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

Emission from the D1D5 CFT

It is believed that the D1D5 brane system is described by an 'orbifold CFT' at a special point in moduli space. We first develop a general formulation relating amplitudes in a d-dimensional CFT to absorption/emission of quanta from flat infinity. We then construct the D1D5 vertex operators for minimally coupled scalars in supergravity, and use these to compute the CFT amplitude for emission from a state carrying a single excitation. Using spectral flow we relate this process to one where we have emission from a highly excited initial state. In each case the radiation rate is found to agree with the radiation found in the gravity dual.Comment: 49 pages, latex, 6 figures; v2: reformatted for JHEP, corrected typos, and added reference

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

Implementation and first results of the KM3NeT real-time core-collapse supernova neutrino search

The KM3NeT research infrastructure is unconstruction in the Mediterranean Sea. KM3NeT will study atmospheric and astrophysical neutrinos with two multi-purpose neutrino detectors, ARCA and ORCA, primarily aimed at GeV–PeV neutrinos. Thanks to the multi-photomultiplier tube design of the digital optical modules, KM3NeT is capable of detecting the neutrino burst from a Galactic or near-Galactic core-collapse supernova. This potential is already exploitable with the first detection units deployed in the sea. This paper describes the real-time implementation of the supernova neutrino search, operating on the two KM3NeT detectors since the first months of 2019. A quasi-online astronomy analysis is introduced to study the time profile of the detected neutrinos for especially significant events. The mechanism of generation and distribution of alerts, as well as the integration into the SNEWS and SNEWS 2.0 global alert systems, are described. The approach for the follow-up of external alerts with a search for a neutrino excess in the archival data is defined. Finally, an overview of the current detector capabilities and a report after the first two years of operation are given.Acknowledgements The authors acknowledge the financial support of the funding agencies: Agence Nationale de la Recherche (contract ANR-15-CE31-0020), Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), Commission Européenne (FEDER fund and Marie Curie Program), Institut Universitaire de France (IUF), LabEx UnivEarthS (ANR-10-LABX-0023 and ANR-18-IDEX-0001), Paris Île-de-France Region, France; Shota Rustaveli National Science Foundation of Georgia (SRNSFG, FR-18-1268), Georgia; Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG), Germany; The General Secretariat of Research and Technology (GSRT), Greece; Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (INFN), Ministero dell’Università e della Ricerca (MIUR), PRIN 2017 program (Grant NAT-NET 2017W4HA7S) Italy; Ministry of Higher Education Scientific Research and Professional Training, ICTP through Grant AF-13, Morocco; Nederlandse organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek (NWO), the Netherlands; The National Science Centre, Poland (2015/18/E/ST2/00758); National Authority for Scientific Research (ANCS), Romania; Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación, Investigación y Universidades (MCIU): Programa Estatal de Generación de Conocimiento (refs. PGC2018-096663-B-C41, -A-C42, -B-C43, -B-C44) (MCIU/FEDER), Generalitat Valenciana: Prometeo (PROMETEO/2020/019), Grisolía (ref. GRISOLIA/2018/119) and GenT (refs. CIDEGENT/2018/034, /2019/043, /2020/049) programs, Junta de Andalucía (ref. A-FQM-053-UGR18), La Caixa Foundation (ref. LCF/BQ/IN17/11620019), EU: MSC program (ref. 101025085), Spain

Letter of interest for a neutrino beam from Protvino to KM3NeT/ORCA

The Protvino accelerator facility located in the Moscow region, Russia, is in a good position to offer a rich experimental research program in the field of neutrino physics. Of particular interest is the possibility to direct a neutrino beam from Protvino towards the KM3NeT/ORCA detector, which is currently under construction in the Mediterranean Sea 40 km offshore Toulon, France. This proposal is known as P2O. Thanks to its baseline of 2595 km, this experiment would yield an unparalleled sensitivity to matter effects in the Earth, allowing for the determination of the neutrino mass ordering with a high level of certainty after only a few years of running at a modest beam intensity of ≈ 90 kW. With a prolonged exposure (≈1500 kWyear), a 2σ sensitivity to the leptonic CP-violating Dirac phase can be achieved. A second stage of the experiment, comprising a further intensity upgrade of the accelerator complex and a densified version of the ORCA detector (Super-ORCA), would allow for up to a 6σ sensitivity to CP violation and a 10º−17º resolution on the CP phase after 10 years of running with a 450 kW beam, competitive with other planned experiments. The initial composition and energy spectrum of the neutrino beam would need to be monitored by a near detector, to be constructed several hundred meters downstream from the proton beam target. The same neutrino beam and near detector set-up would also allow for neutrino-nucleus cross section measurements to be performed. A short-baseline sterile neutrino search experiment would also be possible