On Tuesday, July 20, foreign leaders met in Kabul to discuss the next steps in what has become a long transition process for Afghanistan and its supporters. Afghan President Hamid Karzai addressed the group, saying that he is committed to working to reduce the pervasive violence and corruption in his country. Karzai and other leaders, [...]

In a recent article published by The New York Times, Hoda Gameel, age 22, describes how she wakes up at 7am and serves breakfast to her two younger brothers before walking them to school and returning home to get ready for work. She works all day selling headscarves in a mall, and at 11pm that [...]

The restrictive nature of many Afghani laws and customs has often led critics to refer to the home as a prison for Afghani women. But now these women face something even worse: actual prison.
As many as half of the women prisoners in Afghanistan have been convicted of “moral crimes.” These crimes include such acts as [...]

Human Rights Watch recently released a report titled “’They Took Me and Told Me Nothing’: Female Genital Mutilation in Iraqi Kurdistan” that details the prevalence of the violent and unsafe practice of female genital mutilation (FGM) in the region. While many people are aware that FGM occurs in Egypt and Yemen, most are ignorant that [...]

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 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.

In an effort to help women escape from abusive households and gain financial independence, the Kentucky Domestic Violence Association has given 41 women interest-free micro-loans since 2009. Ranging, on average, from $200-$800, these loans not only provide temporary financial security for women who have recently fled hostile home environments, but they also help to build and/or improve their credit scores.

A piece by the New York Times this month exposes a striking gender inequity in the fields of computer science and engineering. Numbers have long ago proven that investing in women as tech entrepreneurs is good for the bottom line, and that co-ed ventures in computer and software engineering tend to be the most successful. And yet, women continue to be scarce in this professional field…