Gaby Hinsliff

Gabrielle Seal Hinsliff (born 4 July 1971) is an English journalist and columnist for The Guardian.

Quotes

• Female friendships are built on knowing about the minutiae, and just like news, they require your presence.
  • "'I had it all, but I didn't have a life'", The Observer (1 November 2009).

• So I didn't say anything, and for years continued to have a perfectly professional and often productive (in story terms) working relationship with Sex Kitten Man. And he rose into cabinet, where eventually his career imploded over an entirely unrelated error of judgment. Well, I say unrelated; a man who once did something slightly stupid went on to do something much more stupid.
• But the reason I'm not naming Sex Kitten Man either is that making this about any one particular idiot risks letting all the other idiots off the hook.
  For the point is it could have been any idiot.
  • "Who would think any good could come from an MP calling a woman 'totty'?", The Guardian (14 April 2016).
  • A Conservative MP had used the sexist term about the political journalist Isabel Hardman in her presence. She did not name him herself and neither did Hinsliff.

• [A]ll the wrong people are in the spotlight. We have spent too long demanding that famous faces justify what they earn, rather than asking their anonymous managers to justify what they pay. It's not enough for salaries to be transparent if the assumptions underpinning them are shrouded in mystery. For if nobody will tell you the rules of the game, then it's impossible to know if somebody somewhere is cheating.
  • "Gender equality at work is a matter of respect, not just money", The Guardian (2 February 2018).
  • On issues relating to the gender pay gap in which the BBC was then embroiled.

• The opening scene of Breathtaking, in which fictional consultant Abbey Henderson discovers that a mask meant to protect her from a deadly virus doesn’t fit because it was shaped for male jaws, meanwhile almost uncannily echoes the evidence given by senior civil servant Helen MacNamara to the Covid inquiry last year about how hard it was to get the problems women were experiencing with PPE taken seriously in Whitehall.
  • "No sympathy for striking doctors? Watch ITV’s Breathtaking and ask: have we paid our debt to them?", The Guardian (20 February 2024).
  • Breathtaking is a three-part television drama based on the book by palliative care doctor Rachel Clarke relating her experiences of the early period of the COVID-19 pandemic in the UK.

• When men wonder why women won't just let them have their cosy little clubs in peace, one answer is that we fear the mentality those cosy little clubs can sometimes produce.
• It's not that we're necessarily desperate to get into your club. It's more that we learned the hard way to be suspicious of men who want to keep us out.
  • "The Garrick row is not about women getting in – it’s about the dinosaurs desperate to keep us out", The Guardian (22 March 2024)
  • The Garrick Club's continued rejection of women as members was an issue The Guardian had covered in recent days.

• [P]opulists offering easy answers hate nothing more than the long, boring, mercilessly exposing business of trying to put them into practice. If the biggest risk to Reform is being shut out of power, then the second biggest might be winning it.
  • "How to see off the threat of Reform? I found one answer on the streets of Boston and Skegness", The Guardian (21 June 2024)
  • In opinion polls, the Nigel Farage-led Reform UK, was being predicted to gain seats in the UK's 2024 general election on 4 July (including Boston and Skegness).