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This bulletin is devoted to exploring what the quota has meant as a motorway to women's accession to political power. It draws on research findings from Pathways, as well as presentations given at a special seminar held in the Brazilian National Congress. The bulletin raises the questions of who are the women who are best positioned to benefit from the quota as a fast track option, what are they enabled to do once in office via the quota seats, and what kind of gender agendas does the critical mass of women who have come to power via the quota espouse and advocate? …

This bulletin arises from a conference of the same title that was held at the Institute of Development Studies in July 2007 in collaboration with Birkbeck College. It sets out to provoke reflection on the now ubiquitous notions of 'empowerment' and 'agency' within neoliberal development discourses on gender. It also seeks to raise broader questions about the politics and political economy of Gender and Development. …

This bulletin addresses a theme that mainstream development has persisently neglected: sexuality. Drawing on a workshop held at the Institute of Development Studies in 2005, it seeks to show why sexuality matters. It features papers from the workshop which provide diverse accounts of sexual rights conceptions, mobilisation, and new approaches to implementation. …

This bulletin highlights the profound inequities of access both globally and nationally to safe abortion, and the importance of global and national movements for reform to address this. Contributions focus in particular on policy reform and what can be learned from struggles in different parts of the world to obtain or retain safe abortion services. …

A documentary film by Yaba Badoe which tells the story of a community of women condemned to live as witches in Northern Ghana. …

This research looked at resurgent Islam and its influence on the formation of female identities and sexualities in Bangladesh. The aim was to see whether the new forms of Islam in fact open up new spaces thereby ‘permitting’ women greater sexual rights than has been popularly perceived, and what might be learnt by the secular women’s movement from women’s organising in these new spaces. …

Through this study researchers investigated the ‘criss-cross’ processes through which women in Pakistan become empowered, focusing on how the larger institutional set-up (whether military or non-military) helps women achieve their goals. They explored how some of the major initiatives from civil society have contributed to women’s voices at the local government level, and also looked at individual case studies of women when they either surmount or fail to surmount societal pressures in their individual lives. …

This research explored how and why women organise in religious groups and its political implications. The preliminary studies found that women's religious groups in Bangladesh are diverse in terms of composition, political objectives and interpretation of women's role in society/politics, and they have their own visions of women's empowerment. …

Representations of men as perpetrator and patriarch have profoundly shaped the terms of gender and development’s engagement with masculinities discourse and practice. Many of those working in the field have remained hesitant, tentative, often hostile to the notion that men might be potential allies in the struggle for gender justice. This work explores what role there should be for men in women's empowerment. …

In June 2009, the Egyptian parliament passed a new quota law adding 64 additional seats, for which only women can compete in the 454-seat parliament. This project looked at the various instruments to support women's political participation in Egypt, including the National Council for Women’s political empowerment training programme, and asked how effective these have been in challenging power hierarchies and empowering women politically? …

To celebrate their 25th anniversary, the Nucleus of Women’s Interdisciplinary Studies based at the Federal University of Bahia, Salvador held a National Symposium on Women and the Constitution from the 16 to 17 October 2008. The meeting provided feminist reflections on the legal legacy of the Brazilian feminist movement’s political lobby – also known as the ‘lipstick lobby’, twenty years after it was originally formed. The meeting was supported by the National Secretariat for Women’s Policies. …

The life of a meeting report writer is a lonely one. It is easy to get caught up in the energy and excitement of an issue when surrounded by fascinating and challenging speakers. But once everyone has flown home and you are wading through 50 pages of meeting notes, trying to decipher acronyms and cryptic quotes you sometimes feel like you are drowning in a mass of information you will never make legible to those who didn’t have the privilege of attending. So to give myself a bit of impetus and help order my thoughts I have come up with a list of what I consider the top 5 take home messages from the recent Pathways of Women’s Empowerment meeting. …

KPFA Radio Station’s Women’s Magazine (Berkeley, California) interviewed Cecilia Sardenberg on her thoughts as a feminist on President Dilma Rousseff’s election in 2010 and her hopes for the future. Cecilia who is a member of President Rousseff’s PT (Worker’s Party) herself has high hopes for what President Rousseff can achieve despite her lacking the dynamic charisma of the outgoing President Lula. When Rousseff was the Minister for Energy she brought in a gender equity programme which is now in existence across the major energy companies in Brazil. Although she hadn’t previously been associated with the feminist movement, Cecilia believes that she is going to be doing more of this in going forward. …

Cairo has been blessed by an effervescence of protest and openness since Hosni Mubarak resigned and on 8 March 2011 a variety of demonstrations took place in the city. March 8 also marked the centenary of International Women’s Day, but sadly, despite the new optimism for reform since the revolution, the women’s peaceful commemoration of the day was the only group which was attacked, ridiculed, shouted down and chased from the square. …

This morning I ran into some of my oldest friends. We chatted as old friends do, hugged, commented on new looks, graying hair, weight gained and lost as friends always do. We met on the steps of Egypt’s State Council (Majgis el Dawla)*; a grand building in a very busy part of greater Cairo. Upon these steps stood a hundred or so men and women who, like myself, had been alerted by text and e-mail messages to the decision by feminist advocacy groups to stage a protest against the near unanimous decision taken by the general assembly of the highest level of state council judges to ban women from entering the administrative judiciary as judges. …