Elections
Up to 63.8 percent of the 80 members of the newly elected Rwandan Chamber of Deputies, the lower house, are women, a list from the National Electoral Commission (NEC) has shown.
The new development represents an increase of women MPs, up from 61 percent in the previous parliament.
A 2021 report dubbed ‘Women in Parliament’ published by the Inter-Parliamentary Union showed that Rwanda was the world’s leading country in terms of having the largest number of women in government positions.
Besides the 63.8 percent of the country’s parliamentary seats being occupied by women, some 13 ministerial positions out of the available 32 in the current cabinet are occupied by women.
Among the women MPs in the new parliament are notable names that are making a comeback, including the outspoken Christine Bakundifite, who was a member of the Public Accounts Committee (PAC), which spearheads scrutiny of government entities and officials.
Two of her counterparts, Germaine Mukabalisa and Beline Uwineza, who were also PAC members in the previous parliament are also back, in addition to Madina Ndangiza who served as the Chairperson of the Commonwealth Women Parliamentarians (CWP) Africa Region.
Veneranda Uwamariya, a former University of Rwanda lecturer and local government official in Huye District is also back as well as Phoebe Kanyange, an experienced politician who previously served as spokesperson of the political parties’ forum.
Aside from the 24 seats reserved for women parliamentarians (who are elected through an electoral college system), 27 women who vied for the 53 remaining seats were also elected to the parliament.
Read here the full article published by The New Times on 26 July 2024.
Image by The New Times
Shirley Chisholm, a Democratic congresswoman, was the first African American woman to run for president of the United States. Sixty years later, Kamala Harris will become the first Black and South Asian American woman to be nominated for president by a major party. Is the United States poised to elect her?
Chisholm, from Brooklyn, N.Y., first ran for office in 1964 — the year both Harris and I were born (the vice president on Oct. 20 and me on Oct. 30). When Chisholm began her presidential campaign in 1972, Harris and I were probably more focused on our toys and our friends, but I was fascinated by politics and aware of Congresswoman Chisholm.
For Black women of my generation, Black women political leaders were few and far between in the 1960s and ’70s, and the numbers remain below our percentage of the population.
Black women represent 7.7 per cent of the total U.S. population, according to the U.S. Census. The Center for American Women and Politics (CAWP) reports that 5.4 per cent of all voting members of Congress identify as Black women. Nonetheless, the situation has improved greatly compared to 1968, when Chisholm became the first Black woman elected to U.S. Congress.
Read here the full article published by The Conversation on 24 July 2024.
Image by The Conversation
Vice President Kamala Harris is gaining support to become the Democratic nominee for president.
Before she vaulted to the national stage, Kamala Harris served as California’s top prosecutor — state Attorney General — and was raised by immigrant parents in the San Francisco Bay Area.
In speeches and in her memoir, the 59-year-old Harris has often cast herself as a prosecutor who fought from the inside for progressive change. Some, however, have criticized her for upholding the status quo, saying she remained silent on state initiatives to legalize marijuana and reduce penalties for certain crimes.
Despite this, in 2016, Harris was elected as California’s U.S. Senator just four years before she was picked as Joe Biden’s vice president. She made history as the first woman, Black person and person of South Asian descent to serve in the position.
If she’s selected as the Democratic nominee and beats former President Donald Trump in November, she would be the first female president.
CapRadio’s Politics Editor Chris Nichols spoke with Kelly Dittmar of the nonpartisan Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University about the significance of Harris’ rise in national politics.
Read here the full article published by Capradio on 22 July 2024.
Image by Capradio
As the 2024 US presidential election looms, Kamala Harris is emerging as a likely candidate for the Democratic Party after President Joe Biden announced his decision to drop out of the race. Harris’s potential candidacy is set to let loose an unprecedented wave of misogyny upon the American political landscape. Despite her qualifications and historic achievements, Harris will face a unique convergence of gender and racial prejudice.
Harris potential presidential candidacy can be contextualised by examining the experiences of previous female candidates, who have faced a great deal of overt and covert misogyny from across the media and political spectrum.
Bias in media reporting of women candidates
Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign, for example, encountered relentless misogynistic attacks, ranging from media scrutiny of her appearance to baseless accusations about her health and integrity. Throughout 2016, Clinton was frequently criticised for traits that were praised in her male counterparts, such as ambition and assertiveness.
Another prominent example is Sarah Palin who endured sexist commentary that often overshadowed her political stances during the 2008 race. As the Republican vice-presidential nominee running alongside John McCain, Palin was frequently subjected to derogatory remarks about her appearance and intelligence, and her qualifications were questioned in a way that male candidates rarely experienced.
The media’s focus on Palin’s looks, wardrobe, and personal life diverted attention from her policy positions and political record. Indeed, there is evidence to suggest that the focus on her appearance led to reduced intentions to vote for the McCain–Palin ticket in the 2008 US presidential election. Moreover, an analysis of her debate with the Democratic vice-presidential nominee Joe Biden later revealed that coverage of Palin was more likely to include references to her family, physical appearance, and social issues — particularly in newspapers and political blogs — while coverage of Biden focused more on foreign policy and the economy.
Read here the full article published by ABC Australia on 23 July 2024.
Image by ABC Australia
Last week saw a change of Government and a brand-new cohort of MPs (335 new MPs) elected; but with all this churn how representative is our new House of Commons? Before the election we published analysis of the candidates standing for election showing that only 31% of selected candidates were women. Let’s see how many were elected…
At the end of the last parliament, the UK had only ever had 564 women MPs, not enough to fill the House of Commons once over. But, with the 129 new women MPs elected on Thursday 4th July we have finally managed to fill the chamber once over (with 43 extra!).
The House of Commons is slowly creeping towards gender parity; however we are still lackadaisical in our approach to achieving gender parity in our elected bodies, leaving it up to parties to field women candidates rather than ensuring that women are on the ballot paper via other mechanisms such as gender quotas.
Read here the full article published by the Electoral Reform Society on 10 July 2024.
Image by Electoral Reform Society
Only 208 women will sit in the Assemblée Nationale, representing just over a third of all MPs. This is the second time in two years that the proportion of women in the Assemblée has fallen.
Less than two years after the previous legislative elections, France voted to elect the 577 members of the Assemblée Nationale in snap parliamentary elections that followed French President Emmanuel Macron's decision to dissolve the chamber. The new MPs will meet on July 18 for their first session. While this Assemblée stands out for not having a clear political majority, its profile remains similar to that of the previous legislature: Women are poorly represented.
With 36% of women, parity is even further behind
Only 208 women, compared with 369 men, will sit in the next Assemblée, representing just over a third (36%) of all MPs. This is the second time in a row that the proportion of women in parliament has fallen: There were 224 female MPs in 2017, but just 215 in 2022.
Read here the full article published by Le Monde on 9 July 2024.
Image by Le Monde
Shirley Chisholm, a Democratic congresswoman, was the first African American woman to run for president of the United States. Sixty years later, Kamala Harris will become the first Black and South Asian American woman to be nominated for president by a major party. Is the United States poised to elect her?
Chisholm, from Brooklyn, N.Y., first ran for office in 1964 — the year both Harris and I were born (the vice president on Oct. 20 and me on Oct. 30). When Chisholm began her presidential campaign in 1972, Harris and I were probably more focused on our toys and our friends, but I was fascinated by politics and aware of Congresswoman Chisholm.
For Black women of my generation, Black women political leaders were few and far between in the 1960s and ’70s, and the numbers remain below our percentage of the population.
Black women represent 7.7 per cent of the total U.S. population, according to the U.S. Census. The Center for American Women and Politics (CAWP) reports that 5.4 per cent of all voting members of Congress identify as Black women. Nonetheless, the situation has improved greatly compared to 1968, when Chisholm became the first Black woman elected to U.S. Congress.
Read here the full article published by The Conversation on 24 July 2024.
Image by The Conversation
Ahead of the general election, the End Violence Against Women Coalition and 70 other leading organisations published a joint manifesto calling on all political parties to adopt its recommendations for ending this abuse.
The manifesto sets out our priorities for the next government; calling for a comprehensive, whole-society approach to tackling VAWG. We framed this manifesto around ten key areas:
- Rights and inequalities
- Prevention
- Funding and commissioning of specialist VAWG services, including ‘by and for’ provision
- Economic barriers
- Partnerships and multi-agency working
- Health and adult social care
- Housing
- Family courts and children’s social care
- Criminal justice reform
- Perpetrators
After a disappointing round of political debates in which VAWG was glaringly absent, EVAW wrote to political party leaders setting out our key priorities for ending VAWG. We now review: How do the political party manifestos of 2024 match up with our own?
Our polling found that 76% of people do not trust politicians generally to tackle violence against women and girls, and it is up to political party leaders to change this.
Access here the full manifesto published by the End Violence Against Women Coalition on 28 June 2024.
Image source: EVAW Coalition
Last week, all UK political parties confirmed which candidates they were standing in each constituency for the 2024 general election. Including independents, a total of 4,515 candidates will be fighting for a seat in the next government.
If you’ve already tried out our candidate name game, you’d have seen how the most common name was David, owned by a whopping 104 candidates. The Johns came in second with 84 candidates called by this name, and the Pauls a close third with a total of 79.
In fact, when tallying up the most common candidate names, we noticed the top 10 in the list are all male names. It is not until reaching position 11 that you come across the female name Sarah, owned by 43 candidates. Of course, this could be due to women having more diversity in their names. However, it is less easy to dismiss that out of the 4,515 candidates standing, only 31% are women.
Read here the full article published by the Electoral Reform Society on 20 June 2024.
Image by Electoral Reform Society
On June 2, over 60 percent of registered Mexican voters went to the polls for a monumental election, with over 20,000 public offices up for grabs at the federal and local levels. This election was historic, as a woman was elected to hold the highest office in Mexico for the first time. This comes more than 70 years after women gained the right to vote and stand for election. Over the past few years, women in Mexico have gone from being fringe operatives in the political arena to taking center stage. Still, this transformation took time and deliberate action to achieve.
While gender quotas have been used in Mexico since the early 2000s, they were not enough to achieve equality. In 2014, Mexico transitioned from relying on its gender quota system to a “gender parity system,” which mandates equal opportunity based on gender in candidate lists for local and national offices. This transition did not occur naturally; it resulted from consistent, permanent debate at all levels by activists, institutions, academics and women in politics who worked together across party lines to close the political gender gap.
The Impact of Gender Quotas in Mexico
Mexico’s 2002 first legislative quota passed by Congress required that 30 percent of candidates be women, with specific penalties for parties in cases of non-compliance. In 2008, the gender quota was raised to 40 percent, but parties were exempt from complying in cases where candidates were selected in democratic primaries. Six years later, in 2014, gender parity mandates were enshrined in Mexico’s constitution, marking the highest protection standard for women’s political rights. The impact of these hard-fought efforts has been undeniable; women’s participation in Congress has steadily increased with every reform.
Read here the full article published by Ms. Magazine on 11 June 2024.
Image by Ms. Magazine
In India, as in many democracies around the world, there has long been a discernible gender gap in citizens’ political participation. For decades, Indian men were significantly more likely to cast their ballots on election day compared to women. It is noteworthy, therefore, that in the country’s 2019 general election, the historic gap between male and female turnout came to an end; for the first time on record, women voters turned out to vote at higher rates than men (see figure 1). Predictions for India’s upcoming 2024 general election suggest that this trend is likely to continue.
Although the gap between male and female voter turnout in India has been gradually shrinking in recent years, the convergence in electoral participation is nevertheless surprising for multiple reasons. First, as noted by Franziska Roscher, the increase in female turnout in India is occurring while female labor force participation—an important driver of women’s political participation—remains low compared to peer economies. Second, national-level data from the National Election Study (NES), conducted by the Lokniti Program of the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, and other smaller studies confirm that women lag men across all measures of nonelectoral political engagement. For instance, data from two separate primary surveys—conducted in Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh by political scientists Soledad Prillaman and Gabrielle Kruks-Wisner, respectively—demonstrate that while the gender gap in voter turnout has closed, gaps are all too visible in other forms of sustained political engagement, such as contacting elected representatives, attending public meetings, and participating in campaign activities. Third, women continue to be underrepresented in India’s national parliament and its state assemblies.
Read here the full article published by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace on 5 April 2024.
Image source: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
Introduction
Over the last twenty years, the world has witnessed significant shifts towards greater gender equality in politics, which in turn has had positive implications for democracy and society at large.
Mexico has witnessed a systematic incorporation of gender perspective, equality, and parity in public life, signifying a transformation of women's ability to participate in the country's future. The prime example is the National Electoral Institute (INE) mandate, later ratified by the Electoral Tribunal (TEPJF), for political parties to guarantee gender parity in all upcoming gubernatorial elections of 2024: Chiapas, Guanajuato, Jalisco, Morelos, Puebla, Tabasco, Veracruz, Yucatán, and Mexico City.
Unfortunately, as women's participation in politics rises, an increase in political violence that explicitly targets women has also occurred. The 2020-2021 electoral process was the most violent against Mexican women.
Mexico´s political system is awash with political violence that explicitly targets and affects women, obstructs social justice, and hinders democracy. The advances in female political participation have been met with resistance as men, territorial interest groups, and political elites seemingly feel threatened by increasing female power and respond with violent actions to uphold the traditional system of politics to deter women’s independent participation.
Read here the full article published by the Wilson Center on 13 March 2024.
Image source: Wilson Center