San Francisco, United States | AFP | Google on Monday fired the author of an internal memo defending the gender-gap in Silicon Valley tech jobs as a matter of biology, according to media reports. The move, which was not officially confirmed by Google, splashed fuel on a burning controversy about whether …
Read More »Saudi authorities investigate Snapchat model in miniskirt
Riyadh, Saudi Arabia | AFP | Saudi authorities are investigating footage of a woman in a miniskirt and crop top walking through a historic site in the ultraconservative kingdom posted to social media over the weekend. A series of videos, initially posted to the Snapchat account of “Model Khulood”, show a …
Read More »New ranking credits Rwanda on gender
Highest ranked country in the world with most women in parliament as of January 2017 Rwanda has 49 women in its 80-seat lower house of parliament and 10 women in its 26-seat Upper house of parliament, the Women in Politics 2017 map, created by the Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU) and UN …
Read More »World Bank approves US$40 million for Uganda to fight gender violence
Kampala, Uganda | JULIUS BUSINGE | The World Bank’s Board of Executive Directors has approved a US$40 million equivalent IDA credit to Uganda for strengthening social risk management and gender-based violence (GBV) prevention and response project, it said in a press release dated June 22. The bank said that this credit …
Read More »Kenya court orders parliament to pass gender quota
Nairobi, Kenya | AFP | Kenya’s High Court on Wednesday gave parliament 60 days to enact legislation that would make it obligatory to have more female lawmakers, or face dissolution. The 2010 constitution requires that no more than two thirds of lawmakers should be men, a principle hailed at the …
Read More »More than 730 change gender on NY birth certificates
New York, United States | AFP | More than 730 people aged five to 76 have changed gender on New York birth certificates since 2015, an explosion in applications after rules were relaxed two years ago, officials said Thursday. The 731 gender-change applications approved since January 2015 come in stark …
Read More »VIDEO: Uganda Police joins march against gender based violence
VIDEO: The Uganda police has joined in the marking of the 16 days against gender based violence. The celebrations that started with a march around major streets of Kampala was punctuated by women and men carrying items that symbolized social roles of woman – that are often under looked. According to the …
Read More »Karooro decries increasing sexual, gender based violence
Unreported cases of Sexual and Gender Based Violence (SGBV) are on the rise in Uganda, a trend that Minister for General Duties in the Office of the Prime Minister Mary Karooro-Okurut says the country needs to halt. Making reference to statistics from The 2011 Uganda Police Force Report she said, …
Read More »Men made a mess of Somalia, now women want to fix it
Mogadishu, Somalia | AFP | Raped, abused and subjected to genital mutilation, many women suffer terribly in Somalia, an unrepentantly patriarchal country shown by successive surveys as one of the worst places to be female. A quota reserving 30 percent of parliamentary seats for women in current elections is supposed …
Read More »US Supreme Court to decide ‘battle of the toilets’
Washington, United States | AFP | The US Supreme Court said Friday that it will decide which bathrooms should be used by transgender people, a highly sensitive question with national political resonance. The case involves 17-year-old Gavin Grimm, who was born a female but identifies as a male. Grimm filed …
Read More »