Women's Leadership
Opening the annual conference of the Gender Equality Commission, the Deputy Secretary of the Council of Europe Bjørn Berge emphasised that “only 27 countries around the world have a woman serving as Head of State or Government and 103 countries have never had a woman in their top executive office. And even where women occupy ministerial roles, they are largely outside of the powerful portfolios such as defence, foreign affairs or finance. There has been, not only a failure to advance, but a regression in gender equality.”
Despite progress in gender equality, women in politics continue to face disproportionate levels of harassment, exclusion, and violence. While gender quotas and anti-discrimination laws have helped increase women’s representation in public life, problems persist. Sexism and violence – both online and offline – continue to deter women from entering or remaining in politics. These threats not only violate human rights but also undermine the foundations of democratic governance.
“Advances in technology and artificial intelligence mean exponential increases in the amount of intimidation, humiliation and disinformation women are subject to. No longer a whisper in a corridor, but an artificially manipulated video or photograph, gone viral in seconds. We cannot say that we have true democracy if half the population does not experience equal access to the public life, experience violence or is effectively silenced,” Deputy Secretary Berge said.
Full article here.
Four days after violence left 51 people dead and devastated key seats of power, the former chief justice of the Supreme Court was appointed as interim prime minister. Parliament was dissolved.
After a four-day power vacuum, Sushila Karki, the former chief justice of Nepal's Supreme Court, was appointed interim prime minister on Friday, September 12. She was officially sworn in late in the evening before the president, Ram Chandra Poudel. Parliament was dissolved.
Karki, age 73, now faces the daunting task of holding the country together and preparing for the next elections, scheduled for March 5, 2026. It is a task made all the more challenging after the protests of September 8 and 9 plunged Nepal into a whirlwind of violence that left 51 dead and ravaged key sites of power in Kathmandu.
The Sudan War series is a joint collaboration between the Center for Economic, Legal, and Social Studies and Documentation – Khartoum (CEDEJ-K), Sudan-Norway Academic Cooperation (SNAC) and African Arguments – Debating Ideas. Through a number of themes that explore the intersections of war, displacement, identities and capital, Sudanese researchers, many of whom are themselves displaced, highlight their own experiences, the unique dynamisms within the larger communities affected by war, and readings of their possible futures.
They say revolutions turn out badly. But they’re constantly confusing two different things, the way revolutions turn out historically and people’s revolutionary becoming. These relate to two different sets of people. Men’s only hope lies in a revolutionary becoming: the only way of casting off their shame or responding to what is intolerable – Gilles Deleuze
Since the early days of the mid-April 2023 war, Emergency Response Rooms (ERRs) have emerged as a practical extension of the Resistance Committees. The latter were grassroots political groups formed during the December 2018 revolution tasked with shaping the direction of the mobilization towards change. The ERRs too are more than a coordinated humanitarian response, as their work and ethos build on the Committees’ original political vision: building a grassroots civic space that is people-centred with the aim of reconfiguring the uneven dynamic between society and the state.
In Bangladesh, the Forum for Women’s Political Rights has called for comprehensive electoral reforms to ensure fair and inclusive representation of women in the political arena.
The forum also demanded direct elections among women candidates to 100 reserved seats in parliament and the mandatory nomination of at least 33% women candidates by every political party to ensure greater representation of women.
During a press conference at Dhaka Reporters Unity (DRU), the forum leaders said the current 50 reserved seats without direct election do not provide women with meaningful political power.
The forum leaders highlighted that although women constitute more than half of the country’s population, their representation in parliament has historically been around just 7 percent.
They therefore believe that women’s representation in parliament should be increased to at least 50 percent, reports United News of Bangladesh (UNB).
That women in Nigeria who have been the backbone of community building, peace processes, and national development have not been well represented in the decision making and governance of the country is no longer a tale as the evidence abound for all to see.
Women representation in the National Assembly remains low, with only 4.2% (20 members out of 469) in the 10th Assembly (2023-2027), comprising 3 of 109 Senators and 17 of 360 members of the House of Representatives which is significantly below the global and African averages and is a result of factors like political party structures and male dominance.
It is trite knowledge that when it comes to political leadership, their voices are not only underrepresented, their contributions are undervalued due to cultural constraints in a society that is primarily patrilineal and patriarchal in nature. Unfortunately for Nigeria, evidence across the world shows that societies that embrace women’s participation in leadership record greater stability, deeper inclusivity, and stronger economic growth.
President Netumbo Nandi-Ndaitwah reaffirmed Namibia’s firm commitment to promoting gender equality across all sectors.
She emphasised that women’s emancipation is both a constitutional duty and a moral obligation.
During the 63rd Pan African Women’s Day celebration in Windhoek over the weekend, President Nandi-Ndaitwah highlighted Namibia’s leadership in gender equality on the continent, ranking first in Africa and eighth worldwide on the latest international gender parity index.
“This ranking underscores our nation’s continuous efforts to empower women through political representation, education, and economic participation,” she stated.
She praised Namibia’s 50/50 gender representation policy, known as the zebra style, championed by Swapo.
“This strategic policy has transformed gender balance within Swapo structures and the National Assembly, serving as a strong example for Africa,” she added.
Politics & Gender is an agenda-setting journal that publishes quality scholarship on gender and politics and on women and politics. It aims to represent the full range of questions, issues, and approaches on gender and women across the major subfields of political science, including comparative politics, international relations, political theory, and U.S. politics.
Politics & Gender short paper series on Gender, Politics, and the Global Pandemic
The Gender, Politics, and the Global Pandemic series features 24 articles. The topics fall into three broad categories: Gender, leadership, and policymaking on Covid-19; gender, health, and public opinion during the Covid-19 pandemic; and Covid-19, caring, and inequality. The papers address such questions as: Were women leaders more successful in managing Covid-19 response? Why are men less likely to report wearing face coverings? How did the pandemic impact elections?
Click here to learn more and access the articles.
Summary: There has been a lot said about how women have done a better job leading during the Covid-19 crisis than men. According to an analysis of 360-degree assessments conducted between March and June of this year, women were rated by those who work with them as more effective. The gap between men and women in the pandemic is even larger than previously measured, possibly indicating that women tend to perform better in a crisis. In fact, women were rated more positively on 13 of the 19 competencies that comprise overall leadership effectiveness in the authors’ assessment.
When discussing the careers of women leaders, there’s a phenomenon referred to as the “glass cliff.” It’s an obvious relative to the term glass ceiling, which describes the invisible barrier to advancement that women often face when they are up for promotion to the highest levels of an organization. The “glass cliff” describes the idea that when a company is in trouble, a female leader is put in charge to save it. When women are finally given a chance to prove themselves in a senior position, they are handed something that is already broken and where the chances of failure are high.
We see this happen frequently enough that it made us wonder, are women in fact more qualified to lead during a crisis? Could that be why they are handed the reins when times are tough?
Click here to read the full article published by the Harvard Business Review on 30 December 2020.
Tool by Make Every Woman Count that monitors elections in Africa.
See it here.
MPs can sometimes be subject to human rights violations, ranging from arbitrary detention and exclusion from public life to even kidnapping and murder in the worst cases. The IPU has been defending MPs in danger for the past 40 years through its Committee on the Human Rights of Parliamentarians.
The map below shows the latest alleged violations of MPs' human rights currently monitored by the IPU. Clicking on a country leads to the page of the parliament, from where you can access the latest information about the case.
See it here.
Violence against women in politics is an intolerable violation of women’s rights which poses fundamental challenges to democratic values and electoral processes. To tackle this issue, the Kofi Annan Foundation commissioned Carmen Alanis, the first female Chief Justice at the Superior Chamber of the Electoral Court of Mexico, and member of the Kofi Annan Foundation’s Electoral Integrity Initiative, to produce a policy paper which highlights the barriers women face in their attempts to access political spaces, as well as the challenges they encounter if elected to public office.
- In attempts to shed light on the extent of the problem, the paper addresses three vital questions:
- Why do women face barriers in exercising their political and electoral rights?
- If violence against women in politics is a global phenomenon with a negative impact on democracies, why is the problem still not being adequately addressed by states?
- Do current models of access to justice engage with the issue effectively?
The paper demonstrates that violence against women in politics undermines electoral integrity by disregarding the principles of universal suffrage and political equality. These principles are not being fulfilled in both newer and older democracies across the world, with various barriers to equal and universal political participation.
Click here to see the report.
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.