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Supporters of a bill aimed at decriminalizing female genital mutilation demonstrate as parliament debates the bill in Banjul, Gambia March 18, 2024.
Gambia's parliament considers overturning ban on female genital cutting
Gambia’s National Assembly voted Monday to advance a bill repealing the country’s ban on female genital cutting. The vote sent the bill to committee, buying opponents three months before repealing the ban is up for a final vote. If it passes, Gambia will become the first nation to roll back protections against cutting, potentially setting a dangerous precedent for other countries.
Over 75% of women in Gambia experience cutting, which usually involves removing the clitoris and labia minora of girls between the ages of 10 and 15 and often leads to infection and life-threatening complications during childbirth.
The practice was banned in 2015 but only enforced for the first time last year. After three practitioners were fined, influential imams in the Muslim-majority country called to repeal the ban, claiming that cutting is religiously and culturally important.
Anti-cutting campaigners protested outside Parliament during the vote, but only religious leaders and their supporters advocating for the repeal were granted entrance. Out of the 47 lawmakers present, 42 voted to advance the repeal in a parliament with only five women.
Opponents of the bill fear that if the ban is repealed, other laws protecting women and girls, like the ban on child marriage, will be next.
First lady Jill Biden makes remarks before U.S. President Joe Biden signed an executive order to expand and improve research on women's health.
Biden targets gender inequality in medical research
This initiative is long overdue. For most of history, scientific study has been based almost entirely on men – the government didn’t even require women to be included in medical research until the 1990s.
This has led to knowledge gaps on diseases disproportionately affecting women, like multiple sclerosis or endometriosis, and minimal understanding of conditions that affect women differently from men, like post-menopausal rheumatoid arthritis.
Just in time for the election. Biden knows he needs women to come out and vote if he is going to beat former President Donald Trump. He currently leads Trump by 6 points when it comes to suburban women and by 10 points among women overall.
Abortion and reproductive rights have proven to be mobilizing issues for Democrats, helping them win special elections, outperform in the 2022 midterms, and keep control of the US Senate. This initiative gives the Biden campaign another talking point as he tries to woo women to the polls in November.
The Graphic Truth: Female governance gap
March is International Women’s History month, but while women account for just over half the world’s population, the overwhelming majority of political leaders and policymakers globally are men. In fact, there are just six countries where women make up more than 50% of the national legislature, and only 31 countries (out of 193 UN member states) in which a woman is either head of state or head of government. Furthermore, only one G7 country - Italy - currently has an elected female leader. While some countries have introduced controversial gender quotas at various stages in the electoral process as a bid to increase female participation, there's lots of progress still to be made. Here's a look at the facts and figures.
Women in power: Chile’s Michelle Bachelet
Whose job is it to keep an eye on the governments that kill, torture, and displace people? The officials who turn back asylum-seekers, abuse migrants, jail journalists, or smash the skulls of peaceful protesters?
That's more or less a day at the office for Michelle Bachelet. As the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights since 2018, the former two-time leftwing president of Chile is perhaps the most visible and influential voice on human rights in the world today.
Calling out the the worst. As High Commissioner, her job is to promote and monitor governments' protection of universal human rights and freedoms, as laid out in UN declarations and international law. Unjust detention, torture, repression of journalists, and discrimination are just a few of the targets of her work.
Her office has issued searing reports on, among other things, horrific abuses in the Philippines under tough-guy President Rodrigo Duterte's "war on drugs" campaign; the surge in killings by Brazilian police under Brazil's gun-loving; far-right president Jair Bolsonaro, and the erosion of human rights under the current government of Sri Lanka, whose leaders themselves are implicated in crimes committed during the civil war that ended there in 2009.
One of Bachelet's most influential reports to date was issued in 2019, on the human rights and rule of law crisis in Venezuela under the regime of strongman President Nicolas Maduro. It was a tricky undertaking — Maduro himself had invited the investigation, perhaps believing that Bachelet's left-wing bonafides would make it possible to turn the report into an exculpatory propaganda coup for his regime. No such luck. The 19-page report detailed a raft of abuses right as the world was keenly watching the (now largely defunct) opposition movement of Juan Guaidó.
She brings a personal perspective to this work. Bachelet was a teenager in Chile when rightwing General Augusto Pinochet took power in a coup in 1973. Bachelet's father, an Air Force General who opposed Pinochet, was arrested and died in prison after being tortured. Two years later, Bachelet and her mother were jailed by Pinochet's henchmen and subjected to psychological abuse themselves.
They fled into exile. But after several years abroad, Bachelet returned to Chile to study medicine and work in the Chilean health ministry where she developed a reputation among Chileans as a compassionate fighter on behalf of those left behind in a country that, despite its economic successes, is also one of the most unequal in the world.
Her election as Chile's president in 2006 was a watershed. Not only was Bachelet the first woman president in Chile's history, she was also the first president from the left since the end of Pinochet's regime, and the first female president in Latin America elected on her own merits (Argentina's Isabel Perón and Cristina Kirchner are welcome to disagree if they like). And the fact that she is an agnostic leftwing mother of three — "all of the sins together" she likes to say — added to the sense of change in a Catholic country where gender role expectations are often archaic.
She did not always succeed during her two, non-contiguous, terms as president. Her plans for expanding education and infrastructure fell short of their goals, partly because of flawed political strategy, and partly because of resistance from an established business and political elite hostile to change. But she also took criticism from some of her own supporters for her decision to take a pragmatic, non-confrontational approach to dealing with the legacy of the dictatorship in a country that is still deeply divided over the past.
Does her current work have an effect? Critics say that the High Commissioner's office is a toothless body, good at pointing out problems but powerless to solve them. Most countries don't take kindly to having their abuses exposed. (Bolsonaro even reacted with a swipe at Bachelet's dead father.) And any immediate successes, like Venezuela quietly releasing several political prisoners on the eve of her report's publication, are both small and rare.
Meanwhile, the UN Security Council, one of the main audiences for her reports, is riven by geopolitical rivalries among the permanent members (China, Russia, the US, UK, and France), which often deadlock the ability to address human rights abuses.
But at a time when democracy and rule of law are suffering globally — both because of authoritarian impulses in democracies and more assertive strongmen in autocracies — it is important to simply say and prove: these people's rights are being abused, these people's freedoms are being curtailed, these things are happening right now.
Michelle Bachelet's power is, then, to act as the world's most powerful voice for the voiceless. And in 2021, there are a great many people still waiting to be heard.
This article is part of GZERO Media's Women in Power Series, profiling female leaders around the world who hold positions of decisive power and influence in global politics.
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this piece incorrectly stated that Eva Perón was president of Argentina, instead of Isabel. We regret the error.
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The fight for gender equality
A look at the impact the pandemic has had on women's equal rights globally. How much progress in gender equality has been eroded in the wake of job losses and a rise in gender-based violence and economic inequality? And how can that trend be reversed as societies rebuild?
Watch the GZERO World with Ian Bremmer episode: Why the pandemic has been worse for women: UN Women's Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka
The day women around the world flooded the streets
A global look at the celebrations, protests, and riots spurred by International Women's Day, March 8, 2021. It was a day that millions of women across the world took to the streets to demand that their voices be heard.
Watch the GZERO World with Ian Bremmer episode: Why the pandemic has been worse for women: UN Women's Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka
How education has improved women’s lives around the world
What has been the driving force for improving women's lives around the world in the last decade? It's education, says UN Women Executive Director Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka. "The macroeconomic policies of most countries are not gender-responsive," says Mlambo-Ngcuka, but "women have been increasingly graduating at the top of their classes, and in many countries doing better than boys." She joined Ian Bremmer to discuss how the global fight for gender equality has progressed over the past decade and how the pandemic has turned back the clock on so much of that fight.
Their conversation is part of the latest episode of GZERO World, which began airing on US public television stations nationwide on Friday, March 19. Check local listings.
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Why the pandemic has been worse for women: UN Women's Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka
The global fight for gender equality wasn't a resounding success before the pandemic hit, but progress was being made. In many corners of the world, however, COVID-19 turned back that clock significantly. Violence against women—especially in the home—has been skyrocketing over the past year, says Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, Executive Director of UN Women and the UN's top advocate for gender equality. And the toll on girls has been just as severe, says Mlambo-Ngcuka, with the UN estimating that as many as 11 million girls who left school during the pandemic will never return. At the same time, it has been women who have shepherded the world through the worst pandemic, as they occupy the majority of frontline healthcare jobs. Mlambo-Ngcuka joins Ian Bremmer on GZERO World.