Science Media Centre

New Zealanders are pretty unaware of the state of their country, according to a new poll that has ranked New Zealand as the worst developed nation in an ‘Index of Ignorance’. The Ipsos MORI Perils of Perception survey highlights how wrong the public across 33 countries are about some key issues and features of the […]

Fiona Fox, Director of the UK Science Media Centre, writes on her blog about the recent scandal around Nobel laureate Prof Tim Hunt’s sexist public comments at a conference. Below is an excerpt, with the full blog available here. Call off the hunt Am I the only one who feels sorry for Tim Hunt? Judging […]

Nobel prize winner and UK Royal Society Fellow Tim Hunt has caused controversy by saying laboratories should be segregated along gender lines. Although Tim Hunt has apologised for his remarks at the World Conference of Science Journalists in South Korea this week, he stood by his assertion that mixed-gender labs were disruptive. Consequently, the Royal Society of […]

A new report authored by researchers at AUT and the University of Waikato has revealed that New Zealand’s appearances are deceiving when it comes to human rights. The report, titled Fault lines: Human Rights in New Zealand, looks at the country’s commitment to six different international human rights treaties and includes interviews with politicians and both domestic and international experts. […]

American researchers who say gender equity and other sociocultural factors — not national income, school type, or religion —  determine mathematics performance at all levels for both boys and girls suggest there’s little “gender gap” among younger NZ schoolchildren, but it’s quite noticeable in older classes. The new research, Debunking Myths and Gender Performance fingers […]

The Association for Women in the Sciences, in association with Dr Belinda Bray of The University of Auckland, have produced a new booklet giving a snapshot of women in science in New Zealand in 2011. A pdf copy of the booklet can be downloaded here. Key findings of the report show: When science is compulsory at […]

New Zealand researchers studying the complex interplay of sex hormones, behaviour and the brain have found new evidence for the role of hormones in influencing typical male and female behavioural traits. University of Otago neurobiologists Associate Professor Ian McLennan and Dr Kyoko Koishi’s findings are published today in the prestigious journal PNAS (Proceedings of the […]