Women's Leadership
Congress is sprinting to get through a lengthy and challenging legislative to-do list before the end of the year, including passage of President Biden's $1.85 trillion social services package that will provide child care subsidies, free pre-K, paid family leave and an enhanced child tax credit. Meanwhile, many women are still out of the job market, even as the economic recovery gains steam, and the 2022 midterms are heating up, raising questions about what women voters want and how women candidates will fare this cycle.
On Dec. 14, Women Rule editor Elizabeth Ralph hosted a virtual reporters roundtable with POLITICO journalists Laura Barrón-López, Eleanor Mueller, Elena Schneider and Elana Schor providing analysis of the biggest legislative and policy shifts in 2021, particularly those affecting women, and the political and policy forecast for 2022.
Click here to watch the video.
Violence against women in politics is a growing danger to democracy. Sexism, harassment, and attacks are used as tools to discredit and silence women leaders, including women candidates, and discourage them from participating in public life and developing political careers. According to an Inter-parliamentary Union study, over 44% of surveyed women parliamentarians received threats of death, rape, beatings or abduction during their term. More than 80% of the female MPs who took part in the survey said they suffered psychological violence over the course of their mandate.
In this video, we asked women leaders about the impact of violence against women in politics and the solutions they propose to make politics a safe space for all women, including:
- Mabel Chinomona, President of the Senate, Zimbabwe,
- Claudia Roth, Vice-president of the Bundestag, Germany,
- Tone Wilhelmsen Troen, Speaker of the Parliament, Norway,
- Mmatlala Grace Boroto, Member of Parliament, South Africa,
- Eliane Tillieux, President of the House of Representatives, Belgium.
When journalist Mary Ann Sieghart set out to document the ways that women are held back by a cultural presumption of their inferiority, she found reams of data to support her case – and heard stories of how it affects even the most successful women in the world. She explains why the authority gap persists, and asks what we can do about it.
From the very beginning of her career as a journalist in the 1980s, Mary Ann Sieghart found herself pushing against a set of assumptions which accorded her less authority than her male peers – and and led to her being viewed as bigheaded if she showed the same ambition and confidence as they did. When she came to write a book about how experiences such as hers still shape women’s lives, she found a huge range of empirical evidence that confirmed the existence of those prejudices. And when she asked some of the most accomplished women in the world – from Bernardine Evaristo to Hillary Clinton – she learned that they had all experienced the same “authority gap”, no matter how remarkable their CVs.
Click here to read listen to he podcast published The Guardian on 26 July 2021.
The WPL Summit 2021 on June 21st brought to the table the crucial role of women leaders in the recovery of the pandemic, including the opportunity to share with leaders the aims of the Reykjavík Manual, through policy initiatives, personal development, and community engagement.
Co-hosted by the Deputy Secretary-General of the United Nations, Amina J. Mohammed, and with the advisory support of the United Nations Office for Partnerships, the Summit gathered distinguished leaders from around the globe to look beyond the pandemic to an unprecedented decade of sustained action in which strong, durable, sustainable advances will be made in women’s leadership and in equality and opportunity for all.
Contents of the summit:
- 0:00:00 Countdown
- 0:09:45 Intro
- 0:10:41 Opening Sessio
- 0:44:15 Keynote Addresses
- 1:12:44 Roundtable Discussion - Session One
- 1:50:20 Roundtable Discussion - Session Two
- 2:26:05 Roundtable Discussion - Session Three
- 3:04:24 National Transformative Dialogues
- 3:22:44 Reykjavík Manual Launch Video
- 3:24:25 Summarising Remarks
- 3:27:32 Statements by National Delegation Leaders
Click here to see the programme.
Kristina Wilfore and Lucina Di Meco are global experts and passionate advocates for women’s digital rights. With more than 800 million people using the internet as a primary source of information, these ladies are critically concerned about the number of intentional and fraudulent attacks against female politicians and journalists online. The rise of gendered disinformation to undermine women in leadership and deter women from running for political office is pervasive. Kristina and Lucina reflect on individual and social consequences of these strategic digital attacks on women, how they're working to bring public awareness with their initiative, #ShePersisted, and why social media companies should be held accountable.
Click here to listen to the conversation.
For women political leaders, social media had the potential to be a big gamechanger. Often left invisible in the media and lacking access to large financial resources, this was the space where they could overcome traditional barriers and engage with citizens directly. But instead, the online world has increasingly become another site of harassment and abuse for many women politicians across the world.
Gendered abuse, misogynistic comments, even rape threats, doctored images, fake nudes, and doxing of personal information are common, and often come via armies of organized “trolls”. It has affected their well-being, forced many to reconsider their decision to be in politics, and even enabled murderous attacks on women.
This is what Lucina Di Meco, co-founder of #ShePersisted Global, found in her research on the role social media is playing in fostering gender-inclusive and participatory democracies. She found “overwhelming” abuse for women around the world - with similar misogynistic tropes routinely adapting themselves to local contexts in countries as diverse as India, Italy and the Philippines.
Click here to read the full article and interview published by WomenLead on 17 June 2021.
VVEngage is a Vital Voices signature fellowship supporting outstanding women political leaders making and influencing policy across the globe. Through this fully-funded fellowship, we aim to increase the capacity, decision-making power and effectiveness of women leaders in politics and government, shifting culture around women’s public leadership and moving towards equality in public representation globally. We also aim to work towards a more inclusive and equitable world by advancing the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) through policy.
Through this fellowship, Vital Voices advances women’s political leadership and the SDGs by conducting online and in-person* trainings with experts such as women leaders from the Vital Voices Global Network and professors from Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. The fellowship also connects participants to a global network of peers and mentors, such as current and former female heads of state with the Council of Women World Leaders, with whom they can brainstorm and share challenges and best practices.
Click here to learn more and to access application details.
The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) has developed a 10-Point Action Agenda for Advancing Gender Equality in Crisis Settings (10PAA), a roadmap to guide its development programming towards results that will help transform and advance gender equality in crisis contexts and achieve the Women, Peace and Security agenda. The 10PAA is central to UNDP’s new Crisis Offer, as well as its new Gender Equality Strategy 2022-2025. It represents a strong corporate commitment to addressing the most stubborn roots of gender inequalities.
The 10PAA is the result of a broad consultation process that aimed at finding entry points to strengthen gender-transformational results and women’s leadership and participation in crisis contexts. It is grounded in the understanding that deep-rooted, intersectional discrimination sits at the heart of the multiple challenges humanity faces and reinforces models of dominance that exclude and leave women behind, especially in crisis settings.
Click here to access the publication.
Online violence against women in politics (OVAW-P) poses a deepening challenge to democracy, serving as a key tool of illiberalism and democratic backsliding across the globe. OVAW-P encompasses all forms of aggression, coercion, and intimidation seeking to exclude women from politics simply because they are women. This online behavior seeks to achieve political outcomes: targeting individual women to harm them or drive them out of public life, while also sending a message that women in general should not be involved in politics. This online violence has a chilling effect on the political ambitions and engagement of women and girls, decreasing their presence and agency in politics and public life. Stopping gender-based attacks online is a solvable problem, and it is the fastest and clearest investment toward building an internet that enables everyone to be politically engaged.
This report includes a list of interventions that technology platforms, governments, civil society organizations, and the media can take to make meaningful progress towards ending online violence against women in politics.
Click here to access the report.
The Women in Government Fellowship is a six-month program that is focused on capacity-building, training, and mentorship of women in politics. It seeks to enhance and improve the quality of political participation of women.
The fellows will undergo in-person workshops, intensive virtual learning sessions, and hands-on mentorship by seasoned women politicians. This three-pronged approach will provide an academic grounding of democratic frameworks and policy-making, up-skill them with practical know-hows of electioneering, build the fellows' personal brands through personalised Public Narrative trainings by coaches from Harvard Kennedy School, and learn the ropes of politicking directly from a mentor who is undergoing the realities and tackling the challenges of being a woman in public office.
Application deadline: 30th November 2022
Shortlisted applicants' interviews: 5-15th December 2022
Selected Fellows list: 21st December 2022
Click here to learn more.
A compendium of ideas to reach gender parity in municipal politics
How can we begin to overcome the countless obstacles that are preventing women from fully participating in municipal politics?
The suggestions in this Inventory were compiled following consultations we carried out across Canada, as part of FCM’s Toward Parity Project.
These actions are not official FCM recommendations. They are potential strategies that need to be assessed to determine whether they can be adapted to fit local realities and opportunities.
Click here to access the guide.
To inform our own programming on advancing gender-balanced appointments and to establish a scalable, replicable, transformative model for advancing gender-balanced appointments, RepresentWomen gathered learnings from five similar initiatives around the country.
The following summary reviews these conversations:
- Key ingredients for success
- Stumbling blocks
- What they wish they knew
- Common tactics
Click here to access the guide.
For its inaugural Solutions Summit, RepresentWomen gathered experts in election administration, voting rights, and democracy reform to discuss the viable, scalable, and transformative initiatives that will strengthen our democracy. Over the course of three days, they held sessions on fair elections, fair access, and fair representation, ending each day with ways we could take actions to advance the solutions discussed that day.
They compiled all of those ideas, resources, and guides into one place to create this 2022 Solutions Summit Resource Guide, which provides a plethora of take-action options so you can be a part of the solution.
Click here to download the guide.
The internet is a tool that can simplify and encourage democratic engagement, but the rise of online disinformation challenges even the world’s most robust democracies. While the most recognizable disinformation campaigns are related to national politics, disinformers frequently employ narratives targeting women’s gender and sexuality in order to disrupt democracy. This is often then amplified by media agents and the general population, who may not have the intent to drive disinformation nor the capacity to discern it. NDI’s robust research in this field concludes that gendered disinformation is the use of false information to confuse or mislead by manipulating gender as a social cleavage to attack women and/or to sway political outcomes. It has three primary goals: to keep women out of politics; to change the views of women and men about women’s political participation; and specifically to change party policies or political outcomes. In short, it aims to undermine women’s free and equal participation in politics to the detriment of inclusive, resilient democracy.
Based on research conclusions, this paper outlines recommendations for NDI, its partners and those working globally to mitigate the democratic harms of disinformation, to ensure women’s safe participation and leadership in politics, and to monitor the social media and information environment in elections.
Click here to access the guide.
This guide is designed to increase the understanding of the legal obligations of countries in the West and Central Africa (WCA) region to achieve gender equality in decision-making. It focuses on strengthening efforts to improve the legal framework in the region to ensure that laws are clearly drafted, implementable and effective. Special focus is devoted to the processes by which laws supporting political participation of women are developed, negotiated, drafted, passed and implemented. It aims to strengthen law-making processes that build and secure the legal rights of women who want to run for elections and who are ready to take over leadership positions in their parliaments and governments. Legal instruments are presented that can be used to advance the political participation of women.
The comparative experiences presented in this guide address both examples of good practices and laws that have failed because their regulations are imprecise, unclear and/or lack effective sanctions. The guide presents also various provisions of laws resulting from different constitutional requirements or electoral systems, assessing their advantages and disadvantages.
Click here to download the guide published by UN Women in 2021.
This Handbook has been developed as publication by register of Political Parties with support from the Papua New Guinea Election Commission and the United Nations Development Programme in Papua New Guinea. This is part of UN Women Make the Change programme funded by the Australian Government’s Pacific Women Shaping Pacific Development Programme.
Click here to download the report.