A/HRC/23/50 Peoples’ Rights recently issued a decision on the failure of States in protecting women during acts of political protest, including in a case concerning violence against women journalists.40 In an environment where sexual violence continues to go unpunished, this decision makes a valuable contribution towards ensuring that States are held to account when they fail to protect women from violence. 4. Stereotypes 69. Stereotypes41 of women’s capacities and roles that negatively affect women’s effective participation in political and public life persist around the world. Despite evidence of women’s important contributions in other fields of life, including in the labour market, stereotypes of female inadequacy in politics continue to be used as a basis for their marginalization and segregation in decision-making positions, with care and distributive tasks such as health and social welfare allocated to women, while men are assigned to economic and defence affairs, distorting the power structure and resource allocation.42 70. Women who belong to vulnerable groups, based on race, class, ethnicity, religion or belief, health, status, age, class, caste and sexual orientation and gender identity, are effectively barred from political and public life based on multiple stereotyping. In its concluding observations, the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women has expressed concern about stereotyped media portrayals of women’s roles within the family and society. 71. The Working Group notes that negotiation by international, regional and State agencies with sectoral or minority groups is negatively influenced by gender stereotyping when conducted solely with the male community leadership, thereby making women’s leadership effectively invisible and further marginalizing women. 72. Particularly during times of political transitions, in highly polarized discourse regarding national identity, gender stereotypes can be magnified and undermine progress in eliminating discrimination against women. 5. Marginalization by political parties 73. Political parties are key determinants of women’s political empowerment and women’s participation in politics, as political parties recruit and select candidates for elections.43 74. Political parties, which function as gatekeepers in political decision-making, tend to be exclusionary towards women. Women also frequently lack access to political party funding and financial resources for their election bids and campaigns. Some political parties exclude women on religious ideological grounds. Both a national court and the European Court of Human Rights found that a confessional political party’s exclusion of women from its parliamentary candidate list, because “differences in nature, talents and place in society means that, although women are not inferior to men as human beings, they should not be 40 41 42 43 16 Communication No. 323/2006, Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights and Interights v. Egypt. Available from http://eipr.org/sites/default/files/pressreleases/pdf/text_of_the_afriocan_commission_ decision-english.pdf. See Rebecca J. Cook and Simone Cusack, Gender Stereotyping: Transnational Legal Perspectives (2010); and Cusack, Stereotyping and Law, available from http://stereotypingandlaw.wordpress.com/. Committee on Women’s Rights and Gender Equality, report (footnote 5), p. 7. See UNDP and National Democratic Institute for International Affairs (NDI), Empowering Women for Stronger Political Parties: A Good Practices Guide to Promote Women’s Political Participation (2011).