Women's Leadership
This October, Golden, along with the rest of British Columbia, will head to the polls. Residents will vote for mayor, town councillors, school trustees, and regional district representatives. While the election is still five months away, it is never too early to start thinking about what we want from our local government and who we want leading the next chapter of our community.
Last Wednesday, I had the privilege of sitting down with Connie Barlow, Joy Guyot, Kristi Cooper, and Karen Cathcart for a discussion about women in local politics.
The discussion was held at The Island Restaurant and was open to the public. Organized by the Golden Women’s Resource Centre, the event created a welcoming atmosphere with refreshments and childcare available for parents who wanted to attend.
The conversation centred on the experiences of women in local politics, the challenges they face, the sacrifices they make, and the reasons they continue to serve. It was also a call to action, encouraging more local women to become involved in civic life.
“I noticed and respected the women that I saw doing things, and I thought, I’m going to be one of those women,” Cooper shared.
Around the world, escalating armed conflict, political repression and humanitarian collapse are reshaping daily life for women and girls—often with devastating consequences. From drone warfare in Sudan, to internet blackouts in Iran, to attacks on healthcare infrastructure in Lebanon and Gaza, women are navigating intensifying threats while also sustaining families, communities and survival networks under extraordinary strain. At the same time, women-led organizations and feminist movements confronting these crises increasingly face funding cuts, political repression and shrinking civic space even as demand for their work grows.
Globally, over 676 million women and girls live within 50 kilometers of armed conflict, representing about 17 percent of the female population. This staggering figure—a 74 percent increase since 2010—is tracked and analyzed by the Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace and Security in partnership with PRIO.
But we also know: Feminist movements around the world hold answers to some of the world’s most urgent crises. Ms. Global is taking note of feminists worldwide—and the gendered realities shaping conflict, displacement, political repression and survival. (This edition of Ms. Global contains information from the Women, Peace and Security Conflict Tracker’s May updates.)
Over the past two decades, Turkey has undergone a profound authoritarian transformation. Under AKP rule (in power since 2002), the space for political opposition has steadily contracted: press freedom has been gutted, civil society organisations shut down or co-opted, and the legal and electoral frameworks increasingly bent toward the consolidation of power. The tools of this transformation are by now familiar. Which is not limited to outright repression, but a more systematic effort to delegitimise the opposition by fragmenting it, discrediting its leadership, and making organised dissent appear either dangerous or futile. In this context, sustaining any form of political opposition is genuinely difficult.
Yet that is precisely what the feminist movement in Turkey has done. The feminist movement has remained a consistent, visible, and expanding political force, capable of bringing tens of thousands of women onto the streets and articulating demands that cross deep political divides. The feminist movement in Turkey has built an alternative political possibility: a living demonstration that politics can be practiced differently, that opposition need not mirror the power it resists. And that collective action organised around shared experience rather than ideological uniformity can hold ground even as authoritarian pressure mounts. In a political landscape where the question of how opposition survives is increasingly urgent, what the feminist movement in Turkey has built is not merely a local story. It is a case study in political possibility.
WINDHOEK, NAMIBIA -Australian women’s political leadership advocate Leonie Morgan AM, has urged countries in Southern Africa to invest in mentorship, financial support, training and women’s networks to accelerate female political participation and leadership.
In an exclusive interview, Morgan said sustainable progress in women’s political representation depends not only on funding, but also on structured mentoring systems and institutional backing that encourage women to contest elections and remain active in public leadership.
Morgan, who co-founded EMILY’s List Australia in 1995, has spent more than three decades supporting women candidates across Australia and parts of the Asia-Pacific region. Through her work, she has helped approximately 800 women run for state and national parliaments, with 385 eventually elected.
She said her passion for women’s leadership was inspired by the late Joan Kirner, the first female Premier of the Australian state of Victoria, whom she described as a mentor and role model.
For 15 years, Mamata Banerjee and her regional Trinamool Congress (TMC) party seemed to embody a political law of India's West Bengal state: they always found a way to survive.
On Monday, that ended.
The firebrand populist's defeat to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) ended her bid for a fourth consecutive term as chief minister - a feat that would have placed her alongside long-serving regional titans such as Jyoti Basu and Naveen Patnaik.
Banerjee's loss brings one of the most remarkable political careers in contemporary India to a moment of profound uncertainty - one that began with street protests and now culminates in the weakening of the political fortress she herself built.
Dimunitive and draped in a plain cotton sari and rubber sandals, Banerjee hardly looked like a politician who would topple one of the world's longest-running elected Communist governments.
Women who enter public life, including journalists, activists and those in politics, have always understood that visibility comes at a cost.
But in the digital age, first shaped by social media and now increasingly driven by artificial intelligence, that cost has deepened, changed form, and become systemic and often relentless.
Harassment now travels in coordinated waves, often beyond control, moving faster than truth and leaving behind consequences that do not easily fade. And the danger is not limited to these attacks – it is also found in the silence they are designed to produce from their targets. Artificial intelligence is now making easier to manufacture, scale, and sustain that silence.
Examining the impact of emerging technologies
The urgency of these shifts was at the centre of discussions during a side event at the UN’s Commission on the Status of Women (CSW70), Women Holding the Line: Storytelling & Safety in an Age of AI, convened in partnership with BBC Media Action and Peace Pays. Around 60 leaders from across the globe, journalists, activists, technologists, policymakers, and funders, gathered to examine how emerging technologies are reshaping both risk and resilience for women in public life.
In a panel discussion led by BBC reporter Samira Hussain, Fatou Baldeh, an FGM activist from Gambia; Kat Fotovat, a former ambassador and Co-Founder at Peace Pays.ai; Arbana Xharra, a Kosovar Albanian investigative journalist; and Varinder Kaur Gambhir, Country Director at BBC Media Action, India emphasized how the threats facing women in public spheres are no longer isolated or temporary. They are embedded within rapidly evolving technological systems which increase surveillance, track and invade privacy, and may also put family members and sources at risk.
It’s 2024, but power still looks like a man. Despite Australia’s claim to egalitarianism, achieving equal political participation and representation remains a formidable challenge for women. Concerningly, the persistent and ingrained obstacles in women’s way are affecting the aspirations of the next generation of female leaders.
According to 2022 research spanning 29 countries, including Australia, satisfaction among young females aged 15-24 with their leaders’ decisions on issues they care about stands at a mere 11%. An overwhelming 97% acknowledged the importance of political participation. Yet, only 24% of those aspiring to engage in politics could see themselves running for office.
Worse still, 20% have been personally discouraged from political involvement. This is often because they’re either considered to be less qualified or that they will inevitably face discrimination and gendered violence.
I crunched the numbers to assess the situation in Australia. While much has been said about the mistreatment of female leaders, how does this play into the psyche of female constituents?
Read here the full article published by The Conversation on 7 March 2024.
Image source: The Conversation.
Abstract: While the passage of the 2018 Gender Parity Law was a step in the right direction, progress on women’s political empowerment in Japan has been slow. With a combined effort from advocacy groups, political parties, and the international community to include more women on ballots and support them to electoral success, Japan can move the needle on gender equity in politics.
The annual Group of Seven (G7) meeting invites opportunities for multi-national collaboration but also comparison amongst the attending states. The G7 countries (Canada, the United States, United Kingdom, Italy, Germany, France, and Japan, plus attendance from the European Union) indeed share many things in common: they are all relatively wealthy, liberal democracies committed to working together on global issues. Yet the photos from this year’s meeting highlight another questionable commonality: where aren’t there more women in positions of leadership? A deeper look reveals varying levels of gender equality in politics across G7 members with Japan continuing to lag significantly behind.
Click here to read the full article published by The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus on 10 December 2023.
Image by The Asia-Pacific Journal
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Previous work suggests that observing women officeholders increases women’s political ambition. Yet, jumps in women’s representation in the United States’ “Years of the Woman”—following the Anita Hill testimonies and the election of Donald Trump—are linked to women’s exclusion from political decision-making. Drawing on focus groups with prospective women candidates, we theorize that exclusion when combined with a gendered policy threat increases women’s political ambition. Using survey experiments replicated across different samples, we show that women who read about an all-male city council poised to legislate on women’s rights report increased ambition compared with their pretreatment ambition levels and to women in other treatment groups. Women’s increased sense of political efficacy drives these results. When women’s rights are not under discussion, men’s overrepresentation does not move (or even depresses) women’s ambition. Seeing the policy consequences of their exclusion causes some women to seek a seat at the table.
Click here to read the full article published by the American Political Science Association on 30 November 2023.
Image by The American Political Science Association
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Men still dominate political decision-making in the United Kingdom. Women hold just one or two seats on prestigious select committees in the House of Commons, like Defence, Foreign Affairs, and Justice. No women sit on the Domestic and Economic Affairs cabinet committee. And 95% of all local councils have majority-men membership.
Yet voters do care about women’s leadership in elected office. My research shows that when women are absent from political decision-making, voters view governments as less legitimate.
Click here to read the full article published by the Electoral Reform Society on 21 November 2023.
Image by Electoral Reform Society
To what extent has the glass ceiling in global governance been shattered? To answer this question, we need to look beyond the numbers on women’s representation and study how far women are perceived as inspiring and visionary leaders in global governance. This article offers an analysis of perceptions of inspiring and visionary leadership in global multistakeholder initiatives from a gender perspective. Based on 467 interviews with participants in a leading multistakeholder initiative, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), it presents four findings: (1) respondents identify more men than women as inspiring and visionary leaders, with the difference roughly corresponding to the share of women in leadership roles; (2) respondents tend to ascribe more leadership attributes to women than to men when explaining why they find them inspiring and visionary; (3) both feminine and masculine leadership traits are appreciated in relation to both men and women leaders at ICANN; (4) female respondents identify more women as inspiring and visionary leaders than male respondents. These findings contribute novel insights into gendered perceptions around leadership and the importance of role models in global governance. They also shed much-needed light on the demands and expectations from leadership in global multistakeholder arrangements.
Click here to read the full report published by the Cambridge University Press on 26 October 2023.
RepresentWomen is committed to researching and identifying the best practices for increasing women’s representation in politics, drawing from evidence around the world. Part of this work leads us to closely track parliamentary elections and compare the outcomes from year to year. In 2021 and 2022, we identified 43 elections where women achieved record highs for their representation in parliament. The purpose of this analysis is to bring attention to how election rules and voting systems shape opportunities for women to enter politics.
Click here to read the full report published by RepresentWomen on 11 October 2023.