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"Filing nervously into a sports hall in Mosul, northern Iraq, around 20 girls prepared to practice gymnastics. Compared to their male counterparts at Mosul University's Faculty of Sport, their number is small. Another difference is that the gates to the sports hall were locked behind them and an announcement made that the hall was exclusively allocated for women," writes Suha Audah, one of the winners of the UN's first journalist competition for Iraqi women.
Read more at CNN.
Participants in the Nobel Women’s Initiative conference calls for the inclusion of women in the peace process in Syria.
"Syrian women of all ages and ethnicities have been, and continue to be, consistent in demanding and promoting peace and reconciliation, even in the midst of the fighting. They have a right to make those demands to the warring factions in Syria," the statement reads.
Read more at Nobel Women's Initiative.
This week, the Nobel Women’s Initiative puts focus on Women-Driven Solutions for a Nonviolent World at its fourth international conference. One issue addressed is the slow progress in implementing laws against sexual violence.
Madeleine Rees, the Secretary General of Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, speaks at the conference about how sexual violence and become an integrated part of human rights.
Read more at Open Democracy.
Read the full coverage of the conference Moving Beyond Militarism and War: Women-Driven Solutions for a Non-Violent World at 50.50.
“The revolution was an earthquake to the cultural status of women in Libya,” says a rights activist in the Human Rights Watch's newly published report A Revolution for All: Women's Rights in the New Lybia.
The organisation sees the current situations as a historic time to entrench rights through participation, new laws and a new constitution. Still, it warns against women being excluded from the constitution revision process.
Read the full report at Human Rights Watch.
Bringing female workers' pay closer in line with their male colleagues in the Middle East and North Africa is exercising the minds of delegates at the World Economic Forum as estimates put the pay gap at between 20 and 40 per cent.
Read more at The National.
Visit the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap site with statistics and other resources on health, education and economic and political participation.
Search WEF’s collection of successful practices in terms of closing gender gaps in the corporate world.
The advancement of women’s rights in Saudi Arabia is being held back by fear among conservative men, Saudi Arabia’s Princess Ameerah al-Taweel has said during a panel discussion at the World Economic Forum in Jordan.
Princess Ameerah said it was difficult to change the mindset of people within Saudi Arabia, which has one of the worst levels of female participation in society in the world.
Meanwhile, Jordanian Minister of Social Development Reem Abu Hassan, who happens to be the only woman in the 19 member Jordanian Cabinet, stressed that the Jordanian legislation allows for equal gender opportunities at the labour market. She highlighted the negative cultural perception in Arab countries towards women as a hindrance to women taking on a larger role in the economy.
Read more at Arabian Business and Zawya.
Countless Moroccan women continue to face abuse and sexual violence at the hands of their husbands. About 6 million women in Morocco are victims of violence, or around one in three.
Morocco’s Social Development Minister Bassima Hakkaoui, the only female minister in the country, says she would try to push forward a law protecting women that has been stuck in Parliament for eight years.
Read more at Bikya.
Arabic version by the international network Women Living Under Muslim Laws here.
The Women Human Rights Defenders program at Nazra for Feminist Studies is launching its manual on Women Human Rights Defenders (WHRDs) tailored specifically for an Egyptian context.
The manual includes sections on Egyptian legislation and military verdicts used to constrain public action; regional and international mechanisms that WHRDs can utilize to report violations committed against them; and security tips that can be of special use during perilous circumstances.
Nazra is a partner organisation to KVINFO.
Read more at Nazra for Women's Studies.
In Morocco, women have achieved impressive gains over the past decades, both legally and economically, and the human development index shows clear improvements in a wide range of areas, namely girl’s access to schooling or a decline in maternal mortality.
But why do women in Morocco play such a small part in the political, economic and social arenas?
Read more at Global Arab Network.
“One lesson from the 1979 Iranian revolution and the 2011 Arab revolutions is that activists seeking to promote women’s rights, human rights and the transition to democracy must challenge patriarchy from within the Muslim legal tradition.”
So writes Ziba Mir-Hosseini, a legal anthropologist and a founding member of Musawah Global Movement for Equality and Justice in the Muslim Family.
Read more at OpenDemocracy.