Women's Leadership
Previous work suggests that observing women officeholders increases women’s political ambition. Yet, jumps in women’s representation in the United States’ “Years of the Woman”—following the Anita Hill testimonies and the election of Donald Trump—are linked to women’s exclusion from political decision-making. Drawing on focus groups with prospective women candidates, we theorize that exclusion when combined with a gendered policy threat increases women’s political ambition. Using survey experiments replicated across different samples, we show that women who read about an all-male city council poised to legislate on women’s rights report increased ambition compared with their pretreatment ambition levels and to women in other treatment groups. Women’s increased sense of political efficacy drives these results. When women’s rights are not under discussion, men’s overrepresentation does not move (or even depresses) women’s ambition. Seeing the policy consequences of their exclusion causes some women to seek a seat at the table.
Click here to read the full article published by the American Political Science Association on 30 November 2023.
Image by The American Political Science Association
.
Gender quotas have successfully brought women to positions of political power. But the question remains: how and why do they influence women’s political participation, especially in societies where entrenched patriarchal norms serve as barriers, both within political parties and households? In a recent study published in the American Political Science Review, Tanushree Goyal delves into the world of women politicians in local politics and uncovers their profound impact on reshaping the political landscape, notably in lowering gender-based barriers both within political parties and households.
Click here to read the full article published by the American Political Science Association on 28 November 2023.
Image by American Political Science Association
.
Historically, international relations have been one of the fields with the lowest female representation within the world of politics: except for a few notable exceptions, diplomacy has typically been a “man’s world” (Barrios Baron, 2020; Cengiz, 2023). A clear indicator in this direction is the fact that no woman has yet served as Secretary General in the United Nations.
At the same time, according to a report by GQUAL (2022), on the composition of 88 international tribunals and organisations, out of 578 positions, 234 are occupied by women, reaching only 40.48% of the total. The proportion remains practically the same at the regional level in Latin America and the Caribbean, representing 39% of female participation.
Click here to read the full article published by The Peninsula Qatar on 25 November 2023.
British TV features plenty of women who wield power. This is unsurprising. But what we see little of is scrutiny of how these women are presented and the associated narratives. Stories and characters are compelling and therefore influential; narratives drive the evolution of culture and collective attitudes, so balance and variety in the stories we see in the media, TV and film is key. However, an analysis of several British TV series reveals a tendency to view powerful women through a sceptical lens. In general, women who obtain power and influence in atypical ways are portrayed not as potent changemakers, but as threats. So the question we need to ask is whether we need more narratives that encourage optimism about the potential of renegades and unconventional individuals — particularly women — to succeed in politics.
Click here to read the full article published by Shout Out UK on 21 November 2023.
Image by Shout Out UK
Women’s underrepresentation at all levels of government is a persistent problem in the United States. RepresentWomen’s research shows that although we have made progress towards parity, this progress is slow and inconsistent, meaning we are unlikely to reach gender balance within our lifetimes. Increasing and sustaining women’s leadership in elected office requires us to remove the barriers women candidates and legislators face. This drives our research at RepresentWomen to identify the barriers and system-level solutions we can implement to create a more representative, gender-balanced democracy.
Click here to read the full article published by LA Progressive on 22 November 2023.
Image by LA Progressive
The National Assembly (NA) stated that both the legislature and the executive branches of government have a strong political will to encourage, promote and strengthen the role of women to achieve the Cambodia’s sustainable development goals (SDGs) and its vision for 2030 and 2050.
The body has passed comprehensive laws to integrate gender equality into public policy and laws, taking into account the challenges faced by women.
Click here to read the full article published by The Phnom Penh Post on 22 November 2023.
Image by The Phnom Penh Post
Women participating in politics have navigated unique challenges and opportunities from the coronavirus pandemic. Governments around the world should take these steps to safeguard women’s political inclusion during the pandemic and beyond.
The coronavirus pandemic continues to disrupt political processes around the world. Seventy-three elections have been postponed. Many parliaments have suspended or limited their activities, and over a hundred countries have restricted citizens’ freedom of assembly and expression in the name of public health. Authoritarian and authoritarian-leaning leaders have further taken advantage of the emergency to concentrate power in the executive branch.
Few analyses have probed the gendered consequences of these trends. In the media, the main narrative about gender and pandemic politics has centered on the perceived effectiveness of female politicians in responding to the crisis—including Chancellor Angela Merkel in Germany and Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern in New Zealand. Yet these positive headlines conceal a more worrisome global picture: the pandemic’s profound political and socioeconomic effects could halt or reverse advances in women’s political inclusion.
Click here to read the full article published by Carnegie Endowment on 17 November 2020.
Women Political Leaders and Kantar came together in 2018 to create the Reykjavík Index for Leadership– the first measure of perceptions of women and men in terms of their suitability for leadership. The initial findings revealed significant, complex, and deep-seated prejudice towards women – where women were not seen as equally suitable to lead.
When the Reykjavík Index was launched, we acknowledged that progress in equality for women was far from guaranteed. Across the G7 group of countries, and in multiple areas of economic activity, many of the 2018 Index scores fell short of the target score of 100, which indicates a consensus across society that women and men are equally suited for leadership. Nevertheless, we fully hoped at that time to witness improvements in perceptions in the years to come, with scores of countries and sectors approaching the target score of 100.
Unfortunately, in 2020, the third year of Index results, we can only note a striking absence of progress. Indeed, this year cannot be called a period of advancement.
The Reykjavík Index for Leadership 2020-2021 presents findings drawn from the attitudes of over 20,000 people across ten countries – the G7 nations (comprising Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States) along with India, Kenya, and Nigeria. We believe that the addition of new countries to the G7 nations will allow us to better observe whether progress is being made, where stereotypes endure, and where public policy or private sector intervention is making a difference.
A look at the average score for the G7 countries, which we can now track across three years, shows very little change: it remains a 73. This can be regarded as the gap between the ‘birthright’ of equality for men, and the everyday reality of women’s experiences with inequality across the world.
Click here to see the report.
This study applied a conceptual framework that uses a comparative and gendered approach to estimate the cost of politics, using a set of pre-identified variables regularly incurred by both candidates seeking political office and elected representatives while in office. This consideration was in line with the notion that analysis of election delivery and management should not be looked at in the realm of an event but rather as a cycle. The conceptual framework enabled the research team to arrive at both statistical and qualitative evidence regarding the cost of politics in Uganda.
Click here to see the report.
Are elected officials more responsive to men than women inquiring about access to government services? Women face discrimination in many realms of politics, but evidence is limited on whether such discrimination extends to interactions between women and elected officials. In recent years, several field experiments have examined public officials’ responsiveness. The majority focused on racial bias in the USA, while the few experiments outside the USA were usually single-country studies. We explore gender bias with the first large-scale audit experiment in five countries in Europe (France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, and Netherlands) and six in Latin America (Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, and Uruguay). A citizen alias whose gender is randomized contacts members of parliament about unemployment benefits or healthcare services. The results are surprising. Legislators respond significantly more to women (+3% points), especially in Europe (+4.3% points). In Europe, female legislators in particular reply substantially more to women (+8.4% points).
Click here to see the report.
More than 2.5 billion women and girls around the world are affected in multiple ways by discriminatory laws and the lack of legal protections. In response, UN Women, the African Union, the Commonwealth, Inter-Parliamentary Union, Organisation Internationale de la Francophonie, and Secretaría General Ibero-Americana have jointly issued “Equality in law for women and girls by 2030: A multistakeholder strategy for accelerated action” in close collaboration with the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, Equality Now, Global Citizen, Global Campaign for Equal Nationality Rights, International Association of Women Judges, International Development Law Organization, Muslims for Progressive Values, and Women’s Learning Partnership to tackle persisting discrimination in law.
Between 2019 and 2023, the strategy seeks to fast track the repeal of discriminatory laws in six thematic areas—comprehensive reforms, women’s economic empowerment, minimum age of marriage provisions, nationality rights, discriminatory rape laws, and family and personal status laws—in 100 countries and is expected to address the legal needs of more than 50 million women and girls.
Click here to see the report.
Our report, with U.S.-based National Democratic Institute (NDI), outlines a new framework for understanding how disinformation is being used online to exclude women from public life, in the first major study into this threat to democracy.
The report has found that online spaces are being systematically weaponised to exclude women leaders and to undermine the role of women in public life. Attacks on women which use hateful language, rumour and gendered stereotypes combine personal attacks with political motivations, making online spaces dangerous places for women to speak out. And left unchecked, this phenomenon of gendered disinformation, spread by state and non-state actors, poses a serious threat to women’s equal political participation.
In this research, we investigated state-aligned gendered disinformation in two countries, Poland and the Philippines, through an analysis of Twitter data. The research found evidence of disinformation campaigns which attacked women and used gendered narratives to undermine women who oppose or criticise the state.
For the first time, researchers identified core themes of gendered disinformation, and common strategies used by those engaged in it, finding that campaigns relied not just on false information, but used highly emotive content to try to undermine their targets politically.
The report found that gendered disinformation is parasitic on news events, existing rumours, and underlying social stereotypes, and can be extremely successful in reaching a broad audience to reshape public discourse in a way that harms women.
Demos is calling for systematic improvements to be made to how platforms operate in facilitating, promoting and moderating online speech. Existing responses to disinformation, such as fact-checking, while important, are ineffective in solving this problem.
Click here to access the report.