women's political representation

The Queensland Legislative Assembly, where women hold the roles of Speaker and opposition leader, has the nation’s lowest female representation at 21.3 per cent, compared with a national average of 29 per cent of all Australian parliamentarians. Women make up a fifth of ministers in state and federal governments.

MMD chairperson for Arts and Culture Elizabeth Chitika Mulobeka has noted that women are avoiding politics because they are scared of failure.

Ms. Mulobeka who is also former Kawambwa Member of Parliament said women do not want to be associated with failure and the current political atmosphere is not appealing to women as it sets them up for failure.

Last week I was in Tahiti (yes, I know) for PIPSA, the biannual Pacific Islands Political Science Association conference, to discuss China's role in the region and the influence Pacific island governments have in negotiating Chinese financing (more on that research in a forthcoming post).

The Egyptian Center for Women’s Rights (ECWR), a local organization monitoring the elections, said Monday that women were “leading the elections”, as 24 million women are entitled to vote—nearly half of all 53,909,306 eligible voters.

India's 16th General Election has been the most expensive exercise of its kind in the country's history. One estimate puts the figure at Rs 30,000 crore, a tad shy of the bill notched up in the 2012 US presidential polls. What does this tsunami of money power that brought Narendra Damodardas Modi to power mean for the faceless, voiceless Indian? The answer will unfold over the next five years, but what is clear is that for India's women, the more things change the more they remain the same.

Washington has been criticized for being under constant gridlock for the majority of the last five years. This gridlock leads many people to think cynically about our government. The issue of women holding political office is treated cynically as well. Currently, only 1/5 of United States Senators are women. On the second night of the Women in the World Summit, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) and Senator Susan Collins (R-ME) spoke of the gridlock in Washington and what women bring to the table in United States politics.

Despite the increase in the number of female candidates in the parliamentary elections held throughout Indonesia on April 9, 2014, the country would likely fail to meet its target of increasing womens representation in the 560-seat Parliament for the 2014-2019 period.

Of 6,607 legislative candidates racing for the House of Representatives (DPR) seats in the elections, some 37 percent or 2,467 were women, up from 30 percent in the legislative elections in 2009.

The moment there was an inkling that Dyana Sofya would be DAP’s candidate for the Teluk Intan Parliamentary seat, a picture purportedly of her (it wasn’t) in a bikini was circulated on the internet. She has since been subjected to wolf whistles by her own supposed supporters, and called cheap candy by extremist group Isma.