Women's Leadership
Women currently serve as the head of government in just 13 of the 193 member states of the United Nations. This includes Mexico, where President Claudia Sheinbaum was sworn in as the country’s first female executive this week.
Mexico is one of nine countries where the current woman head of government is the country’s first, according to a Pew Research Center analysis.
Overall, 60 UN member states (31%) have ever had a woman serve as head of government. The first was Sri Lanka, then called Ceylon, where Sirimavo Bandaranaike began her first term as prime minister in 1960. Two other countries – India in 1966 and Israel in 1969 – saw their first women leaders during that decade.
Worldwide, the number of countries that have had women leaders has risen steadily since 1990. The biggest single-year increase occurred in 2010, when five countries – Australia, Costa Rica, Kyrgyzstan, Slovakia, and Trinidad and Tobago – were led by a woman for the first time.
60 countries have ever had a woman leader
Mia Mottley, the prime minister of Barbados, is the longest serving woman currently in office. Mottley has been in power for more than six years.
The title of longest-serving woman head of government in modern history is held by former Bangladeshi Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina. Hasina spent more than 20 total years in power but resigned and fled Bangladesh earlier this year, when mass protests against a quota system for government jobs turned into a more violent movement against her government. (She was also the oldest woman leader, according to a separate Pew Research Center analysis.)
Read here the full article published by the Pew Research Center on 3 October 2024.
Image credits: Pew Research Center
The passing of the presidential sash every six years is always an important and symbolic occasion in Mexico.
But on Tuesday, when it was placed over the shoulder of Claudia Sheinbaum - the first woman to hold the highest office in the country - it was truly an historic watershed moment in more than 200 years of modern Mexican history.
It has been a long road which led the first female mayor of Mexico City to break the glass ceiling in Mexican politics again, this time at national level.
To huge cheers of “Presidenta!” ringing out both inside and outside the congressional chamber, she raised her fist in victory, savouring the moment.
She began her first speech as president by thanking her political mentor and predecessor in the top job, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, calling him “the most important political leader and social warrior in Mexico’s modern history".
He leaves office, she said, with “the greatest love of his people".
On that point, she is not wrong. López Obrador is deeply beloved by his supporters and his popularity ratings in his final days in office were higher than those of any other president in Mexican history.
Read here the full article published by the BBC on 2 October 2024.
Image credits: BBC
MEXICO CITY — Mexico inaugurated its first female president on Tuesday, reaching the milestone before its northern neighbor. Even if the United States elects Kamala Harris as president in November, it will lag well behind this traditionally macho country on broader gender parity.
The new president, Claudia Sheinbaum, will govern with a cabinet that is half female and a Congress evenly divided between men and women. Women head the Supreme Court and central bank and run top federal ministries.
Read here the full article posted by The Washington Post on 01 October 2024.
Image by The Washington Post
First of a series
MASS and social media have recently been inundated by a slew of news, "tsismis" and fake news involving Filipino women of diverse status, political color, different persuasions and atypical motivations. But these women have several distinctive traits in common. The first cluster is strong-willed and wields political influence either by fiat as occupying a singularly powerful elective post, as in Vice President Sara Duterte, or the first lady Liza Araneta-Marcos, unelected, nonetheless in a position of vast influence and potential for manipulation by virtue of being married to a perceived weak spouse. Some of these women maneuver around the periphery of power and are themselves powerful but refuse to brandish the same, like Sen. Imee Marcos, in whom many among those who lived and survived the martial law regime of the dictator see the traits of the father. For bad or good, those nostalgic for the old regime regret the Filipino voter's choice of the wrong Marcos. And then there are women who have been unseated from power through the whims of dysfunctional government institutions like the fugitive and suspected Chinese sleeper agent Mayor Alice Guo of Bamban, Tarlac.
The other category is women who, by their notoriety and their strategic personal relations, took advantage of their 15 minutes of fame, attempting to tear to shreds the reputations of the powerful and the mighty as in the disgruntled paramour revealing juicy tidbits about her former Davao politico-businessman lover who has long been removed from power and tale-telling distasteful exposés about the Malacañang "polvoron"-snorting crowd. And these anecdotes are given credence through female internet personalities who rule social media, providing pulpits through their YouTube video blogs. These "Marites" with thousands of followers lap up any scraps of gossip thrown their way, propelling the same to go viral. This is gossip in the fringes providing entertainment to the inane. These women of the second cluster are not the subjects of this column ("The spy and the paramour," The Manila Times, Aug. 14, 2024).
Read here the full article published by The Manila Times on 25 September 2024.
Image credits: The Manila Times
Launched during the 79th session of UN General Assembly, the UN Women Leaders Network unites a global intergenerational and intersectional group of women leaders advocating for gender-equal participation in leadership and decision-making.
The UN Women Leaders Network was launched this week on the sidelines of the 79th UN General Assembly. It is the first permanent network of its kind, composed of intergenerational and intersectional women leaders, and its members represent the change needed in the traditional image of leadership today.
The network includes both emerging and more established leaders across ages, regions, and professions. The network will work together to promote the increase and advancement of women in leadership and decision-making spaces worldwide, and functions as a platform to a diverse group of women leaders to discuss and exchange ideas, solutions and experiences as leaders, community-builders and decision-makers.
Read here the full article published by UN Women on 27 September 2024.
When Japan’s ruling political party, the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), votes on Friday for its next leader, it will effectively be choosing the country’s next Prime Minister.
A slew of scandals have plagued the tenure of Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, who announced in August he would step down after assuming power in 2021. From his son throwing a party at an official residence to alleged fundraising misconduct by party members, the scandals in addition to underwhelming economic reform have dented the LDP’s popularity and forced a reset.
A record nine lawmakers are standing in the intra-party election, competing for majority support among the party’s 368 members of parliament and 368 representatives of its more than a million dues-paying rank-and-file members. Most candidates, according to AP, have vowed to call for a general election, which isn’t due until October 2025, shortly after being elevated within the party, to try to capitalize on their fresh image.
Read here the full article published by the Time Magazine on 26 September 2024.
Image credits: Time Magazine
There is a persistent gender gap in motivations to run for political office. While exposure to role models is widely believed to increase women’s political ambition, there is little field experimental evidence on whether exposure to female politicians in realistic settings can increase political ambition. We conducted a field experiment in which a sample of 612 female students was randomly assigned to receive emails inviting them to an event that included career workshops with female politicians, or no email. The treatment increased interest in the ongoing national election campaign, but, against expectations, did not have any positive effect on political ambition. Our results suggest that female politicians who discuss their experience bluntly, instead of following a motivational script, may fail to motivate other women to pursue a political career. These results highlight the need for more research into the type of events and messages that bring more women into politics.
Click here to see the study.
IMF examines the impact of gender equality on electoral violence in Africa using micro-level data from the sixth round of Afrobarometer surveys. The sample covers 30 countries. IMF finds that gender equality is associated with lower electoral violence. Quantitatively, their estimates show that an increase in female-to-male labor force participation ratio by 1 percentage point is correlated with a reduction of the probability of electoral violence across the continent by around 4.2 percentage points. Their results are robust to alternative ways to measure electoral violence and gender equality, as well as to alternative specifications. The findings of this paper support the long-standing view that women empowerment contributes to the reduction of violence and underscore the urgency of addressing gender inequality in Africa.
Click here to see the report.
The research had three main objectives: first, to obtain a more detailed picture of the situation regarding women’s political participation in the CARICOM countries; second, to identify contextual factors and analyse how they affect the presence of Caribbean women in politics; and third, to provide a list of necessary measures to increase women’s political participation and presence in decision-making positions. In light of these findings, this regional analysis will be an important resource for political parties, civil society, women’s organizations and governments to help identify the steps necessary to increase the presence and representation of women in politics. Moreover, we hope it will serve as a catalyst for strategic alliances amongst these diverse actors. In particular, we hope that the findings will prompt further research and inspire policy reform that accelerates equal political participation of women and men in decision-making structures and promotes it as an indispensable driver for more effective democratic governance, and ultimately, for sustainable human development.
Click here to see the report.
Women are under-represented on decision-making bodies and in positions of economic power. They continue to earn systematically less than men for the same work. Encouraging women to enter politics is key to changing this. More women in politics, and particularly in parliaments, can have a trickle-down effect for the whole of society. Women’s increasing influence results in positive changes in laws, practices, behaviour and cultures. However, women running for office face numerous challenges – including violence, harassment and intimidation.
Click here to see the factsheet.
The global average for women’s representation in parliaments was 24 per cent in January 2019. Political parties are identified as responsible for women’s underrepresentation, given their role as the main gatekeepers of elected decision-making positions in most countries.
This factsheet illustrates the link of gender in political parties’ programmes and operational policies, processes and practices. It highlights the approach for institutionalizing gender equality in the conceptualization, development and implementation of a party’s strategic plan.
Click here to see the academic article.
This Discussion Paper puts together relevant data on the inclusion of young people and women in European Parliament elections.
It is focused on two pitfalls of EU electoral democracy: voter absenteeism on the part of young people, and the under-representation of women in the European Parliament. Data have been combined from the European Election Studies (EES), the European Parliament, the Gender Statistics Database of the European Institute for Gender Equality (EIGE), face-to-face and telephone interviews, and semi-structured questionnaires. Additionally, policy papers and other relevant texts (authored by organizations dedicated to young people, women and think tanks, as well as Europarties and groups in the European Parliament) have been considered. The scope of the paper is European, although data at a national level from France, Poland and Spain (a founding EU country, an Eastern European country and a Southern European country) are introduced in different sections to shed light on national differences. With the purpose of enriching and making EU electoral democracy stronger, the author presents, as food for thought, some evidence on key elements to foster participation in European Parliament elections, as well as to reach a more balanced composition of the European Parliament in terms of age and gender.
Click here to see the academic article.