Women's Leadership
Generally, diversity could be considered a good thing especially if it leads to positive outcomes. Diversity of race, ethnicity, gender, and ideas are some areas of focus for policymakers seeking a more comprehensive representation in government and various organizations both private and public.
The quest to get women involved in Ghana’s public service, institutional leadership, and frontline politics has been ongoing for quite some time with a recent suggestion to give women quotas both in Ghana’s Parliament and the executive level.
An institution that seems to have made significant strides is the judiciary where 3 of the last 4 chief -justices have been women namely Justices Georgina Wood, Sophia Akufo, and Gertrude Torkornoo. It would be during the reign of one of these women chief justice that a comprehensive investigation into the judiciary was initiated.
This write-up explores the works and contributions of 4 women currently active in frontline politics who remain an inspiration to the next generation of Ghanaian kids (both boys and girls).
Read here the full article published by News Ghana on 4 April 2024.
Image source: News Ghana
"If things aren't going well in town, [...] we issue alerts. Because women are afraid. The children are afraid. We get together to discuss and solve any issues so that we can move forward together."
Mouna Awata is the president of the "Case de la Paix" (House of Peace), a project designed to foster women’s dynamic participation in conflict resolution and public life, and promote their economic empowerment in the precarious region of Gao, in the north of Mali.
A major crossroads of trade with neighboring Niger and Burkina Faso, Gao also hosts a growing number of displaced people seeking refuge due to armed conflicts in the surrounding regions. According to the UN Refugees Agency (UNHCR), over 200,000 people have been displaced in and around Gao as of 31 January 2024.
Since its creation in 2013, the "Case de la Paix", now made up of 76 women’s associations and 2000 women, demonstrates the remarkable resilience and initiative displayed by women in the Sahel country in West Africa.
Read here the full article published by the UN Sustainable Development Group on 3 April 2024.
Image source: UN Sustainable Development Group
President Felix Tshisekedi of the Democratic Republic of Congo has appointed Judith Suminwa Tuluka as the country’s next prime minister. Judith, a former planning minister, makes history as the first woman to hold the position. She takes over from Jean–Michel Sama Lukonde Kyenge, who served as prime minister from 2021 to 2024.
In her new role as prime minister, Judith will be tasked with advancing the president’s agenda, which focuses on employment, youth, women and national cohesion for the nation of about 100 million people. In her first televised address as prime minister, she acknowledged the challenges: “The task is big, the challenges are immense but together… we will get there. She emphasised the importance of her role, stating, “I am aware of the great responsibility that is mine.”
Read here the full article published by Bella Naija on 3 April 2024.
Image source: Bella Naija
MOGADISHU (HORN OBSERVER) – In a press conference joined by local women activists on Monday, Somali women Members of Parliament (MPs) expressed their frustration and lack of political will to include a 30% women quota in the constitutional amendments amidst a heated debate over the Somali Provisional Constitution.
"What we were pushing for was that the women quota of 30% be included into the constitution. But sadly, we have now seen that a new parallel process was started which excludes women quota,” said MP Ifrah Naaleeye, highlighting the challenges faced in advancing women’s representation.
The MPs condemned recent comments from political and religious groups opposing the women’s quota, citing religious grounds, a view dismissed by many religious scholars.
"Those who spoke in the Jazeera hotel and said that women quota is haram. I want to ask them where were they when women were killed, raped and abused?” questioned MP Ifrah Naaleeye, challenging the basis of the opposition.
Additionally, the MPs criticized remarks made by the Mayor of Mogadishu and the Somali prime minister, accusing them of using religion to confine women to their homes instead of addressing issues of violence and threats faced by women activists.
Joining the MPs in their advocacy were women activist groups, emphasizing the importance of respecting women’s political participation in Somalia.
Click here to read the full article published by the Horn Observer on 20 March 2024.
Image source: Horn Observer
The European Union and partners launch the Women’s Leadership Initiative, a component of the Women and Youth in Democracy Initiative (WYDE), in New York today during the 68th Session of the Commission on the Status of Women.
Commissioner for International Partnerships Jutta Urpilainen said: “In recent years, we have witnessed the erosion of democratic values. And when democracy is being eroded, women’s rights are under attack as well. Protecting democracy means ensuring an open civic and political landscape in which women can participate safely. This is the objective of the Women Leadership programme which I am pleased to launch today with our partners as part of the EU’s Women and Youth in Democracy Initiative.”
With €11.5 million from the EU for a period of three years, the WYDE | Women’s Leadership Initiative will promote the full and effective participation in decision-making of diverse women, especially those most often left furthest behind, by leveraging collective action, partnerships, coordination, knowledge, and resources at global level. The initiative will prioritise changing the social norms and cultural attitudes that portray the roles of women in communities and society as incompatible with political power. It will build the political skills of young women, and engage men, boys, office holders and the media as allies for gender equality and women’s empowerment.
Read here the full article published by the EU International Partnerships on 14 March 2024.
Image source: EU International Partnerships
The landscape of women leadership in Bangladesh presents a paradox: despite notable female figures in key political positions, the overarching advancement of women into leadership roles remains stagnant. Despite having a female prime minister, a female speaker, women ministers and lawmakers and women heading the major political parties, the desired progress towards gender parity in leadership is yet to be achieved.
The mandated quota of 33% female representation in all political party committees by 2020 has not been met. While there has been an increase in the participation of women in politics, their ascension to leadership roles lags significantly behind.
Apart from the Awami League and the BNP, the left-wing political parties have fallen short of meeting the prescribed targets, with little visible action towards fulfilling the goal of one-third female representation by 2030.
Zara Zebin Mahbub, a seasoned MP representing the Awami League's reserved women's seat from Chapainawabganj, highlights the systemic barriers hindering women's progress.
She said: "Women are as active as men in politics, but only men are promoted. Despite women's equal efforts, men dominate party nominations, media coverage, and resources. The main obstacles for women in elections are men's influence, muscle power, and financial advantage."
Read here the full article published by the Dhaka Tribune on 8 March 2024.
Image source: Dhaka Tribune
During the Summit for Democracy Year of Action, the S4D cohort on Gender Equality as a Prerequisite for Democracy identified recommendations for strengthening democracy by promoting gender equality, Statement and Roadmap of recommendations. The co-leads of the gender cohort – Sweden, Romania, Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace and Security and International IDEA encourage governments and civil society to consider the recommendations and proposed actions.
The Gender Cohort strongly supports the themes for the Regional Summits for Democracy 2023. The regional themes have a critical link to gender equality and democracy nexus and the Gender Cohort has developed specific briefs on gender for each theme: Youth; Anti-Corruption; Free, Fair and Transparent Elections; Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs) and Media Freedom.
Statement and Roadmap of Recommendations
The recommendations and proposed actions were identified in consultation with the cohort consisting of over 100 representatives of governments and civil society from all regions of the world. Governments and civil society are encouraged to consider the recommendations as tools for strengthening democracy by promoting gender equality. The recommendations focus on three pillars: inclusion; legislative and policy frameworks; and conflict prevention, peace and security. Each thematic pillar is fundamental for gender equality in democracy processes.
Read the statement of recommendations >>
Read the roadmap of recommendations >>
Briefs of the Democracy Cohort on Gender Equality
Gender equality is fundamental to the electoral process because it enables women—as voters, candidates and elected officials—to influence public policy and advocate for their interests. However, women face significant obstacles to political participation, including the use of targeted gender-based violence and intimidation meant to discourage them from running for office or exercising their political rights. Challenges and risks are even greater for women from historically marginalized communities. Additionally, women are less likely to be recruited and selected as candidates, are less likely to have equal access to campaign funds and face greater challenges to proportional representation.
Summit for Democracy Cohort on Gender Equality as a Prerequisite for Democracy Anti-Corruption
Corruption undermines democracy and justice because it impedes the ability of the public to benefit fully from government institutions. Combating corruption requires a gender perspective in order to gain a full understanding of its scope and impact. Women have unique (but not uniform) approaches to anti-corruption and are also impacted differently by corruption which drives inequalities and undermines opportunities for healthy democracies.
Summit for Democracy Cohort on Gender Equality as a Prerequisite for Democracy Youth
Youth are the leaders of the future. Yet, people under the age of 35 are rarely found in formal political leadership positions, with fewer women than men in these roles.2 Research by the Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU) found that out of 2.2 per cent of parliamentarians under the age of 30, less than 1 per cent are young women. The marginalization of youth—including young women— from politics leads to missed opportunities to strengthen democracy-building processes and institutions. Gender equality as a prerequisite for democracy requires tailored efforts to engage both young women and men. Barriers to the inclusion of youth in politics must be addressed, including gendered forms of discrimination and violence.
ICTs have the potential to close gender gaps in women’s political participation. They can serve as tools for women to influence policy agendas, increase women’s access to campaign resources, strengthen networks of solidarity, and increase women’s representation in democratic agendas and processes. With social media, blogs, podcasts and promotional videos, women have bypassed traditional media outlets, such as TV and radio, to elevate their profile directly and access political decision-making.
Summit for Democracy Cohort on Gender Equality as a Prerequisite for Democracy Media Freedom
Media freedom and the safety of women journalists are fundamental to the strength of democratic processes and institutions. Yet, women are not equally represented in the media. A 2020 study of the news media in the UK, US, Kenya, India, South Africa and Nigeria found that women comprised only 15–30 percent of the subjects of news reports.
This book addresses the central question of how right-wing women navigate the cross-pressures between gender identity and political ideology.
The hope has always been that more women in politics would lead to greater inclusion of women’s voices and interests in decision-making and policy. Yet this is not always the case; some prominent conservative women such as Margaret Thatcher have rejected the feminist label while others such as Angela Merkel have reluctantly accepted it. Republican women in the U.S. Congress have embraced social and economic policies contrary to what many consider to be women’s issues while EU Commission president Ursula von der Leyen is a staunch supporter of feminist ideas. Other conservative women, such as Marine LePen in France strategically use feminist ideas to justify their conservative stances on immigration. This brings up an interesting yet understudied question: under what circumstances do conservative women become feminist allies and when do they toe the party line? It is this tension between women’s political representation and conservatism that this edited volume explores.
Click here to access the book.
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.