Women's Leadership
Distinguished Guests,
Dear friends,
It is an absolute pleasure to be here today with so many bright, passionate, young leaders and changemakers.
You are the driving force behind the progress we've made in recent years.
And what an incredible journey it has been!
As we kick off this Global Gateway High-Level Youth Event, I want to acknowledge the many partners that have been essential in driving this movement forward. Many of you are here today, in person as well as online.
But this is more than recognition.
It's a celebration of your passion and dedication.
Together, we have achieved so much.
Two years ago, with your help, the European Commission launched its first Youth Action Plan in External Action.
It was a landmark moment – the culmination of a collective effort that involved more than 220 international stakeholders, including young people and youth organisations.
Our goals were ambitious:
To engage young people by giving them a voice in policy and decision making.
To empower them with the resources they need to lead sustainable change.
Read here the full speech deliver by Commissioner Jutta Urpalainen published on the European Commission website on 10 October 2024.
Image by Commissioner Jutta Urpalainen
Adamawa State deputy governor, Professor Kaletapwa Farauta, has highlighted the growing need for female leadership to bring about significant change in Nigeria’s political landscape.
Speaking at the 28th Annual National Conference of the National Association of Women in Colleges of Education (WICE) in Yola, Farauta praised the state’s progress in empowering women in politics. She emphasised the pivotal role women can play in leadership, noting, “Nigeria is waiting for great women to make a change in the political arena.”
Farauta underlined the benefits of female leadership, particularly in terms of accountability and effective governance. She also expressed optimism about the possibility of women becoming local government chairpersons soon.
Read here the full article published by the Daily Trust on 9 October 2024.
Image by Daily Trust
In the remote yet strikingly beautiful Nguruman Escarpment of Kajiado County, Kenya, a transformative initiative is unfolding. Here, in a traditionally patriarchal Maasai community, a group of men—known as the Men Champions—has become crucial allies in the fight for gender equality in leadership. These men are part of a broader effort to challenge deep-seated cultural barriers, offering crucial support for women seeking political leadership in a county where progress has been slow.
Despite Kenya’s constitutional requirement that no more than two-thirds of elective or appointive positions be held by the same gender, Kajiado County remains a striking example of gender disparity. In the 2022 general elections, not a single woman won a political seat beyond the legally mandated women representative position, reflecting the powerful cultural and financial barriers women face when attempting to enter the political arena.
Men as Allies: Supporting Women’s Leadership in Politics
The Expanding Spaces for Women's Political Participation in Kenya project, implemented by Uraia Trust with support from UN Women and Global Affairs Canada, is actively addressing these challenges. One of the most significant elements of the program is the engagement of men in supporting women's leadership aspirations. These Men Champions—community gatekeepers and respected elders—are leading peer-learning forums that bring together male and female gender champions to discuss how to create pathways for women to participate in politics and governance.
For generations, leadership in this region has been male dominated, with powerful clans selecting political aspirants. However, as Paul Ole Koisaba, a prominent elder in Nguruman, explains, “We cannot continue to make decisions that exclude half of our population. Our women have the skills and the vision to lead, and we must stand behind them.”
By challenging the traditional norms that have held women back, these men are setting the stage for women to run for office with the full backing of their communities. In doing so, they are not just supporting women—they are building a future where leadership is more inclusive and representative of all voices.
Read here the full article published by UN Women Africa on 5 October 2024.
Claudia Sheinbaum leads a groundbreaking team of women in Mexico's government, achieving significant gender parity in leadership roles across the country.
Mexico has taken a significant step towards gender parity in leadership, marking a historic milestone with the inauguration of its first female president, Claudia Sheinbaum. As she assumes office, the country stands out as a leader in gender representation, surpassing the United States in this regard. Sheinbaum's administration features a cabinet comprised of 50% women and a Congress that is evenly split between men and women.
Claudia Sheinbaum, 62, elected on June 2 with nearly 60% of the vote, is not only the first female president but also Mexico's first Jewish president. She grew up in a politically engaged family, with her mother, Annie Pardo, being a prominent biologist. After earning a PhD in energy engineering from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), Sheinbaum became active in politics, serving as head of the environment department under then-Mayor Andrés Manuel López Obrador. She later won the mayorship of Mexico City in 2018.
In a recent statement, Sheinbaum asserted, "Never again should we hear the statement, 'You're prettier when you stay silent.' Those days are over in our country."
Read here the full article published by The Latin Times on 6 October 2024.
Image by The Latin Times
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
Business as usual is not an option. To fulfil the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, including Sustainable Development Goal 5 on achieving gender equality and empowering all women and girls, concrete actions and intensified commitments to improve women’s participation and representation are needed.
In early 2016, the International Gender Champions–Geneva started to look closely at the number of women in delegations to governing bodies of Geneva-based international organizations. At its annual meeting in 2016, the United Nations Governing Bodies Secretariat further discussed gender balance in the governing bodies of international organizations and agreed to support efforts to promote women’s participation and advance the goal of gender balance across their conferences and meetings.
This publication aims to build knowledge on women’s participation in national delegations to meetings of international organizations’ governing bodies and their leadership roles in these meetings. It is based on responses to a questionnaire addressed to members of the United Nations Governing Bodies Secretariat and of the International Gender Champions–Geneva. Although the results of the survey may not be representative of all United Nations organizations, they have yielded important information on the current policies and practices in the 23 entities that took part.
Based on the responses, six types of actions to improve women’s participation in governing body meetings have been identified: (a) explicit policies and mandated targets; (b) tracking and reporting; (c) training and capacity-building; (d) financial support; (e) advocacy and networking; and (f) communications strategies.
The survey results are complemented by an overview of intergovernmental and inter-agency frameworks and trends in women’s participation in national Governments and intergovernmental forums. Best practices in promoting women’s participation at different levels – national and multilateral – are also presented with the aim of informing concrete recommendations on the way forward to realize gender balance in international organizations’ governing bodies.
Click here to access the publication.
This book is an overview of women’s activism and political struggles in contemporary Africa, and the ways in which the continent's women are shaping the struggle for women’s rights internationally.
Throughout Africa, growing numbers of women are coming together and making their voices heard, mobilising around causes ranging from democracy and land rights to campaigns against domestic violence. In Tanzania and Tunisia, women have made major gains in their struggle for equal political rights, and in Sierra Leone and Liberia women have been at the forefront of efforts to promote peace and reconciliation. While some of these movements have been influenced by international feminism and external donors, increasingly it is African women who are shaping the global struggle for women’s rights.
Bringing together African authors who themselves are part of the activist groups, this collection represents the only comprehensive and up-to-date overview of women’s movements in contemporary Africa. Drawing on case studies and fresh empirical material from across the continent, the authors challenge the prevailing assumption that notions of women’s rights have trickled down from the global north to the south, showing instead that these movements have been shaped by above all the unique experiences and concerns of the local women involved.
Click here for more information.
iKNOW Politics expert Farida Jalalzai submitted the following article to be published on International Women’s Day 2017.
Few social changes have been as dramatic and rapid as women’s increased political representation worldwide. Simultaneously, nowhere do women hold equal power to men in influencing and exercising political authority worldwide. This story of huge gains and shocking barriers plays out daily in our news, and for good reason. These are all threads of a compelling story – women’s global political empowerment. Changes that were fuzzy and uncertain at first can no longer be ignored. The UN has declared women’s empowerment as the third of its Millennium Development Goals (http://www.un.org/millenniumgoals/). Within this broad charter, political empowerment is one of a variety of areas, often less fully articulated and studied in comparison to economic indicators. Yet, gains in women’s political empowerment directly decrease the role of gender inequality as an obstacle to incorporation as social and economic equals, and open, rather than close, the political domain to all members of society. Indeed, as the largest group today that worldwide encounters current and historical barriers to political incorporation, women’s political empowerment is a fundmental process of transformation for benchmarking and understanding more general empowerment gains across the globe. Thus, women’s political empowerment is a political public good insofar as progress legitimates and strengthens a larger committment to equal political incorporation generally.
What is women’s global political empowerment? In 2015, we began a cross-national and inter-disciplinary discussion of these concepts and are publishing resulting work in an edited collection Alexander, Bolzendahl, and Jalalzai (forthcoming)[1]. As we have continued to develop these ideas, we define women’s global political empowerment as the enhancement of assets, capabilities, and achievements of women to gain equality to men in influencing and exercising political authority worldwide. This definition builds from important previous work on gender, empowerment, and development (Kabeer 2005). First, empowerment denotes a process of transformation from a position of no or limited agency to one of greater agentic opportunity and effectiveness. This captures the transformative essence of empowerment processes writ large. Importantly, it incorporates the systematic marginalization of women as a group from access to and achievement of equal levels of political influence, representation, and integration. Second, we focus on the fact that women’s political empowerment is achieved as part of a political process, not at one particular moment (e.g., women reaching 50% of the legislature). Political empowerment goes beyond the power enjoyed by particular individuals by shedding light on power configurations positioning groups, and recognizes political authority as the legitimate access to state mediated power. Third, women’s political empowerment distributes power more evenly between men and women and undermines entrenched patterns of gender inequality across a broad range of economic, familial, and social institutions.
While the challenges are steep, there is a great deal of positive momentum toward expanding measures of women’s political empowerment worldwide. Data from sources such as the World Bank, the Inter-Parliamentary Union (www.ipu.org); and the UN Women program (www.unwomen.org) are slowly prioritizing measures related to gender, women’s empowerment, and politics. Mirroring the construction of gender as a social structure with individual, interactional, and institutional levels, measures of women’s empowerment must consider women’s individual capacities and opportunities (e.g., political knowledge, access, rights), community-based factors (e.g., political mobilization, campaigning, local representation), and broader arenas (e.g., women’s election nationally, women’s lobbies and political organizations, women’s power and leadership in office). While the bulk of available information relates to women’s formal political power (i.e., election to national office), our collection of research will expand this, for example in including cross-national measures of women’s election to local council, approaches to include women’s committee and caucus memberships, frameworks for linking women’s rights and emancipative values in survey research, broadening international data on women’s executive leadership, and measures of the intersection of gender and minority status worldwide. Moving forward on these measurement issues requires collaboration across disciplines and a commitment by organizations and their resources to prioritize the collection of such data and share it widely.
We argue that we need to still better understand women’s elite involvement and influence. The majority of prior work on elites charts cross-national and longitudinal trends in women’s presence in national legislatures. While women’s presence in legislatures has grown over time, women still remain vastly underrepresented in most countries worldwide. Comparative research on cross-level trends in women’s office-holding also shows that women’s incorporation varies considerably (Bolzendahl 2014). Thus, women’s presence at the national level should not be taken for granted as an indicator of similar achievements in other levels of office-holding. As a point of comparison, we briefly analyze women holding national executive positions (prime ministerships, presidencies, or equivalent posts).
While the current world average of women in parliaments is 23 percent (www.ipu.org) and thus still quite low, compare this to the percentage of women holding executive office. A mere six percent of all executives in power in 2017 worldwide are women. A record year for women would only require 20 women to hold power simultaneously. Even in this scenario, women would comprise less than eight percent of all executives. More stunning is that the numbers of women leading their countries is actually declining rather than increasing[2]. While quantities can indicate some important aspects of political empowerment, we must also account for quality of position and influence of the country. Women, compared to their male counterparts, more often ascend to relatively weak executive posts and gain offices through appointment as opposed to popular election (Jalalzai 2013). Even with high profile female executives such as German Chancellor Angela Merkel (consistently ranked as the world’s most powerful female leader by Forbes Magazine) women still rarely lead more visible countries on the world stage. No doubt, media interest in women in executive power increased as Hillary Clinton’s election as the first woman president of the United States seemed likely. Given her loss and other setbacks for women including the impeachment of two sitting female presidents--Dilma Rousseff of Brazil and South Korea’s Park Guen-hye--it is fair to say that 2017 has not started out as a banner year for women executives. Focusing only on women in national legislatures, therefore, neglects key alternative arenas where women gain in decision-making authority that may be even more influential, including women’s presence including executive positions, but also positions of party leadership, in the courts and security forces.
Our work also suggests the need to incorporate more work on political empowerment of average female citizens since this may strongly influence elite behavior, such as the provision of entitlements, especially those supporting gender equality (Alexander and Welzel 2011). Therefore, average female citizens’ level of political motivation and participation as well as the strength of women’s advocacy networks are fundamental to women’s political empowerment.
Overall, our research on identifies a number of key conceptual issues and opportunities for further developing definitions of women’s political empowerment worldwide. In particular, we see that a critical mass of scholarship exists that provides the launching point for research to expand globally and rethink conclusions across geo-political areas. Through continued work and data collection, a broad theoretical framework can emerge to understand how women have gained fuller access to political power and where challenges toward equality remain.
References
Alexander, Amy C. and Christian Welzel. 2011. “Explaining Women’s Empowerment: The Role
of Emancipative Beliefs.” European Sociological Review 27(3): 364-384.
Alexander, Amy, Catherine Bolzendahl, Farida Jalalzai. Measuring Women’s Political Empowerment
across the Globe- Strategies, Challenges and Future Research. New York: Palgrave Macmillan (forthcoming).
Alexander, Amy, Catherine Bolzendahl, Farida Jalalzai. 2016. “Defining Women’s Global
Political Empowerment: Theories and Evidence.” Sociology Compass.
Jalalzai, Farida. 2013. Shattered, Cracked and Firmly Intact: Women and the Executive Glass
Ceiling Worldwide. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kabeer, Naila, 2005. "Gender Equality and Women's Empowerment: A Critical Analysis of the
Third Millennium Development Goal 1." Gender & Development 13:13-24.
[1] We thank the Thyssen Foundation for support of our conference in Cologne, Germany, 2015.
[2] Currently, only 15 women hold executive posts. In the previous year, 19 women held executive power. Excluded from analysis women occupying positions not conforming to presidential or prime ministerial office such as collective executives (as in San Marino or Bosnia etc.).Leaders of non-autonomous countries are also omitted since ultimate authority lies with another government. Since Taiwan’s independence from China is contested, President Tsai is excluded. A small number of women served in both prime ministerial and presidential capacities in the same country. Others led officially as interim leaders prior to securing more permanent appointments. Since the unit of analysis is the woman leader, they are not considered separate cases. In instances where the same woman held two different types of executive positions, they are analyzed in the position they held longer. Farida Jalalzai compiled cases of women leaders from the Worldwide Guide to Women in Leadership, Zarate’s Political Collection and different media articles.
In 2013-2014, a study was undertaken by UNDP to explore the presence of women in decision-making positions in the countries of the Caribbean Community1,2 (CARICOM), as well as the link between their presence in politics and institutions and the national advances on gender equality, i.e. the link between descriptive and substantive representation. The initial hypothesis for the study was that there is a relationship between women’s political presence and the positive effects it might have through the inclusion of gender and other related inequality issues into the legislative and executive agenda — thereby establishing women as important agents of change for development. A similar study was in process in Latin America, but limited to the legislative agenda. This study was conducted as a desk review, during which available information and data on women, parliaments, and gender equality were collected and analysed from existing reports, documents, and other resources. While the aim of the research was to analyse the data on women’s political participation at the local and national levels for the period between 2000 and 2013, data for the period before were incorporated wherever it was available. This was done in order to paint as complete a picture of women’s political participation as possible and thereby capture key historic milestones and precedents that continue to have significant impact.
The women, peace and security UN Security Council resolutions poster provides a helpful overview of each of the eight resolutions, and pulls out key provisions for each resolution. The poster is an informational resource which can be used by experts and non-experts alike to help explain and highlight the meaning and intention of each resolution on women, peace and security.
The International Foundation for Electoral Systems (IFES) includes gender equality and women’s empowerment programming as a key facet of its democracy-building work in countries transitioning from violent conflict to more stable political processes. IFES has programs on the ground in flashpoint countries such as Libya, Burkina Faso, and Syria, as well as countries striving to end the cycle of conflict such as Côte d’Ivoire and Myanmar. These countries represent a critical cohort of transitional states, which need tailored conflict and political transition interventions well in advance of credible, transparent and inclusive elections. Research has shown that gender equality is a bulwark for democracy – ensuring the resilience of democratic institutions that represent the needs of all their constituencies –and IFES works with partners to ensure women and men from all segments of society are part of the political and electoral process.
Work in conflict and unstable democratic settings will continue for the foreseeable future and a commitment to inclusive democracy will be challenged by these settings in unique ways. The legal framework for elections and political processes are often shaped, drafted, or reformed during peace processes and political transitions. IFES is committed to programming that integrates gender equality and women’s empowerment into all political and electoral technical assistance, including evolving and complex transitional contexts. This is critical for two reasons:
Excluding women from the nascent stages of conflict resolution is a missed opportunity to have all voices influence the blueprint for peace and democracy in their countries, and
Excluding women from political transition processes risks replicating gender inequality in new structures and perpetuating it in societal attitudes.
This briefing paper by IFES Senior Gender Specialist Jessica Huber outlines IFES’ gender-specific programming, which examines and responds to points along the continuum of crisis, political transition and stable democracy.
Click here to access the briefing paper.