women's role in society

Women voters outnumbered male voters in Bhaktapur district in the CA election that concluded on Tuesday with the highest voter turnout in the country's electoral history. According to data provided by Bhaktapur district office, 88.94 percent female voters cast their vote in the election, with the corresponding figure for male standing at 84 percent.

We invite you to read the full article published November 21, 2013

Fifteen years after the assassination of Russian MP and human rights activist Galina Starovoitova, those who masterminded her death are yet to be brought to justice. Starovoitova was shot to death in the lobby of her apartment in St. Petersburg on 20th November 1998. Four men have been serving jail sentences since 2005 as perpetrators and accomplices in the murder with progress on identifying those actually behind the killing remaining slow.

A revision to Nicaragua’s law on municipal elections last year required political parties to put up equal numbers of women and men as candidates for mayor and city council. It also increased the number of city council seats in each municipality. The result has been more women than ever winning races for mayor and city council.

One of them was Antonia Rizo, a city councilor in San Sebastian de Yal. “When I arrived at my position, I was afraid to speak,” she said, because of lack of familiarity with the city’s legal system.

The Muslim Sisterhood, which remains under-reported, is a wing of the Muslim Brotherhood. But is it an organization that has a weight similar to that of the Brotherhood, or does it merely support the Brotherhood in times of need?

Advocates for women in Fiji say they are still hoping for special measures mandating women’s representation in parliament.

Fiji’s new constitution does not contain temporary special measures for women, a mechanism some countries use to speed up progress towards gender equality.

But a spokesperson for the Fiji Women’s Forum, Sharon Bhagwan Rolls, says there is still time for this to happen as the state has an end of year deadline to make changes to the constitution.

When I arrived at the Capitol in 2007 to take my oath as a new member of the U.S. House of Representatives, I had the privilege of filling the seat held for so long and so well by my friend Patsy Takemoto Mink, the first Asian-American woman elected to Congress. I was so grateful to her.
I felt Patsy’s presence when I cast my first vote in Congress, which was to elect Nancy Pelosi as speaker of the House. I rose and said, “In memory of Patsy Mink, I cast my vote for Nancy Pelosi.”

Socialist Michelle Bachelet handily won a first round of Chile's presidential race Sunday, with voters putting her on track to replace the country's conservative leader following a runoff in December.

Bachelet, Chile's first woman president 2006-2010, is now eyeing a non-consecutive second term as leader of the South American nation with the highest per capita income.

Camila Vallejo, who helped spearhead Chile's student uprising in 2011,has been elected to Congress alongside three other former university leaders, underscoring a generational shift in the country's politics.

A gathering of Washington's most important military leaders doesn't seem like the obvious place to champion the cause of increasing women's power around the world. Nor does Hillary Clinton seem like the obvious choice for an award from the National Defense University.