North America | History

The Forgotten History of Female Mapmakers

Source:
In the 1970s, early in her career as map librarian at the New York Public Library, Alice Hudson started researching women mapmakers throughout history. With few other women in her chosen field, she wondered how many had come before her. “I thought I might find 10,” she tells CityLab. But over the years, as she combed through maps, censuses, newspapers, and tips from colleagues, she was amazed by how many women there were in the early days of mapmaking. By the late ‘90s, she’d found over a thousand names of women who had drawn, published, printed, engraved, sold, or traded maps prior
Europe | Great Britain | History

Early men and women had gender equality, say anthropologists

Source:
A study has shown that in contemporary hunter-gatherer tribes men and women tend to hold equal standing and influence, suggesting that sexual equality was the norm for humans throughout most of our evolutionary history. Mark Dyble, the leading anthropologist on the study at University College London, said: “There is still this wider perception that hunter-gatherers are more macho or male-dominated. We’d argue it was only with the emergence of agriculture, when people could start to accumulate resources, that inequality emerged.”
South Asia | New Zealand | Medicine

More single women are turning to fertility services to have children

Source:
The number of single women seeking fertility treatment has almost doubled in two years as career-minded professionals without partners opt to parent alone. Demand at New Zealand's largest private fertility clinic is so high women are waiting 18 months for sperm donors. Fertility Associates' Dr Simon Kelly said numbers of single women wanting fertility treatment had swelled from 80 in 2012 to 156 last year. It was expected to be higher this year. That compared with 56 heterosexual and 88 same-sex couples receiving treatment last year, similar levels to in 2012 and 2013. Donor treatment
Asia | Japan | Culture

Japanese City Will Pay for Women to Freeze Their Eggs

Source:
Late last month, the city of Urayasu, in Japan’s Chiba Prefecture, decided to one-up the nation’s public medical insurance scheme by offering to subsidize egg freezing for local women. Dubbed the Urayasu Oocyte Cryopreservation Program, the plan is an apparent global first by any municipality. The local government has promised to allocate 90 million yen (about $750,000) to the local Juntendo University Hospital to promote research on the process, which involves encouraging local women to utilize the procedure. Normally, including 10 years of storage, egg freezing costs about a million yen