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The empowerment of women has become an interesting if troubling issue for debate and action in the Arab world. Since September 11 it has been difficult for Arabs to escape the simplistic and stereotypical misconstructions of their worlds, and there has been a growing resistance to ideas such as women’s empowerment. Such a resistance makes for a highly frustrating and antagonistic climate to feminism and women’s empowerment initiatives. Hania Sholkamy offers a personal analysis of why women in the Arab world attract attention as victims of an unfair social order and yet repel the advances of those who would work to over turn this social order to ‘save’ them. …

Wendy Harcourt, records the conversation between Peggy Antrobus and Gita Sen, founders of Development Alternatives for Women in a New Era (DAWN), on how they understand gender and empowerment. …

A presentation by Andrea Cornwall about Pathways of Women’s Empowerment RPC, including a background on Pathways and the research conducted, and key findings and recommendations for policy and empowerment programmatic initiatives. …

The pursuit of pleasure is one of the primary reasons people have sex; and sex is the most common way people contract HIV worldwide. Yet information about how to have (or deliver) pleasurable sex and stay healthy are largely missing from health resources and HIV prevention campaigns. Wendy Knerr and Anne Philpott explore how ‘erotophobia’ in the health and development sectors is hindering effective safer sex promotion, and highlight best practices from The Global Mapping of Pleasure, 2nd Edition, a collection of case studies on pleasure and safer sex communication from countries and contexts around the world. …

Hesperian is developing an action resource (book- and web-based tool) that will complement its widely used Where Women Have No Doctor and help community activists work more effectively on all the topics in that book, published originally in 1997. One issue the international team developing the new resource has prioritized is how to help community activists foster sexual empowerment for women. Lucille C. Atkin et al. …

Control of women’s sexuality is the root cause of many women’s human rights violations, such as ‘honour’ crimes, early and forced marriages and female genital mutilation. The Turkish organisation Women for Women’s Human Rights (WWHR) – New Ways, contests this control of women’s sexuality, taking an affirmative approach to sexuality to open up space for women to claim their rights. In 2004, WWHR led a campaign for reform of the Turkish penal code which resulted in over 30 amendments on sexual and bodily rights of women and girls in Turkey, including criminalisation of marital rape and removal of a provision granting sentence reductions for ‘honour’ killings. They have also run human rights trainings for over 4,500 women throughout Turkey which include a module on sexual rights promoting the idea that women have a right to sexual pleasure. …

A bibliography divided into the following sections: Psychological empowerment (theory and analyses); Agency/ self-efficacy/ autonomy/ motivation/self-esteem/ well-being etc. ; Collective empowerment and organisational empowerment; Empowerment, gender and difference; Employee empowerment. The bibliography states that most of the journal articles are available via the Sussex University or LSE electronic journals login. Articles from the internet have URL links. …

Of all the buzzwords that have entered the development lexicon in the past thirty years, "empowerment" is probably the most widely used and abused. Like many other important terms that were coined to represent a clearly political concept, it has been "mainstreamed" in a manner that has virtually robbed it of its original meaning and strategic value. In this article Srilatha explains that the word 'empowerment' must be reclaimed. …

Pleasure – and even sex itself – have been noticeably absent from much of dialogue surrounding sexually transmitted infections and the spread of HIV/AIDS. Safer sex and good sex are not mutually exclusive, yet most established educational programmes give the impression that they are, by using only fear of risk and disease to motivate their audience to practise safer sex. Yet evidence suggests that positive incentives provide the most effective way to get people to want to have safer sex. The Pleasure Project works with these incentives – pleasure and desire – to build bridges between the pleasure/sex industry and the safer sex world. …

At the Millennium Summit world leaders committed to reducing extreme poverty through a series of targets encompassed within the MDGs, with a deadline of 2015. One of these was to promote gender equality and empower women, and the ‘proportion of seats held by women in national parliament’ was set as a key indicator. With the MDG Review Summit meeting in September 2010, this is an opportunity to consider whether the proportion of women in parliament continues to be the most adequate proxy for women’s political empowerment. This IDS Bulletin explores what the quota has meant as a motorway to women’s accession to political power by drawing on research findings from the Pathways of Women’s Empowerment Research Programme Consortium (‘Pathways’), as well as a series of articles from a special seminar in the Brazilian National Congress as part of this programme, and contributions from other country case studies. …

Egypt has recently passed a new quota law, reserving 64 seats for women in addition to its 454 member parliament. While the executive regulations were not issued at the time of writing, the political messages conveyed about the quota are highly relevant: for example, additional seats were allocated rather than existing ones shared. This article speculates on whether the quota will challenge power hierarchies within and among parties. While the quota will undoubtedly increase women's representation in parliament, the political configurations of the existing context – a highly authoritarian one – raise questions as to which women are most likely to occupy these seats. …

This chapter reflects on the quotas for women experience of Latin America, where their implementation, in a context of affirmative action policies, has figured as a major goal in women’s struggles for access to power structures. It asks two main questions: to what extent have quota systems in Latin America served as a pathway of women’s political empowerment? And what lessons can be learnt from this experience? …

Over the last 20 years, the problem of low levels of representation of women in political office has been mobilising women, and especially feminists, throughout the world. The adoption of quotas has become a much-used tool to address the challenge of increasing women's political representation, and as a route to enhancing women's political empowerment. In Latin America, many countries have adopted quota systems, but with widely varying effects. This article takes stock of Latin American experience and asks to what extent quota systems have served as a pathway of women into politics. …

The promise of democratic equality has not arrived for women. In all societies said to be democratic, women have had an arduous struggle and are still fighting for access to rights common to any male citizen, for example an equal salary for equal work, promotion opportunities, the right to physical integrity, and access to work. Gaining the right to vote and the right to run for office as elected representatives has not in practice meant the right to be elected under the same conditions as men (Petit 2007). In the immense majority of representative democracies, women are far from having won political equality. …

An eighty-six page literature review and bibliography with study tables. The chapters in the literature review are: Types of quota; Structural factors that affect the implementation and effectiveness of quotas; Campaigns for women’s representation and influence; Challenges women representatives face in promoting their power and influence; Beyond ‘presence’: enhancing women representative’s power and influence; Questioning quotas. The annotated bibliography sections are: Conceptual Articles and Reviews; Regional comparison and analysis; Country case-studies; Useful web-pages. …