In the days ahead a struggle looms over women's human rights and gender justice in Egypt. Will the Muslim Sisters rise to the occasion?
Les femmes au Burundi ont pu obtenir des modifications radicales du Code pénal, faisant du viol une infraction sanctionnée par la prison à perpétuité. Le tabou interdisant de dénoncer la violence sexuelle a été brisé et la vie de tant des femmes – et des hommes – a commencé à changer profondément,
Women in Burundi have won radical changes to the country's Penal Code, making rape punishable by life imprisonment. The taboo of speaking out against sexual violence has been broken and the lives of some women - and men - are beginning to change forever, says Lyduine Ruronona
The war over contraception in America during the last bizarre month was never about religious freedom or women’s health care. It was about controlling women’s right to control their own bodies and to make their own sexual and reproductive choices, says Ruth Rosen
The feminist critique of religion should not appease the strident voices which label secularism as fundamentalist or militant by promoting a secularism that has had its teeth drawn. Feminists must continue to argue for a robust secularism and the right to stand against religion, argues Rahila Gupt
What are the evolving narratives of the Arab Spring? Hoda Elsadda reports from a conference in Cairo examining the conflicting narratives of and about the Arab revolutions, and the geopolitics of these narratives
Governments are constructing social policy based on misrepresentations and stereotypes about poor people and welfare claimants, rather than by reference to the structural inequalities that affect everyone, argues Kate Donald
The push to police the way that women dress continues across Africa on the pretext that it causes sexual harassment and violence against women. What really underlies this censorship of women’s expression? asks Bibi Bakare-Yusuf
It’s not an individualist but a collective feminism that we need, one that measures success not by how high a woman can climb, but by the condition in which most women remain, says Shereen Essof
The drama playing out in Kampala over the tabling of the Anti Homosexual Bill for its first reading in the Ugandan Parliament represents a complex interplay of historical, political and religious factors, says Rachael Crook
The various social contracts that are emerging between the State and the dominant religious right minority leaderships in the UK trade on nothing less than the human rights of minority women, says Pragna Patel
More than a hundred women's seminaries have been set up by the Iranian state since the 1979 revolution. Yet the number of women candidates standing in next month's parliamentary election is the lowest for twenty years, Mirjam Künkler explores why this may be so