Women Special

/Quotas / Power-Share / Foreign Policy / Feminist Internet / Heroines / HerStory / /Useful Resources / Extras: arts, women cartographers, NASA, archive movies + more/

/Quotas / Power-Share / Foreign Policy / Feminist Internet / Heroines / HerStory / /Useful Resources / Extras: arts, women cartographers, NASA, archive movies + more/

Women On The Front Line Now

Quotas are not obvious and it does take time and pressure to fight for them. In one of the most recent reports on the issue, DemoFinland flags that less than 7% of the world’s states have female heads of states or heads of government and, on average, less than 25% of the parliamentarians across the world are women. In the EU, 31.4% of national ministers are women. The International IDEA gender quotas database is the go-to research tool here. 

Currently, the struggle for effective measures to increase women’s participation is ongoing in Liberia with the reform of the election law and in Somalia with the long-awaited, historical electoral process. In Egypt, 25% of seats for women in the parliament were recently secured by a constitutional amendment. But voices in favor of the safeguards of women’s participation in power-sharing can be heard in many other places, like Israel or Kenya.

In other places, less promising stories emerge. Yet, lessons for activists and civil society should be drawn also from there. Côte d'Ivoire, for example, passed a law in 2019 requiring political parties to meet a female candidate quota of 30% for parliamentary elections. But with less than a month to go before the upcoming elections, no party has reached this threshold.

In Myanmar, these bold and brave women have taken to the streets to protest against the military coup and demand a return to democracy.
‘We’re unstoppable’: Meet the women leading Myanmar’s protests. Another text on the situation in the country is even more to the point: The exclusion of women in Myanmar politics helped fuel the military coup.

Radio in Mali can empower women by remembering they are part of a social web. Studio Tamani is normalising the debate on women’s issues by broadcasting women-related programmes.  

Defend Defenders launched a campaign on women human rights activists in Africa bringing up good practices, emergency phone lines and testimonies of activists. 
This groundbreaking awarded research looks into interactions between post-election violence and sexual violence in Kenya and Nigeria.

Being At The Table

From Estonia to Moldova and from Slovakia to Georgia, the wider region of eastern Europe is increasing its number of female heads of state and prime ministers, seeing more women occupying the highest echelons of national politics. Can Eastern European countries lead the way for female politicians?

In Chile, activists built on years of organizing to achieve a groundbreaking gender-parity requirement: “New Constitution Is a Feminist Victory”.

Julia Gillard, 27th Prime Minister of Australia and Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, Director General of the World Trade Organization, presented together a
TED-Talk on 6 essential lessons for women leaders.

Canadian local organization from Ontario “Women & Politics” collected amazing testimonies of elected women as part of an effort to encourage women to consider running for office in an election. I wish such solidarity was a standard in all communities that are excluded from politics. 

Irish Women For Election is a great example of a pro-women election campaign, and their campaign packs are just awesome. She Should Run is another example of how to do such a campaign. 

iKnowPolitics is the address to go for resources and courses. Political Parity has a number of good solutions and advice and the Council of Europe has a comprehensive report on upholding human rights in times of crisis and pandemics: gender, equality and non-discrimination.

Foreign Policy and Security 

Initiatives like Women Foreign Policy Group, #Shecurity, Feminist Foreign Policy Group, Women In International Security and others are working hard to change what is still a radically male-dominated policy field. 

In this long-read Aida Hozić criticizes the Dayton Peace Agreement and the problems associated with ethic power-sharing peace agreements where gendered political and socio-economic policies only serve to strengthen divisions. From Brussels to Bosnia and Herzegovina, Aida tells us why we must pay attention to the limits of “manly” peace agreements which neglect gender, and instead continue to work for gendered justice and peace simultaneously.

This hashtag reminds us of thousands of women peacekeepers. Respect to them! 

UN Peacekeepers

The Heroines 

Edipcia Dubón is a Nicaraguan politician, human rights activist and a former member of the national parliament, one of 26 opposition deputies expelled from the Assembly, which was widely seen as a crackdown of the opposition. In this mini-documentary, she discusses how she strove to be an advocate for the rights of women and youth before being forced out of Parliament by the Ortega government. She tells the story of how she traveled around Nicaragua to engage with underrepresented minorities and used these interactions to guide her work. 

Eren Keskin is a Turkish journalist. For more than three decades, Eren Keskin, lawyer and advocate for women's and minority rights, has suffered numerous trials, spent time in prison, lived under threat and, twice, attempts on her life. Undeterred, she remains an outspoken, high profile rights campaigner. In 2016 she joined the ranks of hundreds of journalists, writers, and activists on trial in Turkey for their defence of freedom of expression. 
In Egypt, another female journalist, Solafa Magdy, is detained by the authorities and is reported to be subject to cruel and inhumane treatment in prison. 
In Russia, a Siberian journalist, Natalya Zubkova flees her city after an attack and threats against her children.

Leila de Lima Faces, Senator of the Philippines and strong Duterte critic, has been held in prison for 4 years. She served as justice secretary under Mr Duterte's predecessor, Benigno Aquino, and has been one of the most vocal critics of the crackdown. When she served as chair of the Commission on Human Rights between 2008-2010, she investigated Mr Duterte, who was then mayor of Davao City - over unexplained deaths during his anti-crime campaign. The Human Rights Watch report. 

Herstory 

Spain’s dictatorship past is still being uncovered. A small city in Aragon discovers the remains of Mayor María Domínguez Remón - more than eight decades after she was murdered. The place of assassination and burial of Spain’s first female mayor of the second republic have been identified after a months-long investigation that has helped to cast a spotlight on María Domínguez Remón’s trailblazing legacy.

There is no doubt that in the USA they know how to take care of their hi(er)story.
And they are rather good at it. The US suffragette movement has many inspiring elaborations and materials. From those lesser-knowns, here is herstory of the indigenous suffragist Gertrude Simmons Bonnin, also known as Zitkala-Sa, a citizen of the Yankton Sioux Tribe. An activist and composer who fought tirelessly for Native American rights and citizenship.

🎥 This 1913 black and white newsreel tells the story of 14 suffragettes as they go to Washington to protest the women's right to vote. Feel free to go for a longer, silent-movie documentary: Eighty Million Women Want - ? The US public broadcaster has an amazing line-up for March women's month. 

In France, the struggle was not simpler, neither was it in Spain or Mexico. The recording from parliamentary debate in Argentina, 1947 is a strong reminder of the fight our grandmas had to go through. The international human rights history of women voting rights is well covered by the UN Women clip. 

African American women activists of the Cold War: often overshadowed by their male colleagues and counterparts, these women have remarkable stories of their own and impacted the course of the African American leftist movements in ways not fully appreciated until only recently. 

In Britain in 1959, a computer operator was tasked with programming and testing several of the new electronic computers on which the British government was becoming increasingly reliant. In addition, this operator had to train two new hires with no computing experience for a critical long-term project in the government’s central computing installation. After being trained, the new hires quickly stepped into management roles, while their trainer was demoted to an assistantship below them. This situation seems to make little sense until you learn that the trainer was a woman and the newly hired trainees were men. The story: Britain’s Sexist Campaign to Sell Computers.

NASA names headquarters after ‘Hidden Figure’ Mary W. Jackson. Jackson started her NASA career in the segregated West Area Computing Unit of the agency’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia. Jackson, a mathematician and aerospace engineer, went on to lead programs influencing the hiring and promotion of women in NASA's science, technology, engineering, and mathematics careers. 

Amplifier - a nonprofit design lab.

Building feminist internet 

In Latin America, women are adopting strategies to push back against the internet that facilitates online gender-based violence. In Indonesia, after facing abuse and threats online, activist Dhyta Caturani is working to overcome gender discrimination on tech platforms. Is it possible to build feminism in the African internet? Hell yes! 

Amnesty International's new report leaves no doubt:
“As a company, Twitter is failing to respect women's rights online.”
- Toxic Twitter - A Toxic Place For Women.
Read also the story of the Lebanese Al-Jazeera broadcast journalist Ghada Oueiss and how hackers stole her private photos and videos from her phone and posted them online. The leak resulted in a sharp escalation of online attacks on her. In previous years, the NDI took on the subject in their “Tweets that chill: analyzing online violence against women in politics” report. 

Globally, around 30 percent of researchers and only 35 per cent of all students enrolled in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) are female. One Tech company has something to say.
And here a story of how for Indian women, rideshare apps are a lifeline.

Antidemocrats 

Throughout the globe, there is a limited, at times influential, opposition towards equality. Their misogyny is antidemocratic and it equates to their anti-democratism being misogynistic. 
Disinformation campaigns often rely on exploiting existing narratives of discrimination (e.g., misogynistic views) or narratives that stem from historical discrimination (e.g., views within some African American communities about the criminal justice system) to build credibility for the false information being shared. Read a fresh report: Facts and their Discontents: A Research Agenda for Online Disinformation, Race, and Gender.
This short piece by two scholars gives a very accessible overview of this persistent threat. In the USA the anti-affirmative industry is heavily funded to halt equality in politics and, the promotions for the USA’s female generals were delayed over fears of Trump’s reaction. 
When did it start?

Professor Alice Echols explains: “In the early 1970s, even Nixon was a feminist. By the decade’s end, things had changed”, read this review to understand why.

Seemingly Unrelated Extras

Women cartographers: women have been participating in cartography for about as long as any man has. That means women have been using maps to convey ideas and agendas—for better or for worse, conscientiously or unwittingly. A map is never neutral. Women cartographers conveyed both facts and fictions about a country in upheaval and developed new visual techniques in the process.

Women writers: this fantastic Twitter account is dedicated to bringing more women writers to the pop-internet-culture by presenting inspiring quotes accompanied by portraits of female writers. 

Women photographers: Hundred Heroines is an exhibition platform dedicated to advancing public awareness of women in photography. Heroines worldwide are using photography to change perceptions of women by highlighting inequalities, pushing boundaries, tackling taboo subjects, examining difficult social issues and challenging norms. Aesthetica rounds up five digital exhibitions and talks that champion women practitioners – envisioning a brighter future. 5 to See: Women Artists Online. MoMA receives a donation of 100 photos by women artists spanning a century. 

Using data from Eurostat, the European Trade Union Confederation has analysed the slow progress of EU countries in reducing the gender pay gap.
I say: let’s speed it up. 

That’s it, until next time! 
DB