Women's Leadership

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.

Women make up almost 49.6 per cent of the world's population.

Unfortunately, political representation numbers do not reflect the global percentage of women. Based on the statistics provided by the United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women (UN Women), only 27 countries have reached or surpassed 40 per cent of women's representation in their national Parliaments.

On Oct 5 this year, the Women, Family and Community Development Ministry organised a forum on women's leadership in politics.

Throughout the forum, the panellists, most of whom are senior leaders in political parties, agreed that 30 per cent of women should be deployed as candidates in the 15th General Election (GE15).

Click here to read the full article published by New Straits Times on 13 November 2022.

Women running for election are more likely to be the victims of personalised, misogynistic abuse - online and at the doorstep - than their male counterparts.

That is according to new research published today which also shows that female representation at council level across the country - while still very low - has almost doubled in 30 years to 24%.

The study, commissioned by Cork City Council's Women's Caucus, was undertaken by UCC's Centre for Local and Regional Governance.

Click here to read the full article published by RTE on 22 November 2022.

The Gender Equality Index developed by the European Institute for Gender Equality (EIGE) in 2013, is recognised in the European Union as an important tool for analysing the state of gender equality in a society as well as comparing current trends and the current situation at the European Union (EU) level. Since 2016, the Agency for Gender Equality of Bosnia and Herzegovina within the Ministry of Human Rights and Refugees of Bosnia and Herzegovina together with the Agency for Statistics of Bosnia and Herzegovina have been engaged in activities that have led to the development of a Gender Equality Index for Bosnia and Herzegovina. The Gender Equality Index for Bosnia and Herzegovina 2022 presents the full index scores for two full domains, Knowledge and Power and the partial index scores for the domains of Work and Health. With the development of this report, Bosnia and Herzegovina will for the first time be able to rely on a statistically legitimate, objective and up-to-date statistical tool for the comparison of the state of gender equality in the country wth countries in the region and in the EU. The combined efforts of the Agency for Statistics of Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Agency for Gender Equality of Bosnia and Herzegovina within the Ministry for Human Rights and Refugees of Bosnia and Herzegovina, under the invaluable guidance of EIGE and supported by UN Women and financed by the European Union, have resulted in the development of this Gender Equality Index.

Click here to access the report.