Parliaments & Representatives
When the 119th U.S. Congress is sworn in on Friday, some of the newly elected women members will be making history.
Emily Randall, from Washington’s 6th Congressional District, will be its first out LGBTQ+ Latina. Lisa Blunt Rochester and Angela Alsobrooks will be the first Black senators to represent Delaware and Maryland, respectively — and the first two Black women to ever serve concurrently in the upper chamber. Sarah McBride, from Delaware’s at-large House district, will be the first transgender member of Congress. All are Democrats.
But for the first time since 2011, the number of women serving in the Senate and House of Representatives will decline.
While Democrats sent a record 110 women lawmakers to Congress, Republicans elected just 40 women across both chambers. (On Election Day, 151 women were serving.) In addition, at least one Republican, Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York, who was also the only woman serving in GOP House leadership, is expected to resign if she is confirmed as ambassador to the United Nations in the incoming administration of President-elect Donald Trump.
Read here the full article published by The 19th News on 3 January 2025.
Image by The 19th News
More than two dozen members of Congress have been the victims of sexually explicit deepfakes — and an overwhelming majority of those impacted are women, according to a new study that spotlights the stark gender disparity in this technology and the evolving risks for women’s participation in politics and other forms of civic engagement.
The American Sunlight Project (ASP), a think tank that researches disinformation and advocates for policies that promote democracy, released findings on Wednesday that identified more than 35,000 mentions of nonconsensual intimate imagery (NCII) depicting 26 members of Congress — 25 women and one man — that were found recently on deepfake websites. Most of the imagery was quickly removed as researchers shared their findings with impacted members of Congress.
“We need to kind of reckon with this new environment and the fact that the internet has opened up so many of these harms that are disproportionately targeting women and marginalized communities,” said Nina Jankowicz, an online disinformation and harassment expert who founded The American Sunlight Project and is an author on the study.
Read here the full article published by The Markup on 11 December 2024.
Image by The Markup
Voters in Ghana elected the country’s first woman vice president, Naana Jane Opoku Agyemang, in early December 2024. Voters also elected John Mahama as president, a man who had served as president before, from 2013 to 2017.
In that first term as president, Mahama had also appointed the most women cabinet ministers ever in Ghana – six out of 19. But in the December parliamentary elections, women candidates barely improved upon the 2020 election result. Whereas 40 women – 20 from each of the two major parties – had been elected in 2020, only 43 women were elected in 2024 – 33 from the National Democratic Congress (NDC) and 10 from the New Patriotic Party (NPP) according to provisional results. There are 276 seats in the country’s parliament.
This won’t change much until the west African nation addresses certain stumbling blocks, notably Ghana’s single member district or “first past the post” electoral system and its lack of a gender quota for parliament.
Read here the full article published by The Conversation on 11 December 2024.
Image by The Conversation
Despite some progress, women remain seriously underrepresented in politics globally. As of 2023, women held only 26% of parliamentary seats and 15.8% of the positions as heads of state or government.
My new research with colleagues raises one possible factor in this representation that goes beyond discrimination in selection procedures. It is simply more dangerous for women to pursue careers in politics than men. They are far more likely to become targets of violence.
In Italy, where we conducted our study, elected female mayors are approximately three times more likely to experience an attack than their male equivalents.
The reasons behind women’s ongoing underrepresentation in the corridors of power are multifaceted. Research has explored factors from political parties sidelining women and voter discrimination, to cultural norms and traditional familial expectations. Political violence might be part of the story.
Read here the full article published by The Conversation on 26 November 2024.
Image by The Conversation
As the sound of anti-abortion pro-life campaigners raging against women accessing health care quietens down thanks to new buffer zones being introduced to protect women making difficult choices, so too do the voices of women in Afghanistan who are no longer able to talk to each other due to new laws being introduced which are literally silencing women.
Women here looked on aghast as the US voted emphatically for a man and a campaign that denigrated women. Notwithstanding the crimes of which he has been accused and convicted, Trump has a heinous track record of disrespecting women. He is a man who has already been instrumental in the rollback of women’s rights, with the forfeiting of Roe v Wade. Women in the US are so scared that they are being advised to stock up on birth control and file for divorce immediately if they are in an unhappy or abusive marriage. This shows the level of fear about what could come to pass.
Read here the full article published by the Stylist on 21 November 2024.
Image by Stylist
As more African nations seek to encourage gender parity in government positions, some African countries are struggling to fully integrate women into the political sphere. A recent report by the Policy and Legacy Advocacy Centre (PLAC), an independent, non-partisan, non-profit capacity-building organization that works to strengthen democratic governance and citizens’ participation in Nigeria, revealed that Nigeria ranks lowest among Sub-Saharan African countries in terms of women’s representation in parliament.
Out of the 185 countries analyzed in the report, Rwanda ranked highest in Africa, with women making up 61.3 percent of its parliament, while Nigeria ranked 180th, with only 4.4 percent female representation.
The data shows that Nigeria's 360-member House of Representatives currently has 16 women, and the 109-member Senate has just four women. Furthermore, 14 of Nigeria's 36 states have no female state legislators. Even in states with female legislators, their numbers remain disproportionately low. The situation is similarly bleak for elective executive positions: since the return to democratic rule in 1999, no woman has been elected president, vice president, or governor in Nigeria.
Read here the full article published by Global Voices on 20 November 2024.
Image by Global Voices
This map is a unique visual tool that captures women’s participation in executive government and in parliament on a given date—1st January 2019. The map of Women in Politics not only provides a country ranking for both ministerial and parliamentary representation, but also statistics on women in political leadership positions—Heads of State or government, women Speakers of Parliament, as well as ministerial portfolios held by women throughout the world. Borders are depicted and used on the map in order to present data. They are not the expression of any opinion concerning the legal status of any country, territory, city or area, or concerning the delimitation of frontiers or boundaries.
Click here to download the map in English.
The annual report provides an update and analysis of progress made and setbacks encountered by women in parliament further to elections and renewals held over a year. Produced every year on the occasion of International Women's Day (8 March), it presents data on women in national parliaments, regional and world trends, information on women presiding officers and women candidates. It also analyses mechanisms aimed at supporting women's access to parliament. The report is short and easy to read, providing a snapshot on the situation of women in parliaments worldwide.
Click here to see the report.
In January 2018, the Government Equalities Office (GEO) commissioned this rapid evidence review, the two broad aims of which were to identify: a) barriers to women’s participation in local and national government; and b) evidence of policies and practices, sometimes referred to as Positive Action Mechanisms, which have increased their levels of participation.
An established way of examining the barriers that women face to widening their political representation is to explore supply and demand issues. For the purposes of this review, supply and demand barriers have been collapsed into a typology comprising three overall themes: social and cultural barriers; structural and institutional barriers; and knowledge and information barriers.
Much of the literature and research suggests that gender quotas are the most effective method for increasing numbers of women and quantitative analysis has pointed to their broader impact for political engagement as they encourage more women to stand for election, and incentivise political parties to target women’s votes. However, although quotas increase the number of women elected, the evidence points to the fact that they do not necessarily ensure the success of women once elected, as quotas do not tackle the gendered practices of political institutions. The literature emphasises the need for quotas to be accompanied by a broader array of measures.
Click here to read the report.
The importance of having women serving in Congress is still not fully appreciated or understood. In order to document women’s contributions to governing and understand how women are navigating the contemporary environment of party polarization, the Center for American Women and Politics, with support from Political Parity, embarked on a major research study of the 114th Congress.
Click here to read the report.
Promoting the participation of young people in political life is becoming a higher priority worldwide. Over one third of the 169 targets established as part of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) relate to young people and the importance of their empowerment, participation and well-being. Twenty targets across six SDGs – relating to hunger, education, gender equality, decent work, inequality and climate change – specifically focus on youth.
In 2014, recognizing the absence of systematic data and information on youth representation in parliaments, the IPU designed a first-of-its-kind database on the subject, to collect the relevant data through parliaments. The result was the first report on youth participation in national parliaments, which was published in October 2014 and updated in 2016. This 2018 report provides updated information on the percentages and genders of parliamentarians under the ages of 30, 40 and 45, as well as the latest information on special mechanisms designed to encourage or enhance the participation of young people in national parliaments.
Some key findings:
- Young people under age 30 constitute just over 2 per cent of the world’s parliamentarians.
- 15.5 per cent of the world’s MPs are under age 40 – up from 14.2 per cent in 2016, an increase of 1.3 percentage points.
- 28.1 per cent of the world’s MPs are under age 45 – up from 26 per cent in 2016, a 2.1 percentage point increase.
- The global proportion of MPs under age 30 has increased by only 0.3 percentage points since 2016 (from 1.9% to 2.2%).
- 2.2 per cent of the world’s MPs are under age 30 – up from 1.9 per cent in 2016, a slight increase of 0.3 percentage points.
- Male MPs continue to outnumber their female counterparts in every age group.
- The gender imbalance is less pronounced among the youngest MPs in each parliament, for whom the male/female ratio is approximately 60:40. Encouraging signs
Click here to see the report.
This regional study seeks to take the initial findings of a 2016 IPU report further, focusing specifically on the situation in parliaments in Europe. It is the result of close collaboration between the IPU and the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE), and is the first in a series of regional studies that the IPU wishes to conduct on the subject. The study also broadens the scope of the research to include harassment and violence against female parliamentary staff.
Based on interviews with 123 female MPs and parliamentary staff in Council of Europe member States, the survey continues the work already carried out to provide figures and document a range of sexist and violent behavior against women in parliaments. It also seeks to assess the extent and highlight the particular forms of such abuse in Europe. The study therefore aims to break the silence and persistent taboos and to contribute to the fight against gender-based behavior and violence wherever they occur.
Click here to see the report.