Women's Leadership

Love it or loathe it, politics is a completely unavoidable part of life, especially living here in the UK, where politicians and their various flaws and virtues seem to fuel daily headlines. Even as a politics student, I’ve found the ever-changing carousel of names and faces being hurled at me via my BBC news app a little hard to comprehend. For this reason, I have compiled, in no particular order, a list of 10 women in British politics who I think it is important to know about, regardless of my own opinions on their political positions. Perhaps this will make reading the news a little bit less of a minefield for you, and help us all to feel better connected to, and more importantly, educated about, the various characters running our country from Westminster.

ANGELA RAYNER

Angela Rayner’s most important role, among many, is as Deputy Leader of the Opposition, meaning she serves under Keir Starmer in the Labour Party. Rayner’s rise is a remarkable story, with the politician having left school aged 16 because of pregnancy, and without any qualifications. She eventually began training to make a living as a care worker, before working her way into politics through a role as a trade union representative and later joining the Labour Party. She is well known for her strong and outright opinions towards the Conservative party, powerful representation of the working class, and is very much in the running to be Labour’s first female leader.

Click here to read the full article published by Her Campus on 21 November 2022.

“Around the world, we see stigmatization, harassment and outright attacks used to silence and discredit women who are outspoken as leaders, community workers, human rights defenders and politicians,” said Peggy Hicks, Director of the Thematic Engagement, Special Procedures and Right to Development Division of the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, during the annual discussion on gender integration at the Human Rights Council.

The discussion explored gender-based barriers to freedom of opinion and expression, and how theycan be dismantled in a comprehensive and sustainable manner, taking into consideration the intersecting forms of discrimination women, girls and people with diverse gender identities are subjected to.

Click here to read the full article published by OHCHR on 18 November 2022.

UCC research, carried out on behalf of Cork City Council’s Women’s Caucus, has recommended that gender quota legislation be introduced before the next local government elections to help increase the number of female councillors around the country. 

Gender quotas are in place for national elections but not at local government level. The authors called for legislation to introduce a 40% gender quota for the 2024 elections so that Ireland is in line with other European countries. At present any gender quotas are informal, as agreed by individual political parties. 

The authors of ‘Women’s Voice in the Council Chamber’ Dr. Aodh Quinlivan, Dr Fiona Buckley, Olajumoke Olumwaferanmi Igun and John Ger O’Riordan, also recommended that maternity leave and paternity leave be extended to councillors, that of the three councillors nominated by each local authority to the Association of Irish Local Government (AILG), that at least one should be a woman. They also called for a specific mentoring programme for newly elected women councillors and community-based education around the role of local government and the councillors.

Click here to access the report.

Building on the data in the global report on Gender Equality in Public Administration (GEPA), this policy brief looks at women's participation in and leadership of environmental protection ministries as well as all ministries tasked officially with each country's response to climate change. While progress in women's participation in public administration across many other sectors has improved, there are still significant gaps – with the largest ones affecting environment and climate spheres.

Click here to access the report.

increase gender parity in politics, global efforts have struggled to ensure equal female representation. This is likely tied to implicit gender biases against women in authority. In this work, we present a comprehensive study of gender biases that appear in online political discussion. To this end, we collect 10 million comments on Reddit in conversations about male and female politicians, which enables an exhaustive study of automatic gender bias detection. We address not only misogynistic language, but also other manifestations of bias, like benevolent sexism in the form of seemingly positive sentiment and dominance attributed to female politicians, or differences in descriptor attribution. Finally, we conduct a multi-faceted study of gender bias towards politicians investigating both linguistic and extra-linguistic cues. We assess 5 different types of gender bias, evaluating coverage, combinatorial, nominal, sentimental and lexical biases extant in social media language and discourse. Overall, we find that, contrary to previous research, coverage and sentiment biases suggest equal public interest in female politicians. Rather than overt hostile or benevolent sexism, the results of the nominal and lexical analyses suggest this interest is not as professional or respectful as that expressed about male politicians. Female politicians are often named by their first names and are described in relation to their body, clothing, or family; this is a treatment that is not similarly extended to men. On the now banned far-right subreddits, this disparity is greatest, though differences in gender biases still appear in the right and left-leaning subreddits. We release the curated dataset to the public for future studies.

Click here to read the full article published by Plos One on 26 October 2022.

Today, the European Parliament has formally adopted the new EU law on gender balance on corporate boards. By 2026, companies will need to have 40% of the underrepresented sex among non-executive directors or 33% among all directors.

On this occasion, President von der Leyen together with Vice-President Jourová and Commissioner Dalli issued the following statement:

“This is a long-awaited moment, a moment to be celebrated as a breakthrough in gender equality.

After ten years since its proposal by the European Commission, we will now have an EU law to break the glass ceiling of listed companies boards.

There are plenty of women qualified for top jobs and with our new European law, we will make sure that they have a real chance to get them.”

Click here to read the full article published by The European Commission on 22 November 2022.