Women's Leadership
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 .
Ten years of war have severely weakened political life, undermining its role as a peaceful foundation for society in Yemen. CMI is supporting the country’s political parties in restoring their standing, with a strong emphasis on empowering women as a crucial step toward lasting peace. During a workshop held in Amman, Jordan, in November 2024, politicians shared their perspectives on how to strengthen women’s role in politics.
“The first obstacle to women’s participation in politics in Yemen is that their roles are restricted to traditional expectations. We rarely see women involved in critical and sensitive departments within political parties. For instance, women hardly ever work in political or economic departments, and they rarely participate in military or diplomatic matters. This means women are often unaware of or uneducated about these issues.”
Read here the full article published by CMI – Martti Ahtisaari Peace Foundation on 16 January 2025.
Image by CMI – Martti Ahtisaari Peace Foundation
This year’s report looks back at 25 years of women in parliament on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the Beijing conference and its groundbreaking action plan for gender equality.
IPU analysis shows that gender parity is possible. The overall percentage of women in parliaments has reached 24.9 per cent in 2020, up from 11.3 per cent in 1995. In four countries (Rwanda, Cuba, Bolivia and the United Arab Emirates) women now account for 50 per cent or more MPs in their lower or single chambers compared with 1995 when no parliament had reached gender parity.
The IPU has tracked women’s participation in parliament for decades, allowing it to monitor historical trends, progress and setbacks.
Click here to see the report.
This map is a unique visual tool that captures women’s participation in executive government and in parliament on a given date—1st January 2020. The map of Women in Politics not only provides a country ranking for both ministerial and parliamentary representation, but also statistics on women in political leadership positions—Heads of State or government, women Speakers of Parliament, as well as ministerial portfolios held by women throughout the world. Borders are depicted and used on the map in order to present data. They are not the expression of any opinion concerning the legal status of any country, territory, city or area, or concerning the delimitation of frontiers or boundaries.
Click here to download the map in English.
Political campaigns online have demonstrated that they can help candidates win elections, include more citizens’ concerns in political debates or allow upcoming parties to gain political exposure.
However, social media can also have a negative effect on political and electoral integrity by attacking an essential principle of democracy: the fundamental right of citizens to access trustable, reliable information to form their political opinions and, ultimately, decide their votes.
In this context of potential manipulation of public opinion through digital information operations, electoral management bodies, monitoring authorities, legislators and political parties face increasing difficulty in protecting the integrity of the political process.
Based on International IDEA’s work in Tunisia, Panama and Bolivia, this Fact sheet seeks to identify some overarching recommendations and a way forward based on how these types of activities may have potentially influenced their recent elections.
Click here to see the fact sheet.
Women made great strides in political representation in 2018. There has been significant media attention devoted to the historic gains women made in Congress, but the shift in political representation the states was equally significant. Women’s representation in state legislatures increased by more than three points in 2018 (from 25.4 percent to 28.9 percent of all state legislative seats). Nevada became the first majority women legislature and Colorado approached gender parity, with a legislature that is 47 percent women.
Although often presented as a non-partisan phenomenon, the gains in women’s representation across the board were due to Democratic women candidates’ victories. Democratic women gained about 300 state legislative seats in 2018, while the number of Republican women state legislators declined by just over 40.3.
More than a year out from the “year of the woman,” the National Women’s Law Center (NWLC) and Quorum examined the impact of this changing representation in the states. In this fact sheet, we present new data on women’s state legislative achievements, including that women state legislators introduced and enacted more legislation than men over the past two legislative sessions.
Click here to see the factsheet.
In late 2018 and early 2019 UN Women interviewed 87 per cent of the women who ran for Parliamentary election (75 of the 86 women; of the 113 women who registered to run, 86 made it on to candidate lists). This report summarizes their stories and experiences as candidates and looks at issues of: violence against women in politics, financial constraints and campaign management, media and image portrayal, violence harassment and discrimination.
Click here to see the report.
While still far from parity, female representation in politics has continuously increased over the last two decades worldwide. In light of this development, we analyze whether higher female representation has substantive effects on policy choices using the example of child care – a public good arguably valued by women. We hand-collect micro-data for 224,448 candidates running in the local council elections of 2002, 2008 and 2014 across 1,632 municipalities in the German state of Bavaria. Exploiting an open-list electoral system, we run RDD regressions centered around mixed-gender races for the last council seat that accrues to a party. We find that a female victory in a mixed-gender race accelerates the expansion of public child care provision by 40%. Our main strategy to explore mechanisms uses information from hand-collected minutes of 7,721 monthly council meetings. We show that an additional woman changes "the conversation": female councilors speak up more often and child care is discussed more frequently in the council.
Click here to see the report.