“You should take it as a compliment,” a female boss once said to her subordinate, when the latter told her that a male colleague had been making crude remarks about her breasts.

Sadaf Foroughiʹs debut feature film, AVA, examines the complexities of the relationship between a mother and a teenage daughter living in present day Tehran. The movie is both a fascinating character study and an examination of the damage caused by the rules governing women’s behaviour in Iranian society.

What can women’s rights activists in the West learn from the struggle of feminist movements in Iran? DW spoke with researcher Janet Bauer, who has extensively studied women’s issues in different cultural contexts.

In an interview with DW, Indian feminist V. S. Elizabeth says that although the global #MeToo movement had an impact on India, it is still restricted to the educated middle class with an access to the Internet.

Asma Jahangir, Pakistan’s human rights champion and the winner of the Alternative Nobel Prize passed away in Lahore on February 11. A UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights and icon of feminism in Pakistan, Jahangir was the woman the country’s male-dominated establishment most dreaded. From winning a petition against a military dictator in 1972, when she was still a teen, to defending the disqualifications case of a former PM until her death, she consistently urged the Pakistani state to remain on a democratic track.

In Malaysia when our mothers and certainly our grandmothers were young, traveling alone as a woman was literally unheard of. In many traditional cultures, unmarried women are not allowed to roam around unchaperoned.

Super heroes, mythical female figures in the desert: the Suspended Territories exhibition at the Marta Herford museum shows contemporary women’s art from the Arab World, Iran and North Africa. – Author: Julia Hitz