Women make strides in Kurdistan

Despite the situation of women throughout Iraq, women in the Kurdish region have experienced greater freedom, according to Suzan Akrawi of Kurdistan News. Women in Iraqi Kurdistan hold many high level positions within government, including ministers, judges, and elected representatives. In fact, women make up a full 27 percent of the Kurdistan National Assembly, while the number of women in many western parliaments is substantially lower (including the United Kingdom and the United States). The number of organizations devoted to women’s issues has reached 13, while 25 newspapers and magazines are owned and written by women. Women are playing an ever larger role in the justice system as lawyers and judges. Kurdish women are leading the way for their counterparts in the rest of Iraq, where now women are almost 20 percent of the Iraqi parliament and make up 20 percent of the Iraqi workforce.

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