Flip through the pages of Shameless, a feminist magazine for teen girls, and you’ll find a debate about the value of corporate social responsibility titled “When Oppressive Corporations Do Progressive Things” alongside a first-person call for self-acceptance, “Shame, Beauty and Women of Colour.” It’s not exactly Seventeen, and that’s the whole point — or at […] More »

Since today marks the 100th anniversary of International Women’s Day, we wanted to highlight some recent stuff that’s appeared in This and elsewhere on the subject of gender justice and equality. Emma Woolley at Shameless has provided a comprehensive overview of why International Women’s Day still matters. The upshot is that while the last century […] More »

Tara-Michelle Ziniuk, Toronto author, performer, and activist, and sometime This Magazine contributor, yesterday emailed to announce that she’s editing an anthology of writing about the Toronto Women’s Bookstore, which is celebrating its 40th anniversary this year (depending on when you start counting). The TWB has had a difficult few years from a financial perspective, but the […] More »

If you live in a major Canadian city, you may have seen Plan Canada’s “Because I am a Girl” ads plastered on buses and billboards. In the season of giving, the campaign attempts to sell the virtues of female empowerment. Ads state that girls around the world are three times more likely to be malnourished […] More »

This is not an operating room. It’s a solarium. The glass windows connect to a metal frame that connects to the concrete floor, the floor of this enclosed balcony three storeys up. The concrete is coated with sealant to keep it non-porous. The less porous a surface, the less chance bacteria will take root and […] More »

This falls into the “this is a good thing to know,” as opposed to the “this is definitely good news (!),” category. The Bechdel Test is a quick and dirty way to gauge the sexism of a movie, invented 25 years ago by Alison Bechdel, the cartoonist and writer of Dykes to Watch Out For. A […] More »

The eleven extraordinary young people profiled in Citizens of Nowhere have been teachers, social workers, mediators, and breadwinners. Journalist Debi Goodwin meets them as refugees in Dadaab, Kenya, and follows them through their difficult transition to life as first-year university students in Canada. They have each been sponsored to come to study in Canada as […] More »

The July-August 2010 issue of This is now in subscribers’ mailboxes and on newsstands. As usual, you’ll be able to read all the articles here on the website as we post them over the next few weeks. But also as usual, we encourage you to subscribe to the magazine, which is the best way to […] More »

Canada has shockingly few female legislators. Our electoral system is broken. Voting reform could fix both problems at once. One Thursday last spring, an Angolan MP named Faustina Fernandes Inglês de Almeida Alves addressed an assembly at United Nations Headquarters in New York City. Those present—members of the Inter-Parliamentary Union and the UN Division for […] More »

Another new entry today in the Verbatim series, the transcripts we provide of our Listen to This podcast. (Just a reminder that you can catch new, original interviews every other Monday—you can subscribe with any podcast listening program by grabbing the podcast rss feed, or easily subscribing through iTunes.) In today’s interview, associate editor Natalie Samson talked with Eternia, […] More »

In this edition of Listen to This, Associate Editor Natalie Samson talks with Eternia, the Canadian rapper whose music and volunteer work aim to challenge gender-based stereotypes and injustices such as sexism in the music industry, violence against women, and rape. Eternia was in Toronto two weeks ago for the People’s Summit, the alternative gathering […] More »