Advocacy & Lobbying

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the No Ceilings initiative of the Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton Foundation joined forces to assess the evidence on the gains and gaps in progress for women and girls over the past 20 years. They asked: What do women’s and girls’ lives look like around the world 20 years after the Beijing conference? What barriers remain? What do the numbers tell us? How have laws and policies progressed over the same period? What information do we still need in order to assess the status of women and girls? The foundations worked with The Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) and the WORLD Policy Analysis Center at UCLA (WORLD) to examine the performance of 197 countries and Beijing Platform signatories and develop a picture of how the lives of women and girls have changed since the Beijing conference.

The findings are presented in this report and are available in a visual representation at noceilings.org.

The rise of social media in the past decade has changed the political landscape - not only the way friends connect with one another, but also how people and public officials communicate. Elected officials and governments across the globe are able to engage directly with the people they represent on a scale previously inconceivable. This report, a joint effort between the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University’s Kennedy School, Facebook, and the Women in Parliaments Global Forum, is designed to show how women legislators from around the world use social media to engage with citizens as well as how social media can play an even more effective role in facilitating a dialogue between governments and their citizens.

This report is based on the results of a survey that examined the use of social media by female Parliamentarians from 107 countries. The survey sought to discover factors affecting their level of social media use and to identify areas where greater knowledge could strengthen that use.

Click here to access the report. 

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UN Women launched www.cidade5050.org.br where candidates will be able to make public commitments to gender equality. The project was developed in a partnership between UN Women Brazil, the Supreme Electoral Court (TSE), the Patrícia Galvão Institute and the Research Group on Democracy and Inequality at the University of Brasilia (Demodê/UNB). It has institutional support of Congress in Focus, and #MeRepresenta and In Press Group.

The digital platform "City 50-50: All for Equality", available at www.cidade5050.org.br aims to encourage debate on equal rights between women and men in local elections this year.  The platform is a place where candidates can make commitments to gender equality and voters can get information to help them define their vote. It arises from the understanding that a society can only be called democratic when there is equal participation between women and men.

Candidates of the 5,568 Brazilian municipalities, which already have registered their candidatures with the TSE can register and make public commitments to promote women's rights during the election campaign. Voters, in turn, will be able to identify their candidates’ proposals for this topic, and afterwards make the elected accountable.

The Minister of the Superior Electoral Court, Luciana Lossio, highlighted some measures already taken to ensure women's political empowerment: "We had a major trial at the Superior Electoral Court that buoyed the condemnation to all political parties that do not comply with the 10 per cent allocation of radio and TV space to encourage women´s participation. Now we are joining in a partnership with UN Women, to seek a solution to this problem of the Brazilian Electoral Politics."

Among the more than 144 million Brazilian voters who will vote in October, 52% are women. However, only 31% of the candidates running for office (Mayors, Vice Mayor and City Council) are women - the percentage is within the law, which requires a minimum of 30% women candidates.

For this elections, 52 municipalities have only women as candidates for city council, according to a survey conducted in mid-August this year by the TSE. Only men compete for Mayor in 3,815 of the 5,568 municipalities, equivalent to 68% of the total. Currently, women occupy 10% of the municipalities and represent 12% of councilors in municipalities.

To read the full story, visit the UN Women regional website for Latin America and the Caribbean.

The report’s chapters were built in response to the Concluding Observation No. 60 by the CEDAW Committee, where the Committee request from the Iraqi government’s side to submit, within two years, a written report on steps and measures taken to respond to the recommendations included in the Concluding Observations (12 and 18). The Concluding Observations, of the CEDAW Committee, were issued after its 57th session on February 2014, in which the last government’s report, submitted to the Committee at the end of 2013, was discussed, concerning Iraq's obligations to implement the CEDAW Convention, also in that session Iraqi CSOs presented the first CEDAW shadow report for Iraq since signing the convention back in 1986.

This report includes a review of the situation of Iraqi women after an increase in the phenomenon of migration and displacement, in addition to the procedures and measures and legislation adopted to implement recommendations 12 and 18, and the civil society’s observations on the government’s report plus a number of activities run by the Iraqi Women Network and some of its members during this period of time.

Click here to read the Summary of the humanitarian situation and the situation of women in Iraq and the role of CSOs. 

In this report, the Working Group examines discrimination against women and girls in cultural and family life. The cultural construction of gender determines the role of women and girls within the family, including in marriage. After analysing the impact of culture and religion on the enjoyment of equal rights by women and girls in society and the family, the Working Group redefines family by incorporating a gender perspective. In reaffirming equality between the sexes and family diversity, it is necessary to apply the principle of women’s right to equality in all forms of family law, in secular family law systems, State-enforced religious family law systems and plural systems. After recalling the obligation of States to combat discrimination against women in cultural and family life, the Working Group makes several recommendations, drawing on good practices, for the establishment of true equality between the sexes in cultural and family life.

This year, for the first time ever, two of the largest neuroscience societies are led by a female scientist: the Society for Neuroscience (SfN), with nearly 42,000 members, and the Federation of European Neuroscience Societies (FENS), which represents more than 22,000 neuroscientists in 42 member societies across Europe. While the SfN has a history of female presidents, 9 out of 45, FENS welcomed its first female president only recently. Why do women move so slowly through the ranks of the system and why is it important that they do so? More urgently, what can be done to change this and by whom? Here we address current challenges and recommend concrete actions.