More than a hundred women's seminaries have been set up by the Iranian state since the 1979 revolution. Yet the number of women candidates standing in next month's parliamentary election is the lowest for twenty years, Mirjam Künkler explores why this may be so
Despite the African Union's commitment to strengthening women's access and control of land by placing land rights in the public domain of human rights, it is silent on the issue of land grabs. This is a gap that the AU's land policy framework needs to plug, says Kathambi Kinoti
With so many families in Britain struggling in the face of the Coalition's austerity measures, wage inequalities between men and women seem low down on almost everyone's agenda. But as increasing numbers of households depend on women’s wages, equal pay for equal work is a more pertinent demand tha
The Egyptian elections delivered a parliament that has one of the lowest rates of female representation in the world. Yet this is the parliament that expresses the political will of the people of Egypt. It may also be one that ignores the social realities of gender and of women’s political partici
In breach of the government's pledge to make the asylum system sensitive to the needs of women, officials are asking women to disclose information about sex work and abuse in the earshot of queuing strangers, and in front of their own children. This lack of privacy can have disastrous consequences
"We are constantly aware of our gender and of being watched and judged because of it, so we end up "performing". But in taking to the streets there are no performative acts and there is no audience. Now I feel that there is no going back, After all, there is no text to follow, and no director. It
Sylvia Walby’s ‘The Future of Feminism’ makes the case for gender mainstreaming as a successful mechanism for integrating feminist principles into institutions. But doing so runs the risk of subordinating feminist goals to other agendas, a contradiction that Walby never entirely resolves.
'There is no opposite to belonging’: Nira Yuval-Davis in conversation with Jenny Allsopp on religion, migration and the politics of belonging. So is it time to open up the debate and ask what it means to belong 'in' - rather than 'to' - contemporary Britain?
Maternal mortality among black African women in the UK is up to seven times higher than it is among white women. Doctors’ surgeries are misunderstanding their obligations to migrant patients, says Dr Ramya Ramaswami
We are at a point in the drugs policy debate now where it is no longer heretical to critique conventional wisdom; that is, to critique a policy which bears virtually zero relation to medical and sociological evidence. How many more women have to beaten, raped, or murdered before we finally see sen
Feminism needs to recapture the state from the neoliberal project to which it is in hock in order to make it deliver for women. It must guard against atomisation and recover its transformative aspirations to shape the new social order that is hovering on the horizon, says Rahila Gupta
Will the rights of the women, who participated in the struggles leading to fall of Gaddafi, be put under pressure in the new Libya? Kathryn Spellman-Poots assesses women’s status under Gadaffi and points to the perils ahead.
