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As far as I'm concerned, being any gender is a drag.

Every year I teach dozens of students at the University of Birmingham. Most of the students on the gender and sexuality courses are women. I guess this is because the boys don't think that gender applies to them: that it's a subject for girls.

There's a power in women being women. There's a role for men, but we don't have to be men, because we're women. I think that representing that on television is a cool thing.

It would be futile to attempt to fit women into a masculine pattern of attitudes, skills and abilities and disastrous to force them to suppress their specifically female characteristics and abilities by keeping up the pretense that there are no differences between the sexes.

Being feminine in the way you dress doesn't have to compromise who you are as a woman or your career.

Women have taken on traditionally masculine roles and professions, and there is no real equivalent for men. Men are still extremely reluctant, as we all are reluctant to see them, take on traditionally feminine roles or professions. That is just not something that they do easily.

I've been surprised at the number of people who were really angry that I tried to convey gender neutrality by using a gendered pronoun.

It's a controversial issue: many feminists reasonably worry that by taking the concentration off gender as an independent locus of oppression, we dilute the strength of a women's movement, or of women's rights advocacy.

I have a problem with people saying feminine means anti-feminist, and I think it's counter-productive to immediately associate anything 'girly' with vanity or stupidity.

It used to be that you had to make female TV characters perfect so no one would be offended by your 'portrayal' of women. Even when I started out on 'The Office' eight years ago, we could write our male characters funny and flawed, but not the women. And now, thankfully, it's completely different.