Senator Pia Cayetano left the campaign trail in the Philippines momentarily to preside a special meeting of parliamentarians at the United Nations and to take part in another meeting with American legislators in Washington, DC.

Cayetano was elected President of the Coordinating Committee of Women Parliamentarians of the Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU), the highest position ever achieved by a Filipino in the 119-year-old IPU, considered as the United Nations of parliamentarians around the world.

A top Islamic cleric Wednesday welcomed the passage of the Women’s Reservation Bill in the Rajya Sabha, describing it as ‘a great step towards women’s empowerment’.

‘This is a great step towards women’s empowerment. I would urge Indian Muslim women to enter politics and get themselves elected to parliament and state assemblies. They will have to empower themselves,’ the Grand Mufti of Kashmir, Maulana Bashir-ud-Din, told reporters here.

Despite remarkable progress in improving the status of women in social and economic terms, China lags the rest of Asia in empowering women politically, a United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) study has found.

But some six decades after Mao Zedong famously declared “women hold up half the sky”, women in China fare far better overall than their counterparts in India and the rest of the Asia-Pacific on almost every economic indicator, according to the report.

With assured backing from India's main opposition groups, the ruling Congress party hopes to see voted through in the upper house of Parliament Monday a bill reserving 33 percent of seats in national and provincial legislatures for women.

"The timing is right just now,’’ says Ranjana Kumari, a prominent proponent of the bill and president of Women Power Connect, an influential lobby of some 700 women's organisations and individuals that trains women with support from the United Nations Development Programme’s Democracy Fund.