Women's Leadership
The webinar focused on the challenges and opportunities for women politicians in the digital space. Speakers discussed key issues such as online harassment, technology-facilitated gender-based violence, and misinformation/disinformation, all of which hinder women's participation in politics. The discussion also emphasized the importance of digital literacy, legal safeguards, and creating safer online environments for women in politics. Additionally, speakers highlighted the need to engage men in these discussions and support women at the grassroots level.
The invited speakers were:
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Chikas Kumle (Nigerian politician, Women Political Activist)
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Gloria Anderson (Founder & Executive Director at TEDI, Tanzania)
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Juliane Muller (Associate Programme Officer, Digitalization and Democracy, International IDEA)
Key Takeaways and Next Steps
Several action points were identified for different stakeholders.
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Electoral commissions should raise awareness among their staff about the challenges women face in digital political spaces, collaborate with civil society organizations and political parties to better understand and address these challenges, and advocate for and participate in policy reforms to protect women online.
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Political parties need to develop actionable policies and legal frameworks to support and protect female candidates. They should also publicly condemn online abuse against women and take disciplinary action against perpetrators within their parties.
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Women’s rights organizations play a crucial role in advocating for stronger support for women in politics by political parties and electoral bodies. They should also push for digital literacy programs that incorporate a gender perspective.
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Digital platforms must implement and enforce gender-sensitive community guidelines to protect women in political spaces.
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iKNOW Politics in collaboration with civil society organizations should continue organizing webinars and discussions on women’s political participation in the digital age while actively engaging in the development of online safety guidelines and policies for women politicians.
Women’s participation in politics and leadership remains low in African countries due to various factors, including online harassment and a patriarchal system that hinders their involvement.
This was highlighted during a workshop attended by journalists from Sub-Saharan African countries, held in Nairobi, Kenya and spearheaded by International IDEA https://www.idea.int/ and WYDE.
Speaking at the workshop, Josephine Mwangi, the Program Manager for the Women’s Political Participation Project in Africa and West Asia from IDEA, stated that the limited participation of women in politics is driven by multiple factors, including the way media portrays women.
The African Barometer report, published in November 2024, revealed that women’s representation in African parliaments stood at only 27% in 2024. Additionally, the report showed that the increase in women’s political participation in Africa has stagnated, with only a 1% rise recorded between 2021 and 2024.
The workshop also highlighted that one of the key barriers to women’s representation in politics is the threats and harassment they face, both when participating in politics and when using social media platforms.
Read here the full article published by WinoTz on 21 February 2025.
Image by WinoTz
Young women in America have seen two female presidential candidates lose to President Donald Trump during some of the most formative years of their lives.
Four young voters on the GBH News video series “Politics IRL,” debated whether the glass ceiling is breakable, and if the country is making progress toward one day seeing a woman in the oval office in wake of Trump’s latest victory.
“The fact that we’re nominating female candidates is least a move in the right direction,” said 26-year-old independent Leandena Dankese.
She noted former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley’s 2024 run for president. “It was admirable to see women in office actually trying to reach for the presidency and getting closer and closer each time.”Jaclyn Corriveau, a 34-year-old Republican, said Kamala Harris’ candidacy is a bad case study for female candidates, considering her “forced nomination.”
“We need to think about how Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris came into their nominations. I think Hillary came up through a much more democratic process. Kamala Harris was anointed,” Corriveau said.
Read here the full article published by GBH News on 4 February 2025.
Image by GBH News
COLOMBO, Sri Lanka – It was a brief remark during a mundane session of parliament. But to Harini Amarasuriya, Sri Lanka’s prime minister, it was the moment she realized that her country, wrecked not long ago by strongman leaders and their populist politics, had entered a potentially transformative moment for women.
A male colleague (and “not a very feminist” one, as Amarasuriya described him) stood up to say that the island nation could not get more women into the formal workforce unless it officially recognized the “care economy” – work caring for others.
To Amarasuriya, it was “one of the biggest thrills” to hear language in government that had long been confined to activists or to largely forgotten gender departments. “I was like, ‘OK, all those years of fighting with you have paid off,’” she said with a laugh during an interview in December at her office in Colombo, the capital.
Two years after Sri Lankans rose up and cast out a political dynasty whose profligacy had brought economic ruin, the country is in the midst of a once-in-a-lifetime reinvention.
Read here the full article published by The Spokesman-Review on 4 February 2025.
Image by The Spokesman-Review
Worsening levels of abuse are deterring future politicians from careers in parliament, a group of MPs have warned.
Bradford West MP Naz Shah, Rother Valley MP Jake Richards and ex-Dewsbury MP Mark Eastwood said women received more threats and abuse than male colleagues - and it was discouraging their staff from careers in politics.
The politicians made the claims after Spen Valley MP Kim Leadbeater told Radio 4 earlier this week that the level of abuse had increased since her sister Jo Cox was murdered by a far right terrorist in 2016.
Leadbeater said the level of "abuse and nastiness in politics" then was "nowhere near what it is like now".
Richards, who worked on the prosecution of Cox's killer as a junior lawyer, said the abuse had caused members of his parliamentary staff to reconsider careers in politics, which was "pretty shocking".
He said: "We need people from all backgrounds and perspectives to get into public life and to represent us or we'll go wrong politically.
"It's not just about looking after MPs and not hurting feelings, it's about how we make our politics work better."
Read the full article here.
1. Defends Mexico’s Sovereignty
Claudia Sheinbaum, the newly elected president of Mexico, has reiterated the need to “keep calm” in the face of several executive orders and threats issued by President Donald Trump regarding trade, migration, and other issues that impact U.S.-Mexican relations.
2. International Criminal Court Prosecutor Requests Arrest Warrants for Taliban Leaders
This week, a prosecutor from the International Criminal Court (ICC) officially requested arrest warrants for two Taliban leaders in Afghanistan under charges of gender-based persecution. The warrants, which cite article 7(1)(h) of the Rome Statute, target supreme spiritual leader Hibatullah Akhundzada and Abdul Hakim Haqqani, who has been the chief justice of Afghanistan since 2021.
3. Iraqi Parliament Passes Law to Permit Marriage of Girls as Young as Nine
The Iraqi parliament has enacted legislation allowing the marriage of girls as young as nine. The law revokes a ban enacted in 1959 that made the statutory minimum age for marriage eighteen, with some allowance for individuals as young as fifteen to marry with legal approval.
Read here the full article published by the Council on Foreign Relations on 24 January 2025 .
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.
Disappointed by the numerous failures of anticorruption reforms, international organisations, scholars and policy makers increasingly place their hopes on measures aimed at enhancing gender equality and in particular increasing the inclusion of female representatives in elected assemblies. Yet most studies to date focus on aggregate measures of corruption and fail to explain why the correlation between women's representation and levels of corruption occurs. Using newly collected regional‐level, non‐perception‐based measures of corruption, this study distinguishes between different forms of corruption and shows that the inclusion of women in local councils is strongly negatively associated with the prevalence of both petty and grand forms of corruption. However, the reduction in corruption is primarily experienced among women. This suggests that female representatives seek to further two separate political agendas once they attain public office: the improvement of public service delivery in sectors that tend to primarily benefit women; and the breakup of male‐dominated collusive networks.
Click here to see the academic article.
The COVID-19 pandemic has created a global emergency of multiple dimensions. Most national governments have adopted extraordinary measures to protect their citizens and overcome the pandemic. Prior to the COVID-19 global crisis, 2020 was expected to be a year for reviewing achievements and accelerating progress on gender equality after 25 years of the adoption of the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action and 20 years since UN Security Council resolution 1325 on women, peace and security. There is now major concern that COVID-19 and its impact will push back fragile progress on gender equality, including in relation to reversing discriminatory laws, the enactment of new laws, the implementation of existing legislation, and broader progress needed to achieving justice for all.
This rapid assessment examines how the impacts of COVID-19 are threatening women’s ability to access justice. The assessment reflects challenges faced by women and girls of diverse backgrounds and socio-economic groups, including those experiencing overlapping disadvantages—for example, women on the front lines—and those facing amplified challenges in humanitarian settings. Cross-regional and local experiences are highlighted, and quantitative data is utilized where available. Past epidemics are informative—and sobering—in terms of risks for women and offer lessons about how to prevent and mitigate these risks.
Click here to see the report.