Jenny Edwards is a Project Manager with over ten years’ experience of working on gender issues including the Pathways of Women’s Empowerment programme. Currently she is working with the Power and Popular Politics Cluster on the Action for Empowerment and Accountability Research Programme.
Global progress on gender equality is under threat. We are living in an age where major political and social shifts are resulting in new forces that are visibly pushing back to reverse the many gains made for women’s rights and to shrink civic space. This patriarchal backlash is escalating...
Action for Empowerment and Accountability is an international research programme which explores how social and political action can contribute to empowerment and accountability in fragile, conflict, and violent settings, with a particular focus on Egypt, Mozambique, Myanmar, Nigeria and Pakistan.
The central aim of this programme is to influence norms and institutions at global and local levels to more effectively tackle the challenge of achieving gender equality.
Pathways is a research and communication programme which seeks to discover where women are achieving real gains despite or because of policy and practice. It looks at how this has happened, and aims to make these pathways visible so that we can build on these revealed successes.
In early March, the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Institute released its seventh annual democracy report. The report updated the now repeated and discouraging litanies from previous reports. Democracy is backsliding. Closed autocracies outnumber liberal democracies, for the first time in more...
15 March 2023
12 October 2020
IDS Bulletin 55.1
Far from seeing continued steady progress on gender equality, we are currently witnessing significant backlash against gender and sexual rights. Limited and hard-fought gains for some are being reversed, co-opted, and dismantled – all amplified through new social media and digital...
7 March 2024
How and under what conditions does citizen-led social and political action contribute to empowerment and accountability? What are the strategies used, and with what outcomes, especially in settings which are democratically weak, politically fragile and affected by legacies of violence and...
22 February 2022
IDS Bulletin 51.2
The #MeToo movement that spread across the internet in 2017 sparked a focus on sexual harassment as an international issue. However, collective action against sexual harassment did not start with the #MeToo campaign. Grass-roots work that has been taking place for years against sexual harassment...
30 September 2020
Feminist Dissent 3
In this special issue of Feminist Dissent, we are calling for a new interpretive framework that recognises the multiple genealogies that have contributed to binary constructs of the Western/secular versus the authentic/religious; takes into account the different power positionalities of those...
17 December 2018
Gender backlash is continually gaining momentum across the globe, and social and political institutions and policies are being dismantled. Gender justice activists and women’s rights organisations are having to mobilise quickly to counter these attacks. Organised by the Countering Backlash...
This event will launch the new IDS Bulletin ‘Understanding Gender Backlash: Southern Perspectives’. It will address the urgent question of how we can better understand the recent swell of anti-gender backlash across different regions, exploring different types of actors, interests,...
Eleven million fewer women than men voted in the 2018 Pakistan elections. A gender gap in political participation is common in many democracies around the world. To tackle this, many policy interventions focus on increasing participation through educational programmes providing information and...
13 June 2022
The declaration of the Covid pandemic by the World Health Organisation on 11 March 2020 had huge implications, not only for public health. For several years, IDS along with numerous watchdogs, research institutes and activist groups has studied rapid changes in civic space the world over....
