Café Scientifique is a place where, for the price of a cup of coffee or a glass of wine, anyone can come to explore the latest ideas in science and technology.
Meetings take place in cafes, bars, restaurants or even theatres, but always outside a traditional academic context.
The first Cafés Scientifique in the UK were held in Leeds in 1998. From there, cafes gradually spread across the country. Currently, some 70 cafés meet regularly to hear scientists or writers talk about their work and discuss it with diverse audiences.
Café Scientifique is a forum for debating science issues, not a shop window for science. We are committed to promoting public engagement with science and to making science accountable.
Our monthly meetings take place on the first Monday of the month at 7pm.
If you wish to be informed about future events, then please email one of the organisers and we will happily add you to our email list.
Meet the Organisers
The Science of a Stereotype: The Dangerous Single Woman
Caroline Young
Monday, 11th May 2026, 7pm
Waterstones Glasgow, Sauchiehall St, Glasgow G2 3EW
What is it about single women that makes them such a threat? Why are they blamed for everything from falling birth rates to social decline, and why do periods of feminist progress so often coincide with a backlash?
Across history, depictions of single women in pop culture and social commentary have shifted with wider social change. When populations were unbalanced, or when gender roles were in flux, unmarried and childless women were frequently cast as the problem.
In Single & Psycho: How Pop Culture Created the Unstable Single Woman, author Caroline Young explores how the stereotype of the damaged or dangerous single woman has been shaped across film, literature, and music.
Spinster tropes, witch trials, and nineteenth-century diagnoses of hysteria all reveal how independent women were treated in society. In the 1940s, the femme fatale warned that women should return to domesticity after wartime freedoms. The 1980s ‘bunny boiler’ cast single, child-free women as a threat to the idealised family.
In the wake of the Me Too movement, conversations about gender and equality came into sharper focus. At the same time, concerns about fertility rates and a male mental health crisis have fuelled renewed scrutiny of women’s choices. Tradwives promote fulfilment through domestic roles, while others argue it is selfish to bring children into an uncertain world.
In this talk and discussion, Caroline draws on historical studies and recent data to explore what drives these narratives, why they resurface at particular moments, and how they shape contemporary debates around the manosphere, feminism, and cultural expectation.
About Caroline Young: Caroline Young is an author from Edinburgh, Scotland, specialising in film, fashion and popular culture. Her works include Single & Psycho: How Pop Culture Created the Unstable Single Woman, Fashioning Hitchcock, The It Girls, and Crazy Old Ladies: The Story of Hag Horror, which was nominated for both a Rondo Hatton Award 2023 and the 2022 Richard Wall Memorial Award.
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