Gender is not an easy conversation to have. It makes people uncomfortable, sometimes even irritable. Both men and women are resistant to talk about gender or are quick to dismiss the problems of gender. Because thinking of changing the status quo is always uncomfortable.

I think the history of western feminism is one that is fraught with racism, and I think it's important to acknowledge that and, at the same time, to say that feminism is not the western invention, that my great-grandmother in what is now south-western Nigeria is feminist.

Because gender can be uncomfortable, there are easy ways to close this conversation. Some people will bring up evolutionary biology and apes, how female apes bow to male apes - that sort of thing. But the point is this: we are not apes. Apes also live in trees and eat earthworms. We do not.

This idea of feminism as a party to which only a select few people get to come - this is why so many women, particularly women of colour, feel alienated from mainstream western academic feminism. Because don't we want it to be mainstream?

At the end of the day, it's show business: you earn money to make money.

Firstly, economic globalisation has brought prosperity and development to many countries, but also financial crises to Asia, Latin America and Russia, and increasing poverty and marginalisation.

In every single culture I encountered, there were always women who defied cultural norms to do what they believed was right for them. This phenomenon has never been related to how rich, poor, successful or not successful the woman may be.

War is not an exercise of the will directed at an inanimate matter.