Author: admin

This study is the first to examine the psychometric properties and factor structure of the sexual empowerment sub-scale of the WGE-SRH Index across ten culturally diverse settings. Overall, results suggest the scale is a reliable tool for understanding how women frame and act on sexual decisions across diverse cultures in sub-Saharan Africa. After dropping two items, psychometric properties were strong in most sites, except Rajasthan, India, where item fit remained slightly below desired thresholds.

Findings confirm a two-factor structure of sexual empowerment (existence of choice and exercise of choice), similar to that originally identified by Moreau and colleagues [17]. Notably, however, some items performed differently across contexts. In Rajasthan, India, in particular, full models showed that the item,“If I show my husband/partner that I want to have sex, he may consider me promiscuous” loaded strongly onto the existence of choice domain, while the item, “If I do not want to have sex, I am capable of avoiding it with my husband/partner” loaded strongly onto exercise of choice. In contrast, factor loadings for these two items showed considerable variability in sub-Saharan African settings, with the promiscuity item underperforming in the majority of contexts. Similarly, the “avoid” item did not meet desired thresholds in several sites. As such, both items were dropped from final models to ensure consistency across sub-Saharan African sites, however, these items may still have relevance and be considered as critical aspects of sexual empowerment within the context of research in Asia, where commonality of extramarital relationships and implications of promiscuity may differ [32,33]. Combining the sexual existence of choice and sexual exercise of choice domains into a single measure resulted in a multidimensional index of sexual empowerment with moderate to good internal reliability (alpha range 0.59 in Kongo Central, DRC to 0.69 in Niger), along with evidence of goodness of fit across sites, withstanding Rajasthan, India.

Understanding cross-site differences in existence vs. exercise of choice is relevant for the implementation of interventions and programs seeking to counteract harmful gender norms. Marked variations were seen across sites in women’s perceptions of their partners’ responses to refusing sex, as well as their own confidence in voicing when and when not to have sex. Niger, specifically, stood out as a site with overall low exercise of choice; however, this setting was comparable to other sites for existence of choice items. Such contrast between existence and exercise of choice may be indicative of where a population lies on the empowerment pathway [15]. Of note, Niger has the highest prevalence of child marriage globally [27]. While many contexts have overcome gender and power barriers related to existence of choice surrounding sex, many women still may not feel comfortable exercising this choice. In such contexts, programs and interventions should focus on supporting women’s ability to communicate and negotiate their sexual choices, rather than normative factors prohibiting women’s sexual needs in the first place. Community dialogues, such as those implemented for intimate partner violence, may be useful to support communication and negotiation, while concurrently working with men and the broader community [34,35,36]. As opposed to contraceptive empowerment, where women can exercise their choice to use contraception via covert contraceptive use without first having the existence of choice [30,37], sex requires an interaction between sexual partners and, therefore, both existence and exercise of choice must co-exist for women to achieve volitional sex. These results point to the importance of disentangling the domains of existence vs. exercise of choice for sexual empowerment.

Identifying within-site variation is also necessary to determine where empowerment interventions are needed or may have fallen short. Some items were particularly polarizing within contexts—specifically, the “promiscuous” item had the majority responses concentrating in strongly agree or strongly disagree categories, with few women indicating neutral empowerment (i.e., neither agreeing nor disagreeing). These polarized responses persisted for exercise of choice items across contexts and were particularly pronounced for items focusing on women’s desire to have sex rather than not to have sex. Such results highlight the sexual double standards between men and women reported in previous studies [15,38,39,40] and speak to the undervaluing of women’s sexual pleasure as a key component of their sexual health [41].

These cross-cultural findings further elucidate that sexual empowerment is largely constrained—when examining our overall sexual empowerment scores, less than half of the sites reported the majority of women with high or highest empowerment scores (Lagos, Nigeria: 74.5%, Kenya: 58.4%, Kinshasa, DRC: 57.7%, and Rajasthan, India: 54.7%). In sites where existence and exercise of choice were in opposition (i.e., Niger, Kano, Nigeria, and Kongo Central, DRC), overall empowerment concentrated in the neutral category. Notably, these lower empowerment sites likely represent different stages of gender norms programs (i.e., focus on existence of choice rather than exercise of choice) and should continue to be examined.

This study has several strengths, including distinguishing between sexual existence and exercise of choice and its use of ten population-based samples to validate a sexual empowerment sub-scale and compare sexual empowerment levels across sites. Nonetheless, findings should be considered in light of some limitations. Specifically, item wording pertains to a woman’s current husband/partner, precluding understanding of how these items apply within concurrent partner relationships. Women may feel empowered sexually with some partners, but not with others. Within-site variation in sexual empowerment was not examined to afford fuller exploration of sexual empowerment across populations, however, given cultural heterogeneity in practices within many study sites, this should be examined in future studies. Reasons for sexual empowerment within and across sites, as well as an understanding of who is empowered, as additionally needed. Lastly, it is noted that only one small site within Asia was included in this study (Rajasthan, India) and is not generalizable to the whole of Asia nor the whole of India.

The sixth generation of the Fairphone repairable mobile was launched at the end of June. Now spunger-flingers iFixit have got their hands on it, and liked the result.

The iFixit site is a top resource for most of us trying to repair or upgrade a computer – especially if it’s a Mac. Fewer dare to try to fix their own phones, but iFixit reckons you’ll be able to if you spring for a Fairphone, and the newest model gets a perfect 10.

Remove two screws to slide the back off. You will need a screwdriver to swap the battery, though — no more tool-free battery swaps. It’s now held in by four screws and a cable. (It is, however, glued onto a metal backing strip, replaced with it.). Eight more screws hold the screen in place. In part because it’s not glued together, it only has an IP55 rating for dust and water resistance, not the IP68 some devices boast, but that’s still not bad. A nifty touch is a modular USB-C connector, which you can replace on its own if damaged. In total, 12 components are replaceable.

Away from the tech specs, iFixit gives it still more credit: the warranty is an impressive five years, with updates and spares available until 2033, including a promised seven Android version upgrades. That’s hard to beat. The theory is that your new Fairphone should last much longer than most other phones. If you keep using it for five years, that should lower its carbon footprint by nearly a third.

Fairphone’s Generation 6 handset launched on 25 June. GSMArena has full specs. We don’t have one to play with, but it looks like a decent enough mobe: 6.31 inch screen, 8 GB of RAM and 256 MB of storage plus a microSD slot, and a 50 MP rear camera. It’s €599, which translates to $870 or £535.

The manufacturer says it’s Fairphone’s most sustainable ever. Half of it is made from recycled or ethically-sourced materials, which genuinely does matter. As The Register pointed out way back in 2001, many of the important materials in phones come from ecologically disastrous sources. In 2010, El Reg looked at the problems of “coltan” and the “3Ts plus gold” from the Eastern Congo region. Avoiding that, recycling the substances wherever and whenever possible, is seriously important, both to people and to mountain gorillas, as well as less charismatic wildlife.

All that means that it costs more, though. It’s a perfectly capable phone, but you don’t get an amazing spec for the money. It has a slightly smaller screen than its predecessor, the Fairphone 5, which incidentally also got a perfect 10 score a couple of years ago. There’s no headphone socket, and only one physical SIM slot, although it can support an eSIM as well. The battery is slightly more capacious at 4415 mAh, and with a 30 W charger it can get to half full in half an hour. As with most phones now, this happens through a USB-C port – but if you hook it up to your PC, this only operates at USB 2 speeds.

There is a big lime-green colored switch on the side that enables what the company calls Fairphone Moments mode which strips the UI down to five apps, reduces digital distractions, mutes the on-screen colors and so on. There is a built-in Google Gemini LLM-bot “assistant”, but you can turn it off.

If you, like the Reg FOSS desk, are powerfully averse to such gimmicks, the same phone is also available with Murena /e/ OS instead. We looked at version 3 last month, and it does allay a lot of Google-related privacy concerns, at the price of some features and convenience. With the Fairphone, there’s a less metaphorical price, too: it costs €150 more than the base model. ®

You know your software is a success when its name becomes a verb: You’ll now commonly hear about images being photoshopped, even if the editing wasn’t done with the Adobe image editor. Adobe might not like it, but the usage shows how dominant its flagship product has become.

On mobile though, Photoshop hasn’t achieved the same kind of ubiquity or brand recognition. We’ve had official Photoshop apps of various types down the years, but none of them have really translated the power and feature set of the desktop application over to smaller devices in a way that fully works.

Now, Adobe is trying again: The all-new Photoshop app (available now for iOS, and just released in beta for Android), is Photoshop “reimagined” for a smartphone. The app attempts to bring over as many of the tools and features of the full software as it can, while optimizing them for use on a mobile touchscreen.

While it’s impossible to port everything over—in the same way macOS wouldn’t work on an iPhone—there’s a lot to explore in the new Photoshop app. You can download it for free on iOS, though some features require a premium subscription (either $7 a month for the new Mobile and Web plan, or an existing Photoshop plan). Android users can download the beta version and use it entirely for free for a limited time. Regular pricing will kick in when the app becomes generally available worldwide.

Quick Actions

By default, when you open up a new image in the iOS version, you’ll be invited to apply a “quick action” to it. (Android users, this is coming soon.) If you’d rather just go straight to the full editing interface every time, check the Don’t show this again box, and tap Go to editor. However, if you are wanting to apply a basic effect in as little time as possible, these quick actions can be helpful.

You’ll see they all involve backgrounds. Tap Hide background, and Photoshop tries to identify the main subject of the image, and cut out the rest—you can then drop in any kind of replacement background you like. Alternatively, there’s Solid color background, which drops in a color you can edit, or Black & white background, which keeps the subject in color but turns everything else grayscale.

Whichever one you pick, Photoshop will take care of creating a new layer for you, so you can work on the foreground and background independently. You’ll see the layers are available via the thumbnail down in the lower right corner of the image. With the solid color background, for example, tap the layer thumbnail, then the left arrow, then Edit color to switch to a different shade.

Layers and Masks

Choosing an adjustment layer.

Courtesy of Michael Calore / WIRED

Layers and masks are essentially what separates basic image editors from advanced ones, letting you stack different elements in an image on top of each other (layers) and make edits to them (masks). If you’ve used a quick action you’ll already have a layer created for you, but you can create new ones by tapping the + (plus) button just above the bottom toolbar on the right.