By Helene Cooper
I knew my plan to spend my recent trip home eating my way around Monrovia was off to a good start when my sister showed up at the airport to greet me accompanied by a pot of bitterleaf over doughy fufu.
My mom and I, jet-lagged and woozy, peered into the trunk of Eunice’s [...]

By Katrin Bennhold
In 1965, my mother was the only female engineering student in her class in Germany. There were no ladies’ toilets except in the basement, where the cleaners had their lockers, and her professor urged her to find a husband quickly so she wouldn’t fail the exams.
Feminism in those days was pretty clear-cut: It [...]

Paula Fray and Laure Pichegru
JOHANNESBURG, Jun 15 (IPS) – The face of politics is changing in
the southern African country of Malawi. And civil society is
making plans to ensure that it changes even more.
Fresh from a dramatic increase in the number of women
representatives elected into national government last year, the
NGO Gender Coordination Network is already implementing [...]

The French legislature is attempting to combat the age-old corporate “boy’s club” mentality by considering a law that would mandate that corporate boards be composed of at least 40% female members. The law has already passed in the lower house of parliament and is currently being debated in the Senate. Corporate boards across the Western world are still extremely imbalanced in their gender makeup. Currently, women in France only hold 9.5% of corporate board positions. In the United States, boards are comprised of 12.2% women, and in the UK, 8.5%.

In Namibia, women who are diagnosed as HIV-positive are sometimes advised by doctors to undergo a sterilization procedure. Often the women do not understand what the procedure entails, in part due to the language barrier resulting from the 11 indigenous languages spoken around the country. Three HIV-positive women are now suing the state after having allegedly been sterilized without their informed consent.

The New York Times reports that two young Afghani girls, ages 13 and 14, were recently caught dressed as boys in an attempt to flee their village by bus. The two were leaving their homes in order to escape their much older husbands, who the girls report beat them when they resisted consummating their marriages. Police recognized the children to be girls and sent them back to their homes, where they were subjected to brutal public floggings.