WPL Studies

This initial report by WPL, based on findings of the University of Korea and in partnership with King’s College and the Oliver Wyman Forum shows that a country’s overall progress and performance improves

when it has significant representation of women in political leadership because they often have different viewpoints and priorities than men. Increased representation of women typically results in more laws that ensure equality and greater participation of women in the workforce. Releasing the report on WPL’s 10th anniversary reinforces WPL’s mission to increase the number and influence of women in political leadership positions. Read more here.

In 2021, women who were fifty years old and above constituted twenty-six per cent of the total female population worldwide. This marked a four per cent increase compared to the preceding decade. Given that most

women experience menopause between ages forty-five and fifty-five and have longer lifespans, the need to offer effective healthcare and support to women in their personal and professional lives becomes highly evident.
The changing demographics, along with a compelling moral and social duty, highlight the critical need for heightened awareness of the stigma around menopause. Additionally, it emphasises the importance of formulating effective policies governing the access and provision of suitable resources for women across the globe.
With this in mind, Women Political Leaders (WPL) offers this toolkit to help global policymakers develop ways to recognise and practically address problems that arise from the stigma and taboo around menopause. Making menopause manageable by minimising stigma and improving support will benefit all of our constituents and ensure we create a culture where women are supported at every stage of their lives.

This toolkit aims to identify some of the actions it will take to bring equality to women’s health and explore what can be done

to ensure women are able to live long and healthy lives. Women Political Leaders (WPL) is enormously grateful to the experts who took part in interviews that informed the development of this toolkit. A better understanding of women’s unmet health needs can help identify actions required to address them. As the saying goes: “communities are only as strong as the health of their women”.

It is over a hundred years since the first women were elected to national parliaments, yet women worldwide still hold only 26.4 percent of parliamentary seats (IPU 2022). While progress has been made

in recent years there is still much to be done to ensure women’s voices are heard as much as men when it comes to making the decisions that shape all of our lives. This report follows on from the 2015 report The Female Political Career and aims to understand the experiences and intentions of women in politics in today; it is based on survey responses from women politicians in 66 countries seeking to better understand the motivations and challenges shared by women who decide to pursue a political career.

In 2021, Google.org funded a report by Women Political Leaders entitled “Boosting women’s economic empowerment: An action list for legislators” which seeks to provide policymakers with a concrete set of indicators that will assist those seeking to legislate towards economic equality. The data, derived from The World Bank’s annual report on ‘Women, Business and the Law‘, shows that “nearly 2.4 billion women globally don’t have the same economic rights as men”; WPL has worked to provide a toolkit for legislators to remove these legal barriers to women.

Download the report by clicking here

Those seeking to legislate towards economic equality. The data, derived from The World Bank’s annual report on ‘Women, Business and the Law‘, shows that “nearly 2.4 billion women globally don’t have the same economic rights as men”; WPL has worked to provide a toolkit for legislators to remove these legal barriers to women.

The WPL Global Study on Immunisation shares the perspectives of political leaders toward vaccination programmes and their importance throughout the landscape of the pandemic.