It's been a truly disastrous week for women at Westminster, writes Madeleine Bunting. How did things go so badly wrong? It's been a week in which women have dominated politics; their pictures have been on the front of every paper and TV bulletin. But no one is celebrating: this has been a terrible week for women in politics. Twelve years ago the Labour victory of 1997 brought a new gener...

A group of women are holding a protest tomorrow morning in London against what they call an abuse of women by police spies. Really, I don’t. Women in the UK should not have to worry about being sexually abused by policemen. It is as simple as that. In response, we call for women to come

Women's Vote Watch is a project of the Center for American Women and Politics and the Communications Consortium Media Center. It was created to monitor and analyses trends relating to women and voting in the 2008 American presidential elections. The website provides free access to press releases, opinion poll data and full text briefing and research papers. Topics covered by these include: th...

Lucy Powell: Tonight I'm speaking at An evening of Women's Politics in Manchester. The event aims to encourage and support more women to get directly involved in politics as candidates, governors or activists

The End Violence Against Women (EVAW) report is a comprehensive study on the massive prevalence of violence against women and girls, calling on Michael Gove to make a priority of educating against sexism in schools. Great stuff. Simple common sense, even; unless you are generally in favour of violence against women. But developments like these are a starting horn for discussion derailers.

Leading female MPs are failing to inspire a "lost generation" of young women to become interested in politics, a damning report has revealed. Girls and young women feel disenchanted with and disengaged from politics, the major study found.

As a (relatively) young woman in politics, and one very aware of the gender dimension of politics – having both studied gender politics and also convening the SNP Women’s Forum for a time – I am disappointed that women are under-represented in this vital area of public life. There was some debate in a number of blogs in recent months over the issue of all women shortlists in the ...

There’s still a shocking absence of women from the top in politics and leadership roles across society. We can all see that for ourselves. Progressive Women set out to bring women together to discuss issues of inequality, and to network. In the two years since we were established it’s become blatant to us that we

Compass are consulting their members about whether to advocate tactical voting: Mehdi Hassan at the New Statesman has correctly guessed I wouldn't be impressed: Compass' contemplation of advocating tactical voting is silly on two counts: a) the Lib Dems have at no point indicated any preference for falling in with Labour in the event of a hung parliament, in fact logic suggests they would have not...

One of the points that we economically rational people keep trying to make is that at least part of the gender pay gap comes from the fact that men and women (on average of course) seek different things from their jobs. Women might value flexibility over simple pay for example. Women often work in the public