Weekend Reading on Women's Representation: Primary Results Suggest Gains for Women in Congress; the
(lengthy, somewhat encouraging read)
Weekend Reading on Women’s Representation: Primary Results Suggest Gains for Women in Congress; the Impact of Women Voters
6/10/2022 by Cynthia Richie Terrell
Weekend Reading on Women’s Representation is a compilation of stories about women’s representation in politics, on boards, in sports and entertainment, in judicial offices and in the private sector in the U.S. and around the world—with a little gardening and goodwill mixed in for refreshment!
The “Fearless Girl” statue, a four-foot statue of a young girl, was installed in front of the bronze “Charging Bull” for International Women’s Day in 2017 in NYC to draw attention to the gender pay gap and lack of gender diversity on corporate boards in the financial sector. (Volkan Furuncu / Anadolu Agency / Getty Images)
In contrast to the recent setbacks for gender balance on corporate boards in California, officials in the European Union decided this week to require that an “underrepresented gender” fill at least 40 percent of non-executive board seats by July 1, 2026. Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has been pushing for this agreement for a decade, according to this piece on Euroactiv:
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Meta Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg, who announced on Wednesday that she was stepping down from the company, indicated in an interview that her departure was partly influenced by the leaked Supreme Court opinion on Roe v. Wade. “It’s just not a job that leaves room for a lot of other stuff in your life. This is a really important moment for women. This is a really important moment for me to be able to do more with my philanthropy, with my foundation,” Sandberg told Fortune of her desire to focus on advocacy following the leaked draft majority opinion last month showed that the Supreme Court was poised to overturn Roe v. Wade, the 1973 landmark decision that established the federal right to abortion.
(Via Shake The Table and The Bridgespan Group)
Finally, authors at Shake The Table and The Bridgespan Group released a new report this week called Lighting the Way that explores strategies to support feminist movements. Here is an excerpt from the summary:
Women, girls, and nonbinary people have faced systemic oppression for centuries. And too often, other forms of discrimination—racism, ableism, classism, and more—compound gender inequality. We see the impact across all issue areas, from education to disaster relief and from health to climate change.
Our research makes us excited about the power of feminist movements to address systems of oppression and realize the transformative change donors seek. Feminist movements are organizations, leaders, and networks working together to change power structures that reinforce gender and other inequalities.1 Led by people with lived experience of the gender power imbalance and other injustices, feminist movements challenge the compounding factors of discrimination, taking an intersectional approach to address our most intractable problems.
And they are effective. In recent years, feminist movements in Argentina, Ireland, and Mexico realized crucial gains in reproductive rights. Farmworkers in the United States secured better wages and working conditions, including curbing sexual violence in the fields. And feminists in Nigeria organized intense protests to bring an end to an abusive special police squad.
https://msmagazine.com/2022/06/10/women-politics-representation-primary-congress-voters/