Woman's Place UK

Violence against women and sex discrimination still exist. Women need reserved places, separate spaces and distinct services.

A Woman’s Place is fighting back… and winning

TBA LONDON

9th March 2023

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WPUK Mythbusters – A response to the IRR and others

There have been several articles and comments published recently, including one by the Institute...

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The Political Erasure of Sex

We are delighted to be supporting this important new work by Jane Clare Jones....

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Our manifesto

Woman’s Place UK is a group of women from a range of backgrounds who are united by our belief that women’s hard-won rights must be defended.

Women face entrenched and endemic structural inequality. This is reflected, for example, in the high levels of sexual harassment and violence against women and girls, the 'gender' pay gap, and discrimination at work.

This is why sex is a protected characteristic in the Equality Act 2010. We believe it must be defended.

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#WPUKWinning Afsana Lachaux is an award winning women’s rights campaigner and social policy expert. Afsana fought a high profile international custody battle following a court ruling in the United Arab Emirates that granted her husband a Sharia divorce and sole custody of their son Louis. She won a landmark legal victory for women’s rights in France and changed UK Foreign Office advice for British women travelling to the Gulf, to help protect them from discrimination. Afsana is a former senior civil servant and is currently working at The Prince’s Trust. @afsanalachaux Woman’s Place UK is the winner of the Emma Humphreys Memorial Group Prize 2018. WPUK is a grassroots feminist campaign, formed by a group of women in the labour and trade union movement to uphold women’s sex-based rights under the Equality Act 2010. @Womans_Place_UK
Nimco Ali OBE is a leading survivor activist, author and political strategist is the co-founder and CEO of The Five Foundation, a global partnership to end female genital mutilation (FGM). She later went on to form the Daughters of Eve organisation with Leyla Hussein to campaign against FGM. in 2019 she authored What We’re told not to Talk About (But We’re Going to Anyway): Women’s Voices from East London to Ethopia. a series of intimate, illuminating and often devastating conversations with women on the subjects of sex, masturbation, periods, pregnancy, the menopause and more. In 2020 she was appointed as Independent Government Adviser for Tackling Violence Against Women and Girls. @NimcoAli Woman’s Place UK is the winner of the Emma Humphreys Memorial Group Prize 2018. WPUK is a grassroots feminist campaign, formed by a group of women in the labour and trade union movement to uphold women’s sex-based rights under the Equality Act 2010. @Womans_Place_UK.
Woman's Place UK were delighted to celebrate the launch of Victoria Smith's latest book: Hags: The Demonisation of Middle-Aged Women on Friday 3 March. Victoria discusses her book with Observer columnist Sonia Sodha during this live webinar and answered questions from attendees. Copies of the book can be ordered from https://blackwells.co.uk/bookshop/product/9780349726960 and other good booksellers. Victoria Smith is a brilliant writer and polemicist, whose articles perfectly articulate the anger so many of us feel about the current wave of misogyny directed in particular at older women. Her hotly-anticipated book asks why it is that middle-aged women are now treated with active dislike, and regarded by those mired in identity politics as morally inferior bigots who deserve to be ignored, pitied or abused. There is even, she points out, a dismissive insult, coined to describe the middle-aged woman: Karen. In Hags, described by novelist Lissa Evans as “riveting, vital and impossible to read without rage,” Victoria Smith traces a line from the antipathy towards older women that characterised the witch hunts of the 1450s to 1700s to the vitriol heaped on the same group today. In doing so, she seeks to answer the question: what is it about middle-aged women that seems to enrage people so much? Victoria Smith is a regular contributor to the Critic, writing on women’s issues, parenting and mental health. Her work has also appeared in the New Statesman, the Independent and Unherd. Her newsletter, The OK Karen, looks at midlife women’s experiences of feminism, and she tweets @glosswitch. She holds a PhD in German literature, with a particular interest in Romanticism, dark fairy tales and the fantastic. She lives in Cheltenham with her family. Sonia Sodha is chief leader writer and columnist at the Observer. She also makes documentaries on economic and social issues for Radio 4 and appears regularly on the BBC, Sky News and Channel 4 as a political commentator. Prior to her career in journalism, Sonia spent ten years working in policy and politics: initially for the think tanks IPPR and Demos, where she led programmes of work on education and social policy; then as a senior policy adviser to Ed Miliband when he was leader of the Labour party; and then in a series of strategic roles for charities including Which?, the Dartington Social Research Unit and Generation Change. She is a trustee of the Trust for London (and chairs one of its two grant-making committees) and the Indigo Trust. 3 March 2023