Women's Leadership
DAR ES SALAAM: THE United Nations (UN) yesterday said that Tanzania has made significant progress in the advancement of women’s leadership and political participation, saying there should be a legal framework to protect women in the future to attain 50/50 thresholds in leadership.
UN Resident Coordinator, Mr Zlatan Milišić made the statement during the UN Women and Tanzania Editors Forum (TEF) meeting held in Dar es Salaam.
The meeting coordinated by UN women intended to provide findings and recommendations of the gender analysis of Election and Political Party Bills of 2023 to editors.
The Bills were tabled in Parliament on November10 last year.
“There is no doubt that Tanzania has made significant progress in the advancement of women’s leadership and political participation.
Click here to read the full article published by the Daily News Tanzania on 14 January 2024.
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In 2024, 1.5 billion people are expected to vote in national elections in what will be a record year for democracy, with elections happening in at least 64 countries and the European Union.
So what will that mean for women in leadership at a time when men still overwhelmingly dominate on the world stage?
Less than a third of United Nations member states have ever had a woman at the helm. Just 15 countries currently have a woman as Head of State, and 16 have a woman as Head of Government, according to UN Women.
Just over a quarter (26.5 per cent) of parliamentarians in single or lower houses were women in 2023. While that is up 11 per cent in 1995, the pace of change is far from enough to see women get equal representation in legislative decision-making within our lifetimes.
Click here to read the full article published by Women’s Agenda on 15 January 2024.
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More African women are joining and rising up the ranks of the world’s 100 most powerful women, according to Forbes, as they grow their influence in shaping the policies, products and political fights defining the globe.
World Trade Organisation (WTO) director general Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, the former Minister of Finance in Nigeria, has moved the highest on the continent by four places from position 91 in 2022 to 87 in this year’s Forbes "World's 100 Most Powerful Women" rankings.
Okonjo-Iweala, the first African woman to lead the WTO, made it to the list for the seventh time in 2023 since her debut in 2011.
Click here to read the full article published by The Star on 8 January 2024.
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The Pacific Islands Forum Leaders Meeting in Rarotonga, Cook Islands, last month committed to a revitalised gender equality declaration. This declaration, spearheaded by the Pacific Islands Forum Secretariat, was subject to extensive consultation across the region. The first of its seven priority areas is “political leadership and regionalism”, in which leaders have committed to accelerated actions to strengthen the participation of women and girls in all their diversity “at all levels of leadership and decision-making”.
In various ways, women’s political leadership in the Pacific has changed over the last ten years. In 2023, women were represented in the parliament of every national jurisdiction in the region for the first time. Before then, no woman had ever been elected to the legislature of the Federated States of Micronesia. In 2021, the region saw its first female head of government, Fiamē Naomi Mata’afa, elected in Samoa. This followed the region’s first female head of state, Hilda Heine, in the Republic of the Marshall Islands in 2016. Women have held diverse executive portfolios in office, serving as deputy prime minister and leader of the opposition, and as ministers for foreign affairs, education, home affairs and justice, to name a few.
Click here to read the full article published by The Fiji Times on 8 January 2024.
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Amidst the global struggle against gender-based violence, the plight of women in politics battling this pervasive issue remains alarmingly prevalent in Liberia. In a bold initiative led by the National Democratic Institute (NDI) and International Women’s Media Foundation (IWMF) tagged “Breaking the Silence,” emerging as a beacon of hope, dedicated to unearthing the concealed narratives of physical violence endured by women in politics who defiantly challenge societal norms and tirelessly advocate for substantive change.
This groundbreaking endeavor transcends the mere revelation of untold stories, delving deep into the multifaceted challenges encountered by women in their political pursuits. The project aspires to carve a path toward a more inclusive and secure political landscape in Liberia, where women can participate without fear or hindrance.
Click here to read the full article published by Front Page Africa on 04 January 2024.
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This is despite guarantees of equality as provided for in the constitution of Zimbabwe, chapter 4 part 3 section (80) (1), which states: “Every woman has the full and equal dignity of the person with men and this includes equal opportunities in political, economic and social activities.”
In chapter 5 part 3 section (104) (4) the constitution states: “In appointing Ministers and Deputy Ministers, the President must be guided by considerations of regional and gender balance.”
Top human rights lawyer Passmore Nyakureba said political space is also non-existent for women because of the weaponisation of political violence against them.
Click here to read the full article published by The Zimbabwean on 06 January 2024.
Image by: The Zimbabwean
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New reports published ahead of the UN Climate Change Conference COP26 in Glasgow in November show that decision-making and technical panels under UN Climate Change (known as “constituted bodies”) are increasingly integrating a gender perspective into their work, but that male overrepresentation on constituted bodies and on government delegations still remains an issue of concern.
Equal and meaningful participation and leadership of women is vital to achieve climate goals. While women and girls around the world are demanding more climate action at the national and international level and have received increasing recognition for their leadership, in the international climate decision-making process, women’s voices are not yet equally represented.
Click here to read the full article published by UN Climate Change on 12 October 2021.
This working paper is part of UN Women’s research efforts to highlight the importance of women’s leadership and participation in decision-making during the pandemic and beyond. The working paper tackles the question of how women leaders at the national and subnational levels of government managed COVID-19 response and recovery during the pandemic’s first 15 months, from January 2020 through March 2021.
The paper finds that women leaders placed premiums on effective leadership, rapid response, and socially inclusive policies as they understood that the effects of the pandemic would reach far beyond public health, affecting every aspect of society and disproportionately harming women and girls.
The publication also maps out lessons learned and recommendations on how to ensure women participate in and influence decision-making during the pandemic response and recovery.
Click here to read the report.
Special Representative on Gender Issues Hedy Fry (Canada) issued the 2021 Report today with a thematic focus on “Violence against women journalists and politicians: a growing crisis,” shedding light on intensifying and widespread offline and online violence against women in two public fields – journalism and politics.
The report, divided into two parts, explores the impact of such violence and its implications on the fields of journalism and politics, as well as democracy as a whole – outlining that the negative effect goes well beyond physical and mental health challenges. It examines the existing barriers to effective responses and possible ways forward that could be implemented to address this growing issue. Lastly, the report provides information on the dynamics of gender balance in the OSCE structures and its field offices.
Click here to read the full report published by OSCE on 12 August 2021.
The compilation, analysis and dissemination of gender statistics are critical to capture the specific realities in the life of women and men. They are powerful tool to highlight aspects of gender inequality, and to provide an evidence base for developing and monitoring policies and programmes oriented towards reducing these inequalities. Gender data is key to achieve the 2030 Agenda and other national commitments. Government policies and programs in Lebanon articulate the need for measuring and monitoring gender equality, which has led to a substantial increase in demand for data producers to make available relevant and reliable gender statistics.
In response to the rising needs for more gender disaggregated data and indicators, and to better understand trends in gender equalities and inequalities over the past 15 years, CAS- with the support of UNDP- did a compilation of gender-disaggregated indicators based on official survey-based statistics and administrative data. The results were comprehensively presented in the report “The life of Women and Men in Lebanon: A Statistical Portrait”. This compilation provides a better understanding of the country’s progress on gender inequality and highlights critical gaps and disparities yet to be bridged. The report focused on six thematic areas: Demography, health, education, labor market, socio-economic conditions, and decision-making and human rights.
Click here to read the full report published by UNDP on 19 October 2021.
Decades of research has debated whether women first need to reach a “critical mass” in the legislature before they can effectively influence legislative outcomes. This study contributes to the debate using supervised tree-based machine learning to study the relationship between increasing variation in women's legislative representation and the allocation of government expenditures in three policy areas: education, healthcare, and defense. We find that women's representation predicts spending in all three areas. We also find evidence of critical mass effects as the relationships between women's representation and government spending are nonlinear. However, beyond critical mass, our research points to a potential critical mass interval or critical limit point in women's representation. We offer guidance on how these results can inform future research using standard parametric models.
Click here to read the full article published by Cambridge University Press on 21 September 2021.
Abstract
Social norms that legitimise men as political leaders, and undervalue women’s leadership, are a tenacious barrier to women’s representation globally. This article explores the circumstances under which women dynasty politicians, whose legacy connections have provided them with an initial pathway into politics, are able to disrupt these norms. We test a proposed typology of normative change – one that progresses from norm acceptance, to norm modification, then norm resistance – among women dynasty politicians in the Pacific Islands. We find that norms of masculinised political leadership are strong, and in many cases the election of wives, widows, daughters and other relatives of male political actors reinforces these norms through their positioning as ‘placeholders’. Yet some women dynasty politicians can, and do, challenge and extend social norms of leadership. This is especially the case when the ‘legacy advantage’ is a springboard from which women demonstrate – and their publics accept – their own articulation of political leadership.
Click here to access the paper.