Search

This briefing paper shows how the undervaluation of paid and unpaid care drives poverty and inequalities across Britain, and it outlines a transformational vision for change., Every day, millions of people, mostly women, provide essential paid and unpaid care for children and disabled, ill and older people. Yet their huge contribution remains widely unseen, undervalued and underinvested in by governments., It is time to shift to a feminist caring economy, where all care is recognized and valued as a vital social good and a collective responsibility; unpaid care is reduced and redistributed; paid care is adequately rewarded; and all carers have a powerful voice in decision-making.

This scorecard tracks the Welsh government’s progress towards advancing women’s rights and gender equality between 2020 and 2022 in six policy areas: Fair Finance, Caring Responsibilities, Global Women’s Rights, Equal Representation and Leadership, Tackling Gender Health Inequalities, and Ending Violence Against Women and Girls., The scorecard examines the official statements, legislation, policies and practice for each policy area and the evidence gathered from interviews and published statistics. A traffic light system (red, amber and green) is used to rate the government progress in each area., The areas of Fair Finance and Caring Responsibilities have seen regression from amber to red, which partly was influenced by the pandemic and cost of living crisis., There has been little progress on Tackling Gender Health Inequalities, which remains red, and there are policies hindering the effort to End Violence Against Women and Girls. However, progress to amber has been made on Global Women's Rights and Equal Representation and Leadership.

The barriers that women face, and the opportunities they lack, stem from complex and long-entrenched systems of inequality and discrimination. The Welsh government has made some strides to becoming a feminist government and a feminist nation. But despite robust legislation and good intentions to advance gender equality, there has often been a lack of funding, a lack of strategy, and lack of a sense of urgency to see them through., This feminist scorecard shows what could be done now to move Wales forward on its path to equality – on the gender pay gap, taxes and 50:50 representation and other areas. Oxfam Cymru and Women’s Equality Network (WEN) Wales call on the Welsh government to make bold decisions to make the funding available and put action in place so we not only have a feminist government but a feminist Wales.

In September 2000, 189 UN member states signed the Millennium Development Declaration, pledging to halve global poverty by 2015. To date, many governments have broken their promises by failing to take the action needed to meet the agreed goals. With ten years to go, 2005 must see a step-change in commitments from governments in both North and South.

This paper presents preliminary findings of an\ud investigation into the realisation of lexical stress in\ud monolingual and bilingual male adolescents from a\ud community in West Wales. Monolingual speakers of\ud Welsh English were compared with bilinguals from\ud Welsh-speaking and English-speaking homes. This\ud allowed us to explore the effects of language contact\ud and individual linguistic experience on the\ud realisation of lexical stress in Welsh and Welsh\ud English.\ud Results showed that stressed vowels are shorter,\ud post-stress consonants and unstressed vowels are\ud longer, and the F0 difference between stressed and\ud unstressed syllables is smaller in Welsh than in\ud English. Linguistic experience was found to affect\ud the realisation of acoustic stress correlates\ud differently. While no effect was found for any of the\ud durational correlates, linguistic experience was\ud found to affect F0. Individuals from the same\ud community were found to realise F0 differently\ud depending on whether their home language is Welsh\ud or English.

The paper investigates the structure and behaviour of the nighttime ionised (electrified) atmosphere in the polar and auroral regions; the region where the aurora borealis occurs. Of particular interest are plasma structures on horizontal scales of hundreds of kilometres. The observations presented were made by the radiotomography experiment of the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, which has four satellite receiving systems in the high Arctic near the north pole, at Ny Ålesund and Longyearbyen on Svalbard, Bjørnøya (Bear Island) and Tromsø on mainland Norway. Comparisons of tomography images with observations of plasma flow by the international SuperDARN radar suggest that large density plasma produced on the dayside flows across the polar region and into the night sector. The results contribute to the interpretation of physical processes that couple the Earth's environment with space, and are also of interest to users of radio systems where the ionised atmosphere can degrade the propagation of the signals.

The Welsh translation industry in Wales was estimated in 2007 to be worth £45,000,000 per annum (Prys et al. 2009). The industry has also seen massive growth since its early beginnings in the late 1960s (Jones 2005) and is now an attractive and lucrative career option for graduates of Welsh. Scholars have also drawn attention to the importance translation into and out of minority languages plays in the process of linguistic normalization and language planning (Garcia 2005; Kaufman 2010, 2012). Given that translation in modern Wales is so important to language planning and revitalization, a fact the Welsh Government itself acknowledges in its current language policy document (Welsh Government 2012), this paper intends to ask what role language technology can play in translation and as a result in the revitalization of Welsh. The role language technology in particular can play in the process of language planning and revitalization has also been acknowledged by language planners in Wales (Evas 2012; Welsh Government 2014). In light of this, a study is reported on which tested the benefits of using translation technology for the professional translator of Welsh. This was done within a hypothetico-deductive framework, comparing and contrasting the outcomes of a number of variables that are inextricably linked to the professional translation process. A between-groups design is utilized in which cognitive, technical and temporal effort are gauged between translation and the use of Welsh output from a Machine Translation system and Translation Memory software. All participants were members of The Association of Welsh Translators and Interpreters, and all were employed as practicing translators. This empirical translation process study using specialist recording software has not been done before for Welsh, and is also the first process study of its kind for the language. Results show that the use of language technology did speed up the translation process, that translation became cognitively easier and that a number of variables related to text production were also reduced. This has implications for language planners in Wales as currently only a minority of Welsh translators use such technology despite these benefits.