Women's Leadership
Quotas designed to bring gender parity to parliaments have an overall positive impact on support for female political leadership – especially after women members of parliament take office. Furthermore, there is no evidence of a backlash among men.
That’s what I found in a study published in October 2025 looking at the impact of gender-parity quotas in Namibia, in sub-Saharan Africa.
In 2013, Namibia’s dominant political party, the South West Africa People’s Organization, or SWAPO, quietly rewrote its internal rules. From that point forward, every spot on its parliamentary candidate list would alternate between a man and a woman.
Most prior research on measures to encourage gender parity in politics focuses on national or legislative policies rather than voluntary party quotas. Namibia offers an unusually “clean” case in that SWAPO is electorally dominant and did not face grassroots pressure to adopt its quota policy. That makes it possible to isolate the effects of the quota itself, rather than any preexisting trend in public attitudes.
Women board a crude vessel to cross the Ganga in Murshidabad. With every year of handling money, papers and government offices as their husbands and sons remain away, women are becoming more independent and less willing to merely obey their instructions. The Federal photo
“Every election, they ask whether we are Hindus or Muslims. Nobody asks why my husband is washing dishes in Kerala.” This angry remark by Rehana Bibi, a resident of Samserganj whose husband works in Kerala’s Kochi, sums up the mood in the migrant-majority belts of West Bengal’s Murshidabad district.
Women voters in Samserganj and Lalgola are emerging as a potentially decisive force in Murshidabad, which will vote on April 23, with many saying that their concerns over jobs, migration and deletions from electoral rolls now matter more than the identity politics dominating the campaign.
Efforts to deepen grassroots political participation and strengthen women’s involvement in governance received renewed attention in Kogi State following a ward engagement tour in Igah, Olamaboro Local Government Area.
The engagement, organised by the Fawass Group, drew a large turnout of women and community stakeholders who gathered to discuss issues affecting the ward and reaffirm their commitment to political participation at the grassroots level.
Kogi State Commissioner for Youth and Sports Development, Hon. Monday Aridaojo Anyebe, who attended the meeting in his home ward, described the event as an important platform for reconnecting with the grassroots and encouraging broader participation in governance.
According to him, the gathering went beyond routine political interaction, serving as an opportunity for dialogue with community members, particularly women, whose contributions he said remain central to the social and political stability of the state.
Women’s groups have called for greater participation in politics and decision-making in Nigeria as part of efforts to strengthen inclusive governance.
The call was made at the just-concluded International Women’s Day Conference organised by the Chartered Institute of Project Managers of Nigeria (CIPMN) in collaboration with the WCCI Emerging Market Hub in Abuja.
At the event, the MD/CEO of Dominion Mothers Group, Kemi Josephine Elebute-Halle, a former governorship candidate in the Ekiti State 2022, elections, commended Nigerian women for their resilience, intellect and dedication to national development.
When jiang shengnan, a Chinese lawmaker turned political adviser, was born in 1973, a third daughter to parents in the coastal city of Wenzhou, many urged her mother to keep trying for a son. She refused and gave her daughter the name Shengnan, which means “better than men”. Ms Jiang insists she just wants women to be equal, but striving for that equality requires a mix of the resistance imbued in her name and a level of pragmatism in a country where feminism is fraught.
Following the events of August 30, 2023, and the change in governance that occurred after the overthrow of President Ali Bongo Ondimba, Gabon entered a two-year transition period. This transition was marked by several institutional and political milestones aimed at restoring lasting constitutional order.
Over this period, civil society mobilized to relay the expectations and priorities of the general public to the transitional authorities, aiming to ensure effective representation of citizens’ aspirations and their integration into new public policies. Consequently, following the National Dialogue held in April 2024, a new Constitution was adopted by referendum in November 2024, paving the way for the organization of national elections.
Civil society organizations' involvement in the electoral process led to the creation of the first groups of national observers and the active participation of citizens in efforts to restore and consolidate democratic institutions.
Through its project to support civil society organizations during the transitional elections in Gabon, funded by the French Ministry for Europe and Foreign Affairs and the European Union, International IDEA supported citizen engagement to promote free, transparent, and peaceful presidential and local elections. This support materialised in the creation of two monitoring units, including a monitoring unit for electoral violence led by the NGO Women Go for Peace and the Network of Human Rights Defenders in Central Africa (REDHAC).
Abstract
Concern over partisan resentment and hostility has increased across Western democracies. Despite growing attention to affective polarization, existing research fails to ask whether who serves in office affects mass-level interparty hostility. Drawing on scholarship on women’s behavior as elected representatives and citizens’ beliefs about women politicians, we posit the women MPs affective bonus hypothesis: all else being equal, partisans display warmer affect toward out-parties with higher proportions of women MPs. We evaluate this claim with an original dataset on women’s presence in 125 political parties in 20 Western democracies from 1996 to 2017 combined with survey data on partisans’ affective ratings of political opponents. We show that women’s representation is associated with lower levels of partisan hostility and that both men and women partisans react positively to out-party women MPs. Increasing women’s parliamentary presence could thus mitigate cross-party hostility.
Click here to access the paper.
At a time of pandemics, international economic downturns, and increasing environmental threats due to climate change, countries around the world are facing numerous crises. What impact might we expect these crises to have on the already common perception that executive leadership is a masculine domain? For years, women executives’ ability to lead has been questioned (Jalalzai 2013). However, the outbreak of COVID-19 brought headlines like CNN’s “Women Leaders Are Doing a Disproportionately Great Job at Handling the Pandemic” (Fincher 2020). Do crises offer women presidents and prime ministers opportunities to be perceived as competent leaders? Or do they prime masculinized leadership expectations and reinforce common conceptions that women are unfit to lead? We maintain that people’s perceptions of crisis leadership will depend on whether the crisis creates role (in)congruity between traditional gender norms and the leadership expectations generated by the particular crisis.
Click here to read the article by Cambridge University Press the 12 January 2023.
Women’s political rights and their exercise of political citizenship globally have often expanded more rapidly in times of conflict, crisis, and revolution. The decline of empires after World Wars I and II and the creation of new nations served as a catalyst for the expansion of women’s suffrage. Civil wars and revolutions have had similar outcomes in expanding women’s political citizenship. This essay brings together several disparate literatures on World War I, World War II, wars of independence, revolution, and post-1990 civil wars and expands their scope to show how women’s political rights and citizenship in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have often been linked to conflict. In doing so, I highlight a notable pathway by which rights expansions occurred: conflict led to changes in the political elite and ruling class, resulting in the necessity to rewrite constitutions and other rules of the polity. During these critical junctures, women’s rights activists gained opportunities to advance their demands. The context of changing international gender norms also influenced these moments. I consider two key moments in the worldwide expansion of political citizenship: the struggle for women’s suffrage and the struggle to expand women’s representation in local and national representative bodies.
Click here to read the article by Cambridge University Press on 12 January 2023.
UN Women and ESCWA conducted in-depth interviews with seven Lebanese women in politics who were all ‘first’s’ in different ways. They include the first female Minister of Interior in Lebanon and the Arab world, the first female Minister to have a child, the first female independent Member of Parliament, the first female Secretary-General of a political party represented in Parliament and the first female Head of party.
This report analyses the set of interviews and explores the stories of each - the barriers they faced to political participation and the opportunities they leveraged.
The report aims to offer policy makers and practitioners a better understanding of the challenges and opportunities that exist when women seek political office in Lebanon.
Click here to access the report.
How to Include the Missing Perspectives of Women of All Colors in News Leadership and Coverage — a new report from Luba Kassova.
From Outrage to Opportunity: How to Include the Missing Perspectives of Women of All Colors in News Leadership and Coverage is a solutions-focused sequel to the award-winning independent reports, The Missing Perspectives of Women in News/COVID-19 News, authored by Luba Kassova and commissioned by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. It examines the harsh realities facing women of all colors in news leadership and coverage in India, Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa, the UK, and the USA.
In both editorial leadership roles and in news coverage, women continue to be significantly under-represented in an industry persistently dominated by men. While women in news have it hard, women of color have it even harder. In countries with multi-racial populations, women of color experience greater exclusion in the news industry.
Click here to access the report.
With the support of UNESCO, the International Center for Journalists (ICFJ) has published a groundbreaking, book-length global study on online violence against women journalists, documenting alarming trends and offering solutions to this pernicious problem.
The Chilling: A global study of online violence against women journalists is the most geographically, linguistically and ethnically diverse research ever published on the theme. Publication of the 300-page book, concludes a three-year research project originally commissioned by UNESCO in 2019.
Click here to access the report.