Women's Leadership
80 years ago, a landmark referendum empowered women in Italy and led to the birth of the Italian Republic.
On 2 June 1946, millions of Italian women entered polling stations across a country still scarred by war and queued to do something their mothers and grandmothers had been denied: cast a vote at national level.
The occasion was the institutional referendum in which the Italian people chose between monarchy and republic, and simultaneously elected a constituent assembly to draft a new constitution.
It was a founding moment in modern Italian history, and it was also, for around half the electorate, the first time they had ever been recognised as full citizens of a democratic state.
80 years on, Italy is marking this anniversary with official ceremonies and events across the country. In addition to celebration, the occasion invites reflection on the long and frequently obstructed journey that led Italian women to the ballot box.
This October, Golden, along with the rest of British Columbia, will head to the polls. Residents will vote for mayor, town councillors, school trustees, and regional district representatives. While the election is still five months away, it is never too early to start thinking about what we want from our local government and who we want leading the next chapter of our community.
Last Wednesday, I had the privilege of sitting down with Connie Barlow, Joy Guyot, Kristi Cooper, and Karen Cathcart for a discussion about women in local politics.
The discussion was held at The Island Restaurant and was open to the public. Organized by the Golden Women’s Resource Centre, the event created a welcoming atmosphere with refreshments and childcare available for parents who wanted to attend.
The conversation centred on the experiences of women in local politics, the challenges they face, the sacrifices they make, and the reasons they continue to serve. It was also a call to action, encouraging more local women to become involved in civic life.
“I noticed and respected the women that I saw doing things, and I thought, I’m going to be one of those women,” Cooper shared.
Around the world, escalating armed conflict, political repression and humanitarian collapse are reshaping daily life for women and girls—often with devastating consequences. From drone warfare in Sudan, to internet blackouts in Iran, to attacks on healthcare infrastructure in Lebanon and Gaza, women are navigating intensifying threats while also sustaining families, communities and survival networks under extraordinary strain. At the same time, women-led organizations and feminist movements confronting these crises increasingly face funding cuts, political repression and shrinking civic space even as demand for their work grows.
Globally, over 676 million women and girls live within 50 kilometers of armed conflict, representing about 17 percent of the female population. This staggering figure—a 74 percent increase since 2010—is tracked and analyzed by the Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace and Security in partnership with PRIO.
But we also know: Feminist movements around the world hold answers to some of the world’s most urgent crises. Ms. Global is taking note of feminists worldwide—and the gendered realities shaping conflict, displacement, political repression and survival. (This edition of Ms. Global contains information from the Women, Peace and Security Conflict Tracker’s May updates.)
Over the past two decades, Turkey has undergone a profound authoritarian transformation. Under AKP rule (in power since 2002), the space for political opposition has steadily contracted: press freedom has been gutted, civil society organisations shut down or co-opted, and the legal and electoral frameworks increasingly bent toward the consolidation of power. The tools of this transformation are by now familiar. Which is not limited to outright repression, but a more systematic effort to delegitimise the opposition by fragmenting it, discrediting its leadership, and making organised dissent appear either dangerous or futile. In this context, sustaining any form of political opposition is genuinely difficult.
Yet that is precisely what the feminist movement in Turkey has done. The feminist movement has remained a consistent, visible, and expanding political force, capable of bringing tens of thousands of women onto the streets and articulating demands that cross deep political divides. The feminist movement in Turkey has built an alternative political possibility: a living demonstration that politics can be practiced differently, that opposition need not mirror the power it resists. And that collective action organised around shared experience rather than ideological uniformity can hold ground even as authoritarian pressure mounts. In a political landscape where the question of how opposition survives is increasingly urgent, what the feminist movement in Turkey has built is not merely a local story. It is a case study in political possibility.
WINDHOEK, NAMIBIA -Australian women’s political leadership advocate Leonie Morgan AM, has urged countries in Southern Africa to invest in mentorship, financial support, training and women’s networks to accelerate female political participation and leadership.
In an exclusive interview, Morgan said sustainable progress in women’s political representation depends not only on funding, but also on structured mentoring systems and institutional backing that encourage women to contest elections and remain active in public leadership.
Morgan, who co-founded EMILY’s List Australia in 1995, has spent more than three decades supporting women candidates across Australia and parts of the Asia-Pacific region. Through her work, she has helped approximately 800 women run for state and national parliaments, with 385 eventually elected.
She said her passion for women’s leadership was inspired by the late Joan Kirner, the first female Premier of the Australian state of Victoria, whom she described as a mentor and role model.
For 15 years, Mamata Banerjee and her regional Trinamool Congress (TMC) party seemed to embody a political law of India's West Bengal state: they always found a way to survive.
On Monday, that ended.
The firebrand populist's defeat to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) ended her bid for a fourth consecutive term as chief minister - a feat that would have placed her alongside long-serving regional titans such as Jyoti Basu and Naveen Patnaik.
Banerjee's loss brings one of the most remarkable political careers in contemporary India to a moment of profound uncertainty - one that began with street protests and now culminates in the weakening of the political fortress she herself built.
Dimunitive and draped in a plain cotton sari and rubber sandals, Banerjee hardly looked like a politician who would topple one of the world's longest-running elected Communist governments.
In her rightfully celebrated 1969 article, “The Political Economy of Women’s Liberation,” Margaret Benston articulated several of the enduring themes and theoretical insights of feminist theories, especially those developed by socialist and Marxist feminists. For example, she located the material basis of women’s secondary status in their responsibility for the production of use values for home consumption and their ensuing economic dependence upon male breadwinners; the effects of domestic responsibilities on women’s opportunities; and the material conditions for women’s liberation, that is, equal access to employment and an end to the privatized nature of housework and child rearing.2
As a graduate student in the late 1960s, I struggled to make sense of the notion that women were oppressed as women and that men or patriarchy were the source of their oppression—an idea that, at the time, seemed strange to me.3 In contrast, Benston’s perspective that the causes of the secondary status of women were structural, rooted in the capitalist economy, and resulted in women’s responsibility for child care and the production of use values for family consumption, made sense to me. It showed how the functioning of the capitalist economy, given that the organization of social and biological reproduction remained still in a “premarket stage,” placed working-class men and women in different structural positions. This, I inferred, gave some men power over women. Working-class men had to earn wages to survive economically, whereas working-class women, whether married or unmarried, could theoretically either work for wages or work at home, unpaid and dependent on the wages of the male head of the household.4 Abstractly, under capitalism, being an unpaid domestic worker is for working-class women a functional alternative to earning wages.5 In retrospect, having read her article again, I can say that my account of the oppression of women and conceptualization of what, in the early 1970s, I called the mode of reproduction, owes much to Benston’s views about the “structural definition of women” and the household as a place of production and reproduction.6
Full article here.
The 30th anniversary of the Beijing Platform for Action is a moment to reaffirm global commitments to gender equality
2025 is a pivotal year for women and girls. It marks three major milestones: the thirtieth anniversary of the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action, the twenty-fifth anniversary of United Nations Security Council resolution 1325 on women, peace and security, and the eightieth anniversary of the United Nations. Notable progress on laws, policies and some development outcomes for women and girls has occurred, especially since the adoption of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in 2015. In the final five-year stretch before the 2030 deadline of the Goals, it is urgent to accelerate action and investment.
The Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action, adopted in 1995 by 189 countries, laid out transformative measures across 12 critical areas of concern, serving as a foundation for progress on gender equality and the SDGs. Drawing on evidence from the thirtieth-anniversary review – including 159 Member State reports and broad consultations – UN Women has developed the Beijing+30 Action Agenda. This bold, forward-looking framework sets out six priority actions to accelerate progress on both the Platform and the SDGs. It positions gender equality at the heart of global development efforts. This section highlights this Agenda noting the investments needed and the benefits not only for women and girls, but at large for societies and economies. The rest of the report assesses gender equality under each of the 17 SDGs, spotlighting actions and investments to accelerate change.
For decades, African politics has been a domain dominated by men, with women often relegated to the sidelines of decision-making. But a growing number of countries how now experienced female leadership, including Liberia, Malawi and most recently Namibia. With President Netumbo Nandi-Ndaitwah becoming the country’s first female head of state and assembling a cabinet where women hold the majority of ministerial positions, Namibia has set a historic precedent. This moment signifies much more than symbolism; it signals a broader and hopeful shift in the continent’s political landscape, one that may pave the way for future gender equality in governance. Could Namibia be a harbinger of a wider trend across Africa? Let’s take a closer look at the evidence.
Namibia is not alone in challenging the traditional power structures that have long kept women out of high political office. In recent years, countries like Tanzania and Ethiopia have also seen women rise to top leadership roles. Tanzania’s President Samia Suluhu Hassan, who took office in 2021 after the death of President John Magufuli, has already made significant strides in reshaping the country’s political and economic trajectory. However, it is important to note that she, like Malawi’s former President Joyce Banda, assumed office not through an electoral mandate but through constitutional succession. This pattern raises important questions about the actual commitment of ruling parties to gender equality when women are not fielded as primary candidates.
Full article by Democracy in Africa.
Image by Democracy in Africa
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.
The Women and Foreign Policy program’s most recent update of the “Women’s Power Index” ranks 193 United Nations (UN) member states on their progress toward gender parity in political participation. It analyzes the proportion of women who serve as heads of state or government, in cabinets, in national legislatures, as candidates for national legislatures, and in local government bodies, and visualizes the gender gap in political representation.
Over the past year global progress toward gender parity in political representation has remained flat at 29 on the 100-point aggregate scale employed in which a 100-point score represents gender parity. The number of countries that are halfway or more to parity has remained the same. Twenty-eight countries exceeded fifty in their gender parity score, including Canada, Dominica, Moldova, and the United Kingdom in the past year. Mozambique, Peru, Rwanda, and Senegal fell below that halfway to parity mark in the past year. The U.S. gender parity score is slightly above the global average at 35. Iceland has maintained its position in first place, with a score of 86, Mexico and Andorra occupy second and third place, with scores of 75 and 73, respectively.
Progress in women’s political leadership at the national level has been stalling recently. Since the end of World War II, 82 of the 193 countries have elected a female head of state or government, with the most progress coming in the past two decades. Eleven countries elected their first woman into high office during the 2000s, twenty-five in the 2010s, and seventeen thus far in the 2020s. Most recently, Namibia elected its first woman president, Netumbo Nandi-Ndaitwah, in 2025, and Mexico elected its first woman president, Claudia Sheinbaum, in 2024.
Read here the full article published by the Council on Foreign Relations on 2 April 2025.
Image by the Council on Foreign Relations
Last Saturday, March 8th, marked International Women’s Day, when the international community celebrates the social, economic, cultural, and political accomplishments of women. In post-communist societies, where this day is often a public holiday, there is still a lot left to do to ensure better representation of women in political institutions—but the contribution of women to democracy-building efforts is undeniable.
Meet four exceptional female leaders who are shaping Eastern European politics today and learn more about women of the region fighting against war and autocracy.
Read here the full article published by the Wilson Center on 10 March 2025.
Image by Wilson Center