Latest news with #HelenCoffey


Gulf Today
3 days ago
- Business
- Gulf Today
Here's how to not lose your mind when applying for jobs
Helen Coffey, The Independent That is what I wish to offer our beleaguered Gen Zs in this, their time of need. The culture wars often seek to divide my kind (millennials) from yours (genuine young people), but we shall be divided no longer. For now, finally, we really do have common ground that binds us: getting the fuzzy end of the lollipop when it comes to finding gainful employment. In 2008, I proudly graduated from university with a first-class degree — admittedly in drama — and big dreams, ready to take my bite out of the big, wide world. Finding a job would be child's play, I assumed; I had an exemplary academic record, a 'can-do' attitude and a CV filled with real-world work experience thanks to an assortment of term-time and holiday jobs. I was young, I was hungry, I was an asset. Wasn't I? Alas, 2008, if you remember that fateful year, coincided with the global financial crash. It was not a good time to be an unskilled 21-year-old looking for a job, to put it mildly. Between 2008 and 2009, UK unemployment skyrocketed by the steepest jump in any 12-month period of the last 30 years, leaping from 5.71 to 7.63 per cent. The rate rose for the following two years, reaching a high of just over 8 per cent in 2011. This was borne out by my futile job hunt, during which I was forced to move home with my mother, sign on to jobseekers allowance and spend every tedious, drudge of a day for the next four months submitting my CV for entry-level roles that had already attracted thousands of applications. It was like the Hunger Games of job seeking – and the odds were never in my favour. They were never in anyone's favour. Cut to 2025, and Gen Z are facing their own job drought. The numbers may not be quite so dire as those during that extra spicy Noughties recession, but they paint a picture that is, nevertheless, hauntingly familiar in its bleakness. According to newly released official numbers from the Office for National Statistics (ONS), UK unemployment has risen to its highest rate in four years, 4.7 per cent. The data also shows that the number of job vacancies fell to 727,000 for the April to June period. That is the lowest it's been for a decade — including during pandemic lockdown periods when businesses were forced to implement literal hiring freezes. Of course, the demographic usually most affected by any downturn in prospects is young people – those just starting out in their careers, attempting to get full-time work straight out of school, college or university. In June, The Guardian reported that graduates are facing the toughest UK job market since 2018. What's exacerbated the situation for this cohort is AI; since the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022, the number of entry-level jobs has fallen by almost a third (31.9 per cent). It's in part thought to be because junior roles, such as data entry and tedious form filling, could easily be mopped up by artificial intelligence programmes. The big cheeses aren't even denying it. Dario Amodei, the chief executive of AI firm Anthropic, recently claimed that AI could wipe out up to half all entry-level jobs in as little as five years, and argued that UK unemployment could rise to 10 or 20 per cent in that time; another AI company's viral advertising campaign recently got people's backs up with punchy slogans such as 'Stop hiring humans'. And there are already real-world consequences: BT announced in 2023 that it expects 10,000 jobs to be lost to artificial intelligence by the end of this decade. Then there are rising labour costs, with employers squeezed even more by increased national insurance contributions and a higher minimum wage. Slashing headcounts is clearly the quickest and easiest way to ride out such rises. In fact, the ONS data reveals that the number of people on PAYE payroll has fallen in seven of the eight months since Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, announced the NICs rise. But behind all the stats are those affected by them, real people who are more than just numbers or faceless 'candidates'. I've already seen numerous personal stories of young people frantically scrambling to find work to no avail, up against hundreds of rival candidates, with little hope that their CV will be glanced at, let alone bag them an interview. Caitlin Morgan, a 23-year-old finance and accounting graduate from Swansea University, recently told the BBC about her nightmarish job hunt. She'd spent 18 months applying for more than 600 posts before she finally got hired. 'I see you, Caitlin Morgan!' I wanted to tell her upon reading the story. 'I know your pain...' In fact, I see all you poor, exhausted, desperate Gen Z job hunters out there, wondering if you'll ever win the 'lottery' — because that's what it feels like — of merely securing full-time work. I see you because that was my origin story, too. So here's my advice, woefully out-of-date and toothless as it may be 17 years down the track: remember, it's not you. It's the economy.
Yahoo
13-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Does Tinder's new height filter spell doom for 'short kings'?
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. "I'm a feminist, but as women we don't always help our cause – especially when it comes to the realm of romance and relationships," said Helen Coffey in The Independent. Scratch beneath the surface and our "blatant" heightism has always been a problem. Now, though, Tinder's trial of a new feature that allows paying members to screen potential matches based on "how tall they are" has brought the debate "kicking and screaming back into the light". As part of the trial, users who subscribe to Tinder Platinum can sort potential matches depending on a list of options including height, minimum number of photos and whether or not they have a bio. "Technically, these are 'preferences', rather than outright filters", said Shivali Best on the Mail Online. While potential matches won't be ruled out altogether based on their height, preferences will influence the recommendations made by the app. Tinder's vice president says the platform is "always listening to what matters most" to users, and it seems height really does matter to "many singles on the digital prowl", said Scottie Andrew on CNN. Research has shown that men prefer to date shorter women, while heterosexual women tend to seek out taller men. But Liesel Sharabi, an associate professor at Arizona State University who studies the impact of online dating on modern love, points out that by enabling its users to filter by height, Tinder is "telling you what you should be prioritising". And the narrower your idea of a "perfect match" becomes, the harder it is to forge real-life connections, she told the broadcaster. Tinder is hardly "breaking new ground" here, said Maia Davies on the BBC. Other apps such as Hinge have allowed users to filter matches according to their height, education level, religion and whether a potential match takes drugs, while paying Grindr members can filter by body type. But as Tinder is the planet's biggest dating app, the trial is "significant". Following the "life-affirming 'Short King' Spring of 2022, I genuinely thought we'd reached a place where women weren't going to be quite so shallow about height any more", said Coffey in The Independent. However, this "golden era was short-lived (pardon the pun)" and last year saw the arrival of the viral "man in finance, 6'5", blue eyes" TikTok that sparked thousands of memes. Any man who has used a dating app will know that "most of us are only there to make up the numbers", said Simon Bourke in the Irish Independent. In the online "world of swiping", only the most "attractive" and "determined" men will succeed. And now, women will be able to "eliminate all those undersized halflings", leaving just the men who meet the "universally accepted 'sexy height' of six foot". Because, if you're a man, you'll know that, for many women, meeting this criteria is non-negotiable. "Those are the rules of engagement. Nobody said it was fair." Of course, the new filter has sparked outrage in the "short king community", with some "haughtily requesting a weight filter to even the score". Unfortunately this is the "default response" for a group of men who choose to feel "attacked" and lash out at what they perceive as yet another barrier to finding love. Dating apps certainly "incentivise pickiness", said Andrew on CNN. "But singles who want to improve their chances of finding someone kind, who makes them laugh and shares their interests, might consider putting a little less emphasis on how tall that person is". For Natasha Burns, who is six inches taller than her husband, who she met on Tinder, it's possible that if they had been able to use the new height filter, the pair "would have written each other off based on measurements alone". "I've never been afraid to date a short guy", agreed Elle Hunt in Vogue. While you can't blame people for making use of the technology available to find a potential partner, the rigid criteria risks "ruling out people who would actually make us happy".


Gulf Today
05-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Gulf Today
Katie Piper's right, ageing as a woman is like a bereavement
Helen Coffey, The Independent 'Age is just a number,' goes the old adage. The new version should perhaps come with an addendum: 'Age is just a number — but one that your face and body should never reflect.' It was the recent words of presenter and activist Katie Piper that prompted this musing on our collective endeavour to erase the visible passage of time. 'Ageing can be compared to a bereavement,' the Loose Womenpanellist said at this year's Hay Festival while promoting her new book, Still Beautiful: On Age, Beauty and Owning Your Space. 'Sometimes we know we're losing somebody or something, and it's slow, it's gradual — and when it's ageing, we look down at our hands, we see they look different. We catch ourselves in the shop window, and everything's changed.' The 41-year-old's sentiments hit a nerve. I'm 38, a mere slip of a girl, surely, and yet I've already started having those out-of-body experiences — suddenly seeing a photo of myself taken from an unexpected angle and thinking, 'Who's she? That middle-aged woman with the chins and the deeply etched eye bags?' Or catching a glimpse in the mirror, brought up short by the marching silver threads that can never be beaten back no matter how often I dye my hair, because there's always more, more, more — a never-ending onslaught of grey to remind me that I'm getting older by the day. Piper, who has had to endure multiple surgeries to repair her face and eyesight ever since she was the victim of an acid attack orchestrated by an ex-boyfriend in 2008, has a very different relationship with her appearance compared to most of us. 'Women age out of the male gaze,' she said frankly. 'I was ripped from the male gaze at 24. I didn't just become invisible. I became a target for people saying derogatory things.' The reality is, everywhere you look, women are point-blank refusing to engage with the 'bereavement' of ageing; instead, they're locked into a relentless quest to freeze time and, increasingly, reverse it. This endeavour is nothing new. Though the modern iteration of 'anti-ageing products' can have been said to start in the first half of the 20th century, with the likes of Elizabeth Arden and Holly Rubinstein creating a mass market for their 'rejuvenation' treatments, go back a few centuries and you'll find Elizabethan women putting raw meat on their faces to turn back the clock. Travel further, to the first century BC, and Cleopatra was famously taking daily donkey milk baths for the same purpose. Hankering after youth and beauty is clearly hardwired into the human experience, the physical manifestation of our innate fear of death. But what has changed is the advancement of the technology to facilitate this age-old pursuit, and the extreme makeovers that are now being positioned by female celebrities as the gold standard towards which we should all be secretly striving. Or should that be 'make-unders' — as in, make this 60-year-old look underage, please? The most recent example to send shockwaves around the aesthetics world is Kris Jenner and her time-defying facelift. The woman is 69, but you'd never know that from her brand new £100,000 face. Rumoured to be her fifth surgery, and also rumoured to be a 'deep plane facelift' – because God forbid one of these women ever actually admit to what they're having done – the op has left her plump-cheeked, smooth-skinned and, ultimately, looking like an uncanny valley version of her daughter, Kim Kardashian. It's utterly mesmerising, the intricate artistry of someone who's arguably more wizard than plastic surgeon. Though Jenner is on one end of the spectrum – and perhaps feels like such measures are a prerequisite for being the matriarch of the nip-and-tuck-happy Kardashian dynasty – you don't have to look very far to see examples of Benjamin Buttons everywhere. Demi Moore, who has denied having various cosmetic procedures in the past, has fewer wrinkles at 62 than she did 20 years ago. Nicole Kidman has a face so taut it doesn't seem humanly possible that it's seen 57 trips around the sun.


The Independent
13-05-2025
- Health
- The Independent
A ‘Longevity Doctor' tells me how old I REALLY am
The Independent 's Features Writer Helen Coffey visits a so-called ' longevity doctor' to find out how old her body really is – and whether it's possible to slow down, or even reverse, the aging process. Longevity medicine, once associated with billionaire biohackers like Bryan Johnson, is gaining traction as a more mainstream approach to personalised healthcare. From blood tests to bone scans and a fitness stress test, Coffey undergoes a full-body MOT to reveal her 'biological age' – and explores whether anti-ageing science is really just hype, or the future of wellbeing.


Gulf Today
04-02-2025
- Gulf Today
The rise of the middle-class shoplifter
Helen Coffey, The Independent You wouldn't steal a car,' the Noughties video piracy PSA infamously pointed out. 'You wouldn't steal a handbag. You wouldn't steal a television.' Twenty years on, it feels like many of us would steal just about anything else though. Call me crazy, but I've always subscribed to the notion that nicking stuff is, well, wrong, and that the law is something that should largely be abided by in a civilised society. But these days, I increasingly feel like an outlier — a hopelessly naive hick amid a sea of otherwise upstanding citizens who believe they're inherently entitled to a 'five-finger discount' whenever they like. All the evidence seems to suggest that we've entered the era of the middle-class shoplifter. I present to you exhibit A: an anonymous first-person piece recently featured in The Times, in which the writer confessed to stealing 'a magazine here, a Mother's Day card there, anything I felt I shouldn't have to pay for.' The author in question, a Gen Z graduate in the first round of post-uni job hunting, justified this recently acquired criminal habit by framing it as the natural response to an overstretched budget. Yet in the same breath, they admitted: 'It's not as if I was Aladdin, stealing what I couldn't afford. But I was stealing what I didn't want to pay for.' Therein lies the distinction: 'want', not 'need'. 'Would not', rather than 'could not'. Their first intentional theft was telling: a pain au chocolat. We're hardly talking Les Mis's Jean Valjean here, forced into snatching a hunk of bread to fend off starvation. No, what we're looking at is a person who quite fancies a bougie pick-me-up pastry with their morning coffee, and believes that they deserve to have it for free. 'Everything we desire is dangled like a carrot in front of us daily on social media — and we are not willing to wait for it. We are, after all, the impatient generation,' the writer concluded. Now, before you think I'm here to use this as a stick with which to beat the already much-maligned Gen Z, I promise I'm not — far from it. The truth is, most people I know are middle-class millennials with, at this stage, fairly good jobs, mid-tier salaries and comfortable lifestyles to match. And yet a considerable majority of these people would, and do, quite happily steal things they can easily afford on a regular basis. They barely seem to think of it as shoplifting. We're never talking big-ticket, expensive items; just like that anonymous Gen-Zer, these part-time kleptos are merely 'forgetting' to scan an item or two on their Waitrose shop. Maybe that almond croissant goes straight in the bag for life without being 'beeped' through first. Perhaps an avocado 'accidentally' gets put through as a carrot. There's always plausible deniability baked in — 'Whoopsy! Silly old me!' — and always the reliance on their obvious middle-class credentials to protect them from criminal conviction should they get busted by staff. 'It was a simple mistake, your honour, of course I didn't mean to pass off that sourdough as a plain white loaf!' I'm no longer all that surprised by the revelation that most of my generally law-abiding friends and acquaintances have developed a very specific blind spot that means they find this behaviour perfectly acceptable. It's become normalised to the point where I feel like I'm the one who should be justifying my decision to pay for all items in the bagging area. There's even a term for this recent phenomenon of well-to-do thieves outwitting the self-scan system: Swipers, coined by City University criminology professor Emmeline Taylor as an acronym for 'seemingly well-intentioned patrons engaging in regular shoplifting'. These people 'would not steal using any other technique, they're not interested in putting chocolate down their pants or a piece of steak in their coat', she previously told The Times. Their numbers have grown substantially since the introduction of self-service checkouts. Yet the trend for purloining isn't confined to groceries. Far from being the preserve of students, the act of swiping a glass from a club or restaurant is just as prevalent among my mates in their thirties. Only now, there's not even the excuse of being skint and wanting to drink cheap box wine out of something other than a Sports Direct mug at a house party — the reasoning is simply that they like the design and think it would make a quirky addition to an already extensive glassware collection. They spend enough on drinks, goes the (to my mind) flimsy justification; in a way, they've already paid for that cut-glass tumbler. An image of Bilbo Baggins in Peter Jackson's Fellowship of the Ring springs to mind, the much-memeified line where the hobbit stubbornly looks down at the One Ring and defiantly mutters, 'After all, why not? Why shouldn't I keep it?' (Because it's not yours!, I want to shriek hysterically in response.) The same goes for fancy napkins, crockery, silverware — I've even seen a salt and pepper shaker disappear into the designer bag of a professional who I know for a fact earns at least twice my salary. A 2023 survey from catering equipment supplier Nisbets found that a staggering 37 million Brits have stolen glasses from restaurants, 17 million have stolen tableware, and 4 million steal from eateries on a weekly basis. Then there's public transport. In recent years, I've come to realise just how many of my peers see train fares as 'optional', a nice-to-have extra if you can be bothered or think you might get caught. The rationalisation is frequently that 'train fares are too expensive', without any acknowledgement that perhaps the number of people who refuse to pay for an essential service drives up the price for everyone else. More than three-quarters (79 per cent) of Londoners who travel by Tube or national rail at least one day a week have seen people evading fares in the last year, according to a 2024 YouGov poll, including 49 per cent who see it 'very or fairly frequently'. Fare dodgers reportedly cost Transport for London (TfL) £130m a year and, whether true or not, the majority of the public (54 per cent) believe that fare dodgers can afford to pay for travel – and that they simply choose not to. Between 1 April 2023 and 31 March 2024, Northern Rail had to investigate 57,302 reports of attempted fare evasion, issue 41,922 Penalty Fare Notices and attend 172 court sittings. As Mark Powles, commercial and customer director at Northern, said at the time: 'The reality is that fare dodgers expect the taxpayer to pick up the tab for their journey — and that's just not on.' Nobody likes having to cough up for things. Most of us would, of course, love to have everything we wanted for free. But whenever people explain away their pilfering by banging on about 'victimless crimes', the question I always come back to is this: what would happen if everybody decided that they were somehow exempt from the social contract? What would happen if everyone believed that they were inexplicably entitled to go through life using goods and services without ever paying for them? 'Total anarchy', seems to be the most obvious answer. So if playing by the rules makes me woefully uncool in the modern era, then hey, just call me a loser. French patisserie tastes all the sweeter without a guilty conscience anyway.