Women's Leadership
Ulaanbaatar, May 22, 2025 /MONTSAME/. The “We Women” Forum, jointly organized by the Secretariat of the State Great Khural, the United Nations, and the Korea International Cooperation Agency (KOICA), opened on May 21, 2025, at the State Palace.
Speaker of the State Great Khural of Mongolia Amarbayasgalan Dashzegve delivered opening remarks, stating, “Last year, amendments were made to the Law on Parliamentary Elections, adopting a mixed electoral system and legislating that no less than 30 percent of the candidate list of political parties and 50 percent of candidates in constituencies must be women. As a result, of the 1,341 candidates in the 2024 Parliamentary Election, 38.7 percent, or 520 candidates, were women, a historic high, and 32 women were elected to the State Great Khural, bringing women’s representation in Parliament to 25.4 percent, also a record.”
Full article published by Montsame on 22 May 2025.
Image by Montsame
Women bring different perspectives of cultures and conflict and when those voices are at the negotiating table a lasting peace is more likely, writes Maha Akeel.
It is important to include women at the negotiation table of conflict resolution and peacebuilding early in the process and not be persuaded to delay that for any reason. Ensuring that women’s rights, needs, and expectations are reflected in any texts adopted during the talks lays the groundwork for their political participation and social empowerment later. Third-party mediators can and should play a role in including women in such negotiations whether as negotiation delegates or mediators. A mediator is a neutral third party and a negotiator takes sides or negotiate on behalf of a side.
Including women in peace processes
Research indicates that women’s participation in peace processes, whether at the formal or informal level, leads to a more durable peace. Women not only bring different experiences of war from men but also different perspectives. Most often, through their informal networks and grassroots activism, women can bridge ethnic, cultural, and religious divides, such as in Liberia, Nigeria, and Somalia.
Despite these documented benefits, women face barriers to their effective participation in peace negotiation processes. One of the most persistent and difficult to overcome is the structural problems of patriarchy. Patriarchal structures define the roles women are allowed or assigned to play in peacebuilding and their level of involvement. Even if their numbers are increasing steadily in the political sphere, women remain constrained by patriarchal structures of male leadership.
Mediators play an important role in supporting women’s inclusion in peace processes and in leading by example through having women in mediation. However, from 1990 to 2018, mediation was involved in only 34 per cent of the total 876 conflict-years, and of those mediations only 10 per cent included at least one woman as co-mediator. Despite evidence that women’s full participation makes peacebuilding much more effective, the number of women in decision-making roles is actually falling.
In 2023, women represented only 9.6 per cent of negotiators, 13.7 per cent of mediators and 26.6 per cent of signatories in peace processes. According to a report by the United Nations Secretary General, women were virtually absent from talks on ending the conflicts in Ethiopia, Sudan, Myanmar and Libya. In Muslim societies, culture and tradition are most often used to justify the exclusion of women from peace processes even though the women are active. In fact, women were consulted and included in resolving conflicts and negotiating peace since the time of Prophet Mohamed.
Full article published by the London School of Economics on 23 May 2025.
Image credits: LSE
Artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming our world—but when it reflects existing biases, it can reinforce discrimination against women and girls. From hiring decisions to healthcare diagnoses, AI systems can amplify gender inequalities when trained on biased data. So how can we ensure AI is ethical and inclusive? Zinnya del Villar, a leading expert in responsible AI, shares insights on the challenges and solutions in a recent conversation with UN Women.
What is AI gender bias and why does it matter?
“AI systems, learning from data filled with stereotypes, often reflect and reinforce gender biases,” says Zinnya del Villar. “These biases can limit opportunities and diversity, especially in areas like decision-making, hiring, loan approvals, and legal judgments.”
At its core, AI is about data. It is a set of technologies that enable computers to do complex tasks faster than humans. AI systems, such as machine learning models, learn to perform these tasks from the data they are trained on. When these models rely on biased algorithms, they can reinforce existing inequalities and fuel gender discrimination in AI.
Imagine, training a machine to make hiring decisions by showing it examples from the past. If most of those examples carry conscious or unconscious bias – for example, showing men as scientists and women as nurses – the AI may interpret that men and women are better suited for certain roles and make biased decisions when filtering applications.
This is called AI gender bias— when the AI treats people differently on the basis of their gender, because that’s what it learned from the biased data it was trained on.
Full article published by UN Women on 5 February 2025.
What you need to know:
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The Finnish President, who is on a three-day official visit to Tanzania, made the remarks during a tour of the facility in Ilala District on Friday, 16 May 2025.
Dar es Salaam. The President of Finland, Mr Alexander Stubb, described the Finnish-supported initiative Machinga Complex in Dar es Salaam as a shining example of multi-stakeholder cooperation to promote gender equality and empower women.
The Finnish President, who is on a three-day official visit to Tanzania, made the remarks during a tour of the facility in Ilala District on Friday, 16 May 2025.
He praised the Women’s Leadership and Economic Rights (WLER) Project as a model of collaboration between the governments of Finland and Tanzania, UN Women, and women in both business and politics.
Full article published by The Citizen on 16 May 2025.
Image by The Citizen
As we commemorate World Telecommunications and Information Society Day this year, with its theme of gender equality in digital transformation, we focus on the transformative power of technology in the lives of women across Egypt. Central to this progress in Egypt is the Qodwa-Tech initiative, launched by the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology (MCIT) and supported by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).
Since its inception in 2019, Qodwa-Tech has been empowering women across all governorates, training over 32,000 women so far. Its core mission is to bridge the gender digital divide by equipping women with essential digital skills—from social media marketing and e-commerce to advanced areas like artificial intelligence—and fostering leadership capabilities.
Today, we shine a spotlight on inspiring women beneficiaries of the Qodwa-Tech initiative—women whose lives are being transformed by the power of technology. Their stories exemplify resilience, innovation, and leadership—proof that digital inclusion is a vital tool for achieving gender equality and sustainable development.
Full article published by UNDP on 17 May 2025.
Naila Kabeer is a Professor Emerita in Gender and International Development at the Department of International Development, London School of Economics and Political Science. She is also a Faculty Associate at LSE’s International Inequalities Institute and serves on the governing Naila’s extensive work and research focuses on gender equity, social justice, labour markets, and poverty alleviation. Naila Kabeer joined a two-day Expert Group Meeting organized by UN Women to address one of the most persistent barriers to gender equality in political and public life: discriminatory social norms. The event held on 4-5 February 2025 brought together feminist scholars, policymakers, activists, and practitioners to chart a path forward for transforming social norms and ensuring women’s full and effective political participation. This experts’ meeting was organized under the WYDE | Women’s Leadership, funded by the European Union, which is a collaborative global effort aimed at advancing women’s full and effective political participation and decision-making at all levels, especially those most often left furthest behind.
what advice would you give to young women aspiring to lead in their communities and countries?
Have courage. The world is not always kind to young women who step forward! Find support, build alliances, you don’t have to face the system alone. Be present in every space where decisions are made and make people aware that gender equality matters everywhere. Having allies and a strong constituency behind you will give you the strength to keep going. And finally, never let anyone put you down!
Full interview available here.
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.
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.