Women's Leadership

A century on from women winning the right to vote in the U.S., our nation has made huge progress on many fronts. But plenty more is needed—and above all in the political sphere. The U.S. compares badly to most other countries in the world in terms of gender equality in politics—including to our nearest neighbors, Canada and Mexico.

Measuring gender equality

The 2020 Global Gender Gap Report from the World Economic Forum ranks progress toward equality in 153 countries around the world. The U.S. is in a disappointing 53rd place, compared to 25th place for Mexico and 19th place for Canada. WEF calculates gender equality in each country based on four equally weighted domains: educational attainment, health and survival, economic participation and opportunity, and political empowerment. WEF calculates the degree of gender equality in each domain, drawing on a range on indicators for each, where each indicator ranges from 0 to 1, with 1 indicating parity.

Click here to see the academic article.

• Since 1995, the world has made important strides in advancing gender equality. The increase in female representation in parliaments across the globe has been driving these advances, although there has been some progress on other indicators used to measure Gender Equality in the Global State of Democracy (GSoD) Indices.
• Democracies provide better guarantees for gender equality. Out of 29 countries that scored highly in the GSoD Indices on Gender Equality in 2018, 28 of them are democracies.
• There are wide regional variations in Gender Equality, with North America and Europe seeing the highest scores, and the Middle East the lowest. However, the greatest progress over the 25-year period has been achieved in Africa, and Latin America and the Caribbean.
• The representation of women in parliament is considerably better today than 25 years ago. The world average has increased from 10 per cent in 1995 to 23 per cent in 2018 (and 24 per cent in 2019). The percentage of women legislators is highest in Latin America and the Caribbean (28 per cent), and lowest in the Middle East (11 per cent).
• Despite progress made to date, at the current rate it will take another 46 years to reach gender parity in all parliaments.
• Civic space is shrinking across all regions of the world and across all levels of democratic performance. The shrinking of civic space has had severe effects on women’s participation in civil society, as women’s organizations tend to be the most vulnerable, the least well-resourced and the least networked.
• Over the 25-year period since 1995, the global average of women’s participation in civil society organizations has seen very slow improvement. While the Middle East is the lowest performer, North America and Europe have the highest scores, although Europe has witnessed some declines in the last five years.

Click here to see the academic article.

Gender-based violence (GBV) increases during every type of emergency – whether economic crises, conflict or disease outbreaks. Pre-existing toxic social norms and gender inequalities, economic and social stress caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, coupled with restricted movement and social isolation measures, have led to an exponential increase in GBV. Many women are in ‘lockdown’ at home with their abusers while being cut off from normal support services.

This briefing note provides concrete actions and strategies that UNDP, UN agencies and other development partners can take to prevent and address GBV in the context of COVID-19. It includes recommendations for adapting dedicated GBV services and support to the crisis context, and for mainstreaming GBV prevention and response in 'non-GBV specific' interventions. 

Click here to see the report.

Conventional wisdom holds that women politicians confront a parenting dilemma. Those with children are questioned about their ability to balance parental roles with political responsibilities, but child-free women are regarded as unable to relate to “ordinary” families or perform well in “feminine” policy areas. As both women and men are now balancing parenthood with politics, the time is ripe to re-investigate how cultural ideas about family life shape understandings of political leadership. By systematically comparing newspaper coverage of 22 Canadian and Australian government leaders with diverse families, our study investigates the ways in which discourses of family shape representations of high-profile politicians. It provides valuable insights into the ways in which politicians’ levels of conformity to the idealized western family model shape perceptions of political legitimacy and authenticity for women and men, and parents and non-parents. We find that when the families of newly elected leaders are discussed in newspaper coverage, the message conveyed is that only the “right” kind of family will facilitate political success.

Click here to see the Academic Article.

We assessed the effects of female political representation on mortality among children younger than age five in Brazil and the extent to which this effect operates through coverage with conditional cash transfers and primary care services. We combined data on under-five mortality rates with data on women elected as mayors or representatives in state and federal legislatures for 3,167 municipalities during 2000–15. Results from fixed-effects regression models suggest that the election of a female mayor and increases in the shares of women elected to state legislatures and to the federal Chamber of Deputies to 20 percent or more were significantly associated with declines in under-five mortality. Increasing the political representation of women was likely associated with beneficial effects on child mortality through pathways that expanded access to primary health care and conditional cash transfer programs.

Click here to read the full article published by Health Affairs on 6 November 2020.

The Center for American Women and Politics (CAWP), a unit of the Eagleton Institute of Politics at Rutgers University, is proud to announce the launch of the online CAWP Women Elected Officials Database, a first-of-its-kind tool for exploring and analyzing women’s current and historical representation in the U.S. political system. The CAWP Women Elected Officials Database includes every woman officeholder in U.S. history at the federal, statewide elected executive, and state legislative levels. This tool expands on the officeholder database that CAWP has long kept and shared with researchers, and, crucially, transforms it into a searchable, online format for public access.

For further information, please click here.