Private companies and public sector employers will be forced to publish the salaries they pay their male and female employees so as to expose any gender pay gap in their ranks if a new Labour party bill becomes law. That possibility took a big step forward yesterday when the Government lent their support to it and assisted its passage to the next stage of the legislative process. The Bill would enable the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission to audit companies and to ensure they publish transparent pay scales, broken down by gender, Labour senator Ivana Bacik said. In a piece in the journal.ie, she said, “our bill would require companies with 50 employees or more to report regularly on any gender pay gap in the workplace. Such employers would be required to publish the difference between the mean and median hourly rate paid to men and women employees.”

A woman died last week of complications from gender re-assignment surgery as part of an effort to “transition” to the male sex. Rebeccah Feldhaus, 25, who went by the name “Rowan,” had a hysterectomy and was readmitted to the hospital later after going into septic shock and losing oxygen to her brain. Feldhaus was a University student in Atlanta, Georgia, and board member for an LGBT advocacy group Georgia Equality. In a video segment recorded last year on “transgender” students and the opposition they faced to legally use the facilities of the opposite biological sex, she said, “It frustrates me they lack empathy about how we just want to live our lives,” adding: “We’re the ones who feel unsafe.”

Transgender academics have reacted angrily to a claim that the rationale for accepting transgenderism should also apply to those who make transracial claims. The article “In Defense of Transracialism” by Rebecca Tuvel, an assistant professor of philosophy, was published in the peer-reviewed, feminist philosophy journal Hypatia. However, a furious reaction by academics on social media ensued with one professor accusing Tuvel of “discursive transmisogynistic violence.” In response the Associate editors of the journal denounced the article and questioned how it slipped through their peer-review process saying that it did great harm to “trans people and people of color”, and also exposed the author “to heated critique that was both predictable and justifiable.” The response from the wider philosophy community, however, has been one of outrage at the mistreatment of Professor Tuvel. Professor Brian Leiter of the popular blog “The Leiter Reports” likened it to the committing of a “thought crime” while the New York magazine has compared it to a modern day witch hunt.

Researchers have developed a method of harvesting skin cells and transforming them into egg and sperm cells that could them form embryos, but, the New York Times reports, many scientists are unsettled by the prospect. The process, known as in vitro gametogenesis, or I.V.G. for short, could, for instance, enable two men provide all the genetic material for a new embryo. The procedure has already been successfully used on mice, but not yet on humans. However, not all are enamoured of the prospect. “Basic research is paramount, but it’s not clear that we need new methods for creating viable embryos,” said David Lemberg, a bioethicist at National University in California. “Attempting to apply what we’ve learned to create a human zygote is dangerous, because we have no idea what we’re doing, we have no idea what the outcomes are going to be.”

The Prince of Wales met with a visiting Iraqi Archbishop in the Royal residence, Clarence House, in London this week. The Chaldean Catholic Archbishop Bashar Warda of Erbil, northern Iraq is working with other Bishops to enable a rebuilding and repopulation of Christian towns and villages in the Nineveh plains. The inhabitants of those towns had fled the advancing hordes of ISIS terrorists in August 2014 but are now beginning to return. The Archbishop is being helped by the Catholic charity Aid to the Church in Need who facilitated the meeting with Prince Charles.

A study that claimed women can “safely” abort their pre-born children using abortion pills is being debunked by critics as unscientific, problematic, and lacking any real credibility. The study tracked the outcomes of 1600 women in Ireland who had obtained the pills from the Netherlands-based pro-abortion organisation Women on Web. “The main problem with this study is that of the 1600 women who self-induced medical abortions without medical supervision, —  600 (over 30 percent) did not respond to a follow-up survey,” said Michael J. New, Visiting Associate Professor of Economics at Ave Maria University and an Associate Scholar at the Charlotte Lozier Institute. “There is a good chance that women who did not follow up were more likely to experience medical complications than those women who were happy to participate,” he added. Professor New called the study “not particularly rigorous.” The study used a non-random sample and was based on self-reporting by participants.