The head of the United Nations entity mandated to promote gender equality today welcomed the increase in women's representation in Algeria's new parliament as a result of elections held last week, and stressed that it represented a step towards democratic reform and gender equality.

Female farmworkers across the United States are commonly sexually harassed and assaulted, in part because their immigration status makes them fearful of calling police, according to a report being released Wednesday by Human Rights Watch.

The survey by the international rights group mirrors two previous reports on the risks facing women and girls that had focused on California, where most of the nation's farmworkers reside.

While Aung San Suu Kyi enjoys iconic status in Myanmar (also known as Burma), women remain invisible in this country steeped in Buddhist tradition and emerging from decades of military rule.

After two decades of civil war and being subjected to violence and unthinkable hardships, Somali women are now expected to have a voice in the country's government, Press TV reports.

If the African nation's constitution draft is passed into law, Somali women will be given 30 percent of the seats in the new Constituent Assembly and will be a part of the permanent Somali government set to take office at the end of August.

The fate of a gender equality bill pending in Indonesia's parliament and aligned with the United Nations convention on the elimination of all forms discrimination against women (CEDAW) has become uncertain after falling afoul of powerful Islamist groups.

The Organization of American States (OAS) and the government of Chile have signed a letter of intent to strengthen capacities in the area of violence against women in the countries of the Eastern Caribbean, among which are OAS member states Antigua and Barbuda, Dominica, Grenada, St Lucia, St Kitts and Nevis, and St Vincent and the Grenadines.

“Violence associated with the ‘war on drugs' and organized crime, which includes government corruption in some countries have specific consequences for women in Latin America”, said the Chilean lawyer Patsili Toledo, member of ‘Antígona' a research group of the Autonomous University of Barcelona and a specialist in the subject of femicide in the continent.

Decades of conflict have left South Sudan with some of the world's worst health and educational indicators, contributing to a growing problem of violence against women in the world's newest nation.

The country, which became independent in July 2011, has the world's highest maternal mortality rate -- 2,054 per 100,000 live births -- and lowest female education rates.

A top United Nations official has voiced her concern about the latest wave of fighting in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), especially in areas that have previously witnessed sexual violence committed against civilians by members of armed groups.

Farima Samake, a widow living in the village of Gwelekoro in the south of Mali, regrets obeying her husband when he took their first daughter out of school to take care of her younger brother. "Her father decided it and I didn't refuse," says Farima. "Now she is married in another village not far from here.