Participation

Voters in Haiti go to the polls on Sunday, March 20, 2011 to elect a new president and a new Parliament. Those elected will face daunting challenges as Haiti rebuilds itself: quake-related devastation, systemic poverty, ongoing crises in the delivery of basic services such as health care and education, and violence.

"Hope is dying in Afghanistan."

Women in Sri Lanka won the right to vote in 1931, seventeen years before independence. In the post independence period, Sri Lankan women made rapid progress in relation to health, education and employment, and their human development indicators are still considered a model for South Asia.

In the western world the greatest triumph of spin in the last century is reflected in attitudes to feminism. Our struggle for emancipation and equality has been surreptitiously rewritten as a harpy bra-burning contest while elsewhere, in less affluent parts of the world, the response is altogether different.

The Head of the OSCE Mission in Kosovo Ambassador Werner Almhofer called on March 8 for the enhanced participation of women in political and social life, on the occasion of the 100th International Women's Day.

An outside observer of Burmese politics might assume women in Burma have made progress towards equality in a way that hasn't happened in many countries.

The round table, held at Centre's premises on March 1, was opened by welcome speech of Tanja Miscevic, State Secretary in the Ministry of Defence. During her speech, she discussed the process of developing a National Action Plan (NAP) for the implementation of the UN Security Council Resolution 1325 in Serbia and its significance for achieving equality of men and women in Serbia.

Quotas are needed to ensure equal representation of women in the private and public sectors, agreed most participants in a meeting held by the EP Women's Rights and Gender Equality Committee with national parliaments' representatives on Thursday, ahead of the 100th anniversary of International Women's Day on 8 March.

A man and his son are driving in a car one day, when they are involved in a fatal accident. The man is killed instantly. The boy is badly injured, but he is still alive.

He is rushed to hospital, where it is decided he needs immediate surgery. The surgeon walks into the emergency room, looks at the boy, and says..."I can't operate on this boy, he is my son." How is this possible?

Among the most prevalent Western stereotypes about Muslim countries are those concerning Muslim women: doe-eyed, veiled, and submissive, exotically silent, gauzy inhabitants of imagined harems, closeted behind rigid gender roles. So where were these women in Tunisia and Egypt?