'Soul-destroying': women politicians from New Zealand become frequent targets of online hate, and other stories
#WomenLead (Issue 93): Your weekly round-up on women in politics
Hello, and welcome to Issue 93!
A very warm and joyful welcome to all of you who have subscribed to #WomenLead in recent days. We are always so thrilled to see more of you here, and we hope you’ll find this newsletter worth every minute you spend reading it.
In recent days, we have caught the 🐞 of a Twitter challenge - the #30DayChartChallenge - which expects participants to create one data visualization/chart based on a different prompt for each day. We are hoping to use the opportunity to put out some important data on women in politics out there! Join us and cheer us on as we go about it! And if you have/know of some important data which you’d like us to visualise, send it along our way! (We’re at womenlead.project@gmail.com).
In this week’s edition, we bring you updates from Albania, Colombia, and the USA, and the spotlight is on New Zealand. In case you missed last week’s edition, you can read it here.
Quick Updates
🐢 SLOW PROGRESS: The share of elected offices in US cities held by women has gone up marginally as compared to a year ago, new data from the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University shows. However, women still make up less than a third (31.5 percent) of city-level leaders, up from 30.5 percent in 2021.
“We'll take any change we can get or any improvement we can get, but it just shows you how slow the rate of change can be and that we need to do more to get more women running for local office,” Jean Sinzdak, associate director at the Center, told Bloomberg.
❌ NOT GUILTY: A quick follow-up to the trial in the case involving four men accused of plotting to abduct US governor Gretchen Whitmer. The jury decided not to convict any of the four men, the Associated Press reported. The verdict has provoked mixed reactions - with many shocked and concerned about threats of political violence going unpunished.