Women's Leadership

This year, on March 8, International Women’s Day, participants of the Islamabad chapter of the Aurat March (Women’s March) faced extreme brutality and arrests by the authorities after attempting to hold their annual rally in Pakistan’s capital. Organizers from the feminist collective Hum Aurtein say police used force to disperse the gathering and arrested more than 35 women, including several well-known activists. Authorities accused the group of violating Section 144 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, a legal provision that bans public assemblies in designated areas. The detainees were released later that evening after nearly 10 hours in custody.

For the past eight years, Aurat March organizers have marked International Women’s Day (March 8) with creative demonstrations to raise awareness against patriarchy and advocate for the rights of women and marginalized communities in Pakistan. Over the years, marches have been typically organized in several major cities, including    Islamabad, Lahore, Karachi, and Multan, where the four chapters are based. While the rallies have often faced pushback from authorities and conservative religious groups, organizers say this year’s detentions in Islamabad marked an unusually severe response.

On the morning of March 8, Aurat March organizers and participants gathered at a supermarket in Sector F-6, intending to march toward the Islamabad Press Club located downtown. Before the rally could begin, police detained the group and transported them in prison vans. Their mobile phones were confiscated, and they were taken to the Women’s Police Station in G-7. Witnesses said that friends and family members who arrived at the station seeking information about the detainees were also threatened with arrest.

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A war that began between the United States and Iran on February 28 led to a two-week ceasefire on April 8, brokered through mediation efforts by Pakistan. Islamabad invited both countries to engage in negotiations. Although the first round of talks, held in Islamabad from April 11 to 12, ended in a deadlock, discussions continued behind closed doors, away from media scrutiny. While political leaders sought a path toward peace, a female anchor from GTV News faced a separate struggle, becoming the target of online harassment and abusive commentary.

On April 11–12, media outlets from around the world gathered at the Jinnah Convention Center in Islamabad, Pakistan’s capital, located less than two kilometers from the venue where the official talks were taking place. As social media buzzed with commentary on logistical arrangements and even the branding of coffee for journalists, a photograph of Gharida Farooqi, anchorperson at GTV News, wearing a green cord-set suit, went viral—accompanied by derogatory remarks about her attire. Some accounts circulated morphed images of her, while others engaged in gender-based harassment and shared AI-generated videos of the anchor.

Gharida Farooqi, no stranger to online harassment, filed a complaint with the National Cyber Crime Investigation Agency (NCCIA) soon after the images began circulating. At the same time, she quietly gathered evidence to help identify those responsible.

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In 2009, 93.7% of Mexico’s governors were men, as were 72.4% of federal deputies and 80.5% of senators.

Seventeen years later, the numbers are very different, as major progress has been made in increasing women’s representation in Mexican politics. Federal gender parity laws, including a 2019 constitutional reform dubbed paridad en todo (parity in everything), have supported the progress.

Today, Mexico has achieved virtual parity in women’s political representation, and the country — as everyone knows — has a female president for the first time.

In this week’s “Mexico in Numbers” article, we take a look at women’s representation in President Claudia Sheinbaum’s cabinet, at the head of state governments and in federal Congress. We also compare female political representation in Mexico to that in the United States.

Let’s get into the numbers!

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Abstract: The election of Sanae Takaichi as Japan’s first female prime minister in October 2025, coupled with the Liberal Democratic Party’s historic supermajority in the February 2026 lower house election, invites examination of what women’s political leadership actually means for gender equality. We provide an overview of the key gender-related issues surrounding Takaichi’s rise to power and the broader legislative landscape, arguing that her impressive political triumphs underscore a tension long recognized by political scientists: descriptive representation (i.e., who holds office) does not necessarily improve substantive representation (i.e., whose interests are advanced through policy). Takaichi’s time as prime minister, we argue, can be understood as a test case for the limits of descriptive representation, as voters appear to substitute descriptive and symbolic satisfaction with demands for substantive representation.

Keywords: gender equality, descriptive representation, substantive representation, female leadership, Sanae Takaichi

On February 8, 2026, Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi successfully led the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) to the largest majority any single Japanese party has secured in the lower house in the postwar era. The LDP won 316 of 465 seats, a historic supermajority that will help Takaichi enact her campaign promises and has also silenced many of her critics. It can be argued that Japan’s first female prime minister now commands more legislative authority than any of her (male) predecessors.

This electoral outcome raises important questions about representation. When she first won the prime ministership on October 21, 2025, Takaichi had broken what commentators have liked to describe as “the ultimate glass ceiling” in a country that ranks 118th out of 148 economies in the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report 2025, which is lower than Uzbekistan (#110) and only a bit higher than Jordan (#122). In stark contrast to Japan’s international gender ranks, an October 2025 Kyodo News poll found that 86 percent of Japanese considered it “desirable” or “somewhat desirable” to have a female prime minister. These data align with other polling done by the Stanford Japan Barometer in the last several years, which has consistently shown that the Japanese public prefers female elected officials. But it’s not clear exactly why this is the case. Do they value female politicians, or Takaichi specifically, or the policies that a female politician might promote, or both? The answer matters here because it helps us understand what Japanese voters think about gender and gender-related policies.

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A civil society activist is calling for the urgent enactment of a formal legal framework to enforce the 35% affirmative action for women, warning that without “punishment” for non-compliance, political parties will continue to treat gender equality as a mere “song” rather than a reality.

During a comprehensive assessment of the political landscape on Thursday, Grace John Kenyi—Executive Director for the Centre for Strengthening Community Voice—highlighted significant progress in mentoring young female leaders.

Speaking during the “Amplifying Voices of Women and Girls” program, she also exposed the “dark underbelly” of the political arena, citing challenges ranging from online harassment to demands for sexual favors.

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Quotas designed to bring gender parity to parliaments have an overall positive impact on support for female political leadership – especially after women members of parliament take office. Furthermore, there is no evidence of a backlash among men.

That’s what I found in a study published in October 2025 looking at the impact of gender-parity quotas in Namibia, in sub-Saharan Africa.

In 2013, Namibia’s dominant political party, the South West Africa People’s Organization, or SWAPO, quietly rewrote its internal rules. From that point forward, every spot on its parliamentary candidate list would alternate between a man and a woman.

Most prior research on measures to encourage gender parity in politics focuses on national or legislative policies rather than voluntary party quotas. Namibia offers an unusually “clean” case in that SWAPO is electorally dominant and did not face grassroots pressure to adopt its quota policy. That makes it possible to isolate the effects of the quota itself, rather than any preexisting trend in public attitudes.

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