Women's Leadership
Across Latin America, democracy is coming under severe pressure. Authoritarian leaders across the continent have been entrenching political power through constitutional manipulation, militarised policing and the persecution of dissent.
In Venezuela, Nicaragua, El Salvador and Argentina, regimes are increasingly eroding democracy and mounting a backlash against human rights.
It is in this bleak regional landscape that the Nobel Committee’s decision to award the 2025 peace prize to María Corina Machado has landed. The award is a recognition of one woman’s defiance. But it is also an opportunity to ask what kind of democracy and what kind of peace the world should aspire to.
Machado has long been the face of Venezuela’s democratic opposition. Disqualified from public office, vilified by Nicolás Maduro’s regime and repeatedly threatened, she embodies the persistence of civic dissent.
The Nobel prize committee’s citation reads: “She is receiving the Nobel Peace Prize for her tireless work promoting democratic rights for the people of Venezuela, and for her struggle to achieve a just and peaceful transition from dictatorship to democracy.”
Yet that transition is a long way from being achieved and remains deeply uncertain. Venezuela has fallen victim to increasing political polarisation and is now suffering one of the worst displacement crises in the hemisphere, with 8 million people having left the country since 2014. And the threat of US interference is ever present.
Member Adiguve, the coordinator of the Young Women in Politics Forum in Benue, has called for more women’s participation in politics.
Ms Adiguve said on Sunday in Makurdi that women should stop restricting themselves to the position of women leaders in politics.
The coordinator urged women to aspire to occupy all positions within their political parties and the government.
She said the forum was already conducting extensive public enlightenment across the 23 local councils, educating women on the need to join active politics.
Ms Adiguve stated that the forum was also pushing for the full implementation of the 35 per cent affirmative action on women in the state.
The opposition movement in Venezuela, spearheaded by María Corina Machado, has many allies worldwide.
After last year’s election, the US and the European Parliament formally recognised Edmundo González as Venezuela's President. The UK dismissed Nicolás Maduro’s election win as "fraudulent".
When Machado was briefly arrested during protests ahead of President Maduro’s inauguration, Donald Trump posted a statement saying that she and the "president-elect González" are "peacefully expressing the voices and the WILL of the Venezuelan people with hundreds of thousands of people demonstrating against the regime".
He added that: "These freedom fighters should not be harmed and MUST stay SAFE and ALIVE!"
Both Machado and González were accused of "treason" after the election by the Venezuelan government.
Full article here.
Newswise — Washington, D.C. - October 6, 2025 − As the non-partisan Women & Politics Institute at American University marks its 25th anniversary, a new nationwide survey underscores both the progress women have made in politics and the barriers that remain. The poll, She Leads: Progress and Persistent Barriers for Women in Politics, finds that while voters strongly support electing more women and trust them on key issues, lingering biases and double standards continue to shape the path to the presidency.
The poll of 801 registered voters, conducted September 3–6, 2025, by Breakthrough Campaigns in conjunction with WPI’s Gender on the Ballot project, highlights a paradox in public opinion: progress in attitudes toward women leaders coupled with persistent resistance to a woman in the Oval Office.
“These findings capture both the momentum and the headwinds for women in politics,” said Betsy Fischer Martin, Executive Director of the Women & Politics Institute. “As we mark WPI’s 25th anniversary, the results remind us why our mission matters. Voters clearly value the perspective women bring and want to see more women in office. But when it comes to the presidency, stereotypes and double standards still cast a long shadow. That tension will define the next chapter in women’s political leadership.”
One year on from her inauguration as Mexico’s first female president, Claudia Sheinbaum still commands the sort of popular support many leaders can only wish for.
Roughly 70% of Mexicans approve of her performance, according to an August poll by Buendía & Márquez for the newspaper El Universal.
Although that’s down from 80% in February, it’s still a sharp contrast to US President Donald Trump, whose rating is hovering just over 40% eight months into his second term, according to a CNN poll aggregate.
So, what’s the key to Sheinbaum’s success?
Surveys suggest one of her most popular achievements has been the expansion of social support programs for millions of citizens, including seniors, students, single mothers and women in general. These are in part a continuation of the policies that made her predecessor and mentor, former President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, so popular and reflect the slogan that swept him into power: “For the good of all, first the poor.”
Full article here.
Maria Del Carmen Huber Guevara, 63, travelled in a bus with 60 other people all night just to get the chance to see Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum in person during a rally Sunday in Mexico City.
Huber Guevara said she left her home in Boca del Rio, in the state of Veracruz, at 11 p.m. local time for the 400-kilometre trip northwest to the national capital where she arrived at 6 a.m.
"[She] is the best because she is the first female president and, the truth is, she is working well for us," said Huber Guevara, sitting on a chair in Constitution Square, which was jammed with tens of thousands of Sheinbaum supporters waiting to hear the president speak from a large white stage to mark her first year in office.
The crowds spilled into the adjacent streets beneath the white flags of Sheinbaum's party, the left-populist National Regeneration Movement, known as Morena, which fluttered among blimp-like white balloons.
Huber Guevara said that Sheinbaum's government had finally given her title to her home where she's lived for over 30 years as part of a neighbourhood that grew on squatted land.
Full article here.
Uganda adopted the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and was one of the first countries to integrate them into its National Development Plan. Under Goal 5, countries commit to promoting and guaranteeing women’s full and effective participation and equal opportunities for leadership at all levels of decision-making. This survey report is a follow-up of the baseline survey of women in local governments that was conducted by the Uganda Bureau of Statistics in 2017 and addresses three specific objectives:
1) To update and track progress towards attainment of gender parity in political representation at LG level;
2) To assess the extent to which women in LGs effectively contribute to local decision-making processes; and
3) To provide a deeper understanding of the factors that hinder elected women in LGs from effectively fulfilling their mandate.
The study was undertaken using Local Government (LG)’s election data from the Electoral Commission and survey data collected through key informant interviews with political leaders at the LG levels and focus group discussions with community people. The survey was conducted in Gulu, Nwoya, and Pader in the North; Napak, and Morotoin Karamoja sub-region; Pallisa and Bugiri in the East; and Kiryandongo in the West. Survey data was analysed using both quantitative (descriptive statistics) and qualitative techniques, which involved qualitative data from focus group discussions and open-ended survey responses from individual respondents was analysed through the following steps: transcribing the qualitative responses; pooling the transcribed responses from the various FGDs according to specific research questions; identifying the main ideas that occur in the answers to each question and creating themes; and writing narratives to describe the themes.
Click here to download the report.
Advancing Gender Equality in National Climate Plans: Progress and Higher Ambitions highlights the latest data on country progress in integrating gender considerations into their national climate plans, or Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), under the UNDP Climate Promise initiative. UNDP supports 120 countries through the Climate Promise to reach their climate goals as part of the Paris Agreement. The brief also explores how countries can scale up ambitions on gender integration in the NDC implementation process, as well as the challenges and opportunities that could arise as countries move from pledges to realizing these gender commitments.
Click here to access the report.
This article analyses how women governors, mayors, and local elected officials promoted public health and social protection in countries where men chief executives failed to take steps to contain the virus. We focus on adverse circumstances in six cases: Brazil, the United States, the Philippines, Japan, Mexico, and India. While individual women may not see their leadership in feminist terms, their pandemic response contrasted with men chief executives’ hypermasculine bravado and slapdash decision-making. Women leaders relied on science, co-ordinated community outreach, and attended to the needs of marginalised groups. Their stories reveal women’s resiliency, resourcefulness, and resolve at the local level.
Click here to access the article
Indians accept women as political leaders, but many favor traditional gender roles in family life.
More than half a century ago, India was one of the first countries in the world to elect a woman as prime minister, and the country currently has several highly influential women politicians, including Sonia Gandhi, the head of one of the major national parties. Today, most Indians say that “women and men make equally good political leaders,” and more than one-in-ten feel that women generally make better political leaders than men, according to a recent Pew Research Center survey of nearly 30,000 adults throughout India. Only a quarter of Indian adults take the position that men make better political leaders than women.
Click here to access the report.
Political gender equality is a central pillar of democracy, as all people, independently of gender, should have an equal say in political representation and decision-making. In practice, democracies are generally better at guaranteeing gender equality than most non-democratic regimes. According to International IDEA’s Global State of Democracy Indices, 41 per cent of democracies have high levels of gender equality, while this is the case in only two of the world’s authoritarian regimes (Belarus and Cuba). The democracies with low levels of gender equality are also exceptional (only four, all weak democracies - Iraq, Lebanon, Solomon Islands and Papua New Guinea). Low levels of gender equality are much more common in non-democracies – more than one third of them fall into this category.
Despite more than half the countries in the world being democracies of some form, levels of political gender equality have not kept pace with democratic progress. In 2022, only 26 per cent of legislators in the world are women, according to the Inter-Parliamentary Union. At the current rate, gender parity will not be achieved until 2062, according to International IDEA’s estimate. The proportion of women heads of state is even lower. In 2022, only 19 countries in the world have women in the highest office of executive power. Of these, all except four are democracies. Moreover, as global democratic progress is threatened by rising authoritarianism and democratic backsliding, fragile levels of gender equality, further weakened by the pandemic, are at risk of more setbacks, as gender is increasingly used as a weapon in such processes.
Click here to read the full article published by International IDEA on 7 March 2022.
The pantheon of autocratic leaders includes a great many sexists, from Napoléon Bonaparte, who decriminalized the murder of unfaithful wives, to Benito Mussolini, who claimed that women “never created anything.” And while the twentieth century saw improvements in women’s equality in most parts of the world, the twenty-first is demonstrating that misogyny and authoritarianism are not just common comorbidities but mutually reinforcing ills. Throughout the last century, women’s movements won the right to vote for women; expanded women’s access to reproductive health care, education, and economic opportunity; and began to enshrine gender equality in domestic and international law—victories that corresponded with unprecedented waves of democratization in the postwar period. Yet in recent years, authoritarian leaders have launched a simultaneous assault on women’s rights and democracy that threatens to roll back decades of progress on both fronts.
Click here to read the full article published by Foreign Affairs.