Women's Leadership
There are calls for more support for Pacific women to get into politics, while also recognising cultural leadership roles.
Pacific Island Forum Secretariat policy advisor on gender equality Dr Fiona Hukula says Pacific women have to balance expectations that can contradict each other.
“We live and fend in a world where we are also tied to some of our cultural and social obligations, and it in many ways influences the way we think about gender relations, the way we think about leadership.”
In the Pacific region, just 8.8 per cent of MPs are women. In the Marshall Islands, Hilda Heine is the first woman to become president, and the first woman president of any Micronesian country.
Speaking to William Terite on Pacific Mornings, Hukula says the low representation of women in parliament is a longstanding concern.
“We know that our region has some of the highest rates of violence in the world and the lowest rates of women’s political representation, but to be fair, there’s been a lot of work in trying to ensure that women take up leadership roles.”
Louisa Wall is a former Labour cabinet minister, and was the Ambassador for Gender Equality in the Pacific until March when her role was scrapped by the coalition government.
Read here the full article published by the Pacific Media Network News on 14 May 2024.
Image by the Pacific Media Network News
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Why is it important to have more diverse women in spaces of power for democracy in Latin America? How does misinformation and online gender violence operate against them now that they are conquering political spaces? How is artificial intelligence beginning to play a role in the political participation efforts by women and underrepresented groups? These and other questions will be up for discussion this Tuesday in Mexico at the forum ‘Mujeres al poder, representación política y tecnología en elecciones (Women in power, political representation and technology during elections), organized by EL PAÍS América and Luminate, the alliance behind the Women Leaders of Latin America project. The event will feature numerous women with a public voice.
With less than a month to go before a national election in Mexico, where there are two women candidates with a strong chance of winning, the debate becomes increasingly relevant, and even more so because the forum is organized around solutions and an exploration of the challenges and difficulties faced by women who reach positions of power. One of the guest speakers who will discuss online gender violence is Salma Luévano, Mexico’s first trans lawmaker, who has suffered it firsthand; other Mexican speakers include Senator Beatriz Paredes of the PRI party, the politician and feminist Martha Tagle; and Rita Bell López, Advisor for the National Electoral Institute (INE).
Read here the full article published by El País on 14 May 2024.
Image by El País
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Progress towards legal gender equality has stalled in many parts of the world. The data published earlier this year by Women, Business, and the Law report reveals that women, on average, have less than two-thirds of the legal protections that men have, down from a previous estimate of just over three-quarters. This stark reality is a sobering reminder of the challenges that still lie ahead.
For example, the absence of legislation prohibiting sexual harassment in public spaces, such as mass transit, hampers women's ability to access employment opportunities and fully participate in the workforce. The lack of services and financing for parents with young children places a disproportionate burden on women. Furthermore, the effectiveness of gender-sensitive legislation is often undermined by inadequate enforcement mechanisms. In many regions, women's limited political clout fuels a self-perpetuating cycle of restricted legal rights and reduced economic empowerment.
Recognizing the importance of women's representation in political leadership, the World Bank, represented by the Women Business and the Law (WBL) report, Women Political Leaders (WPL), and the Oliver Wyman Forum (OWF), have joined forces to address the challenges faced by women in political leadership positions. Our collaborative efforts under the Representation Matters program aim to foster women’s participation in decision-making positions, and to promote legal equality and economic opportunities not only for women, but for everyone.
The initiative comes at a critical time. Achieving equal opportunity is not only a fundamental human right for half of the world's population; it is also an opportunity to drive faster economic growth, fostering prosperity for all.
Read here the full article published by The World Bank on 14 May on 2024.
Image by The World Bank
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Say you’ve just scored your dream job. And that dream job involves representing your town, county, state, or even country, dedicating your time and energy to making a difference in people’s lives. You’re feeling energized, hopeful, idealistic even. And then, on day one, you face a harsh reality: The majority of governments in this country weren’t set up with women in mind. You knew your job would be tough, but maybe you didn’t realize how tough.
It’s a previously underreported scenario we heard again and again while talking to elected women for How to Succeed in Office. They face far more roadblocks than their male counterparts on all fronts—financial, logistical, physical, mental, emotional, we could go on—with women of color and working parents often being even more affected.
Below are ideas and tangible solutions for the biggest and most common challenges women in office face. We also enlisted veteran politicians to help out a few newcomers with their very specific quandaries. Because we know it takes a village, and we’re pretty sure it’s women who are going to get each other out of this mess.
Read here the full article published by Cosmopolitan on 13 May 2024.
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Can a democracy where women have never been equal ever really thrive? How are attacks on democracy tied to gender equity? What can we learn from past fights to protect and expand women’s rights in order to chart a path forward?
A two-part virtual discussion hosted by Ms. magazine in partnership with NYU Law’s Birnbaum Women’s Leadership Center and the 92Y explored these questions, plus how women’s rights are inextricably tied to the integrity and durability of democratic institutions.
The conversation was moderated by Jennifer Weiss-Wolf, executive director of the Birnbaum Women’s Leadership Center at NYU Law and executive director of partnerships and strategy at Ms. magazine, with panelists:
1. Alexis McGill-Johnson: president and CEO of Planned Parenthood Action Fund
2. Melissa Murray: Frederick I. and Grace Stokes professor of law and faculty director of the Birnbaum Women’s Leadership Center at NYU Law
3. Pamela Shifman: president of the Democracy Alliance
Watch here the full recording published by Ms. Magazine on 02 May 2024.
Image by Ms. Magazine
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The struggle of Black women to be recognized, respected, and welcomed as leaders is an international one. Generally, Black women have been absent and invisible from leadership positions in many countries—including the author’s home country of Nigeria, where a historical dearth of women in political or official positions remains very much the case today, despite purported efforts by the Nigerian government to increase women’s participation in politics.
According to Nigeria’s National Bureau of Statistics, the national average of women’s political participation in Nigeria has remained at 6.7 percent in elective and appointive positions—far below the global average of 22.5 percent. Many of the hurdles Black women face in Nigeria resemble those faced by Black women in the United States, including discrimination, stereotyping, and a lack of support.
But Nigerian women aspiring to leadership face other hurdles more specific to Nigerian culture. Nigeria remains a patriarchal society in which men are considered the “natural” decision-makers in every sector. Women are generally looked upon as mere housewives and homemakers, unfit to lead in any place where men dominate. In Igboland, it is considered an abomination for a woman to even look upon kola nut—a crucial part of many ceremonies, gatherings, and welcomings—or bless it in any event. Instead, it is the duty of the men to pass the kola nuts and bless them.
Women who do attain leadership positions are often antagonized by men, who do not want to take instructions from a woman. It is easy to villainize a Black woman on the basis of her gender, especially if she is challenging the status quo in her career path.
Read here the full article published by the Nonprofit Quarterly on 30 April 2024.
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This article analyses how women governors, mayors, and local elected officials promoted public health and social protection in countries where men chief executives failed to take steps to contain the virus. We focus on adverse circumstances in six cases: Brazil, the United States, the Philippines, Japan, Mexico, and India. While individual women may not see their leadership in feminist terms, their pandemic response contrasted with men chief executives’ hypermasculine bravado and slapdash decision-making. Women leaders relied on science, co-ordinated community outreach, and attended to the needs of marginalised groups. Their stories reveal women’s resiliency, resourcefulness, and resolve at the local level.
Click here to access the article
Indians accept women as political leaders, but many favor traditional gender roles in family life.
More than half a century ago, India was one of the first countries in the world to elect a woman as prime minister, and the country currently has several highly influential women politicians, including Sonia Gandhi, the head of one of the major national parties. Today, most Indians say that “women and men make equally good political leaders,” and more than one-in-ten feel that women generally make better political leaders than men, according to a recent Pew Research Center survey of nearly 30,000 adults throughout India. Only a quarter of Indian adults take the position that men make better political leaders than women.
Click here to access the report.
Political gender equality is a central pillar of democracy, as all people, independently of gender, should have an equal say in political representation and decision-making. In practice, democracies are generally better at guaranteeing gender equality than most non-democratic regimes. According to International IDEA’s Global State of Democracy Indices, 41 per cent of democracies have high levels of gender equality, while this is the case in only two of the world’s authoritarian regimes (Belarus and Cuba). The democracies with low levels of gender equality are also exceptional (only four, all weak democracies - Iraq, Lebanon, Solomon Islands and Papua New Guinea). Low levels of gender equality are much more common in non-democracies – more than one third of them fall into this category.
Despite more than half the countries in the world being democracies of some form, levels of political gender equality have not kept pace with democratic progress. In 2022, only 26 per cent of legislators in the world are women, according to the Inter-Parliamentary Union. At the current rate, gender parity will not be achieved until 2062, according to International IDEA’s estimate. The proportion of women heads of state is even lower. In 2022, only 19 countries in the world have women in the highest office of executive power. Of these, all except four are democracies. Moreover, as global democratic progress is threatened by rising authoritarianism and democratic backsliding, fragile levels of gender equality, further weakened by the pandemic, are at risk of more setbacks, as gender is increasingly used as a weapon in such processes.
Click here to read the full article published by International IDEA on 7 March 2022.
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.