Minorities and Indigenous Women

According to a 2012 survey by the World Economic Forum, Pakistan is still considered to be one of the worst places in the world to be a woman. With a total of 37 million registered female voters, the policies adopted by political parties to ensure the rights and progress of women might play a key role in the outcome of the elections.

For decades, not a single woman in this dusty Pakistani village surrounded by wheat fields and orange trees has voted. And they aren't likely to in next week's parliamentary election either. The village's men have spoken. "It's the will of my husband," said one woman, Fatma Shamshed. "This is the decision of all the families." Mateela is one of 564 out of the 64,000 polling districts across Pakistan where not a single woman voted in the country's 2008 election.

African women make less than one percent of the senior counsel in the legal profession in South Africa, the Sunday Times reported. Of the 473 senior counsel from whose ranks candidate judges are selected, only nine were black women, the newspaper reported.

Al Jazeera's Kamal Hyder, reporting from Islamabad, discusses women in Pakistani politics.

(We invite our users to watch the video posted Arpil 2 2013)

Traditional belief and practice that women should not hold positions of power was the ultimate hurdle for female aspirants in the General Election last month.

In the Coast, of all the women who declared interest in different competitive elections, only former Cabinet minister Naomi Shaban was elected to represent Taveta in the National Assembly after beating her closest rival, former MP Basil Criticos, by only 109 votes.

In all, men won 25 of the 26 parliamentary seats in the Coast region.

Participants in a women's only peace conference in South Sudan's Jonglei state took the drastic step of saying they would leave their homes and refrain from child bearing if men in their communities continued to seek violent solutions to ongoing conflicts in the troubled region rather than peaceful dialogue. They also demanded that women be given greater involvement in peace talks and political decision making processes, saying more needed to be done to arrest tensions and spiralling conflict in their communities.