Australia

Communities across NSW can look forward to better, more representative local government following a dramatic rise in the number of women elected to councils, the sector's peak body said. MidCoast Council has four female councillors including one new councillors.

These include Claire Pontin, Katheryn Smith, Kathryn Bell, and Dheera Smith. Local Government NSW (LGNSW) president Darriea Turley said women now make up 39.5 per cent of all councillors in NSW - an 8.5 per cent jump on the proportion of women elected in 2016/17.

Earlier this year, following a string of attacks on women in the Australian Parliament House in Canberra, both verbal and physical, a popular female TV host asked rhetorically whether the easiest place in the country to rape a woman is in Parliament House.

Now, a group of independent female candidates are looking to batter down parliament’s doors at the next federal election, to be held sometime between March and May 2022.

A sea of change is washing across New South Wales local government as more women and young people take up seats as councillors. Until recently, 22-year-old Imogen Draisma could not see herself reflected in the local council running her home city of Kiama, in the Illawarra.

"My ideas and [I] were not represented by the people that were purporting to represent me," Cr Draisma said.

Forty. That's the number of countries around the world that have chosen a woman to lead since Julia Gillard was ousted on June 27, 2013. In the past year alone, Sweden, Tunisia, Samoa and Estonia all elected their first female prime ministers while Tanzania, Honduras and Barbados chose women as their presidents.

This month, Germany's Angela Merkel handed over the reins after four consecutive terms as chancellor — 16 years and 16 days to be precise, just 10 days shy of a record.

At just 21 years old, Adila Yarmuhammad believes she will be the youngest Muslim woman running in the 2022 federal election. She aims to secure a seat in Australia's parliament, but she knows she's inexperienced.

"Even just running [for a seat] is enough, it's showing other women and younger girls that this is possible," she said. "You don't really see a lot of women of color in parliament, let alone a lot of Muslim women in parliament."

Australians want to see more women in politics, new research has found. The research - conducted by Women for Election, an organisation which provides support and training to women wanting to enter politics - found 69 per cent of people surveyed agreed more diversity in politics would lead to better outcomes for everyone.

Despite representing more than half the population, women are currently under-represented at all levels of Australian government

Female candidates are overrepresented for marginal seats at the next federal election, while safe seats for both major parties remain dominated by males, an analysis by Guardian Australia shows.

While the major parties are yet to finalise all candidates for the forthcoming federal election, an analysis of those preselected so far for parliament’s 35 marginal seats shows that about 60% of the candidates across both major parties are female.