Elections

Female aspirants seeking elective seats in the 2022 General Election have adopted varying strategies to woo voters.

Esnahs Nyaramba, an aspirant for Kisii Woman County Representative has found mobilising youth to register for national identity cards, a beneficial means of selling her agenda.

Click here to read the full article published by Nation on 22 December 2021.

As the 2022 midterm election season gets underway, speculation is already mounting that it’s going to be another banner year for female candidates. Early reports suggest that Black women and Republican women are especially poised to make historic gains.

But make no mistake, even if 2022 is another so-called “Year of the Woman,” politics is still a man’s game.

Click here to read the full article published by Brookings on 8 February 2022.

The Independent National Electoral Commission(INEC) says it is collaborating with the Policy and Legal Advocacy Centre(PLAC), a Civil Society Organisation(CSO) towards increasing women and youths participation in politics.

Prof. Sam Egwu, the INEC Niger Resident Electoral Commissioner, said this at a Roundtable on Strengthening Internal Democracy with Special Focus on Gender and Social Inclusion in Abuja.

Click here to read the full article published by The Guardian on 10 February 2022.

Although the landscape for female candidates in U.S. politics has improved, research continues to find that many voters possess sexist attitudes. We rely on a standard political communication framework to help reconcile sexism in the electorate with increasingly favorable outcomes for women in primary elections. Based on two national survey experiments, we first demonstrate that in the absence of gendered campaign rhetoric, sexism is a weak predictor of support for female candidates on both sides of the political aisle. We then show, however, that when a male candidate attempts to activate sexism among voters by attacking a female opponent, gender attitudes become more salient—but not to the woman’s disadvantage. In a Democratic primary, gendered attacks backfire and lead to a significant boost in support for the female candidate. On the Republican side, a male candidate does not face the same backlash, but the attacks do very little to depress his female opponent’s support. While the persistence of hostile attitudes toward women has slowed the march toward gender equality in society, our experimental results suggest that sexism exerts only contingent effects in primary elections and not systematically to female candidates’ detriment.

Click here to download the paper published by Sage Journals on 23 September 2021.

By Darcie Draudt

In South Korea, gender equality and the feminism movement have become politicized and polarizing issues, especially among the younger generation, leading up to the March 9 presidential election.

In January, South Korean presidential candidate Yoon Seok-yul pledged in a Facebook post to abolish South Korea’s Ministry of Gender Equality and Family (MOGEF). The ministry, which in Korean is named the Ministry of Women and Family (Yeoseonggajokbu), largely provides family-based services, education, and social welfare for children. (The MOGEF budget comprises 0.2 percent of the total national budget, and less than 3 percent of its budget targets women’s economic equality promotion.)

Click here to read the full article published by Council on Foreign Relations on 8 February 2022.

By Roudabeh Kishi

Attacks on women in politics are on the rise around the world. New data and research from the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED) reveal how physical violence targeting women in politics is creating dangerous – and at times lethal – obstacles to women’s participation in political processes. Even as women are engaging in elections in record numbers around the world – both by seeking office and by voting – they are being met with an increasingly violent backlash.

Over the course of 2020 and 2021, Mexico, Colombia, China, India, Brazil, Burundi, Myanmar, Afghanistan, the Philippines, and Cuba top the list of the most violent countries in the world for women in politics. With rapidly evolving political situations as well as upcoming elections in many of these countries, the threat of violence targeting women in politics may only grow in the new year. Examining key trends from the latest political violence data for these countries will provide a glimpse of what to watch for in 2022 when it comes to the risks facing women in politics.

Click here to read the full article published by GIWPS on 28 January 2022.