Asia and the Pacific

Leaders of 15 Pacific Island nations have pledged to remove barriers to women’s economic empowerment, end violence against women and pave the way for their increased political representation, at the conclusion of the 43^rd Pacific Islands Forum in Rarotonga in the Cook Islands, last week. The meeting was also attended by the Executive Director of UN Women, Michelle Bachelet.

The Pacific lags behind much of the world when it comes to women in parliament and Australia could do much better too.

One group has been working for the last 18 years to get Australian women into politics.

They've helped elect 153 women to parliament, and created a model that other countries are looking to.

The group is called Emily's List.

Listen to the interview at Radio Australia, published 3 September 2012.

Six women from the Aizawl Municipal Council (AMC) staged a walk out on Saturday soon after the council passed a resolution not to create reservation of seats for the fairer sex  in the local council.

Mongolia lags in three of the UN Millennium Development Goals (MDGs): poverty reduction, environmental sustainability and gender equality, according to the UNDP country report for 2012-2016.

According to Begum, one of the most challenging issues for women is obtaining identity cards. It's estimated that all over the country, 10 million women don't have IDs. The share is particularly high with Pashtun women, where some 70 percent don't have IDs. "Nobody cares about women's identity cards," says Begum, and adds that women usually only come to the identity card office when they're pushed by men.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has joined Pacific leaders in a call for full gender equality - equal treatment of men and women in all parts of social, economic and political life.

The monsoon has failed in large parts of India. But so has Parliament, in its monsoon session. With the political gridlock between the government and the opposition, all work has come to a standstill. One of the casualties of this is the inability of the government to pass the Protection of Women Against Sexual Harassment at the Workplace Bill. Similarly, although the Sexual Assault Bill has received Cabinet approval, it is unlikely to become law just yet.

Yesterday Loujaya Toni MP - gardener, teacher, poet, singer, journalist, mother, wife and (judging by a lively phone interview) political firebrand - was in the Cook Islands, where she was to be welcomed into the fold by some rather more experienced female political operators: US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and UN Women chief and former Chilean president Michelle Bachelet. (She was also to have met the Australian Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, who had to leave the Pacific Islands Forum early because of the deaths of five soldiers in Afghanistan.)

WOMEN should make up 40 per cent of the new parliament and this should be enshrined in the new constitution.

Ba resident Merewai Dolewale told the Constitution Commission earlier this week that the size of the parliament should also be reduced.

"The last parliament had 71 members and I believe this can be reduced to 50 when you look at the size of the country and the population," she said.

"And I also believe that more women should be encouraged to participate."