Women's Leadership
SEOUL, June 03 (AJP) - The Ruling Democratic Party candidate and former justice minister Choo Mi-ae is certain to win the Gyeonggi Province gubernatorial race, making her the first woman to head a metropolitan or provincial government in South Korean history.
According to the National Election Commission on Wednesday, Choo is projected to defeat People Power Party candidate Yang Hyang-ja in the June 3 local elections. The six-term lawmaker maintained a wide lead over Yang throughout the campaign, cementing her victory early on.
Her win breaks a long-standing glass ceiling in South Korean politics. Since the country introduced nationwide local elections in 1995, women have consistently run for top regional posts but have never won.
The closest attempts occurred in 2022 and 2010. In the 2022 Gyeonggi governor race, conservative candidate Kim Eun-hye lost to Democratic Party candidate Kim Dong-yeon by a margin of 0.15 percentage points after a tight race that stretched into the morning after election day. In 2010, Democratic Party candidate Han Myeong-sook lost the Seoul mayoral election to Oh Se-hoon by 0.2 percentage points.
Nyaradzayi Gumbonzvanda, Deputy Executive Director for Normative Support, UN System Coordination, and Programme Results, visited Bangladesh from 16–21 May this year. During her visit, she travelled to Dhaka and Cox’s Bazar and engaged with key UN Women partners, including government counterparts, civil society organisations, and development partners, to discuss both opportunities and challenges in advancing gender equality in Bangladesh.
In an interview with Prothom Alo, Gumbonzvanda speaks on gender equality issues and ways to strengthen collaboration to accelerate the implementation of international and national commitments on gender equality. She was joined by Christine Arab, Regional Director, UN Women Regional Office for Asia and Pacific. The interview was taken by Ayesha Kabir.
80 years ago, a landmark referendum empowered women in Italy and led to the birth of the Italian Republic.
On 2 June 1946, millions of Italian women entered polling stations across a country still scarred by war and queued to do something their mothers and grandmothers had been denied: cast a vote at national level.
The occasion was the institutional referendum in which the Italian people chose between monarchy and republic, and simultaneously elected a constituent assembly to draft a new constitution.
It was a founding moment in modern Italian history, and it was also, for around half the electorate, the first time they had ever been recognised as full citizens of a democratic state.
80 years on, Italy is marking this anniversary with official ceremonies and events across the country. In addition to celebration, the occasion invites reflection on the long and frequently obstructed journey that led Italian women to the ballot box.
This October, Golden, along with the rest of British Columbia, will head to the polls. Residents will vote for mayor, town councillors, school trustees, and regional district representatives. While the election is still five months away, it is never too early to start thinking about what we want from our local government and who we want leading the next chapter of our community.
Last Wednesday, I had the privilege of sitting down with Connie Barlow, Joy Guyot, Kristi Cooper, and Karen Cathcart for a discussion about women in local politics.
The discussion was held at The Island Restaurant and was open to the public. Organized by the Golden Women’s Resource Centre, the event created a welcoming atmosphere with refreshments and childcare available for parents who wanted to attend.
The conversation centred on the experiences of women in local politics, the challenges they face, the sacrifices they make, and the reasons they continue to serve. It was also a call to action, encouraging more local women to become involved in civic life.
“I noticed and respected the women that I saw doing things, and I thought, I’m going to be one of those women,” Cooper shared.
Around the world, escalating armed conflict, political repression and humanitarian collapse are reshaping daily life for women and girls—often with devastating consequences. From drone warfare in Sudan, to internet blackouts in Iran, to attacks on healthcare infrastructure in Lebanon and Gaza, women are navigating intensifying threats while also sustaining families, communities and survival networks under extraordinary strain. At the same time, women-led organizations and feminist movements confronting these crises increasingly face funding cuts, political repression and shrinking civic space even as demand for their work grows.
Globally, over 676 million women and girls live within 50 kilometers of armed conflict, representing about 17 percent of the female population. This staggering figure—a 74 percent increase since 2010—is tracked and analyzed by the Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace and Security in partnership with PRIO.
But we also know: Feminist movements around the world hold answers to some of the world’s most urgent crises. Ms. Global is taking note of feminists worldwide—and the gendered realities shaping conflict, displacement, political repression and survival. (This edition of Ms. Global contains information from the Women, Peace and Security Conflict Tracker’s May updates.)
Over the past two decades, Turkey has undergone a profound authoritarian transformation. Under AKP rule (in power since 2002), the space for political opposition has steadily contracted: press freedom has been gutted, civil society organisations shut down or co-opted, and the legal and electoral frameworks increasingly bent toward the consolidation of power. The tools of this transformation are by now familiar. Which is not limited to outright repression, but a more systematic effort to delegitimise the opposition by fragmenting it, discrediting its leadership, and making organised dissent appear either dangerous or futile. In this context, sustaining any form of political opposition is genuinely difficult.
Yet that is precisely what the feminist movement in Turkey has done. The feminist movement has remained a consistent, visible, and expanding political force, capable of bringing tens of thousands of women onto the streets and articulating demands that cross deep political divides. The feminist movement in Turkey has built an alternative political possibility: a living demonstration that politics can be practiced differently, that opposition need not mirror the power it resists. And that collective action organised around shared experience rather than ideological uniformity can hold ground even as authoritarian pressure mounts. In a political landscape where the question of how opposition survives is increasingly urgent, what the feminist movement in Turkey has built is not merely a local story. It is a case study in political possibility.
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.
This data story looks at the economic empowerment of women over the past decade and a half across selected Middle East and North Africa (MENA) countries (Algeria, Bahrain, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Liban, Libya, Morocco, Oman, Palestine*, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Tunisia, and the United Arab Emirates). It sets out a few stylised facts on how education, labour markets, laws, and public opinion shape women’s opportunities**. It also looks at how economic realities interact with cultural norms and legal structures across the region. Most importantly, it asks a central question: are women agents of change in their own economic and political trajectories, and how is that visible in the data that follows?
This issue goes beyond human rights or social and economic concerns and directly affects the region’s political and security landscape. As women gain greater opportunities to work, earn and participate in public life, they strengthen the resilience of families and communities, which supports broader social stability and – as research has consistently shown – contributes to higher levels of security and peace.
-
Despite notable normative advances, after 25 years, the effectiveness of the Women, Peace and Security Agenda is threatened by a fragmented global panorama and faces significant challenges and setbacks.
-
In the new context, the following stand out: (a) the increased frequency and complexity of armed conflicts; (b) the rise of ‘anti-gender’ movements and the erosion of women’s rights in many regions; (c) geopolitical divisions, which make it difficult to prioritise comprehensive solutions to conflicts; (d) the Agenda’s funding crisis; (e) the crisis of multilateralism; (f) the reduced representation of women as negotiators and mediators; and (g) the loss of policy coherence and its transformative potential due to the instrumentalisation of the Agenda, often used for geopolitical purposes.
-
For the Agenda to remain relevant, it is crucial that it evolves and adapts to the new global situation and updates its principles with an understanding of the local contexts in which it must be applied.
In 2000, the United Nations Security Council recognized that women’s leadership and gender equality are crucial for international peace and security, and the past 25 years have seen increased attention to this matter. However, the rise in global conflict in recent years risks erasing the modest progress made in previous decades.
Every year, the UN Secretary-General presents an annual report to the Security Council detailing the status of the women, peace and security agenda in the world. This year’s report contains more than one hundred facts and figures on issues ranging from women’s participation in peace processes, peace operations, or politics in conflict-affected countries, to the impact of conflict on women and girls, including atrocities that target them disproportionately, like reproductive violence, gender-based persecution, or conflict-related sexual violence.
This infographic, prepared by UN Women, highlights a few of these facts and figures, along with recommendations to change course.
Abstract
Advocates of women’s rights in many Muslim countries have long demanded the formation of state-level institutional structures that promote and protect women’s rights, in turn contributing to democratization and development. The design and impact of such structures, collectively referred to as national women’s machineries (NWMs), has, however, varied across contexts. This paper advocates analysis of the actors and factors that impact the design, influence, and function of NWMs, with an emphasis on the role of state gender ideology. It argues that NWMs, as formal state institutions, are never conceptualized and formed in a vacuum, with various competing interests impacting their design and function especially in non-democratic and unrepresentative contexts. Through a case study of NWMs in the Islamic Republic of Iran, it shows that despite efforts for cabinet-level women’s rights policy-making since the early 1990s, throughout the past decades such gains have faced backlash and reversal as a result of conservative ideological shifts, at times rendering such institutions illegitimate in the eyes of the Iranian feminist movement.
The act was a forceful symbol of her support for the movement and condemnation of the Iranian regime. “We cannot remain silent against the killing of women and girls like Mahsa (Jina Amini) or Armita (Geravand) who were killed merely because of their hijab,” she says.
Other prominent women, including celebrities, had removed their hijabs in public acts of defiance against Iran’s mandatory hijab laws during the protests. But Vasmaghi’s unveiling held particular significance. Until then, her public persona was that of a deeply pious scholar who consistently observed the hijab in a strict sense without showing any hair—even while lecturing in Europe on her expertise in Islamic fiqh (jurisprudence). What Vasmaghi clearly opposed was not veiling itself but its compulsory nature: Just months before her public unveiling, she had drafted an open letter to the Supreme Leader challenging the Islamic justification for forcing women to cover their hair. In it, she asked pointedly: “How can the Islamic Republic justify such strict enforcement of mandatory veiling when even the Quran does not explicitly require women to cover their hair?