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U.S. Congress
Women in the 119th Congress: Thus far, 148 (109D, 39R) women will serve in the 119th Congress in 2025 (current record: 151, set in 2023). They will be at least 27.7% of all members of Congress. Currently, 151 (107D, 43R, 1Ind) women serve in the U.S. Congress, holding 28.2% of all seats. Five (3D, 2R) women candidates remain in congressional contests that are too close to call.
Women in the U.S. Senate: Twenty-five (16D, 9R) women will serve in the U.S. Senate in 2025 (current record: 26, first set in 2020). They will be 25% of all members of the Senate. Currently, 25 (15D, 9R, 1Ind) serve in the U.S. Senate, holding 25% of all seats.
Women in the U.S. House: Thus far, 123 (93D, 30R) women will serve in the U.S. House in 2025 (current record: 126, set in 2023). They will be at least 28.3% of all members of the U.S. House. Currently, 126 (92D, 34R) women serve in the U.S. House, holding 29% of all seats. Five (3D, 2R) women candidates remain in U.S. House contests that are too close to call.
Read here the full article published by CAMP on 14 November 2024.
Image by CAWP
Donald Trump’s victory was helped in no small part by the unexpected shift of support he received among Gen Z voters.
While voters under the age of 30 still broke for Kamala Harris, her margin of victory was much smaller than the one enjoyed by President Joe Biden, who, according to a survey based on 2020 validated voter files, secured 59 percent of the youth vote compared with 35 percent of young voters who backed Trump. Depending on which exit poll you view, Trump improved his performance by between 8 points and 11 points among young voters compared with the 2020 race.
Trump’s performance with the nation’s youngest voters, however, was very uneven along gender lines. Analysis of the AP Vote Cast Survey by CIRCLE at Tufts University shows young women preferred Harris to Trump by an 18-point margin (58 percent to 40 percent), while young men broke for Trump by 15 points (56 percent to 42 percent). Trump’s gains among young male voters were particularly large, as a slight majority of men under 30 backed Joe Biden just four years ago.
Why did Trump do so much better among young men?
Read here the full article published by The Hill on 13 November 2024.
Image by The Hill
Right now, we’re existing in an especially tense and unstable “in between.”
We know what’s to come next January – yet at the same time, we have no idea what’s to come. Once-again President-elect Donald Trump has already promised mass deportations and a gutting of the Department of Education. His followers have already shown us shades of their callousness to come, in telling women that consent is now a matter of, in their disgusting words, “your body, my choice.” But we have no clue if there is a rock-bottom still looming below.
At present, I – and most every politically engaged progressive I’ve spoken with – is in a place of: “What can I do about it?” Some of us are taking quiet moments to regroup, to prepare bodies and minds and spirits for a long haul. And then there are people like me, who have spent the past week being rather vocal – encouraging others against the allure of quick fixes, while also howling against each new sign of injustice that crops up in the social media feeds we (fine, I) can’t quite step away from.
There is another option, though. As a number of the women candidates I’ve spoken with throughout 2024 have proposed, we might also consider running for office ourselves.
Read here the full article published by The Story of Exchange on 13 November 2024.
Image by The Story of Exchange
A notable number of women are contesting Sri Lanka’s general elections on Thursday, signalling a potential shift in the nation’s male-dominated political landscape, but analysts warn simply having more female candidates is not enough to transform the country’s leadership culture.
The rise in female candidates come as Sri Lankans prepare to elect the first parliament under the country’s inaugural leftist government, led by President Anura Kumara Dissanayake of the National People’s Power (NPP) party.
Dissanayake’s election in September, the first presidential vote after the country’s debilitating economic crisis in 2022, marked a pivotal moment in Sri Lanka’s political history. His rise ushered in a caretaker government and the appointment of Harini Amarasuriya as the nation’s third female prime minister.
Sri Lanka has a notable legacy of female leadership. In 1960, when the country was known as Ceylon, Sirimavo Bandaranaike was elected the world’s first woman prime minister. She took office after the assassination of her husband, then-Prime Minister S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike.
Read here the full article published by South China Morning Post on 13 November 2024.
Image by South China Morning Post
Currently in Ghana, there are 40 females out of the 275 Members of Parliament in the 8th Parliament of the Fourth Republic. Clearly, this number is likely to decrease as some women in Parliament lost their seats during the primaries ahead of the December 7 elections.
Among them are Sarah Adwoa Safo, Dome-Kwabenya, Sheila Bartels, Ablekuma North, Gifty Twum Ampofo, Abuakwa North, Ama Pomaa, Juaben, and Freda Prempeh, Tano North.
Creating equal opportunities and ensuring that more women are represented to address the matter of underrepresentation of women in politics, policy and decision-making levels as well as in public life in general has taken centre stage in Ghana of late, especially with the passage of the Affirmative Action, Equal Opportunity Bill 2024, into law.
ABANTU For Development, with support from the African Women’s Development Fund (AWDF), is implementing a project titled, “Strengthening Activism for a Gender-Responsive Elections 2024 in Ghana”.
It convened a platform to give women parliamentary aspirants, political parties, civil society organisations, the media, and other key stakeholders the platform to discuss ways of advancing women’s participation and representation in the upcoming General Election, taking into consideration the passage of Ghana’s Affirmative Action (Gender Equity) Act 2024 (Act 1121).
Read here the full article published by Ghana Broadcasting Corporation 13 November 2024.
Image by Ghana Broadcasting Corporation
Last summer, Hanako Okada, a Tokyo lawyer and mother of two young children, started to plan a campaign for Parliament from the northern rural district where she spent her childhood. Nearly everyone she consulted gave the same odds on her chances of winning: close to zero.
As a candidate for a party in opposition, she was facing an incumbent from the party that has ruled Japan for all but four years since 1955. His grandfather, father and brother had all held seats in the prefecture before him. Ms. Okada, 44, was a political novice and a virtual stranger to locals in Hirosaki, the city in Aomori Prefecture on the northern coast of Japan’s main island that she had left more than a quarter century earlier to attend college.
Among democratic nations, Japan has one of the most abysmal records of giving women political power: Before a general election late last month, women held just over 10 percent of seats in the lower house of Parliament, putting the nation at 163rd out of 183 countries in the proportion of women in its national legislature, according to the Inter-Parliamentary Union, a Swiss-based organization.
“I think everyone was thinking somewhere in their hearts that it would be impossible,” Ms. Okada said during an interview last week in a conference room at the telecommunications business in Hirosaki owned by her mother.
Read here the full article published by The New York Times on 12 November 2024.
Image by The New York Times
What you need to know:
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There’s a growing consensus among academicians that these quotas “work”.
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However, there is a conundrum as women who are elected in countries with gender quotas are often criticised as being less qualified.
Standing in the scorching afternoon heat, Aminata Bilkisu Kanu took off her sunglasses to wipe away the beads of sweat trickling down her face as she appealed to the crowd of mostly male voters.
“Think ‘women’ when voting in the June 24 elections,” she told them.
“We keep your resources within; the men take them away.”
The 24-year-old single mother was the first woman to run for the national parliament from Mamoi village, part of the Masimera Chiefdom in Port Loko District, located in the conservative north of the country.
Patriarchal culture runs deep in Sierra Leone, but it is even stronger in the north and parts of the east, where customs do not allow for women to become a paramount chief, the traditional name for the district leader.
Read here the full article published by The Nation on 11 August 2024.
Image credits: The Nation
With voters heading to the polls in countries around the world, 2024 has been dubbed the year of elections. While a recent change in the United States election will put a woman at the top of a major party ticket, a June presidential election just over the border in Mexico stood out. Earlier this summer, Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo was elected president of Mexico, shattering the political glass ceiling in North America. In second place came Xóchitl Gálvez Ruiz, another woman. Sheinbaum–in addition to perhaps being born a leader (and having a Nobel-prize winning brain)–and Gálvez are the product of an enabling environment–otherwise, how to explain the rise in women’s political leadership only in the second half of the 20th century? The first woman ever to be elected to the highest office (in this case, the office of prime minister) occurred in Ceylon (present-day Sri Lanka) in 1960.
This blog, part of CGD’s work on women’s leadership, focuses on political leaders and explores which conditions enable women’s leadership by contrasting Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC), a region that is ahead of most in women’s presence in politics, with Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) that is currently some steps behind. The 42 countries in LAC have had a total of 26 women heads of state, presidents, or prime ministers (PMs), with seven incumbent women heads of government (including Sheinbaum who will assume office on October 1, 2024). The 48 countries in SSA have had a total of 16 women heads of state, presidents, or PMs, with four incumbent ones.[1] Women currently hold 36 percent of parliamentary seats in LAC and 27 percent in SSA. Countries in LAC also have a higher share of women cabinet ministers.
Read here the full article published by the Center for Global Development on 09 August 2024.
Image by Center for Global Development
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