Policy Brief: Bridging the Gender Pay Gap

Gender pay gap (GPG) is a complex issue that various forums, including the G20, have attempted to discuss. Mitigating GPG requires large-scale transformative changes, but constraints on financial resources and public spending, along with cultural norms and deep-seated societal beliefs, make it a difficult task. Proposed actions, therefore, must be economically prudent and actionable. This Policy Brief offers five recommendations for the G20 to help bridge the gender pay gap. These include: introducing pay transparency legislation; mandating data-driven gender budgeting; increasing emphasis on parental leave; promoting women in STEM subjects; and engaging with the industry by proposing initiatives such as exclusive women only portals, reporting on gender, facilitating leadership programmes, and ‘de-biasing’ organisations. These proposals can help policymakers move the needle on gender equity, promote social justice, and improve economic outcomes

The language of family therapy : what we say we do and what we actually do in therapy

Systemic family therapy, as a variant of the "talking cure", has developed its conceptual base during the second half of the twentieth century. Its founding fathers and mothers made a conceptual break with psychoanalysis, and this theoretical distinction has until recently been well established. Contemporary theorists have shown an interest in narrative metaphors and sought to situate systemic therapy within the terms of postmodernist and specifically social constructionist discourses. By this fact a challenge is presented to the researcher who wishes to subject to scrutiny the theoretical claims made for this form of human activity: how to rigorously evaluate theoretical propositions whilst employing a methodology that is congruent with the assumptive base of family therapy. The present study represents an attempt at taking up this challenge. Family therapy sessions are videotaped, transcribed and subjected to a discursive anlalysis. The method is in tune with social constructionist premises and allows for a meaningful analysis of such contemporary theoretical preoccupations as the therapeutic relationship, power, gender, culture and the injunction to place the self of the therapist within the system. The actual enactment of these theoretical premises is examined and the conditions for the successful accomplishment of discursive, and hence therapeutic, goals is explored. A finding emerges that cannot be adequately accounted for within a post-foundationalist epistemology of socially and culturally-situated talk: consistent individual differences in the positions taken by interactants. In order to explain this finding it has been found necessary to insert an ontology of subjectivity within social constructionist explanatory frameworks. A nonrational, non-unitary version of the individual is constructed that bears more than a passing resemblance to the psychoanalytic subject. Consideration is given to the implications of these findings for future research

Impact of Community-led Total Sanitation on Women’s Health in Urban Slums: A Case Study from Kalyani Municipality

This Evidence Report seeks to understand the health and other impacts of slum women’s access to sanitation through the Community-led Total Sanitation (CLTS) approach. It also examines the process through which open defecation free (ODF) status was attained in two different slum colonies, the resulting health impacts and the collective action that took place around both sanitation and other development benefits. The study was conducted in the slums of Kalyani, a Municipality town located 55km north of Kolkata, the capital city of West Bengal state in India. From an area plagued with rampant open defecation, the slums of Kalyani were transformed into the first ODF town in India in 2009. This was achieved through the CLTS model that focused on motivating the community to undertake collective behaviour change to achieve ‘total’ sanitation and an ODF environment. This was in sharp contrast to earlier, top-down approaches to the provision of toilets, which had failed to ensure ownership or usage by the community. The benefits of CLTS to the community were not limited to changed sanitation behaviour and an end of open defecation – there were significant development and health gains beyond sanitation. Women’s health in this study has been viewed not just in terms of the presence or absence of disease burden on the physical health of women but also in terms of their socio-psychological wellbeing resulting from reduced risks and a wide range of benefits accruing from better sanitation and hygiene practices and facilities. The study also focused on exploring the extent to which the CLTS process can be said to have empowered women. As experiences of good health and wellbeing are affected by factors in the external environment, namely the role of the local government, women’s access to health services and the involvement of multiple sectors, these issues were also considered, in order to understand the overall health status and experiences of women in Kalyani slums.UK Department for International Developmen

Search for Short-Term Periodicities in the Sun's Surface Rotation: A Revisit

The power spectral analyses of the Sun's surface equatorial rotation rate determined from the Mt. Wilson daily Doppler velocity measurements during the period 3 December 1985 to 5 March 2007 suggests the existence of 7.6 year, 2.8 year, 1.47 year, 245 day, 182 day and 158 day periodicities in the surface equatorial rotation rate during the period before 1996. However, there is no variation of any kind in the more accurately measured data during the period after 1995. That is, the aforementioned periodicities in the data during the period before the year 1996 may be artifacts of the uncertainties of those data due to the frequent changes in the instrumentation of the Mt. Wilson spectrograph. On the other hand, the temporal behavior of most of the activity phenomena during cycles 22 (1986-1996) and 23 (after 1997) is considerably different. Therefore, the presence of the aforementioned short-term periodicities during the last cycle and absence of them in the current cycle may, in principle, be real temporal behavior of the solar rotation during these cycles.Comment: 11 pages, 6 figures, accepted for publication in Solar Physic

Search for black holes and other new phenomena in high-multiplicity final states in proton-proton collisions at root s=13 TeV

Peer reviewe

Search for high-mass diphoton resonances in proton-proton collisions at 13 TeV and combination with 8 TeV search

Peer reviewe

Search for heavy resonances decaying into a vector boson and a Higgs boson in final states with charged leptons, neutrinos, and b quarks

Peer reviewe