Women's Leadership

The wife of the President, Mrs Aisha Buhari, on Tuesday urged more women to show interest and participate in partisan politics.

She made the call while addressing newsmen ahead of the summit on female political aspirants scheduled for Thursday in Abuja.

Actor and politician Kamal Haasan on Sunday encouraged more women to join politics.

“I have seen women as resilient participants in many great revolutions and will encourage them to join politics. Whichever party you choose to join will only be benefited by your presence,” he said at the Homepreneur Awards 2018.

By Paola Flores, Associated Press

Few countries in the world have advanced so quickly toward gender parity in politics as has Bolivia, where women now hold almost half the seats in congress and laws mandate gender equality at lower levels too.

But some male Bolivian politicians have resisted the change, and women's rights activists report a sharp increase in violence against female politicians as their numbers rise.

Sweden’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs released a Feminist Foreign Policy handbook outlining guidelines on how to define women’s rights and make policy around them.

Human rights activists are campaigning to save the life of the first woman in Saudi Arabia to be sentenced to death over her political activism. 

Israa al-Ghomgham, 29, was arrested along with her husband Moussa al-Hashem in December 2015 for their roles in organising anti-government protests in eastern Qatif province in the aftermath of the Arab Spring.  

Mysuru: Pointing out that representation of women in India was worse than that of Pakistana and Nepal, retired professor of political science at the University of Mysore (UoM) Prof. M Umapathi on Sunday said that only 9% of the elected legislators in the various assemblies of the country were women – putting India in an embarrassing 148^th position of the 193 countries across the world in this regard.

Last week, the new President of Colombia, Iván Duque, swore in his vice president, Marta Lucía Ramírez.

She is Colombia’s first female vice president.

Ramírez’s oath of office would have been a historic enough moment – but the bigger story is that half the cabinet she’ll lead are also women, in charge of ministries from Justice to Energy to Culture. It’s the first time a Colombian government has had that top-level gender parity.