Gains in Sri Lanka Parliament, Maia Sandu is Moldova President again, and more: All the important updates about women in politics from November
#WomenLead (Issue 156): Your monthly round-up on women in politics
Hello, and welcome to the November edition of #WomenLead!
“Will history be made in the USA?”, we had asked as we sent out last month’s edition, only a handful of days before the critical election. Well, when it comes to shattering the iron plate of gender at the top, it wasn’t. The long list of male-only Presidents is set to continue for longer, it seems.
In this month’s edition, we bring you updates from Australia, Botswana, Bulgaria, Italy, Moldova, Sri Lanka and the United States of America. In case you missed last month’s edition, you can read it here.
Election Watch
Tracking women among candidates and winners
🇱🇰 SRI LANKA: Twenty-one women were elected to Sri Lanka’s Parliament in November’s election, the highest ever for the island nation. For context, in the previous election of 2020, only 12 women had been elected. While this is a significant and encouraging shift, women’s overall share will continue to be under ten percent in the Parliament, unless parties nominate some more women on their national lists. Here’s to hope!
🇧🇼 BOTSWANA: In the meanwhile, only three women were directly elected alongside 58 men in Botswana’s election held at the end of October, data from the Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU) shows. Twenty-eight women had contested the polls, according to this Voice Of America report. Along with three other women who were indirectly elected, women’s total share in Parliament is only 8.7 percent, a dip from the previous share of 10.8 percent.
🇧🇬 BULGARIA: Bulgaria, too, recorded a dip in women’s representation after its most recent Parliamentary polls held in late October, IPU data shows. Fifty women were elected to the 240-member house, fourteen less than in the previous polls held a few months ago that had failed to deliver a clear mandate.
🇺🇲 UNITED STATES OF AMERICA: In the USA, 127 women were elected to the House of Representatives in this year’s election, one more than the number elected previously. Twenty-five were elected to the Senate, the upper chamber of Congress, data from the Centre for American Women and Politics shows. These include some historic victories. Additionally, the country is all set to have 13 women governors after Kelly Ayotte, a former U.S. senator and state attorney general, won the New Hampshire gubernatorial race. This will be a record high in terms of the number of women governors across various states.
Leaders
Updates about women leading countries, states and movements
In Moldova, Maia Sandu has been re-elected as the President for a second term. A former World Bank economist and former Prime Minister of the country, Sandu became the first woman to be elected the East European nation’s President in 2020.
A snippet of a video of Canadian PM Justin Trudeau in conversation with Italian PM Giorgia Meloni during the G20 summit in Brazil went quite viral on social media. You don’t need to listen, or have any context of the agenda of the discussion. Just watching them speak, and their contrasting body language, deviating from all established gender stereotypes, will tell you why.
Watch here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SxbW_MKBRnY
On-the-job Updates
Spotlighting women’s experiences in political office
In Australia, Senate members Lidia Thorpe and Mehreen Faruqi have co-sponsored a motion calling the procedure committee of the Senate to explore updating the rules of the house to “eliminate language, behaviour, decision-making, and practices that are sexist, racist or otherwise exclusionary and discriminatory”, The Guardian has reported. Thorpe said that racism in the Senate was “routine”, and that other senators failed to call it out, the report added. Read more here.
Higher representation of women in national government was associated with a lower likelihood of schools being closed during the Covid-19 pandemic, a new study has found. The research by Natalia Danzer and others looked at women’s representation in 28 European countries. This was not the case “because women politicians were less concerned about the spread of the virus but due to their heightened awareness of the costs of school closures, notably for working mothers with young children”, the researchers note in this summary of their research for VoxEU. Read more here.
Reading List
The more one learns, there’s only more to learn
“Why are female politicians more often targeted with violence? New findings confirm depressing suspicions”: The Conversation
“How gender quotas are challenging political inequality in South Korea”: LSE Blogs
“How not to read the woman vote”: The Indian Express
“Why America still doesn’t have a female president”: The Atlantic
“The woman who may break through Indonesia’s boys’ club”: The Straits Times
“Strong women, carnival populism, and Romania's new far-right leader”: The Loop
Community Watch
A quick round-up from the community working at the intersection of gender x politics
On November 25, the Inter-Parliamentary Union organised a webinar on “Strategies and tools to support women in public life against gender-based violence online and offline”. The webinar was organised in collaboration with other partners of the IPU to mark the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women. The discussion from the same are available online here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F5BnZHEo4H0
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Disclaimer: #WomenLead is a non-partisan newsletter produced in a personal capacity, and does not reflect any institutional affiliation/opinion. In case of any questions, please drop in a message at womenlead.project@gmail.com.