The day-to-day casual monitoring of women’s issues has become complicated with the deluge of information available.

I have been sneaking looks underneath the veils of Iranian women, with their consent of course, with the help of an online campaign to give voice to sistren who disagree with the compulsory hijab.

Pondering the struggles of women in the West to find value and pride in the natural configurations of bodies that are constantly under the onslaught of the beauty industry and other nefarious sources of shame.

Bemused by the eruption of discussions about domestic violence in the wake of high-profile cases that have been accumulating over time from India to, well, you name the place.

Trying to sift through what topics have made it to our communal media consciousness is incredibly interesting but doesn’t lend itself to easy conclusions.

I do this as part of an informal project to keep an eye out for places where being a woman is a bad business. This has two functions: To remind me that this whole gender thing is very much negotiated in the contexts of the societies being observed, that it always comes down to power, and partly to show me where the armpits of hell on earth are so as to step lightly if I travel because mine isn’t the kind of government that retrieves citizens in trouble once they have left the national borders.

It’s an admittedly shifty habit picked up from reading one too many country comparisons of achievements along various indicators, one that I blame on being a product of the global community effect.

As a Generation Y human with an Internet connection, I can only process information if it is represented in lists whose titles begin with “The 10 most amazing...” and include cats, or in comparative graphs that are preferably animated and can edutain me via a gadget that I can fondle in public.

Admittedly, I still haven’t quite worked my way up to revering Beyonce as the embodiment of the sacred feminine; I am not fully integrated in the matrix yet.

Recently, I did stumble on some information that attracted me by making it appear that Tanzanian women are holding it down in the area of politics.

This I learned from an infographic (not animated, shame on them) distributed online by the BBC, highlighting some of the findings of the World Economic Forum’s 2013 Gender Report.

The exciting parts of the report were the sub-indices and graphs of the report itself that showed three areas in which we’re doing impressively well.

Labour: Almost full gender parity, which is excellent, and makes me wonder about where to look for information about income by gender. Primary school enrolment is also almost at full gender parity, with the result that literacy rates amongst women are also very high.

And that’s as good as it gets. The political participation indicators, on closer inspection, seem to contradict the overall conclusion made just a paragraph or two ago that politics is the area in which we have really challenged this gender divide.

Colour me surprised. There is a tiny graph at the bottom of the Tanzania page report which shows women’s political empowerment inching up painfully slowly since 2006, lagging very far behind the gains made in health, education and economic participation. What’s not happening here?

The entertainment industry is full of admirably successful women slinging opinions, crooning at us, refining and redefining local standards of beauty and intellect and all that entails.

Over the course of the Fourth Administration it has become normal to encounter women politicians of all stripes at all different levels of government. And yet we’re...not really empowered yet? Oh, wait, I think I just stumbled on something there, would that be... um, patriarchy?

Couple of months ago my representative in parliament, Halima Mdee (Kawe-Chadema) tried to come up with some positive energy when she was ambushed by an overly-enthusiastic radio journalist who wanted to know her opinion on whether Tanzania is ready for a female president.

She sounded tired but bravely flew the flag of optimism.

I happen to agree with her, we are ready to have a woman as Head of State. And because it is still a man’s world, a woman president wouldn’t make all that much difference to the status quo on her own.

Decades of women’s representation in parliament through special seats and we still cannot protect young girls from early marriage, curb domestic violence, guarantee safe childbirth, etcetera?

What we need is that dreaded F-word in our leadership. Evidence of feminist tendencies is something for which I’ll be examining the candidates emerging on a daily basis as we inch our way towards President-the-Fifth.

In the meantime, somewhere between mainlining twerking videos and waiting for the next Marvel Comics blockbuster, I try to be grateful for the incremental gains in the gendered power struggle. We’re so much further than we were before, right? Right?

Elsie Eyakuze is an independent consultant and blogger for The Mikocheni Report, http://mikochenireport.blogspot.com. E-mail: [email protected]