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Women's Leadership

Source: The Namibian

In a parliamentary democracy like Namibia, all power shall be vested in the people through freely elected representatives exercising this power.

Some 51 % of Namibia’s population are women who still face many injustices based on their gender.

Namibia has a long history of many types of social inequality, including gender inequality.

Many challenges women face in Namibia today have been influenced by the historical imbalance of power between women and men, social structural factors such as poverty, unemployment and related social problems.

This includes economic inequalities, like no acknowledgement of unpaid domestic work women disproportionately often do in their households, being exposed to gender-based violence, or being single mothers without any or insufficient support from children’s fathers.

Some of these inequalities are based on political, cultural, traditional or religious beliefs that promote gender inequality.

For example, the cultural concept of the alleged supremacy of men over women.

This makes it even more important that women are represented in parliament and have a say in who makes decisions in Namibia by participating more in the election process and casting their votes.

The voices of women must be present and respected in decision-making at all levels.

Click here to read the full article published by The Namibian on 22 February 2024.

Image source: The Namibian

Discover how the University of Tasmania's Pathways to Politics for Women program is empowering aspiring female politicians in Tasmania. Supported by political vanguards, this initiative is reshaping the political landscape and fostering inclusive representation.

Imagine a political landscape where the voices of women are not just heard but amplified, where the halls of power resonate with the diverse experiences and perspectives of over half the population. This vision is on the cusp of becoming a reality in Tasmania, as the University of Tasmania steps into the spotlight with its groundbreaking Pathways to Politics for Women program. Supported by a formidable alliance of Tasmania's political vanguards, this initiative is poised to dismantle the barriers that have historically sidelined Tasmanian women from political arenas.

A Unifying Endeavor

The Pathways to Politics for Women program, originally kindled in 2016, has burgeoned into a beacon of hope and action for aspiring female politicians across Australia. Its expansion into Tasmania, facilitated by the Trawalla Foundation's generous funding, is a testament to its remarkable success in catalyzing political careers. The program's ethos, championed by figures like Tasmania's first female premier Lara Giddings, former Greens leader Christine Milne, and past premier Will Hodgman, transcends partisan lines, emphasizing the universal benefit of diversifying political representation.

Click here to read the full article published by BNN Breakings News on 22 February 2024.

Image source: BNN Breakings News 

Discover the impactful conversations and calls to action from the Women's Rights Conference 2024 in Malaysia, addressing the critical issues of female political representation and the collective efforts towards gender equality.

In the heart of Nairobi, a seismic shift in the narrative of law enforcement is underway. The Kenyan government, in a move as bold as it is necessary, has announced a substantial 40% salary increase for National Police officers, a decision set to roll out in July this year.

This initiative, born from the recommendations of the Maraga-led committee, is not merely a financial adjustment; it's a beacon of hope, signaling a transformative era for police welfare and institutional reforms within the police and prisons departments.

Click here to read the full article published by BNN Breakings News on 24 February 2024.

Image source: BNN Breakings News

Auckland, New Zealand – Numbers speak volumes, and in the Pacific, they tell a concerning story: less than 7 percent of parliamentarians are women.

Serving as the impetus for further collective action, women leaders from parliaments across the Pacific have convened on Auckland for the Pacific Women in Power Forum.

The three-day forum – supported by the people of New Zealand, Australia and Japan – sees women members of parliaments as well as parliamentary officials coming together to discuss opportunities for improving women’s representation, approaches to improving inclusivity, and the effectiveness of parliaments in tackling gender inequality.  

The forum will discuss the many challenges women in politics face, including persistent online harassment fueled by the anonymity of social media; abuse that unfortunately dominates the daily lives of many women MPs worldwide.

Despite women's representation in politics still languishing as the worst in any region across the world – and progress sitting somewhere between stalled and gradual – a shift in attitudes across the Pacific is demanding change.

Click here to read the full article published by UNDP on 21 February 2024.

Image source: UNDP

When will the next general election be? No one knows. Well, perhaps Rishi Sunak does; the Prime Minister not-so-helpfully said he had a ‘working assumption’ that it would take place in late 2024.

As it happens, this will be a busy year in politics. Americans will also be going to the polls – the first time our two countries’ electoral cycles have synced since 1992. Already, there have been warnings about global disinformation campaigns – fuelled by AI and spread on social media – and what they may do to our already fragmented countries.

In total, over 60 nations – from India, Pakistan and Mexico to Taiwan and Ukraine – will be going to the polls before the end of 2024. Just under half of the world’s population is eligble to vote in some form of election this year, making it the biggest year for democracy in history. The world may well be a very different place by the time 2025 comes around.

Click here to read the full article published by Elle on 22 February 2024.

Image source: Elle

Recently, the minister responsible for women, family and community development, Nancy Shukri, reportedly said the 30% quota for women previously set by the government should be reconsidered given the current situation that “42% of women actively participated in decision making roles within the public service sector”.

The minister reportedly said many women now possess the qualifications, including experience and academic achievements, to compete equally with men in decision-making positions across various service levels. 

“Considering that we have already surpassed the 30 per cent mark, reaching 42 per cent in the public sector, setting a new target at 50 per cent or beyond should not be hindered by ceilings or limitations,” she added.

Click here to read the full article published by Aliran on 19 February 2024.

Image source: Aliran

Abstract

Concern over partisan resentment and hostility has increased across Western democracies. Despite growing attention to affective polarization, existing research fails to ask whether who serves in office affects mass-level interparty hostility. Drawing on scholarship on women’s behavior as elected representatives and citizens’ beliefs about women politicians, we posit the women MPs affective bonus hypothesis: all else being equal, partisans display warmer affect toward out-parties with higher proportions of women MPs. We evaluate this claim with an original dataset on women’s presence in 125 political parties in 20 Western democracies from 1996 to 2017 combined with survey data on partisans’ affective ratings of political opponents. We show that women’s representation is associated with lower levels of partisan hostility and that both men and women partisans react positively to out-party women MPs. Increasing women’s parliamentary presence could thus mitigate cross-party hostility.

Click here to access the paper.

At a time of pandemics, international economic downturns, and increasing environmental threats due to climate change, countries around the world are facing numerous crises. What impact might we expect these crises to have on the already common perception that executive leadership is a masculine domain? For years, women executives’ ability to lead has been questioned (Jalalzai 2013). However, the outbreak of COVID-19 brought headlines like CNN’s “Women Leaders Are Doing a Disproportionately Great Job at Handling the Pandemic” (Fincher 2020). Do crises offer women presidents and prime ministers opportunities to be perceived as competent leaders? Or do they prime masculinized leadership expectations and reinforce common conceptions that women are unfit to lead? We maintain that people’s perceptions of crisis leadership will depend on whether the crisis creates role (in)congruity between traditional gender norms and the leadership expectations generated by the particular crisis.

Click here to read the article by Cambridge University Press the 12 January 2023.

Women’s political rights and their exercise of political citizenship globally have often expanded more rapidly in times of conflict, crisis, and revolution. The decline of empires after World Wars I and II and the creation of new nations served as a catalyst for the expansion of women’s suffrage. Civil wars and revolutions have had similar outcomes in expanding women’s political citizenship. This essay brings together several disparate literatures on World War I, World War II, wars of independence, revolution, and post-1990 civil wars and expands their scope to show how women’s political rights and citizenship in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have often been linked to conflict. In doing so, I highlight a notable pathway by which rights expansions occurred: conflict led to changes in the political elite and ruling class, resulting in the necessity to rewrite constitutions and other rules of the polity. During these critical junctures, women’s rights activists gained opportunities to advance their demands. The context of changing international gender norms also influenced these moments. I consider two key moments in the worldwide expansion of political citizenship: the struggle for women’s suffrage and the struggle to expand women’s representation in local and national representative bodies.

Click here to read the article by Cambridge University Press on 12 January 2023.

UN Women and ESCWA conducted in-depth interviews with seven Lebanese women in politics who were all ‘first’s’ in different ways. They include the first female Minister of Interior in Lebanon and the Arab world, the first female Minister to have a child, the first female independent Member of Parliament, the first female Secretary-General of a political party represented in Parliament and the first female Head of party.

This report analyses the set of interviews and explores the stories of each - the barriers they faced to political participation and the opportunities they leveraged.

The report aims to offer policy makers and practitioners a better understanding of the challenges and opportunities that exist when women seek political office in Lebanon.

Click here to access the report.

How to Include the Missing Perspectives of Women of All Colors in News Leadership and Coverage — a new report from Luba Kassova.

From Outrage to Opportunity: How to Include the Missing Perspectives of Women of All Colors in News Leadership and Coverage is a solutions-focused sequel to the award-winning independent reports, The Missing Perspectives of Women in News/COVID-19 News, authored by Luba Kassova and commissioned by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. It examines the harsh realities facing women of all colors in news leadership and coverage in India, Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa, the UK, and the USA.

In both editorial leadership roles and in news coverage, women continue to be significantly under-represented in an industry persistently dominated by men. While women in news have it hard, women of color have it even harder. In countries with multi-racial populations, women of color experience greater exclusion in the news industry.

Click here to access the report.

With the support of UNESCO, the International Center for Journalists (ICFJ) has published a groundbreaking, book-length global study on online violence against women journalists, documenting alarming trends and offering solutions to this pernicious problem.

The Chilling: A global study of online violence against women journalists is the most geographically, linguistically and ethnically diverse research ever published on the theme. Publication of the 300-page book, concludes a three-year research project originally commissioned by UNESCO in 2019.

Click here to access the report.