Filipino voters who have yet to make up their minds about their choice for their next president are being advised: look at each aspirant’s stance on reproductive health to help them gauge the candidate’s leadership mettle and political guts.

A candidate’s position on issues like reproductive health, which has a long history of opposition from the Catholic Church in this mainly Catholic country, reveals clues regarding his or her capacity for governance, says Ramon San Pascual, head of the Philippine Legislative Committee on Population and Development (PLCPD).

While Aung San Suu Kyi remains the most widely-known woman suppressed for her political views in Burma, the jails in that military-ruled country continue to be filled by lesser-known women dissidents being held on a range of questionable charges.

Mid-February saw the latest group of female political activists thrown into jail with a two-year prison term, including hard labour, for a "crime" they committed four months ago – donating religious literature to a Buddhist monastery, an act that the junta deemed as "disturbing the peace."

Indian lawmakers approved a historic bill Tuesday that would set aside one-third of all legislative seats for women, a move aimed at overturning six decades of male-dominated decision-making in this country.

The bill, which drew fierce opposition before its passage in the upper house of parliament, would guarantee seats for women in the national legislature and all state assemblies in the world's largest democracy, where women have been largely kept on the sidelines of the legislative process.

"Equal rights, equal opportunities, progress for all" is the theme for the celebration of International Women's Day at the United Nations in New York on Wednesday.
"To me, the conference served as a wake-up call. Although many Chinese women had received higher education and become mid-level managers, I was reminded of the challenges we still faced." as Li Xing writes on China Daily.