Advocacy & Lobbying
Fatuma Muhumed is glowing as she arrives for an interview with DW just hours before her inauguration as a local councilor in the Dutch municipality of Apeldoorn — her first political office, on top of her job as a lawyer.
Her election was far from certain: She was ranked 15th on the candidate list of the left-leaning GroenLinks-PvdA, yet she secured one of the party's six seats. Muhumed climbed the ranks thanks to preferential voting, or "smart voting," as the campaign Stem op een Vrouw (Vote for a Woman) calls it.
How does it work?
In the Netherlands, voters don't just choose a party but select a specific candidate on a party list. Candidates are ranked by the parties, typically with their leaders at the top.
"We see more men, and then we see women lower on the lists," says Zahra Runderkamp, political scientist and lead researcher at Stem op een Vrouw.
Voters tend to favor candidates on top of these lists, but to boost women's representation, Stem op een Vrouw encourages voters to support women ranked lower down, especially those just below the projected seat threshold.
This strategy has helped Muhumed and 503 other women across the Netherlands get elected in the latest elections.
As it stands, women only account for 13% of Malaysia’s parliamentarians, despite making up 50% of Malaysia’s overall population.
On the road towards the next general election, civil society organisations, led by the NGO Empower, are pushing for legislation on gender parity in political representation, which would call for a binding legal framework to ensure that at least 30% of election candidates are women.
But why is this legal intervention even necessary in the first place? BFM talks to Azira Zainal from the Association of Women Lawyers, Ayesha Sofia Faiz from Empower, and Kasthuri Patto from the DAP.
A growing wave of high-tech misogyny has left the British public fearing for the safety of women and girls, a bombshell report reveals today. In a damning indictment, three in four (73%) of the public say Sir Keir Starmer’s Government should be doing more to tackle violence against women and girls. Campaigners warn that predators have harnessed the power of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to supercharge abuse on an “unprecedented scale”.
AI-powered chatbots have encouraged boys and men to abuse women and girls and the technology is used to create sexually explicit and abusive images, according to the End Violence Against Women (EVAW) coalition. Its director, Janaya Walker, warned that AI is “making abuse easier and more widespread”. Eight out of 10 (79%) women and 65% of men say more regulation of AI is needed to protect women and girls.
Women in Italy: What the Data Really Says in 2025
Italy has its first female prime minister. Italian women are more educated than Italian men. And yet in 2025, Italy ranked 117th in the world for female economic participation, trailing countries that most Italians would be surprised to find ahead of them. This is the central paradox of women in Italy today: a country of visible female achievement and stubborn structural exclusion, often existing side by side, sometimes in the same woman's life.
Women in Italy: Key Facts and Statistics
Before the detail, the numbers that frame the conversation.
Only 51% of women of working age in Italy are employed, compared to 69% of men. The female unemployment rate is nearly double that of men, at 8.4% versus 4.9%. Women earn on average 10.7% less than men, with a gap reaching 27.3% in managerial roles.
In France, Germany and Britain, the female employment rate exceeds 66.6% and the employment gender gap is below 6.7 percentage points. Italy's gap stands at 17.8 percentage points.
The World Economic Forum's Global Gender Gap Report 2025 places Italy 85th out of 148 countries overall, but 117th specifically for employment and leadership, where only 28.8% of top positions are held by women.
Across the globe, deliberate illiberal strategies that exploit entrenched gender inequality are increasingly being used to weaken democratic institutions from within. The dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) was not simply a byproduct of chaos at the beginning of U.S. President Donald Trump’s second term. Rather, it followed a well-documented authoritarian strategy in which attacks on gender equality are used to consolidate power, narrow civic space, and make democratic governance harder to defend. While the process of dismantling the agency that administered U.S. government foreign assistance has been well documented, significant gaps remain between what insiders witnessed and what the broader public understands. This gap in understanding is not benign. When the public perceives these events as isolated policy shifts rather than coordinated institutional erosion, it diffuses accountability, obscures the impact, reduces resistance, and allows similar tactics to be redeployed without scrutiny.
The administration’s early actions targeting gender equality, women’s empowerment, LGBTQI+ initiatives, and diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility functions operated not as peripheral policy disputes but as frontline tactics that weakened foreign assistance infrastructure, government institutions, and democratic norms. Trump has used this approach since at least 2016. It was mapped out in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025. Drawing on firsthand experience and technical analysis, this report situates these actions within an effective authoritarian pattern of leveraging patriarchal norms and cross-ideological gender bias to justify institutional retrenchment, create administrative compliance, and accelerate structural dismantling. Ultimately, the strategic sidelining of gender equality functions increased institutional vulnerability. Although the Trump administration’s targeting of those functions did not create the vulnerability, it recognized, exposed, and exploited it as part of a wider effort to erode democratic norms. Rebuilding democratic systems and foreign assistance architecture, therefore, will require treating gender equality as a core resilience safeguard rather than a peripheral policy concern. Its strategic targeting is central to the broader authoritarian assault on democracy. Democracy stakeholders must name that pattern, examine the decisions that enabled it, and learn from what unfolded.
Today, the European Commission is presenting its new Gender Equality Strategy for 2026 to 2030. The Strategy embeds gender equality into every aspect of life, online and offline, from education and health to work and public life, and addresses modern threats such as cyberviolence and AI-related risks, which particularly affect women.
While progress has been made, estimations by the European Institute for Gender Equality suggest that, at the current pace of change, it would take 50 years for the EU to reach full gender equality. Disparities among Member States also persist. The new Strategy turns the objectives of the Roadmap for Women's Rights, presented by the Commission and endorsed in 2025 by all Member States, into concrete actions to empower women and girls, engage men and boys, vigorously oppose any backtracking on fundamental rights, and accelerate progress towards a truly gender-equal Europe.
Presented ahead of International Women's Day on 8 March, this Strategy builds on the milestone legislation adopted under the Gender Equality Strategy 2020-2025, including rules on Combating Violence against Women, on Pay Transparency and improving Gender Balance on Corporate Boards, and as well as the implementation of rules on Work Life Balance to promote equal sharing of care responsibilities.
Today’s political landscape poses complex global challenges to democracies.
The landscape is shaped by globalization, geopolitical power shifts, changing roles and structures of (supra)national organizations and institutions, and the rise in modern communications technologies. Transnational phenomena such as migration and climate change influence the dynamics of conflict and development, citizenship and state sovereignty. Rising inequalities, and the social polarization and exclusion they generate, skew political representation and voice, reducing the vital moderate centre of the electorate.
These dynamics have contributed to a widely contested view that democracy is in decline. Events around the world continue to challenge the notion of democracy’s resilience and make democratic systems appear fragile and threatened. Yet democratic values among citizens, and within institutions at the national and international levels, continue to be expressed and defended.
This Overview of International IDEA’s The Global State of Democracy 2017: Exploring Democracy’s Resilience outlines the key current challenges to democracy and the enabling conditions for its resilience. Based on newly developed Global State of Democracy indices as a key evidence base to inform policy interventions and identify problemsolving approaches, the publication presents global and regional assessments of the state of democracy from 1975—at the beginning of the third wave of democratization—to 2015, complemented by a qualitative analysis of challenges to democracy up to 2017.
A single moment can spark a revolution, collective actions can transform laws, creative expression can change attitudes and an invention can alter the course of history. It’s these threads that weave together to propel the women’s movement — even in the face of obstacles. Discover how some of these strands, big and small, have shaped your lives, and the rights and lives of women and girls worldwide.
Explore women’s activism from generations past and present with this UN Women interactive platform.
This report is based on the discussions held during the International Forum on Women’s Political Empowerment, held on 7 September 2017 in Budapest, Hungary. It is a short summary of views expressed by experts, guest speakers and participants, as highlighted in their remarks and group discussions that followed.
The OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR), the Hungarian Women’s Lobby, and the Embassy of Finland in Budapest organized the forum, in collaboration with the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, Corvinus University of Budapest and the Embassy of Estonia in Vienna. The forum was also supported by the Royal Norwegian Embassy in Budapest and the Council of Europe.
The International Forum on Women’s Political Empowerment aimed to raise awareness and facilitate dialogue on women’s participation in political and public life in Hungary and beyond. The forum gathered around 200 participants (165 women and 35 men), including politicians, civil servants, gender equality advocates, representatives of civil society, academia and youth organizations, as well as students. Thirty Hungarian and international experts (23 women and 7 men) shared their knowledge on the topic, including guest speakers from Austria, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Ireland, Norway, and Portugal.
The forum served as a platform to exchange good practices for advancing women’s political participation. It explored persisting and emerging challenges as well as opportunities and good practices for political parties, civil society and youth to strengthen gender equality, women’s rights and women’s access to decision-making.
Click here to access the report.
Using data to bridge the gender gap
Globally, women make up 49.7% of the population but hold only 22% of public offices. The Women in Public Service Project Data Portal seeks to answer why this is so, and how to increase the percentage of women in public office to 50% by 2050.
Click here to visit the data portal http://data.50x50movement.org/.
This policy guidance provides a range of good practice options for advancing gender equality in the content of constitutions. It contributes to, and complements, the capacity-building support that United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) staff in country and regional offices provide to a range of national partners and stakeholders for different aspects of constitution-making (which includes but is not limited to support for the drafting of new constitutions and the revision of existing constitutions). Other UNDP initiatives provide guidance and support for the process of constitution-making. This policy guidance is designed to build the capacity of UNDP staff to advocate for the advancement of gender equality and women’s human rights in the content of constitutions. It is intended to provide technical support for a range of partners and national stakeholders involved in constitution-making, including; legislatures, constituent assemblies, constitutional review committees or commissions, governments, civil society organizations and legislative drafters. Through the inclusion of numerous examples from existing constitutions, it aims to foster UNDP entry points for pursuing South–South exchanges through which countries can benefit from, and utilize, the good practice constitutional provisions of similarly situated countries. It also aims to raise awareness of the importance of advancing gender equality in the content of constitutions. With this in mind, examples have been chosen based on the de jure constitutional formulation rather than the record of gender equality in the particular country.
As per the statues of international IDEA, the Secretary-General reports to the Council of Member States on the overall implementation of the Institute’s activities. In April 2014, as part of the Mid-Term Strategy Review, Member States recommended that the organization continue to strengthen its communication about results. This fifth International IDEA Annual Results Report therefore presents improved qualitative reporting of results, giving more information beyond the simple implementation of activities.