WHILE reading a business report last month that listed Malaysia’s top 40 richest people (in 2017), it struck me that only one of them was a woman. And she ranks 19th at that.

The motto is #LawanBersama or fight together. Women from many organizations demonstrated in the capital city of Jakarta and voiced their demands together.

Karuna Mondal, 51, of the village of Hiranmoypur in the Sundarbans clearly remembers the day her husband ventured out in the morning for a fishing trip with some other men. That was seven years ago.

In an interview with DW, one of the most popular women authors in Iran and Germany talks about the impact of censorship on her work, and why she devotes her time to educate women in writing.

They say it is “discriminatory” and would introduce a gender apartheid that would disadvantage India’s many and complex transgender, hijra, inter-sex and gender variant communities.

At the close of 2017, I was asked to research a Top 10 list of African women who had made an impact with regard to women’s rights that year was as excited as a kid in a candy store and was super confident that I would produce a forceful article featuring several legendary female African activists- I mean how rare and how cool would such an article be? I was so sure that I would construct my list in no time.

When I was a rookie journalist in Malaysia in the mid-1990s, I was assigned to the “women’s desk” to cover “women’s stories.”

We often worked with feminist organizations to push the male-majority government to pass badly-needed legislation on rape and domestic violence. Later, there would also be calls for legislation on sexual harassment at the workplace.