Women's Leadership
On the sidelines of the 80th session of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA80), a powerful, intergenerational and intersectional group of women leaders called for urgent action to centre women’s leadership in global peace efforts.
The event, hosted by the UN Women Leaders Network, in partnership with the Government of Iceland and the UN Foundation, was held ahead of the 25th anniversary of UN Security Council resolution 1325, which launched the Women, Peace and Security agenda. This year also marks the 30th anniversary of the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action on gender equality, elevating women and girls’ leadership in peace and decision-making as fundamental to building a peaceful and sustainable future for all.
Gender equality commissioner Josie Christodoulou on Friday voiced concern over the low level of female participation in Cyprus’ political life ahead of the 2026 parliamentary elections, warning that unbalanced representation in decision-making creates a democratic deficit.
“Political parties need to demonstrate the same commitment to strengthening gender equality in politics to ensure the equal participation of all citizens in shaping the country’s future,” she said.
Christodoulou noted that women currently hold only 14 per cent of seats in parliament and 37 per cent of positions in the Council of Ministers.
At the local government level, female representation remains similarly low, while Cyprus is represented exclusively by men in the European parliament.
For several years, Nigerian MPs have been blocking legislation aimed at better representation for women in politics. The country's women – who make up the majority of the electorate – are pushing for a bill that would reserve at least 35 percent of seats in parliament for women.
Hundreds of women descended on the Nigerian capital, Abuja, on Monday to push for a bill that would add women-only seats in the Senate and House of Representatives.
Several African countries, from Senegal to Rwanda, have increased their number of female legislators by using quota systems.
Nigeria, which has some of the lowest numbers of women in parliament worldwide, has no such system.
It counts just four women senators out of 109, and 16 women in the 360-member House of Representatives, according to the Policy and Legal Advocacy Centre (PLAC), a local NGO.
Weekend Reading on Women’s Representation is a compilation of stories about women’s representation in politics, on boards, in sports and entertainment, in judicial offices and in the private sector in the U.S. and around the world—with a little gardening and goodwill mixed in for refreshment!
Milestones for notable women this week include birthdays for: Mary Church Terrell, African American civil rights activist and suffragist (1863); Muthoni Wambu Kraal, partner at NEWCO Strategies; New York City council member Diana Ayala; U.S. Rep. Erin Houchin; Mehrnaz Teymourian, RepresentWomen board member; Erin Loos Cutraro, founder & CEO of She Should Run; U.S. Rep. Doris Matsui; U.S. Rep. Marilyn Strickland; Onida Coward Mayers, RepresentWomen board member; Sophie Dorf-Kamienny, RepresentWomen alum; Serena Williams; Corinne Bennett, RepresentWomen alum; Fatma Tawfik, RepresentWomen international research manager; Vi Alexander Lyles, mayor of Charlotte, N.C.; Madeleine M. Kunin, former Governor of Vermont; Poppy McDonald; and Katharine Pichardo-Erskine, executive director of Latino Victory Project.
The immediate past Accountant General of the Federation, Dr Oluwatoyin Madein, has decried the under-representation of women in the country’s political space, saying that efforts must be intensified to address this imbalance.
In a statement issued on Saturday by the Media Consultant to the former Accountant General, Temitope Oyekan and made available to journalists, Dr Madein described Nigerian women as very brilliant, resourceful, resilient, courageous and possessing all the required capacity to provide adequate leadership for the betterment of the country.
She remarked while speaking at the Ogun East Conference for Women, held at the Akarigbo Palace Hall in Sagamu.
This year’s conference, themed “Women in Leadership: Building Capacity, Enhancing Participation and Securing Tomorrow,” brought together leaders, professionals, entrepreneurs, and grassroots advocates in a vibrant exchange of ideas, celebrating women’s achievements and charting pathways for greater inclusion in governance and economic development.
Women leaders under the National Women’s Council have appealed to all stakeholders in Uganda’s electoral process to champion peace and prevent acts of violence during and after the forthcoming elections.
Addressing the media in Kampala, National Chairperson Faridah Kibowa emphasized that women and children often bear the heaviest impact of election-related conflicts.
“As women, we stand to advocate for peace because any form of violence directly affects us more, and it is our families that suffer most,” Kibowa said.
The leaders highlighted that violent episodes frequently result in displacement, lack of shelter or food, and exposure to gender-based violence.
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.
COVID-19 and conflict: Advancing women’s meaningful participation in ceasefires and peace processes
This brief addresses the importance of women’s full, equal, and meaningful participation to an effective pandemic response and to peacemaking efforts, and how the women, peace and security (WPS) agenda can provide a critical framework for inclusive decision-making and sustainable solutions. While efforts to flatten the pandemic’s curve unfold around the globe, violent conflict remains a deadly reality for far too many people.
In March 2020, the UN Secretary-General called for a global ceasefire to allow the world to address COVID-19. Since the outbreak of the pandemic, women have been at the forefront of effective COVID-19 prevention and response efforts—from frontline service delivery to the highest levels of decision-making. With women’s participation central to achieving sustainable solutions, the pandemic has brought into sharp relief how critical the WPS agenda is to inclusive and effective decision-making.
This brief recognizes the vital role of women’s civil society organizations in mobilizing support for an urgent cessation of hostilities, inclusive ceasefire processes, and comprehensive peace talks. It also provides a preliminary analysis of the impact of COVID-19 on women’s participation in ceasefires and peace processes and offers a series of recommendations, including on “building back better”.
Click here to see the report.
On 24–25 October 2019, the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (International IDEA)—together with the Edinburgh Centre for Constitutional Law (ECCL) and the Political Settlements Research Programme (PSRP) at the University of Edinburgh—hosted the inaugural event in a series of forums to be known as the Women Constitution-Makers’ Dialogue.
The series is a networking and peer-to-peer dialogue programme wherein women constitution-makers and comparative constitutional experts can share country-specific constitution-building experiences, knowledge resources and tools, and identify opportunities and obstacles to women’s participation and influence from both a country-level and global perspective. The dialogue focuses on women’s representation and participation in national constitution-making processes, examines constitutional outcomes from a gender perspective, and considers commonly contested constitutional design choices more broadly.
Click here to see the report.
Women have made significant inroads into political life in recent years, but in many parts of the world, their increased engagement has spurred attacks, intimidation, and harassment. This book provides the first comprehensive account of this phenomenon, exploring how women came to give these experiences a name: violence against women in politics.
Tracing its global emergence as a concept, Mona Lena Krook draws on insights from multiple disciplines--political science, sociology, history, gender studies, economics, linguistics, psychology, and forensic science--to develop a more robust version of this concept to support ongoing activism and inform future scholarly work.
Click here to see the book.
UN Women organized an Expert Group Meeting (EGM) on “Data and violence against women in politics” (VAWP) on 4–5 December 2019, in New York, as a part of its ongoing efforts to tackle this issue. More than 40 experts attended the meeting, including academics, gender equality advocates, Members of Parliament, representatives of electoral management bodies, civil society organizations, and international organizations, as well as UN agencies.
Being recognized as one of the key deterrents to women’s political participation, VAWP has captured global attention, but comparative data remains unavailable. Internationally agreed indicators and data collection methods to measure incidence or prevalence do not yet exist. The EGM helped map existing knowledge tools, databases, and surveys as sources of data on VAWP, and facilitated the exchange of lessons learned, experiences, and good practices in data collection.
This follow-up EGM on data was a recommendation of the Violence against Women in Politics Expert Group Meeting in March 2018.
Click here to see the report.
This report aggregates over five hundred pieces of academic and institutional research on the ways in which women’s political careers differ from their male counterparts, what stands in their way, and what impact their political presence has on democracy and policy. Parity of political presence between women and men is fundamental for a representative, legitimate and accountable democratic system, and this report points to the diverse and important ways that women’s political representation improves and contributes to democratic institutions and processes. It also highlights methods and approaches which address their underrepresentation. Bringing this research together in this way gives us a holistic understanding of the political recruitment and impact of women politicians that will provide a platform for future research and action.
Click here to see the report.