The country that has known only women PMs for 28 years of its 50-year existence, and other stories
#WomenLead (Issue 80): Your weekly round-up on women in politics
Hello, and welcome to Issue 80!
This will be the last “weekly wrap” for 2021. On December 22, we will send out our year-end special, bringing you some of our favourite moments from the world of women in politics in 2021. If you have a favourite in mind, now is the time - do mail us if you want to ensure we don’t miss it! We will resume the weekly editions from January 16, 2022.
We hope you have found reading #WomenLead worth your time in this last year. So many of you have allowed us the privilege of getting some inbox space this past year, and we are so delighted and grateful to you for that! We are super excited about taking our work a few notches up next year, and we hope we’ll have your back.
This week, we bring you updates from Australia and South Korea, and the spotlight is on Bangladesh, a country which just celebrated its 50th birthday. In case you missed last week’s edition, you can read it here.
If #WomenLead has brought any value to you this past year, please consider supporting our work by upgrading to a paid subscription this holiday season🎄🎈🎉. This newsletter is free but paid subscriptions help us stay sustainable and invest more time and resources to make our work sharper and insightful. You could also choose to gift🎁 a subscription to a friend or a colleague (‘tis the season, after all! :) Thank you!
Quick Updates
🤨 SAFE EXCUSES: Australia is due to hold elections for its National Parliament next year. Even as the country pushes to improve the representation of women, political parties are more likely to put forth women candidates on losing seats, while safe seats are more likely to be fought by men, an analysis by The Guardian shows.
Related: Canada again has ‘record’ number of women running but will they win?
📢 SHOUT OUT: In an inspiring development, Shoutout, a South Korea based women’s group, held a protest in front of the headquarters of two major political parties in the country to denounce the “misogynist” 2022 presidential election, Hankyoreh reported. The women criticized the anti-feministic campaigns of the candidates of the People Power Party (PPP) and the Democratic Party (DP), and said that male politicians who exploit misogyny could not be put in charge of state affairs. #GoldenWords
PPP candidate Yoon Seok-yeol’s campaign includes a promise that could lead to complanaints of sexual violence to face criminal charges for calumny. He has also promised the abolition of the ministry of gender equality. Lee Jae-myung, the DP’s candidate, had defended his nephew accused of brutally murdering two women in 2006.