TITLE:
Women in Politics: The Correlation between Women's Representation in The Political Leadership and their Social Status
AUTHORS:
Myada Abu-Chaled
KEYWORDS:
gender discrimination, women leadership, gender disparity
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Journal of Leadership,
Vol.11 No.3,
September
30,
2022
ABSTRACT: Women have been discriminated against by society throughout
human history in different fields. In most cultures, women had no legal
standing and little access to education and financial sources. Nowadays,
women’s rights are being violated daily in different aspects; they experience
violence, sexual harassment, wage gap, and educational steering, and their
social status, in general, is still weak in comparison to males. Politics, though, is one of
the most prominent fields in which women are discriminated against. Until the
nineteenth century, they did not even have the right to vote, and nowadays,
they are a minority or absent in the political field of leadership. This paper
relates to how this social phenomenon of minor representation of women in
leadership contributes to weak social status and rights violations of women,
manifested in the lack of reinforcing women’s rights and in not enacting laws
to protect them, as well as not having an impact on government decisions in
favor of women. This paper relies on data from different formal governmental
and academic sources. It compares women in the western world and women in the Middle
East countries and Gulf states in terms of political representation to
emphasize the correlation between the strong attendance of women in leadership
and their social status.