When a leftwing female congresswoman was described as too ugly to be raped, Manuela D’Avila’s stomach turned. The speaker was Jair Bolsonaro, the Brazilian far rightwing congressman and presidential candidate.

That feeling only worsened after the execution-style murder in March of Marielle Franco, a Rio de Janeiro councillor, a crime that many attribute to the fact that she was a black lesbian activist.

BEIRUT — Earlier this month, Lebanon voted in parliamentary elections to fill seats based on a new system of proportional representation. After the ballots were counted, women occupied six of the 128 seats.

CAIRO — Egypt has yet to pass a law needed to hold local elections, but hundreds of women will not be wallflowers waiting for an invitation to run for office. Thanks to an initiative dubbed “The Councils Are Ours,” potential candidates will be prepared when the elections are finally held for the first time in eight years.

Just 35 women filed for one of the 125 Oklahoma legislative seats that were up for election in 2012.

This year, there will be nearly four times as many women running for the same number of seats. And following a trend across the nation, women will be better represented on the ballot than in at least a decade – and likely ever.

Is this the year of the woman in Georgia politics?

Based on the results of the May 22 primary election, including the local races, it may be.

Politics has been a male-dominated industry in the state for centuries, with no female governors or even Georgia House or Senate majority leaders, but that could change this year.

In its highly anticipated parliamentary election in almost ten years, Lebanon saw a record number of women on the ballot. An unprecedented 113 women registered as candidates, and 86 of them made it to candidate lists. This was a whopping increase from 2009, when only 12 women candidates had registered.

The Barbados Labour Party (BLP) has won the country's 2018 General Elections claiming all 30 seats in the country's House of Assembly and unseating the Democratic Labour Party (DLP), which has governed the country since 2008.

The crushing victory for the BLP means that its political leader Mia Amor Mottley will be sworn in as Barbados' first female Prime Minister since the country gained independence from Britain in 1966.