The Japanese golf club at the centre of a sexism row has bowed to pressure from Olympic officials and will overturn restrictions on female membership. The Kasumigaseki country club, north-west of Tokyo, was threatened with the loss of its status as a 2020 Olympics venue if it failed to grant women full membership rights. Under its existing rules, women were prohibited from playing on Sundays. The private club in Saitama prefecture held three briefings for its members before it decided to fully admit women, which required unanimous approval from the board, made up of 15 men. The president of the Tokyo 2020 organising committee, Yoshirō Mori, praised the club, founded in 1929, for voting to uphold the spirit of the Olympic charter of non-discrimination. “I’d like to extend my gratitude to the members of the club for their understanding and cooperation,” he said in a statement recently. Before the decision,…

By Judie Kaberia Political parties and the Centre for Multi-party Democracy (CMD) have recently resolved to implement the two thirds gender rule to promote representation of women in political leadership after attempts to enforce it in Parliament flopped. CMD Chairman James Magara said the institution will monitor political parties to ensure they expose those who do not abide by the commitment they made. “Some of us actually play to the gallery. We do not practice what we preach. But the commitment signed here today, I want to assure these members here (political party) mean business and they have appended their signatures in broad daylight; we can bring them to account,” he explained. Magara explained it will be tested by the results of the August General Election. Part of the agreement signed on Tuesday requires parties to nominate not less than 30 percent of women candidates to participate in the August…

Politicians on the right have welcomed a ruling by the EU’s highest court that allows companies to ban staff from wearing visible religious symbols, as a long-awaited legal judgment ricocheted into the French and Dutch election campaigns. In its first decision on the issue of women wearing Islamic headscarves at work, the European court of justice in Luxembourg ruled that garments could be banned, but only as part of a general policy barring all religious and political symbols. Nor can customers simply demand workers remove headscarves if the company has no policy barring religious symbols, the court ruled on Tuesday. The long-awaited ruling came on the eve of Dutch elections, where Muslim immigration has been a contentious issue. In France, where the race to succeed President François Hollande remains wide open, politicians on the right seized on the issue. François Fillon, the presidential candidate who has taken a hardline stance…