Women's Leadership

History will be made in America on 3 January when a record number of women are sworn in as part of the 116th Congress.

It will be the culmination of two years of resistance to President Donald Trump - primarily led by women - following his unexpected victory over Hillary Clinton in 2016.

The day after his inauguration, millions of women joined protests against him across the country.

As the mid-term elections approached, Democrats saw a surge of women who wanted to represent the party - a stark contrast to previous years when they appeared reluctant to enter politics.

This led to suggestions that 2018 could become another “Year of the Woman” - a reference to the 1992 elections in which the number of women in Congress nearly doubled.

That jump 26 years ago was put down to a controversy over claims of sexual assault against a Supreme Court nominee - a situation similar to the case of Brett Kavanaugh in 2018.

Here's how the mid-term results have changed the make-up of Congress and a look at some of the women leading that change.

Click here to see the BBC report.

As the world becomes increasingly connected online, our reliance on social media platforms such as Twitter has also become increasingly important. But the online world, and social media platforms like Twitter are not immune to many of the human rights abuses that women face offline.

Over the last 16 months, Amnesty International has conducted qualitative and quantitative research about women’s experiences on social media platforms including the scale, nature and impact of violence and abuse directed towards women on Twitter, with a particular focus on the United Kingdom (UK) and the United States of America (USA). Such abuse includes direct or indirect threats of physical or sexual violence, discriminatory abuse targeting one or more aspects of a woman’s identity, targeted harassment, and privacy violations such as doxing or sharing sexual or intimate images of a woman without her consent.

(…) Many of the women who spoke to Amnesty International about the violence and abuse they experience on Twitter emphasized how important the platform is to them – both professionally and personally. Women rely on social media platforms like Twitter to advocate, communicate, mobilize, access information and gain visibility.

Pamela Merritt, a US blogger and reproductive rights activist, told us,

“I am a bit of a Twitter addict. I wake up, I check Twitter. I have two cups of coffee, and I check it again. Being online is important for my work. I want to know what’s going on. I want to know what people are saying and I want to weigh in, so I’m on Twitter through the day”.

Seyi Akiwowo, UK Politician and activist, talked about how Twitter makes her feel part of a movement and ‘puts words to her experiences’ of being a woman of colour. She told us,

“I feel torn. I love Twitter. The platform has connected me to people I will probably never see in my entire life and they are amazing, successful and inspirational people. There is now a massive movement of women of colour online. We express our beauty and confidence and talk about self-care and intersectional inequality…and so some of my life changing moments and development into womanhood has happened because of and via Twitter. I remember finding my first international job through Twitter. The possibilities and opportunities on that platform are endless.”

(…) Politicians themselves agree. Scottish Parliamentarian and Leader of the Opposition, Ruth Davidson, emphasized how important Twitter is as a tool to communicate and listen to her constituents and the wider public. She notes.

“Social media platforms are where a lot of political debate now happens, particularly as we see the divide in age range of voters. For a lot of younger voters, actually – they don’t want to be told things – they want to be able to discuss them.”

Click here to see the report.

Gender parity is fundamental to whether and how economies and societies thrive. Ensuring the full development and appropriate deployment of half of the world’s total talent pool has a vast bearing on the growth, competitiveness and future-readiness of economies and businesses worldwide. The Global Gender Gap Report benchmarks 149 countries on their progress towards gender parity across four thematic dimensions: Economic Participation and Opportunity, Educational Attainment, Health and Survival, and Political Empowerment. In addition, this year’s edition studies skills gender gaps related to Artificial Intelligence (AI).

Click here to see the report.

El artículo presenta evidencia actualizada sobre la brecha de género en la implicación, el cono- cimiento y la participación política en España y en perspectiva comparada. Los resultados muestran que mientras que la brecha de género ha disminuido hasta casi desaparecer para el caso de la participa- ción política, sigue siendo importante respecto al conocimiento, la implicación con la política, y la creencia en la propia capacidad para entender cómo funciona la vida política. Se discuten los factores explicativos de estos hallazgos, incidiendo en la importancia de la socialización en roles de género y el predominio de la idea de que la política sigue siendo cosa de hombres.

Haga clic aquí para acceder al informe. 

The Reykjavik Index for Leadership measures how people feel about women in leadership. It measures the perceived legitimacy of male and female leadership in politics and across twenty professions, as well as a measure of how men and women differ in their views, and the extent to which men and women are viewed equally in terms of suitability of individuals for positions of power.

The Index evaluates the G7 groups of nations, surveying the attitudes of more than 10,000 people.

Click here to see the report.

Recent years have witnessed a troubling rise in reports of assault, intimidation, and abuse directed at politically active women. The United Nations General Assembly first called for zero tolerance for violence against female candidates and elected officials in Resolution 66/130 in 2011. In 2012, Bolivia became the first country in the world to criminalize political violence and harassment against women, in response to a more than decade-long campaign by locally elected women to document the numerous injuries and abuses they confronted. Resonating across the region, this development led the states parties to the Inter-American Convention on the Prevention, Punishment and Eradication of Violence against Women to endorse a Declaration on Political Violence and Harassment against Women in 2015.

Click here to see the academic article.