Women's Leadership
Discover the impactful conversations and calls to action from the Women's Rights Conference 2024 in Malaysia, addressing the critical issues of female political representation and the collective efforts towards gender equality.
In the heart of Nairobi, a seismic shift in the narrative of law enforcement is underway. The Kenyan government, in a move as bold as it is necessary, has announced a substantial 40% salary increase for National Police officers, a decision set to roll out in July this year.
This initiative, born from the recommendations of the Maraga-led committee, is not merely a financial adjustment; it's a beacon of hope, signaling a transformative era for police welfare and institutional reforms within the police and prisons departments.
Click here to read the full article published by BNN Breakings News on 24 February 2024.
Image source: BNN Breakings News
Auckland, New Zealand – Numbers speak volumes, and in the Pacific, they tell a concerning story: less than 7 percent of parliamentarians are women.
Serving as the impetus for further collective action, women leaders from parliaments across the Pacific have convened on Auckland for the Pacific Women in Power Forum.
The three-day forum – supported by the people of New Zealand, Australia and Japan – sees women members of parliaments as well as parliamentary officials coming together to discuss opportunities for improving women’s representation, approaches to improving inclusivity, and the effectiveness of parliaments in tackling gender inequality.
The forum will discuss the many challenges women in politics face, including persistent online harassment fueled by the anonymity of social media; abuse that unfortunately dominates the daily lives of many women MPs worldwide.
Despite women's representation in politics still languishing as the worst in any region across the world – and progress sitting somewhere between stalled and gradual – a shift in attitudes across the Pacific is demanding change.
Click here to read the full article published by UNDP on 21 February 2024.
Image source: UNDP
When will the next general election be? No one knows. Well, perhaps Rishi Sunak does; the Prime Minister not-so-helpfully said he had a ‘working assumption’ that it would take place in late 2024.
As it happens, this will be a busy year in politics. Americans will also be going to the polls – the first time our two countries’ electoral cycles have synced since 1992. Already, there have been warnings about global disinformation campaigns – fuelled by AI and spread on social media – and what they may do to our already fragmented countries.
In total, over 60 nations – from India, Pakistan and Mexico to Taiwan and Ukraine – will be going to the polls before the end of 2024. Just under half of the world’s population is eligble to vote in some form of election this year, making it the biggest year for democracy in history. The world may well be a very different place by the time 2025 comes around.
Click here to read the full article published by Elle on 22 February 2024.
Image source: Elle
Recently, the minister responsible for women, family and community development, Nancy Shukri, reportedly said the 30% quota for women previously set by the government should be reconsidered given the current situation that “42% of women actively participated in decision making roles within the public service sector”.
The minister reportedly said many women now possess the qualifications, including experience and academic achievements, to compete equally with men in decision-making positions across various service levels.
“Considering that we have already surpassed the 30 per cent mark, reaching 42 per cent in the public sector, setting a new target at 50 per cent or beyond should not be hindered by ceilings or limitations,” she added.
Click here to read the full article published by Aliran on 19 February 2024.
Image source: Aliran
On 15 February 2024, an article titled “Why Cambodia needs to incorporate more women into its foreign policy process” was published on the Diplomat and has caught attention from various readers including the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation of Cambodia, which is also now requesting for clarifications from the author. While the article highlighted the significance of having more women in leadership and decision-making positions and some important statistical facts on the disproportionately low number of women in politics and diplomatic field, it failed to acknowledge the efforts and significant progress made by the government over the years to promote and mainstream gender equality in all sectors.
In Cambodia, commitments to empower and increase women leadership come from the highest level of the government. As often heard, women are considered as the “backbone of the society and economy”. Gender equality has been one of the government’s priority agendas, as manifested in various national policies and strategies, the Rectangular Strategy, the National Strategic Development Plan (NSDP), the five-year Strategic Neary Rattanak, and National Plan for Sub-National Democratic Development (NP-SNDD), just to name a few.
Click here to read the full article published by the Khmer Times on 20 February 2024.
Image source: Khmer Times
For standing up to the dangerous elements of today’s political reality—racial and socio-economic disparities and crackdowns on dissent, among them—both Robredo in the Philippines and Márquez in Colombia faced threats online and offline.
The same year, in Colombia, Francia Márquez showed up in tough times. Running for president in a political terrain hardly conducive for a black candidate, let alone a rural single mother, she reduced hundreds to tears with her speech: ‘We’re not descendants of slaves. We’re descendants of free men and women who were enslaved.’
The two women have been strong voices of reason advocating against authoritarian environments in their respective democracies, as two documentaries—belonging to separate parts of the world but bearing themes that rhyme—showed at the Sundance Film Festival in Utah recently. .
Click here to read the full article published by Feminism in India on 19 February 2024.
Image source: Feminism in India
The pantheon of autocratic leaders includes a great many sexists, from Napoléon Bonaparte, who decriminalized the murder of unfaithful wives, to Benito Mussolini, who claimed that women “never created anything.” And while the twentieth century saw improvements in women’s equality in most parts of the world, the twenty-first is demonstrating that misogyny and authoritarianism are not just common comorbidities but mutually reinforcing ills. Throughout the last century, women’s movements won the right to vote for women; expanded women’s access to reproductive health care, education, and economic opportunity; and began to enshrine gender equality in domestic and international law—victories that corresponded with unprecedented waves of democratization in the postwar period. Yet in recent years, authoritarian leaders have launched a simultaneous assault on women’s rights and democracy that threatens to roll back decades of progress on both fronts.
Click here to read the full article published by Foreign Affairs.
Fawcett's Sex and Power 2022 Index is a biennial report which charts the progress towards equal representation for women in top jobs across the UK. Yet again, the report reveals the pace of change is glacial in the majority of sectors and shows that women are outnumbered by men 2:1 in positions of power.
Women of colour are vastly under-represented at the highest levels of many sectors and alarmingly, they are missing altogether from senior roles such as Supreme Court Justices, Metro Mayors, Police and Crime Commissioners and FTSE 100 CEOs.
Click here to download the report.
Very little research has considered how media discrimination could impact men and women’s political ambition. Yet, media discrimination could impact both beliefs about gender roles and political competence, and beliefs about voter bias, both of which could decrease women’s political ambition and increase men’s. Alternatively, media discrimination could lead women to react against discrimination and be motivated politically. This study tests how political ambition of men and women is impacted by media discrimination in a campaign and election lab experiment. Media discrimination in this experiment under-reports on women and uses traditional, stereotypical depictions of men and women. The results suggest that in certain conditions, media discrimination in political news may lead to a reactance or positive challenge effect for women, increasing their political ambition. Men, instead, may feel an aversion to entering politics, lowering their political ambition.
Click here to read the full article published by Sage Journals on 22 October 2022.
Although a voluminous literature has studied the substantive representation of women, these studies have largely been confined to advanced democracies. Similarly, studies that focus on the relationship between Islam and women’s rights largely ignored the substantive representation of women in Muslim-majority countries. As one of the first studies of its kind, this article investigates the role of religion in the substantive representation of women by focusing on a Muslim-majority country: Turkey. Using a novel data set of 4,700 content coded private members’ bills (PMBs) drafted in the Turkish parliament between 2002 and 2015, this article synthesizes competing explanations of women’s representation in the Middle East and rigorously tests the implications of religion, ideology, critical mass, and labor force participation accounts. The results have significant implications for the study of gender and politics in Muslim-majority countries.
Click here to download the report.
In times of crisis, people are more likely to appoint women and people of colour to be leaders. But this puts crisis leaders in a very precarious position.
When Carol Bartz was appointed CEO at Yahoo in January 2009, the internet company was struggling. She was hired on a four-year contract and put forward a strategic plan to turn things around. But in September 2011 – in a phone call with Yahoo's chairman of the board – she was fired, just two years and eight months after she'd joined the company.
"They didn't even let [her plan] come to fruition," says Alison Cook, a professor of management at Utah State University in the US.
Bartz is one of countless female leaders given a precarious leadership position and left standing on the edge of a "glass cliff" with no support.
Research shows that women and people from ethnic minorities are more likely to be chosen to lead a company, sports team, or even country when it is in crisis mode. While those glass cliff positions can provide a way for some leaders to prove themselves, they come with significant downsides – including stress, burnout, and derailed careers.
Click here to read the full article published by BBC on 7 February 2022.
As part of last December’s Summit for Democracy, the Biden administration launched a wide range of commitments aimed at countering the troubling anti-democratic headwinds around the world. One of these pledges is the “Advancing Women’s & Girls’ Civic and Political Leadership Initiative,” a new U.S. government effort to promote women’s democratic inclusion. Implemented by the U.S. State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) with a planned budget of $33.5 million, it seeks to strengthen women-led civil society organizations, tackle entrenched barriers to women’s political and economic participation, and foster a more inclusive environment for women in politics.
Click here to read the full article published by Just Security.