Highlights from this week’s Weekend Reading: insights from the Reykjavík Global Forum, new data on global confidence in women’s leadership, 2025 election takeaways, structural reforms advancing gender parity, and stories of women reshaping democracy.

This week, I had the chance to return to Reykjavik for the Global Forum, joined by our Programs and Partnerships Director, Katie Usalis. Every time I go to Iceland, I’m reminded why this gathering matters so much. The Reykjavik Global Forum is one of the few spaces in the world where hundreds of women leaders — from politics, business, civil society, philanthropy, media, and academia — come together with a single shared purpose: to reimagine power by redesigning the systems that shape them. 

With Katie Usalis beneath at statue of the first woman elected to the Icelandic Parliament, Ingibjörg H. Bjarnason

Co-hosted by the Government and Parliament of Iceland, the Forum is a convening of about 500 global changemakers. It has always struck me as both intimate and expansive: intimate in the sense that every conversation feels personal and purposeful, and expansive in the sense that the ideas exchanged here ripple outward to countries and communities worldwide. Iceland may be small — about a third of the size of my county in Maryland — but its commitment to equality gives it an outsized influence, and it shows. 

These annual trips are always nourishing for me. There’s something uniquely grounding about being in a country that has made gender equality not just a value, but a design principle for decades. Surrounded by leaders who work every day to close the gender gap, I was reminded of a truth that echoed throughout this entire week: while we often talk in the United States about individual women “leaning in” or “breaking barriers,” the real work is structural. The message in Reykjavik made clear that it’s not the women who need fixing, it’s the rules. 

With Katie Usalis and Þórunn Sveinbjarnardóttir, Speaker of the Icelandic Parliament

That theme of structure, design, and shared power was directly translated into the mainstage panel I was honored to moderate on women’s leadership in the boardroom. I joined three remarkable women — Jocelyn Mangan of illumyn and illumyn Impact, Philana Mugyenyi of 50/50 Women on Boards Africa, and Nabila Aguele of the Malala Fund — for a conversation about boards as a pathway to power. We explored what it means to build power collectively, not just to earn a seat at the table, but to shape what happens around it. As we talked, it became clear how closely private sector boards mirror the public service. Whether in corporate governance or government, the core questions remain the same: Who is recruited? How do networks operate? What criteria open (or close) doors? And perhaps, most importantly, do those inside the room see themselves as gatekeepers or power-sharers? 

Panel I moderated: Breaking the Boardroom Glass Ceiling

Panel members: Nabila Aguele, Philana Mugyenyi, & Jocelyn Mangan

As we wrapped our discussion, I realized how much our panel mirrored the conversations happening all across the Forum. Throughout the week, leaders kept returning to the same essential sentiment: systems shape outcomes. That focus on systems came through powerfully in the latest Reykjavik Index for Leadership, a project created by my friend Michelle Harrison, CEO of the Verian Group and founder of the Index, who was at the Forum with us this week. The Index measures how people worldwide perceive the suitability of women and men to lead, and this year’s findings offered both encouragement and urgency. Iceland once again topped the list with a score of 86 — far above the G7 average of 68 — though even here, the broader trend mirrors the global pattern: a gradual softening of confidence in women’s leadership. 

Katie Usalis with Michelle Harrison

In the United States and Germany, the scores slipped again, with the steepest declines among 18 to 34-year-olds, reminding us that progress is never guaranteed unless it is embedded in systems. Yet we also saw bright spots, as Kenya and Nigeria both saw meaningful increases this year, and countries like Japan and Italy have begun reversing earlier declines. Across every country, one pattern holds steady — women consistently express stronger support for gender equality in leadership than men. As Michelle has continually reminded us in conversation, perceptions shift when structures shift; culture follows design. 

And that sentiment echoed everywhere we stood. Iceland has long understood that equality is not achieved by asking individuals to work harder, but by redesigning the conditions around them. Just as I reflected last month on Iceland’s 1975 Women’s Day Off strike, that legacy was evident everywhere in Reykjavik: in the stories shared, the songs sung, and the collective understanding that systems, not individuals, determine whether progress lasts. 

Lines from the rallying song for the Women’s Day Off held in October 1975

And Iceland’s current levels of representation are a direct reflection of the rules they use. Open-list proportional representation, legislated gender quotas, and balanced cabinets have produced a political landscape where women hold 45-50 percent of seats and women serve as both President and Prime Minister. These outcomes have been made possible not by accident, but by intentional electoral design. It’s a powerful example of what happens when systems match a country’s values. 

These lessons learned from Iceland carry directly into our work at RepresentWomen. In panel sessions and conversations over dinner, there was real excitement around candidate-based proportional systems and the promise of proportional ranked choice voting (PRCV). With more than 520,000 elected offices in the United States — nearly 80 percent of them nonpartisan — we must align reforms with the institutions we actually have. PRCV does exactly that, and Iceland’s outcomes showcase how these structural reforms produce representative results for women. 

Seated around the table in conversation with Samina Hydery Burke, Eliza Reid, Danielle Reyes, and Liuba Grechen Shirley.

And while the policy conversations were rich, the connections were just as meaningful. We spent time with Forward Women from the Forward Parity, led by our board member Lindsey Williams Drath; with Running Start’s Founder and CEO (and RepresentWomen Board member) Susannah Wellford; and with Eliza Reid, Iceland's Former First Lady and brilliant writer whose work has illuminated Iceland’s feminist history for global audiences. Her books, including Secrets of Sprakkar: Iceland's Extraordinary Women and How They Are Changing the World and her new novel, Death of a Diplomat, remind us how storytelling itself helps shift norms and expectations. 

With RepresentWomen board members Lindsey Williams Drath and Susannah Wellford

I flew home with a familiar conviction and a renewed sense of urgency. When we design systems that share power, whether on boards, in parliaments, or in city halls, we unlock leadership that has always been there, waiting. From Reykjavik to reforms here at home, women aren’t just stepping into existing structures; they are helping to redesign them so that they work for everyone. 

With Hanna Birna Kristjansdottir, Chair & Co-Founder of the Reykjavik Global Forum,  and Liuba Grechen Shirley at the home of the president of Iceland, Halla Tomasdottir

With my dear friend Laura Liswood, Secretary General of the Council of Women World Leaders

With Nicola Sturgeon, former First Minister of Scotland

I had wonderful conversations with WA State Representative, Liz Berry & NY State Senator Michelle Hinchey, who are both very impressive legislators and interested in partnering on our work to ensure women can serve effectively once elected through packages of reforms that could include fair pay, childcare, proxy voting, and digital participation in committee hearings.

With a statue of Vigdís Jakobsdóttir, the first woman to be elected head of state

Birthday celebrations for notable women this week include: Stephanie Bice (U.S. Representative), Julia Frost (Arjuna Capital), Nicole Malliotakis (U.S. Representative), Karyn Polito (former Lieutenant Governor of Massachusetts), Elizabeth Cady Stanton (leader of the Women’s Suffrage Movement), Libby Schaaf (former mayor of Oakland, CA), Whoopi Goldberg (actress, comedian, author, and television personality), Monica Burke (Former Staffer at Rank the Vote), Vanessa Bayer (Saturday Night Live alum), Valerie Jarrett (advisor to former President Barack Obama), Lyda Krewson (former mayor of St. Louis, MO), Debbie Lesko (U.S. Representative), Condoleezza Rice (American diplomat and president of the Hoover Institution), Kathryn Murdoch (co-founder and President of Quadrivium Foundation), Georgia O’Keeffe (artist), Xochitl Torres Small (Under Secretary for Rural Development), Shailene Woodley (actress and activist), and Jay Newton-Small (author).

Milestones: The arrest of 41 suffragists in front of the White House in 1917; Mary Edwards Walker becoming the first (and so far only) woman to win the Medal of Honor in 1865 for her work as a surgeon with the Union Army during the Civil War; and Nancy Pelosi being selected as Speaker of the House in 2007.

Mexico’s Claudia Sheinbaum Elevates Violence Against Women after Brazen Attack

Claudia Sheinbaum on the evening of her landslide election win. Source: Forbes

As a survivor of several incidents of sexual violence, it struck me deeply that even the president of Mexico cannot escape predatory behavior by men. Here’s the New York Times on Claudia Sheinbaum’s shocking experience earlier this month — and how she’s taking on a deep problem in her nation. 

When Claudia Sheinbaum was elected as Mexico’s first female president, many voters hoped that the historic moment would represent the beginning of the end of the male-dominated, machismo culture that has long permeated Mexican society.

Thirteen months later, Ms. Sheinbaum was groped on the street by a constituent, a stark reminder that — despite her efforts — Mexico still has far to go in its attempts to ensure equality and safety for women…

For many women in Mexico, the crime against the president, during which a man tried to kiss her and put his hands on her chest, was a sad fact of life. Mexico has a long history of machismo, a culture that teaches men they are entitled to control women, according to Mexican activists and female politicians, as well as a system of norms that reinforce inequality and violence. …

Ms. Sheinbaum entered office promising to make the country safer and more equal for women. Earlier this year, she said that her political movement was “the only one” that could improve women’s rights in Mexico. And from a policy standpoint, she has made clear progress.

She created a new pension program for women. She successfully pushed Congress to pass an amendment that now makes it unconstitutional to pay women less than men. And her administration has started to design an ambitious national system to care for children, older citizens and the disabled, with the intention of taking the burden off women who fall into caretaker roles.

She also forced all security and justice institutions to recognize that gender can be a factor in a crime. And she required every state to have a specialized prosecutor’s office for so-called femicides, which Mexico defines as murders in which the authorities can prove a woman was killed because of her gender.

“No more violence against women,” Ms. Sheinbaum said in March. “No more femicide, no more beatings, no more abuse, no more violent words against Mexican women.”

On Thursday, in response to her assault, Ms. Sheinbaum unveiled a new national initiative against sexual abuse. The plan includes a push to make sexual abuse a punishable crime in every state in Mexico, education for prosecutors and judges on crimes against women, a new public campaign to encourage women to report sexual abuse, and a streamlined process to do so.

But changing the social dynamic in Mexico has been a challenge, data shows ... .Part of the problem, the data suggests, is that so many of the crimes go unpunished.

In the first nine months of this year, the authorities reported nearly 219,000 emergency calls for violence against women. But in that same period, only about 5,000 formal investigations were opened for gender-based violence.

Update on Women in International Elections this Fall

I wanted to share the toplines of results for women in elections around the world this fall. Relying on the invaluable team at the Inter-Parliamentary Union, we present data on elections. We will report on the results from elections in the Czech Republic and the Netherlands as soon as they are announced. Notably, countries with U.S.-style plurality voting systems tend to trail those using proportional representation systems, which is common.

• Tanzania re-elects a woman president - but with a big asterisk: Tanzanian President Samia Suluhu Hassan on October 29 won the country's disputed election with more than 97% of the vote, a vote total that highlights the deeply problematic nature of the elections that triggered major protests. 
• Jamaica's elections show a small uptick for women to 30.2%: Jamaica has been in the news due to being struck by a massive hurricane, but on September 3, it held national parliamentary elections in U.S.-style single-member districts. Men continue to dominate, with women winning 30.2% of seats, up slightly from 28.6% 
• Guyana shows a decrease to 36.9% for women in parliament: Using a party list form of proportional representation, Guyana held elections on September 1st. Women won 36.9% of seats, down from 39.4%.
• Moldovan women's representation decreased from 40% to 38%. Using proportional representation and a gender quota system, Moldovan women experienced a significant increase in seats to 40% after the passage of a gender quota law. On September 28, it declined slightly to 37.6%.
• Malawi women decline to 21.4% of seats: Using U.S.-style plurality voting in single-member districts, women won just 21.4% of seats in Malawi's election on September 16, down from 22.2%.

New Zealand cities showcase proportional ranked choice voting: In New Zealand’s local elections in October, several major cities used ranked choice voting, including proportional RCV for council elections. The capital city of Wellington had a record high turnout, with seven women elected to the city council. Hamilton also had a high turnout.

Katie Wilson Wins in Seattle: 8 Women Mayors in 18 Largest American Cities

Katie Wilson in an interview this year. Source: Puget Sound Business Journal

Katie Wilson’s improbable campaign for mayor of Seattle this year concluded with her narrowly defeating incumbent Bruce Harrell. A 43-year-old grassroots activist who had never before run for political office, Wilson will become mayor of the 18th largest city in the United States, joining seven women mayors in largest cities: Karen Bass in Los Angeles, Kate Gallego in Phoenix, Cherelle Parker in Philadelphia, Gina Ortiz Jones in San Antonio, Donna Deegan in Jacksonville, Mattie Parker in Fort Worth, and Vi Lyles in Charlotte.  

Fox13 Seattle covered Wilson’s victory:

Wilson ran on a platform of increasing affordable housing, addressing homelessness, reforming landlord practices and limiting homebuying by private equity firms, climate action and "Trump-proofing" Seattle. 

"The homelessness crisis is going to be a very, very top priority for me. We have an aggressive timeline in the first six months of next year, leading up to the FIFA World Cup to really tackle the homelessness crisis as it affects the downtown core and adjacent neighborhoods," said Wilson.

Before her mayoral campaign, Wilson was perhaps most well-known locally for co-founding and serving as executive director of the Transit Riders Union. The Wilson campaign has touted her role in designing the ORCA LIFT program.

FairVote: Women Win with Ranked Choice Voting in 2025 

St. Paul’s city council in 2024. Source: FairVote 

The electoral reform organization FairVote highlighted the success of women in the 2025 elections, which were held using ranked choice voting (RCV). From the article by Rachel Hutchinson:

Salt Lake City, UT, used RCV for the third time this year, and voters elected new Council Member Erika Carlsen in District 5. With Carlsen’s victory, the City Council will have four women and three men, and will also be majority-Latino. 

St. Paul, MN, elected Kaohly Her, who will become the city’s first woman and first Hmong American mayor. She will serve alongside an all-women City Council, all elected using RCV and mostly composed of members under 40 years old. Women also continue to hold a majority on the Minneapolis City Council, which is elected with RCV as well. According to researchers at Rutgers University, St. Paul is the largest U.S. city to be led by an all-women city government. 

Additionally, New York City voters elected a majority-women City Council for the third election in a row. New Yorkers elected its first-ever majority-women Council after implementing RCV for primary elections in 2021, and women have held a majority of seats ever since.

Cities and states using RCV have frequently seen historic advances for women in government. In 2021, Las Cruces, NM elected its first majority-women City Council. Oakland, CA elected its first four women mayors in RCV elections – in a row. In Alaska, voters elected their first majority-women State House, and sent their first woman representative (and first Alaska Native) to the U.S. House.

RCV empowers a diverse range of candidates to run for office without being told to “wait their turn.” That’s because, in RCV elections, candidates can enter the race without fear of splitting the vote with someone who has a similar background or platform. In this way, RCV helps level the playing field and lower barriers to entry in politics – including for women, who remain underrepresented in government. 

Research from RepresentWomen shows that greater women’s representation can translate into meaningful impacts on policy: For example, under New York City’s majority-women Council, the city advanced numerous women’s health initiatives that had long been overlooked due to stigma or a lack of life experience among policymakers.

Young Women Want to Leave the U.S. — A Warning Sign We Can’t Ignore 

Source: Gallup Report 

A striking new Gallup analysis made headlines this week: 40 percent of American women aged 15-44 say they would leave the United States permanently if they could — four times the share who felt this way just a decade ago. This is not a fringe statement, nor a passing political reaction. It’s a systemic signal. 

This sharp rise has created a 21-point gender gap between younger women and younger men, the widest Gallup has ever recorded in any country since it began tracking migration desire globally. And unlike their peers in other advanced democracies, younger American women are increasingly alone in this trend. In OECD countries, desire to migrate among women has stayed stable; here, it has skyrocketed. 

Gallup’s analysis reveals a clear pattern: this is not just about politics. It’s about trust in institutions, or the loss of it. As the Gallup report notes: 

“Across demographic groups, Americans with lower confidence in institutions such as the government, judicial system, military and integrity of elections are consistently more likely to express a desire to leave the country.

Over the past decade, younger women have not only shown the largest increase in wanting to move abroad but also have experienced the steepest drop in institutional confidence of any age or gender group.

In 2015, women aged 15 to 44 scored an average of 57 on Gallup’s National Institutions Index, which measures confidence in the national government, military, judiciary and honesty of elections.

Since then, younger women’s scores have fallen by 17 points — a sharper decline than seen for any other demographic — and dropped during both the Trump and Biden administrations. By comparison, women aged 45 and older and men aged 15 to 44 have remained broadly stable in their confidence in institutions, while the score among men aged 45 and older has increased by 15 points.

The Supreme Court’s 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision, which overturned the constitutional right to abortion, may have contributed to the drop in younger women’s National Institutions Index score — particularly the steep decline in their confidence in the judicial system, which fell from 55% in 2015 to 32% in 2025, more than any other age group. However, when it comes to desire to migrate, the Dobbs decision alone may have played a more limited role, given that the trend in wanting to leave began years before the ruling.” 

When nearly half of young women imagine their futures elsewhere, we are not talking about personal preference. We are looking at evidence of a democracy that is failing to reflect, support, or include them. And this is precisely why structural reform matters. 

From where we sit at RepresentWomen, this data is not surprising. In fact, it’s consistent with what we see in the scores of our Gender Parity Index every year: women continue to navigate a political system that was never designed with them in mind. Women hold just one-third of elected positions nationwide; appointments and leadership pathways remain limited; and representation continues to depend more on individual heroics than institutional design. 

We know what happens in systems like that: Women burn out, opt out, and now, as this new data shows, young women increasingly want out of the country altogether. 

But, here’s the hopeful part — this is a fixable problem if we focus on repairing the structure, rather than the individual. Other countries that rank near the top of the global gender equality metric rely on proportional representation, gender-balanced cabinets, transparent appointment processes, and party rules that intentionally recruit women. Young women in those countries show stable levels of trust, not a steep decline. We can do the same. 

The Gallup numbers are not a story about women wanting to leave — they are a story about a country that must evolve structurally to ensure women want to stay. If we want young women to see a future here, in a democracy that represents them, the work of redesigning our systems cannot wait. 

“Did Women Ruin the Workplace?” Or Did the Workplace Need Fixing? 

Source: Vanity Fair

This week, The New York Times gave space to a provocative question from the columnist Ross Douthat: “Did Women Ruin the Workplace?” (later softened to “Did Liberal Feminism Ruin the Workplace?”). The backlash was swift, including a sharp, darkly funny response from the women of Vanity Fair, who convened their own Slack-style roundtable to unpack what the question reveals. 

As one editor, Lindsey Underwood, pointed out, the shifting headlines “speaks to a misunderstanding of what feminism is to begin with, and perhaps what being a woman is.” She notes that systemic change always provokes backlash from those worried about losing power: 

“Those with power are afraid to lose it, and look to shift blame on to those who are encroaching on their space—earned or not—and blame those folks for any friction that arrives in the process.”

Others highlighted how absurd the premise is when workplaces have long been structured without women in mind. Writer Wisdom Iheanyichukwu put it plainly: 

A multitude of the examples of how women ruin the workplace are just traits misattributed to femininity, while in reality they are not exclusively that, as women and men can behave in similar manners and fail at the same things. If the idea is that women are unfit to be in the workplace because it is “unnatural” for them, then I raise, it’s also unnatural for men. Women are not the only ones who find fault with the systems in place at work, but why are they the only ones being asked to divorce themselves from the workplace? Being restrained to a workplace for the majority of one’s week, being forced to prioritize work over one’s self and needs, is unnatural for humans in general. What we see is people being placed into situations and institutions where different levels of power are stripped from them, and these people then act out, or they don’t always behave in a manner conducive to everyone’s well-being. And so, rather than asking if women are ruining the workplace, we should be asking if the workplace is ruining the people. The workplace is unnatural; it is not a foundational aspect of human nature, so regardless of whoever dominated the space first or dominates it presently, we should be focusing on creating spaces that everyone can exist within in a copacetic manner.

Women are accused of ruining the workplace for calling out discrimination and harm done to them in the office, and then belittled because it’s seen as operating from a place of weakness and emotion. But “weak” and “emotional” are not inherently female/feminine traits. Before women were allowed in these workspaces, there were men who were facing similar scenarios and problems with the boys club—discrimination and bullying that weren’t as recognized because it was seen as men being weak to call it out. A toxic workplace does not become toxic when the issue is vocalized; it was already toxic. The initial question desires to blame women for “creating” the idea of toxic workplaces when these spaces were already ruined."

Taken together, their commentary gets at something we see every day in our own work: when women name harm, push for accountability, or demand equity, the system often blames the messenger rather than examining the rules. The same patterns play out in politics, when calls for gender balance are dismissed as “identity politics,” rather than understood as fundamental democratic fairness. 

From RepresentWomen’s perspective, the real question isn’t whether women have “ruined” anything. It’s this: What would our workplaces and our democracy look like if they were designed from the start for women, caregivers, and communities that have always been at the margins? 

That’s the conversation that we should be having — one grounded in structural reform, not scapegoating — and it’s precisely the lens we bring to questions of power, representation, and leadership through our work.

That's all for this week, my friends, 

Cynthia 

Executive Director, RepresentWomen

P.S. — 

Lighted candles, on-brand purple hues, and inspirational messaging were in abundance at the Reykjavik Global Forum 💜

And we saw the northern lights right outside Reykjavik on our last evening 💚