The Afghan parliament has failed to pass an important women’s law which would ban violence against women, as many members of parliament deem this particular law to be “un-Islamic.” Two women made the news this week conquering Mount Everest: Samina Baig is the first Pakistani woman to do so and Saudi Raha Moharrak was the first female […]

Reports about Syrian refugee women getting sold in marriage in Jordan remain rampant, especially young girls are considered to be desirable. In Egypt too, Syrian refugee women are often singled out by Egyptian men with propositions of marriage. Last weekend were the elections in Pakistan, for some women it was the first time in half a century […]

Pakistan will vote on May 11, and women, both as voters and as candidates, are the subject of many articles in the news last week. First there is the question of women voters: IPS speaks with several Pakistani women and asks them what women voters really want. But not all women get a chance to vote […]

Last week a factory building collapsed in Bangladesh, and approximately 400 people were killed; most of them were female factory workers. About 150 people are still missing. The BBC spoke to Merina Khatun, who had spent four days trapped inside the rubble before she was rescued, and 14-year-old Halima Akhtar, who was employed as a sewing operator in one […]

There were, of course, a lot of news items related to the (female) relatives of the alleged “Boston bombers” this week: there were interviews with the mother and the aunt, and a lot of speculation about both the mother and the converted wife of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, Katherine Russell. One Muslim woman in the Boston area has reported […]

Nausheen Tobassum, a 17-year-old Indian girl, shares her horrific story as an “one month wife,” and reveals the scope of the sex tourism business in Hyderabad, India. More and more young Afghan men and women meet each other on Facebook; in a society where dating is strictly prohibited, many young men and women have (multiple) relationships online. […]

Zainab Bangura from Sierra Leone is the new UN Special Rapporteur on Sexual Violence in Conflict; she says that her life story makes her confident that things can change, and that one day sexual violence will be history. She visited Somalia last week, where she stated that 70% of the sexual violence that takes place in the camps is […]

Last week on Maundy Thursday, Pope Francis I washed the feet of inmates in Rome, Italy, one of whom was a Muslim woman. The government of Kerala state, India has decided that women cannot go on hajj alone, after Aminakutty Mohammad demanded a court order so that she could perform the pilgrimage with a female […]

Last week in Algeria, women went to the streets to defend their local tradition of wearing the white religious garb, the haik, claiming that black religious clothing is inspired by Saudi Arabia and alien to Algerian culture. Gambia’s Isatou Touray has been campaigning against female genital mutilation (FGM) for about 25 years, and even went to prison […]

This week marks the ten-year anniversary of the Iraq war, and when it comes to the position of women in present-day Iraqi society articles are unanimously negative and speak of rampant violence against women, limited freedom for contemporary Iraqi women and the ongoing fight for gender equality. CNN also follows up with “miracle baby Noor,” years […]