Meet The Badass Women Wrestlers Of Senegal

It was lunchtime and 67-year-old great-grandmother Marie-Thérèse Sambou was recalling a childhood spent crisscrossing nearby villages to take part in wrestling matches. “If you’re a Jola woman, you wrestle right until the day you have children.” “Wrestling is how we prove our womanhood,” she said, sitting outside her home in a forest clearing in […]
Empowering Girl Activists Through Art

Dariya is a 17-year-old activist in Kyrgyzstan, standing up for girls’ rights with arts and humor. She shares her story about creating Girl Activists of Kyrgyzstan through Bishkek Feminist Initiatives, a recent Global Fund for Women grantee partner that helps to foster the creation of young women’s groups and empower young women’s activism and leadership. […]
Going Undercover To Help Girls

Nida has been going to Shaheen’s centers in India since she was eight years old. With Shaheen’s vocational training, she learned how to do mehendi—or henna—to make an income and now does it at weddings and other celebrations, and also teaches other girls. She has become a powerful advocate focused on ending early and forced […]
The Tech Industry’s Real Problem With Diversity Is Clear. It’s Not The Pipeline

For women in Silicon Valley, 2017 has been a watershed year. We’ve seen women technologists share their stories of sexual harassment and bias, shocking industry outsiders and even many male colleagues. Susan Fowler’s blog post blew the lid off of Uber’s sexual harassment issues and hostile culture. Soon thereafter, a crew of female entrepreneurs turned […]
Sunni Women Tell of ISIS Detention, Torture

Fighters from the Islamic State (also known as ISIS) are arbitrarily detaining, ill-treating, torturing, and forcibly marrying Sunni Arab women and girls in areas under their control in Iraq, Human Rights Watch said today. Although accounts of gender-based violence have emerged from areas under ISIS control, these are the first cases against Sunni Arab women […]
On Colourism And Other “Isms”

Colourism is defined as the prejudice or discrimination against individuals with a dark skin tone, typically among people of the same ethnic or racial group (see Google’s first million pages). Yes. I had to look it up. Unless you have experienced the sharp end of colourism or indeed, are of the darker-skinned races then […]
What Feminism Looks Like In 2017

Every day, women are breaking barriers. We’re astronauts and doctors and judges. We raise children and juggle families. We are doing amazing things. Most of us acknowledge that we have a fair way to go yet and, in some places, a hell of a long way. In my professional circles, this acknowledgement that we want […]
Invest And Mobilize To End Violence Against Women

One in three women around the world experience violence in their lifetime, often in the hands of someone they know, love and trust. Of all women who were victims of homicide globally in 2012, almost half were killed by intimate partners or family members. Violence against women and girls, a gross human rights violation, […]
How Hungary And Poland Have Silenced Women And Stifled Human Rights

In the women’s movement in Central Europe, there are few moments to celebrate. Polish women successfully preventing a total ban on abortion from coming into law recently was one of them. While we may praise the success of Polish women’s “black protest“ – where women across the country went on strike and dressed in black […]