Women's Leadership
National environments shaping the women who serve should be a central part of discussions about the future of peace operations.
Fundamental shifts are taking place in conversations about the future of peacekeeping. Geopolitical tensions, funding cuts and a legitimacy crisis are prompting questions about whether international peace operations remain effective and relevant.
There is also a growing recognition that traditional peacekeeping approaches do not resolve the political dynamics and local complexities of a conflict, with unique and disproportionate consequences for women and children. Policymakers and global security experts are opting for narrower mandates and more agile interventions to ensure operations are more context-specific and demand-driven.
What appears to be missing from these conversations, however, is a focus on the people who serve and the impact of their background, skills and experience on a mission’s effectiveness.
Conflict is gendered – in how it is experienced and perpetuated, and how peace is negotiated. The personnel deployed to address conflicts need to reflect that reality. Research consistently shows that the quality and diversity of peacekeepers, not just their numbers, determine whether operations have the skills and legitimacy to meet their mandates, and above all, protect civilians.
It is precisely this reality that the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda was designed to address. Established by the United Nations (UN) Security Council in 2000 and rolled out on the continent through African Union (AU) frameworks, the WPS agenda promotes women’s participation and protection in conflict settings. That agenda has long faced implementation gaps and is now under increasing threat.
Democracy cannot be measured solely by the right to vote. It must also be measured by who participates in decision-making, who has access to spaces of power, and what obstacles continue to prevent certain voices from being heard.
In Panama, women represent approximately half of the voter roll and actively participate in democratic life. However, they hold less than 14% of elected public offices. While this reality represents a challenge for women in general, the hurdle takes on different dimensions for indigenous women. According to the 2023 Census, 352,292 indigenous women live in the country, representing 50.5% of the national indigenous population. Many of the social, economic, and territorial gaps take on a distinct form in their lives, especially during childhood and old age. Their opportunities to participate, lead, and exert influence are conditioned by intersecting and mutually reinforcing gender, economic, geographic, and cultural inequalities.
In the frame of International Day of the World's Indigenous Peoples, this reality invites us to ask an essential question for democratic strengthening: Are we creating the conditions so that indigenous women can participate and exert influence with equal opportunities in decision-making spaces?
Two extraordinary young Indigenous women recently participated in the Young Women Empowerment Academy organised by International IDEA for emerging women leaders across Southeast Asia.
Cindy Yohana, an Indigenous youth leader from the Wairasa community on Sumba Island, Indonesia, and Ricamae Ented, a Tëdurai youth leader from the Bangsamoro Region in the Southern Philippines, joined the Academy as representatives of their communities.
The Academy focused on identifying and challenging negative gender social norms while strengthening positive ones. What stood out were the testimonies of these Indigenous young women, who described being supported and uplifted within their own communities—yet facing challenges when interacting with broader society.
Another shared theme was the strong emphasis placed on food security and food sovereignty. This was not only highlighted by the Indigenous participants but by the Academy’s young women overall. They underscored the importance of community organising, sustainable agriculture, and Indigenous knowledge in ensuring long-term resilience. Their understanding of security extends beyond traditional notions to include the stability and wellbeing of their societies.
Advancing women’s political participation needs to go beyond legal and policy reforms. Deeply rooted social norms continue to keep women out of political leadership — from unequal care burdens at home to media bias and exclusionary party practices. Seeing real progress means changing attitudes and daily practices across institutions and society.
Change is possible, but it requires action from different stakeholders:
- Parliamentarians are lawmakers and play a role in passing gender-sensitive laws, enforcing protections against harassment and violence, and supporting women’s caucuses, which are critical steps to dismantle barriers. Parliaments shape not only laws and policies but also public perceptions of who belongs in decision-making.
- Local representatives can support a shift in public perceptions within communities through awareness campaigns, promote women’s leadership at the local level as an entry point for young women candidates, and can enact gender-responsive policies, such as public services and care systems to enable participation of diverse women.
- Political parties are gatekeepers to leadership. By adopting internal quotas for leadership positions, providing training and resources, enforcing gender-sensitive internal rules and procedures, and holding members accountable for harassment, parties can open the pipeline for women candidates and reshape internal cultures that too often exclude them.
- Women’s organizations, youth-led organizations, and grassroots organizations can elevate women’s leadership through training and mentoring, providing stepping-stones for decision-making at the local level, building confidence, agency, and skills for leadership.
- Media are storytellers and powerful agents of change. Highlighting diverse women leaders, rejecting stereotypes, and reporting responsibly on women in politics can normalize women’s leadership and inspire the next generation.
- Families and schools are the norm-setters. Social norms take root early. Parents and teachers can show children that leadership has no gender by modelling equality at home and in classrooms, providing inspiring role models, encouraging girls’ ambition, and teaching boys to value women’s leadership.
- Men in leadership have influence and they should use it. By calling out discrimination, nominating women for decision-making positions, and promoting cultures of respect, they can help shift norms from within.
What can I do?
Everyone has the power to challenge harmful norms in daily life:
- Hear a stereotype or bias? Challenge it whether in the classroom, the office, or at the dinner table.
- Boost women’s voices: Share, support, and celebrate women leaders, especially on social media.
- Lift the next generation of girls to take leadership roles at school or in community initiatives. Future changemakers start young!
- Vote like gender equality depends on it. Support candidates who champion women’s rights and leadership. Be the example. At home, at work, and in public, show equality is possible and powerful. Lasting change takes all of us.
Shifting mindsets is as crucial as changing laws. From institutions to households, everyone has a role in creating societies where women’s leadership is not the exception but the norm. Together, we can build inclusive democracies that reflect the voices, experiences, and diversity of all women and girls.
Continue reading: Invisible barriers — how social norms keep women out of leadership roles
Invisible barriers: How social norms keep women out of leadership roles
Despite growing evidence that women’s leadership improves political decision-making processes, parity between women and men in decision-making is far off. According to data from UN Women and the Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU), 27.5 per cent of parliamentarians globally are women. In only 28 countries, women occupy positions in the highest office, while 101 countries have not had a woman leader. Women represent less than a quarter of Cabinet ministers and account for 36 per cent of locally elected officials.
What factors account for these figures? The answer lies not only in concrete barriers — including unequal laws, limited funding or opportunities, and violence against women in politics — but in the unwritten rules of society: social norms.
- What are social norms?
Social norms are the unwritten rules about what is considered “normal” or “acceptable” in a community. They shape perceptions of who is deemed fit to lead and participate in public life, and whose voice counts, limiting women’s access to decision-making roles and driving men’s domination. While some norms help societies function smoothly, others reinforce discrimination — including the norms that block women's path to political leadership, explored below.
Social norms directly influence individual behaviour, family and community expectations, and institutional practices. They often reflect historical, cultural, and gendered assumptions about authority, power, and public engagement. Social norms can change, as time, culture and societies evolve. Though adaptable over time, these norms can be deeply rooted and often intertwined with culture, religion and other community-based beliefs, making transformation extremely difficult and slow.
- How do social norms limit women’s political participation?
These invisible barriers can be both explicit and implicit, enforced through approval or disapproval of behaviours, or social pressure. They are present in private and public spheres:
- At home, women are often expected to shoulder a disproportionate amount of unpaid care and domestic work, compared to men, leaving little time for political engagement. Boys are often taught to be assertive and ambitious, while girls learn to nurture.
- In politics, women are often confined to “soft” portfolios in education and social protection, while men dominate areas widely perceived as more prestigious or powerful, such as economy, finance, or defense – limiting women's influence over major resource and policy decisions.
- Political parties often provide women candidates with less funding or support due to doubts about their leadership abilities.
- Media tend to portray men as competent, but women often have to repeatedly prove themselves and face stereotypes.
- Monuments, textbooks, and movies celebrate men as leaders, shaping ambition long before adulthood.
As a result, harmful social norms often exclude, silence, or discourage women from pursuing leadership roles.
When women lead, decision-making is more representative, inclusive, and effective. Studies1 show that women in parliaments push for childcare, healthcare, pensions, and gender equality laws. Yet as long as norms keep politics a “man’s world,” democracy itself remains incomplete.
- Can social norms change?
Social norms can change and evolve - but not overnight. Some shifts happen quickly, with, for instance, norms related to women’s employment in paid work - which unintentionally changed following the two World Wars, to make up for the gap in men’s employment due to military mobilization. This period transformed roles of women and men and therefore expectations tied to women's participation in economic and public life altogether. But most social norm changes require decades of advocacy and tireless actions from different parts of society.
UN Women research shows that social norms can change - when three approaches come together:
- Transform the story – The stories we hear and tell shape what we think is “normal.” Too often, they reinforce stereotypes and inequality. To shift norms, we need new narratives—ones that challenge harmful narratives and open up new possibilities for women and girls.
- Change everyday realities of women and girls: Norms don’t shift if people don’t have real alternatives. Women won’t step into public life if it means facing violence, having no financial support or juggling with care responsibilities. Change happens when women and girls have access to opportunities, services, and safety—backed by laws that are not only in place, but actually work in practice. And for those laws to work, public support and ongoing advocacy is important.
- Build collective power – Social norms are shaped by power—who has it, and who doesn’t. To change them, power needs to shift too. This means supporting women and marginalized groups to organize, speak out, and lead, while also building alliances with others—from community leaders to unions, from the media networks to academia. Lasting change comes from collective, sustained action.
No single intervention works alone; it takes all three, at the same time, to make change happen.
- What is UN Women doing about it?
UN Women supports efforts to transform the social norms that hold back gender equality and women's leadership through its country, regional and global programmes, in partnership with governments, civil society organizations, women's rights movements and other stakeholders. One of these efforts is the WYDE | Women’s Leadership Initiative, funded by the European Union and implemented with partners including International IDEA, the Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU), United Cities and Local Governments (UCLG), and civil society organizations. Through WYDE, UN Women and its partners are working globally to:
- Shift harmful narratives through advocacy initiatives, intergenerational dialogues, training of the media, parliamentarians, local representatives and civil society leaders.
- Reform institutions by promoting quotas, mentoring women candidates, and training parliaments to address violence against women in politics.
- Strengthen feminist movements by funding grassroots organizations working on innovative social norms change projects and building bold coalitions for systemic change.
Explore more: WYDE | Women’s Leadership: Strategy on Social Norms Change.
Continue reading: Time to act — everyone has a role in making women's leadership the norm.
The Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) has called for accelerated political, legal and institutional reforms across member states to increase women’s representation in governance, saying the region must move beyond declarations to concrete action if it is to achieve gender parity in political leadership.
The call was made on Thursday at the opening of the West Africa Women’s Political Leadership Forum, themed “Accelerating Gender Parity in Political Leadership in West Africa: From Commitment to Action,” where regional leaders, ministers, parliamentarians, development partners and civil society organisations agreed that existing commitments must now translate into measurable reforms that remove barriers preventing women from participating fully in politics.
The two-day forum is expected to adopt the Abuja Regional Action Plan, providing a roadmap for member states to implement reforms aimed at increasing women’s political participation and achieving ECOWAS’ gender parity objectives by 2035.
Vice-President of the ECOWAS Commission, Damtien Tchintchibidja, said the initiative was conceived as part of the legacy of ECOWAS’ 50th anniversary celebration to ensure that the next phase of regional integration reflects the aspirations and talents of all citizens.
She said the adoption of the Presidential Declaration on Gender Parity in Political Representation and the Pact for the Future of Regional Integration demonstrated the determination of West African leaders to pursue a more inclusive, people-centred regional agenda.
The Women and Foreign Policy program’s most recent update of the “Women’s Power Index” ranks 193 United Nations (UN) member states on their progress toward gender parity in political participation. It analyzes the proportion of women who serve as heads of state or government, in cabinets, in national legislatures, as candidates for national legislatures, and in local government bodies, and visualizes the gender gap in political representation.
Over the past year global progress toward gender parity in political representation has remained flat at 29 on the 100-point aggregate scale employed in which a 100-point score represents gender parity. The number of countries that are halfway or more to parity has remained the same. Twenty-eight countries exceeded fifty in their gender parity score, including Canada, Dominica, Moldova, and the United Kingdom in the past year. Mozambique, Peru, Rwanda, and Senegal fell below that halfway to parity mark in the past year. The U.S. gender parity score is slightly above the global average at 35. Iceland has maintained its position in first place, with a score of 86, Mexico and Andorra occupy second and third place, with scores of 75 and 73, respectively.
Progress in women’s political leadership at the national level has been stalling recently. Since the end of World War II, 82 of the 193 countries have elected a female head of state or government, with the most progress coming in the past two decades. Eleven countries elected their first woman into high office during the 2000s, twenty-five in the 2010s, and seventeen thus far in the 2020s. Most recently, Namibia elected its first woman president, Netumbo Nandi-Ndaitwah, in 2025, and Mexico elected its first woman president, Claudia Sheinbaum, in 2024.
Read here the full article published by the Council on Foreign Relations on 2 April 2025.
Image by the Council on Foreign Relations
Last Saturday, March 8th, marked International Women’s Day, when the international community celebrates the social, economic, cultural, and political accomplishments of women. In post-communist societies, where this day is often a public holiday, there is still a lot left to do to ensure better representation of women in political institutions—but the contribution of women to democracy-building efforts is undeniable.
Meet four exceptional female leaders who are shaping Eastern European politics today and learn more about women of the region fighting against war and autocracy.
Read here the full article published by the Wilson Center on 10 March 2025.
Image by Wilson Center
This year, 18 of Africa’s 54 countries went to the polls for presidential or general elections, making 2024 a significant year on the continent. There were high hopes for renewed commitment to fair governance, transparency and equal representation. In particular there were hopes for women’s political participation, for more women to be elected to office to shape policies that address the needs of all citizens.
For more than a decade, we at the human rights organisation Make Every Woman Count (MEWC) have been tracking women’s political participation across Africa. Unfortunately, we did not see the progress we hoped for this year. In 2014, there were three women serving as heads of state across Africa. In 2024, there were two: the president of Tanzania, Samia Suluhu Hassan, and Netumbo Nandi-Ndaitwah, who became Namibia’s first female president-elect on 3 December; the result is being contested in court. Nandi-Ndaitwah was the sole woman among 15 candidates, underscoring the persistent gender disparity in contests for high office.
Ghana also made history by electing Prof Naana Jane Opoku-Agyemang as its first female vice-president.
Read here the full article published by The Guardian on 31 December 2024.
Image by The Guardian
Significant and, arguably, profound changes took place in Baltic high politics over the past four years. The peak pandemic years — 2020 and 2021 — proved quite pivotal for both Lithuania and Estonia, as both saw the emergence of the first most gender-balanced cabinets in the history of these countries, with Latvia following in 2022. The Estonian parliament elected the first woman prime minister, Kaja Kallas, whose cabinet had the largest number of women ministers. For almost a year, Estonia’s top political positions — the presidency and prime ministership — were held by two women, making Estonia the only parliamentary democracy ruled by elected women. Meanwhile, the Lithuanian prime minister, Ingrida Šimonytė, was the second woman to hold this position. Unlike her predecessor, Danutė Prunskienė, who served as the first woman prime minister of Lithuania more than 30 years ago (1990-1991) and was the only woman in her all-male cabinet, Šimonytė’s cabinet was the most gender-balanced in the modern history of the country. With the election of Evika Siliņa in September 2023 as Latvia’s prime minister, all three Baltic prime ministerships were held by women for about ten months — a historical first in the Baltic states’ politics.
Read here the full article published by the Foreign Policy Research Institute on 19 December 2024.
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Introduction
Gender equality has been a point of debate in the recent past. This is based on the ability to accord equal rights and opportunity for both genders where discrimination and prejudice are prevented. In Nigeria, gender equality and related issues are prevalent in different cases.
This is where the female gender is facing different inequalities and challenges, which are making it hard for them to cope and become effective in community participation and development (. This is based on the rise of various forms of conflict in the region, such as the Boko Haram and Harder-Farmer conflicts.
These are negatively impacting the country’s economy, and they are also affecting women and gender dynamics in the area. Therefore, this research outlines the way such conflicts have led to issues impacting women, such as gender-based violence, and also impacts the roles of women in society. Also, the discussion outlines the relationship between conflict and political participation of women in the country and the post-conflict challenges and opportunities available in the case of women in Nigeria.
Read here the full article published by The Vanguard on 7 January 2025.
Image by The Vanguard
This is the second issue of our policy insight series on gender-inclusive conflict transformation. This paper explores the political re-conversion pathways that women ex-combatants pursue after the signing of a peace agreement. From 2022 to 2023, we engaged in focus group discussions, interviews, and peer-learning workshops with over 70 women ex-combatants from Colombia, El Salvador, and the Philippines. In this publication, we present their testimonies and analyse their experiences of continuing their engagement post-war through nonviolent means in both formal and informal political spheres.
Click here to read the full article published by Relief Web on 17 December 2024.
Image by Relief Web