Parliaments & Representatives
Violence against women in politics has become a systemic threat to democratic participation in The Gambia, forcing many women out of leadership spaces through intimidation, harassment, and abuse, a new study by the Westminster Foundation for Democracy (WFD) has revealed.
The findings were unveiled on Friday 23rd January 2026 at the official launch of the Violence Against Women in Politics (VAWP) report, a landmark research conducted under WFD’s Governance for Inclusive and Accountable (GIA) Programme, bringing together government officials, lawmakers, diplomats, civil society, and development partners.
West Virginia has the lowest percentage of women legislators in the country. That fact alone should concern anyone who believes our government works best when it reflects the people it serves.
Misogyny in politics—both loud and quiet—doesn’t just silence women. It silences the communities we represent, and it shapes laws that harm families across our state. Politics has taught me that for women, the reality is never whether misogyny exists, but how much of it we must endure to keep our seat at the table. I learned this firsthand when I ran for office and during my service in the Legislature. This reality is demoralizing not only for women in office, but for the communities we are elected to serve. When women’s voices are ignored or silenced, entire constituencies are cut out of decisions that shape their lives.
The overt forms of misogyny are obvious—sexual harassment and legislation designed to control women’s bodies. But the most corrosive form is the subtle, everyday misogyny women are expected to tolerate just to stay in the room.
Read the full article here.
Gender isn’t just a matter of individual identity. It’s an axis of governance—and for the last year, across a range of policies, the Trump administration has punished women.
Today is the first anniversary of Donald Trump’s inauguration. From ICE deportations to the dismantling of DEI to the criminalization of pregnancy to environmental rollbacks, the administration has narrowed whom it protects and who, through degradations to citizenship, it has determined is expendable.
In this country, gender often determines who bears risks, absorbs costs, and is rendered responsible for the failures of markets and the state. This administration’s policies are, accordingly, especially harrowing for women as well as those who won’t or can’t conform to its gender regime.
Read More here.
The state of women’s rights in Turkey showed no meaningful improvement in 2025, as longstanding problems persisted and new challenges emerged. Femicides, institutional failures to protect women and increasing inequalities in social and political representation remained defining features of the year, with women’s rights defenders continuing to face legal and administrative measures aimed at curbing their activities.
Femicides in 2025 were marked not only by extreme violence but also by judicial processes that renewed concerns over impunity. The case of Rojin Kabaiş, a 21-year-old university student whose body was found three weeks after she went missing, became a striking example of this pattern. Despite authorities’ repeated assertions that her death was a suicide, details brought to light through the persistence of her family and public scrutiny pointed to the possibility of homicide and further intensified concerns over accountability.
The Scottish Government has “betrayed women and girls” by failing to progress legislation designed to protect them, an opposition MSP has claimed.
Last year, the SNP administration said the protected characteristic of “sex” would be added to the Hate Crime Act.
The pledge came after plans for a standalone law against misogyny was dropped.
Yet moves to update the legislation have stalled with no clear timeline from the government as to when the change will be made.
Ash Regan MSP, who sits as an independent, described the delay as a deliberate political decision rather than a technical oversight.
“Women were told they would be protected, yet sex remains excluded from the Hate Crime Act years later, and after the promise of a stronger, standalone misogyny law was quietly dropped,” Ms Regan said.
Opening a newspaper these days, one cannot miss the year-end reviews on a wide range of issues. Statistics and surveys published across various media outlets in 2025 help us grasp the country’s overall condition. What emerges from these accounts is a troubling picture of continued violations of fundamental rights and citizen security in the post–July uprising period.
This raises serious concerns and casts doubt on how much of the spirit of the uprising has been lost. After all, ordinary people took to the streets in July demanding a “discrimination-free” society, a “new order,” and “justice.” At the end of the day, people seek peace they seek visible improvements in their quality of life. I believe it is necessary to objectively observe and analyse how much of these expectations have actually been fulfilled.
Various studies show that in transitional contexts, people articulate their aspirations in multidimensional ways. While states or international organisations may define “peace” in terms of treaties or ceasefires, ordinary people understand peace as the ability to live their lives—not as an abstract concept.
Ensuring GSP principles are embedded in political institutions is vital for a healthy democracy. It highlights that women’s inclusion and equality does not just stop at the ballot box. All groups must be able to fully participate within our elected institutions for our democracies to work effectively and to the good of all in our societies. This interim report comes at a timely moment for the GSP agenda.
More recently, the CPA and CWP updated its gender sensitive guidelines providing a ‘checklist’ for parliamentary change. Not only this, but COVID-19 has offered a moment of significant reform (albeit temporary in many cases) to parliamentary practices and procedures across the Commonwealth and many political institutions around the world are reflecting on the experience and the lessons learnt.
The 2020 CPA Gender Sensitising Parliaments Guidelines set out four dimensions of Gender Sensitive Parliaments (Figure 1). This interim report focuses on the first two dimensions: ‘Equality of participation within Parliament’ and ‘Parliamentary infrastructure’. It documents the current state of play regarding GSP practices in institutions across the British Islands and Mediterranean region (BIMR), particularly in light of institutional responses to COVID-19 and recommends ‘best practice’ reforms for the short and medium term.
Click here to access the report.
Gender and politics scholars are increasingly making appeals to ethnographic methodology to bring important contributions to understand the reproduction of gender, gender hierarchies, gendered relations, and their redress in parliamentary settings. This article draws upon fieldwork conducted in the U.K. House of Commons and the European Parliament and finds distinctive gendered cultures and norms in debating and working parliaments. Focusing on one dimension of this distinction—the parliamentary debating chamber—the article argues that parliamentary ethnography provides novel empirical insights into this conceptual distinction and into empirical understandings of gendered debating and working parliaments. While parliamentary ethnography is a fruitful innovation, the article discusses the drawbacks of this methodology and provides feminist reflection on ways to make it more accessible.
Click here to read the full article published by Cambridge University Press on 3 August 2022.
This report highlights the key findings from research conducted by Equal Voice on sexual harassment in Canada’s legislative Assemblies.
Click here to access the report.
The performance of women legislators is analysed by looking at the nature of questions posed by them over a span of 20 years (1999–2019) in the lower house of the Indian Parliament. The analysis, however, is a contestation of claims that suggest women act as silent members, and if at all they speak, they do on “softer issues” like women and child development, food processing, health, and sanitation, thus trying to escape the discussions on national security, finance, agriculture, railways, etc. These are otherwise considered as male bastions. This paper is a quantitative analysis of women’s political performance during the Question Hour session, which is considered as an important plenary space where legislators act on their own, free from the party regulation.
Independent India claims to be the world’s largest democracy, turbulent and vigorous but ever so evolving. Elections form the animating spirit of Indian democracy. It is held religiously every five years with enough pomp and show. Indian democracy flourishes with exceptional rates of citizen participation. The Lok Sabha elections of 2019 manifested 67% voter turnout with decreasing rates of gender gap (ECI 2019). These figures indicate the undying credence citizens have in Indian politics and its democracy, despite the limitations of electoral democracy. The Indian Parliament acts as a theatre of democracy regardless of the people’s sneering disbelief and despondency in political institutions of the country to which Parliament is no exception (Rai and Spray 2019: 2). Electoral democracies all over the world are faced with criticism about their substantive representation1 to which they retort by translating democracy into electoral representation. How can the democratic institutions in India include all its citizens? In other words, how can these institutions be representative of its entire population? (Jayal 2013: 25). Here, what concerns this paper is the study of the impact of systematic exclusion of women from the political life on their political representation and in turn on their political performance.
Click here to read the full article published by Economic and Political Weekly on 1 August 2022.
In this study, we report results of a survey of U.S. state senators about their experiences of psychological abuse, physical violence, and sexualized abuse and violence on the job, as well as gender differences among senators. Overall, our results indicate that more than 80% of state senators reported having faced abuse and violence, and women senators reported more physical violence than men. Moreover, we found differences in the factors that contributed to abuse and violence among women and men state senators. Most notably, women with higher levels of power (party or committee leaders) were more likely than other women to experience psychological abuse and sexualized abuse and violence, and Democratic women senators faced more sexualized abuse and violence than Republican women. The implications for continued service by state senators in the face of these experiences, the likelihood of attracting future candidates, and the implications for gender diversity in office are explored.
Click here to read the full article.
The third Global Parliamentary Report examines public engagement in the work of parliament. This report takes a detailed look at why engagement matters and how parliaments globally are engaging with the people they represent. It outlines trends and priorities for public engagement and considers key principles for ensuring better and deeper engagement into the future, in support of the 2030 Agenda.
Click here to access the report.