Women's Leadership
Former St. Gallen National Councillor Hanna Sahlfeld-Singer has died, according to an obituary in the "St. Galler Tagblatt". The former SP politician would have been 82 years old next Friday.
Sahlfeld-Singer was the first female SP National Councillor from St. Gallen from 1971 to 1975 and was one of the first eleven female National Councillors ever, as the SP and the SP Women of the Canton of St. Gallen wrote in the advertisement. "She will be fondly remembered as a pioneer for equality and as a fighter for human rights, against poverty and for social justice," it continued.
Shortly before she took office, women in Switzerland had just been granted the right to vote at federal level. When Sahlfeld-Singer entered the Federal Palace on December 14, 1971, a porter told her that there were no guided tours on that day - to which she replied that she was there to be sworn in, as she said in an SRF interview in 2021.
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?
Abstract
Much of the literature on women’s-rights activism in the Muslim world presents such activism as employing discourses either of egalitarianism (secular) or of complementarianism (religious). This article analyzes the recent framing of demands for women’s right to political office by elite Islamic women in Iran and Turkey in terms outside this dichotomy. Drawing on data gathered from personal interviews as well as on careful study of public statements and publications by elite women, or those backed by state institutions, this article demonstrates the inadequacy of understanding women’s activism in Muslim contexts as employing either an egalitarian or a complementarian approach by highlighting a more nuanced conceptualization of women’s-rights framing and organizing in accordance with shifting contexts and political ideologies. Specifically, it shows how Islamic women’s-rights activists who are closely affiliated with their governments at times strategically adopt a “gender justice” framing, as opposed to “gender equality,” to appeal to more conservative sectors of their society. This strategy can have important policy implications and lead to shifts in political discourse about women and politics. However, elite women’s backing from and affiliation with conservative ruling elites can lead some groups, particularly secular feminists, to perceive their use of gender justice discourse differently and to be dismissive of their efforts
Women of Iran, similar to those across many parts of the region, benefit from a long history of feminist activism. Refusing to remain silent to discriminatory laws, practices, and behaviors, women have been struggling for equality, freedom, and justice through grassroots mobilization against conservative religious rule.
The latest spark of feminist resistance on a mass level occurred in September 2022 over the killing of Kurdish-Iranian Mahsa Jina Amini from injuries she sustained while in police custody for allegedly violating Iran’s conservative hijab laws. Under the banner of, “woman, life, freedom,” women led vast street protests for months in demand for basic rights and liberties, risking their lives and freedoms in the face of a violent state crackdown. Building on decades of women’s rights organizing, women across Iran rose to express their frustrations from systemic gender discrimination codified in Iran’s laws, as well as their intentional marginalization from politics.
In this latest wave of protests, large sections of the population, regardless of gender, region, ethnicity, age, and religious identity, also joined in—recognizing that women’s demands for equality and freedom form the foundations of broader demands for democracy, human rights, and justice.
Large-scale protests that erupted in 2022 across Iran, centering on women’s rights, captured the world’s attention.
Iranians peacefully protested in the streets of places ranging from Tehran to small towns across the country, chanting, “Woman, life, freedom.” The protests reflected many Iranians’ growing frustration with the political regime in power since 1979 – and its ongoing violation of citizens’ basic rights, especially those of women and other historically marginalized groups.
While the latest wave of street protests dwindled by the first few months of 2023, nonviolent protests for freedom, democracy and equality have a long history in Iran and continue today.
The Nobel Peace Prize committee granted its 2023 prize to Narges Mohammadi, a prominent and currently imprisoned women’s rights advocate in Iran. This recognized popular resistance to Iran’s authoritarian regime.
As a scholar of women’s rights in Muslim cultures, I have documented women’s political activism in Iran and other Middle Eastern countries. My research shows that even when women are not demonstrating en masse in the streets, they consistently fight against gender discrimination, often at their own peril.
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.