to ensure that novel technology is secure. Across SMR, AMR and fusion we work to make sure that projects, programmes, processes and products are protected and commercially viable.”
“Our clients include: the UK Department for Energy Security and Net Zero; the UK Ministry of Defence; UK National Nuclear Laboratory; the Canadian Nuclear Waste Management Organistion; the Ukrainian Government and nuclear industry; Magnox; Babcock International; BAE Submarines; University of Bristol; University of Manchester and SMR developers. We’ve worked with the armed police capability of the Ministry of Defence Police, Civil Nuclear Constabulary and US teams in protecting nuclear material and developing doctrine, and with the infrastructure police of some Middle Eastern Governments.”
I don’t doubt that Jasmin Diab is sincere, and that she is a good mum to one human and two dogs. And she can provide for them well, with that good job with GNSP. I’m not sure that her message will go down that well with Australian women. A recent national survey shows that Australian women are strongly opposed to nuclear energy and are most concerned any consideration of the controversial power source will delay the switch to renewables.
The Mums for Nuclear groups seem curiously uninterested in the fact that women, and children, are significantly more vulnerable to illness from nuclear radiation than men are.
Protect your girls: We show that biological sex IS a factor in radiation outcomes, WIDELY
Mary Olson, GENDER AND RADIATION IMPACT PROJECT, 1 Jan 25
NEWS: We show in a new paper that the finding that girls and women suffer greater harm from radiation exposure compared to boys and men (who are also harmed) can be seen WIDELY in recent radiation research literature.
Dr Amanda Nichols, University of California at Santa Barbara, lead author, joins Mary Olson, founder of Gender and Radiation Impact Project in the new paper, entitled “Gender and Ionizing Radiation: Towards a New Research Agenda Addressing Disproportionate Harm.”
The paper is available to view or download at no charge, from the publisher: United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research .
The news here is the simple difference between standing on a relatively slender branch, and standing on a robust limb—apply this image to research and it is the difference between evidence found in a limited case, versus the same evidence being FOUND widely—beyond what could have been limited application.
In terms of radiation—a finding was made that radiation harms girls and women more than boys and men in one set of data as early as 2006. That data was in the National Academy of Science (NAS) watershed report called the Biological Effects of Ionizing Radiation VII (BEIR VII).
Now, thanks to the invitation by the UN Institute for Disarmament Research (UNIDIR), I and my co-author Dr Amanda Nichols have sampled the research literature since 2006 (post-BEIR VII) and find that in studies that report data on males and females separately (now common) the sex-based difference can be seen, and in all cases where it is seen, females are harmed more than males. ……………………………………………………………………………………………….. more https://www.genderandradiation.org/blog/2024/12/31/protect-your-girls-we-show-that-biological-sex-is-a-factor-in-radiation-outcome-widely
Gender and radiation: New report shows girls most at-risk group
December 4, 2024,
https://beyondnuclear.org/gender-and-radiation-new-report-shows-girls-most-at-risk-group/
A new United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research (UNIDIR) report by Amanda M. Nichols — Postdoctoral Researcher, University of California, Santa Barbara and Mary Olson — Founder, Gender and Radiation Impact Project entitled Gender and Ionizing Radiation: Towards a New Research Agenda Addressing Disproportionate Harm examines recent research correlating harm from exposure to ionizing radiation and biological sex. The following is the executive summary:
“The detonation of a nuclear weapon in a populated area would cause devastating harm: it can kill thousands of people instantly, whether through the explosion itself, or through the intense heat and high levels of radiation. The mid- and long-term consequences from radiation exposure are less well understood, in part because they manifest differently for male and female survivors.
Robust evidence of differentiated health impacts emerged in 2006, when the US National Academy of Sciences published Biological Effects of Ionizing Radiation VII which reported 60 years of data from the Life Span Study of atomic bomb survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Nearly 20 years after the publication of that report, this report speaks to the extent to which new evidence has been published regarding the correlation between harm from exposure to ionizing radiation and biological sex.
This report concludes the following:
The post-2006 radiation research reviewed in this report provides clear evidence that radiation causes more cancer, heart disease, and stroke in women compared to men.
Several studies present evidence that supports the hypothesis that a higher percentage of reproductive tissue in the female body could be one contributing factor to the greater rate of harm from radiation exposure in females compared to males.
In addition to biological sex, some studies suggest that age at time of exposure may be an important factor in assessing radiation outcomes.
Girls (ages 0–5 years) are the most at risk post-birth lifecycle stage for developing cancer and non-cancer related health consequences over the course of the lifetime from exposure to ionizing radiation.
These findings are important for discussions about nuclear non-proliferation and disarmament, given that sex-specific and gendered impacts of nuclear weapons are a prominent topic during the meetings of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.
More research is needed, however, that takes seriously the ways that age and intergenerational impacts inform discussions about radiological harm. This report concludes with an outline of a future research agenda and suggests research questions applicable across a number of disciplines and lines of inquiry.
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Cuba Is Not a Failed State – It Is a Besieged State
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of the week– Nuclear Reactor Information Task Force
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