tagged w/ national organization for women
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Women have entered politics in greater numbers than ever in the past decade, accounting for 18.4 percent of parliament members worldwide, according to a study released Thursday by the United Nations Development Fund for Women.
The proportion of women has increased by seven percentage points since 1995. Much of the increase was driven by women realizing that they needed to attain power rather than just lobby for change, said women who spoke at a ceremony for the study's release.
"We need to convince women that the only way to really make a change is to stop complaining and just be the owner of power," said Senator Cecilia López Montaño, the speaker of the opposition Liberal Party in Colombia. "It is a huge fight because men have been controlling power for centuries."
If the rate of change holds constant, it will take until 2045 for women to reach parity in the developing world, which the study by Unifem, as the development fund is known, defined as holding 40 percent to 60 percent of elected parliamentary seats. The report also examined how women were affected by economics, the courts and crime, among other issues.
Quotas that reserve seats for women have proved instrumental in increasing their numbers. In elections held in 2007, women in countries with some form of electoral quota captured 19.3 percent of the seats, as opposed to 14.7 percent in countries without such quotas, the study said. Of the 22 countries where women constitute more than 30 percent of the national assembly, 18 have some form of quota.
Provisional election returns from Rwanda, announced in news reports on Thursday, indicated that its Parliament, which reserves 24 of 80 seats for women, will become the first in which women hold a majority, with 44 seats.
The genocide in Rwanda was also a crucial factor in galvanizing women to get more involved politically during the country's reconstruction, said Inés Alberdi, the executive director of Unifem.
"If you are in a secondary position, you can never fight for women," she said.
The study found a high correlation between the number of elected women and legislation related to women's issues, including agriculture services, day care and street lighting for security. It also cited British research that women turned out in higher numbers to vote in elections when there was a female candidate.
In addition, the study suggested that women held far fewer party leadership posts than their membership in the rank and file would suggest. A Latin American study quoted in the United Nations report said that while 47 percent of party members in Paraguay were women, they held just 19 percent of leadership positions. In Mexico, 52 percent of party members were women, compared with 31 percent of the leaders. In Panama, the numbers were 45 percent and 19 percent.
"You have to be three times more intelligent, you have to be four times more transparent, you have to have everything more than men," said Senator López, of Colombia. "We still have a male chauvinist society."
It will continue this way, she said, until the "democratic deficit" is closed, meaning equal representation for men and women.
Women have entered politics in greater numbers than ever in the past decade,... more
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A GOP lead among white women fueled by Sarah Palin's nomination as vice president is waning. Prominent women's rights leaders staked their support behind Barack Obama during a week when John McCain also stepped up his appeal to female voters.
The last time the National Organization for Women endorsed a presidential candidate in the general election was 1984, the year Democratic nominee Walter Mondale made history when he asked former New York Rep. Geraldine Ferraro to run alongside him as vice president.
In the quarter century since then, NOW has endorsed candidates in primary elections, backing New York Sen. Hillary Clinton this year and Illinois Sen. Carol Moseley Braun in 2000. But no general election candidate has met the group's high standards since 1984 in a general election; at least, not until now.
"It's very unusual for us to endorse in a presidential election, but this is an unusual election," NOW president Kim Gandy said at a Sept. 16 news conference in Washington, D.C. "For more than a decade Barack Obama has consistently said 'yes' to women's rights; Sen. McCain has said 'no.'"
Women's rights groups' support for the Democratic ticket goes beyond the top slot; Gandy and other women's rights leaders fawned over vice presidential nominee Joe Biden, a Democratic senator from Delaware, and rebuked Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, the first Republican woman to become a vice presidential nominee.
"Women know they need to cast votes based on the policies the candidates set forth, regardless of gender," said Betsy Clark, executive director of the National Association of Social Workers, a group in Washington, D.C., that lobbies for social workers, more than 80 percent of whom are women.
Palin is a social conservative who opposes same-sex marriage, comprehensive sex education and abortion in all cases except to save the life of the woman; positions that go against stands taken by NOW and other women's rights groups.
Women's rights advocates also criticized Palin after news reports revealed that while she was mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, the town charged sexual assault victims between $300 and $1,200 to cover the cost of their rape kits and forensic exams to collect criminal evidence. Alaska has the highest sexual assault rate in the nation.
A GOP lead among white women fueled by Sarah Palin's nomination as vice president... more
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For the past week, some activists in the abortion rights community have been trying to figure out why Barack Obama, a Democrat praised for his strong defense of reproductive rights, appeared to be turning soft.
Those who work on the front lines of the abortion debate couldn’t quite believe what they were hearing: Obama, in an interview with a Christian magazine, seemed to reject a mental health exception to the ban on late-term abortions. They feared that Obama, like Democrat John Kerry in 2004, was adopting a view favored by abortion opponents to appeal to conservatives.
After days of examining his initial comments and a subsequent clarification that he supports a mental health exception — as long as the woman suffers a diagnosed illness and is not just “feeling blue” — some activists are satisfied, while others are far from it or just plain confused.
“That kind of statement really feeds into the wingnut argument that women have abortions because they are frivolous about that decision, because we are having a bad hair day,” Kim Gandy, president of the National Organization for Women, said in an interview Wednesday. “There seems to be an information gap there.”
The confusion comes at a politically sensitive juncture for Obama, as he attempts to build credibility and a comfort level with women voters and institutional advocacy groups, including some that supported Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton. The timing exacerbated the concerns of these groups, some of which are still awaiting a personal meeting with the presumptive Democratic nominee: It followed a major push by Obama to court religious voters who hold positions at odds with these advocacy groups.
As he faces criticism from some on the left, Obama is also taking hits from the right over abortion. The Christian Defense Coalition began running print ads this week calling Obama “the abortion president.” And Republican John McCain, an opponent of abortion rights, took a dig at Obama during an Ohio town hall meeting on Wednesday, criticizing his vote against a ban on late-term abortion as an Illinois state senator.
The reaction to Obama’s statement revealed a divide in the abortion rights community, one that closely tracks the allegiances formed during the Democratic Party’s protracted primary election fight. While NOW and the Feminist Majority voiced concern over Obama's abortion remarks, two of the largest organizations dedicated to reproductive rights took a different tack and backed up Obama.
NARAL Pro-Choice America, which endorsed Obama in early May, issued a statement of support after Relevant magazine published the interview last week, saying he was a strong supporter of Roe v. Wade and his views were consistent with the landmark ruling establishing the right to an abortion. The Planned Parenthood Action Fund, which stayed neutral in the primary, announced its formal support of Obama on Tuesday.
Kate Michelman, a prominent women’s rights advocate who endorsed Obama in February, said Obama was not softening his long-standing support of Roe, but rather articulating his understanding that abortions in the second and third trimesters should be rare and necessitated by serious health issues.
“He was very deliberately speaking to those people who over the past 35 years have made the case that the exception to protect women’s health is a big loophole through which women can leap when they are feeling blue,” said Michelman, who headed NARAL for nearly 20 years until 2004. “Obama was making it clear that he doesn’t believe that is what women do and what the law allows.”
For the past week, some activists in the abortion rights community have been trying to... more
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Michaela Walsh, founder of the Women's World Bank talks about the use and effect of micro credit on women around the world. This was at the 2008 United Nations Conference on the Status of Women. She talks about advocacy in the Third World and the effect of business loans on low income women.Michaela Walsh, founder of the Women's World Bank talks about the use and effect... more
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No one has seen this filmstrip presentation in almost 30 years. Originally created by Ellen Cooperperson, It really shows the origins of modern feminism and starts conversations about where we were, how far we have come and how far we have NOT come.No one has seen this filmstrip presentation in almost 30 years. Originally created by... more
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