Elections
When out campaigning, especially in the run up to elections I often encounter women who say they do not vote. This is one area of life where socio-economic status does not seem to be a factor, with mums on council estates and women living in detached mansions all saying the same thing. I frequently hear phrases such as, “I let my husband/partner make the decisions”, “I don’t understand politics”, “they (politicians) are all the same”, and “my vote doesn’t make any difference”.
More than 100 years since women won the vote it’s sad to note that a significant number of women still do not use their hard-won franchise to help shape the decision-making bodies that affect our everyday lives. After all, women are in many cases juggling multiple responsibilities, managing household budgets, trying to make ends meet often in difficult circumstances. Our experience matters and when our voice is not heard the whole of society is worse off.
Beyond the obvious solutions such as quotas and ‘Women Only’ short-lists what else could we do to improve the situation? Changing our electoral system is one option which might contribute to reducing the democratic deficit along with improving the representation of women in politics.
As India moves towards the key state elections of 2026, women leaders across regions such as West Bengal, Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Assam, and Puducherry are shaping both electoral narratives and representation debates.
While the overall legislative presence of women in India remains uneven, there are several influential and emerging female politicians whose political participation, leadership visibility, and voter mobilisation are back in focus.
West Bengal leadership
While talking of influential women leaders in India, TMC supremo and West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee's name may often come up first.
CM Banerjee continues to dominate the political landscape of the state and remains one of India’s most powerful regional leaders. Her electoral performance and influence in West Bengal is a rare example of long-term female leadership in Indian politics.
Alongside her, other Trinamool Congress figures such as Mahua Moitra and Sayani Ghosh represent a group of leaders combining grassroots organisation with national visibility.
Bangladesh's new government led by center-right Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) chief Tarique Rahman was sworn in last week after his party's landslide victory in the February 12 general elections.
The 60-year-old Rahman takes over leadership from the interim government headed by Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus. This transition concludes an 18-month interim period following a bloody student-led uprising in August 2024, which ousted former Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina and ended her 15-year rule.
Rahman plans to lead a 50-member Cabinet over the next five years, promising reforms that the BNP agreed to during the interim period. These were approved by a referendum alongside the election.
Among those reforms are initiatives to empower women, who comprise around half of Bangladesh's 130 million voters.
For a nation that has seen not one but two female prime ministers, the recently concluded elections showed a dismal reality. Although half of Bangladesh’s voters are women, the representation of women in politics continues to be low. Only 78 women candidates contested the February 12 elections, out of 1,981 candidates – a meager 3.93 percent. Just seven women actually won election, out of 300 directly elected seats.
The Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), which won the elections handily, accounted for six of those women MPs – but it fielded only 10 women candidates for the elections out of the 300 contested constituencies. Only three women were sworn in as union ministers by the Tarique Rahman Cabinet, out of 50 Cabinet members in total.
The present political landscape of Bangladesh reflects a nation at odds with women’s place in public life. This was most evident in the case of the National Citizen Party (NCP), formed by student leaders who led the uprising against the ousted Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina. The NCP has few women leaders, although many women participated in the street protests of July-August 2024. The pre-poll alliance between NCP and Jamat-e-Islami (JI) was seen by many women leaders of the NCP as abandoning the cause of gender equality.
This free, non-partisan event will take place on Feb. 24 from 7-8:30 p.m. EST, and is open to participants across the province.
Building on the momentum of the Run Where You Are initiative, Say Yes is designed for those who are curious about running for office, actively considering a campaign, or seeking clarity on what leadership could look like in their community. The event focuses on breaking down barriers, addressing self-doubt and offering practical insight from those who have already said ‘yes’ to leadership.
“So many women are already leaders. They just haven’t called it that yet,” Amanda Kingsley Malo of Sudbury, founder of PoliticsNOW, said in a release. “This event is about naming what’s already there, and showing women that they do not have to leap alone. There is a whole ecosystem ready to support them.”
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The virtual panel will feature municipal leaders from across Ontario who will share candid reflections on their paths to public office, including lessons learned, challenges faced, and what they wish they had known before entering public office.
Confirmed panellists include Michelle Boileau, mayor of Timmins; Marilyn Crawford, councillor with the Town of Ajax; Tammy Hwang, councillor for the City of Hamilton; Joan John, councillor in the Township of Southgate; and Melanie Pilon, mayor of Wawa.
“If you have ever thought ‘maybe me,’ that is not random,” Kingsley Malo added. “That thought is information. Say Yes exists to help people take that whisper seriously and connect them with the training and support that makes it real.”
Despite progress in recent years, women and gender-diverse individuals continue to be underrepresented in municipal leadership across Ontario, critics say. Run Where You Are – Say Yes aims to help close that gap by offering accessible, community-driven entry points into politics.
Since gaining independence from the UK in October 1962, Ugandan women have played a critical role in shaping politics and governance throughout the country. From Joyce Mpanga, who served as Minister of Women in Development from 1988 to 1989, to Winnie Byanyima, who played a critical role in framing the 1995 Ugandan Constitution, women have shaped the political and governance landscape in Uganda, paving the way for countless young girls and women.
The 1995 Constitution introduced affirmative action. Article 21 of the Ugandan Constitution reserves one-third of local government seats and parliamentary positions for women, ensuring their active participation in the country’s decision-making processes.
In January 2026, Uganda held its general elections, and several women ran as candidates. However, women campaigners have to worry about more than giving speeches and rallying voters — they also have to navigate online violence that manifested as deepfakes, AI-generated images, gendered disinformation, and harmful narratives that were weaponised to target Ugandan women politicians during this year’s election.
Ahead of the general election, the End Violence Against Women Coalition and 70 other leading organisations published a joint manifesto calling on all political parties to adopt its recommendations for ending this abuse.
The manifesto sets out our priorities for the next government; calling for a comprehensive, whole-society approach to tackling VAWG. We framed this manifesto around ten key areas:
- Rights and inequalities
- Prevention
- Funding and commissioning of specialist VAWG services, including ‘by and for’ provision
- Economic barriers
- Partnerships and multi-agency working
- Health and adult social care
- Housing
- Family courts and children’s social care
- Criminal justice reform
- Perpetrators
After a disappointing round of political debates in which VAWG was glaringly absent, EVAW wrote to political party leaders setting out our key priorities for ending VAWG. We now review: How do the political party manifestos of 2024 match up with our own?
Our polling found that 76% of people do not trust politicians generally to tackle violence against women and girls, and it is up to political party leaders to change this.
Access here the full manifesto published by the End Violence Against Women Coalition on 28 June 2024.
Image source: EVAW Coalition
Last week, all UK political parties confirmed which candidates they were standing in each constituency for the 2024 general election. Including independents, a total of 4,515 candidates will be fighting for a seat in the next government.
If you’ve already tried out our candidate name game, you’d have seen how the most common name was David, owned by a whopping 104 candidates. The Johns came in second with 84 candidates called by this name, and the Pauls a close third with a total of 79.
In fact, when tallying up the most common candidate names, we noticed the top 10 in the list are all male names. It is not until reaching position 11 that you come across the female name Sarah, owned by 43 candidates. Of course, this could be due to women having more diversity in their names. However, it is less easy to dismiss that out of the 4,515 candidates standing, only 31% are women.
Read here the full article published by the Electoral Reform Society on 20 June 2024.
Image by Electoral Reform Society
On June 2, over 60 percent of registered Mexican voters went to the polls for a monumental election, with over 20,000 public offices up for grabs at the federal and local levels. This election was historic, as a woman was elected to hold the highest office in Mexico for the first time. This comes more than 70 years after women gained the right to vote and stand for election. Over the past few years, women in Mexico have gone from being fringe operatives in the political arena to taking center stage. Still, this transformation took time and deliberate action to achieve.
While gender quotas have been used in Mexico since the early 2000s, they were not enough to achieve equality. In 2014, Mexico transitioned from relying on its gender quota system to a “gender parity system,” which mandates equal opportunity based on gender in candidate lists for local and national offices. This transition did not occur naturally; it resulted from consistent, permanent debate at all levels by activists, institutions, academics and women in politics who worked together across party lines to close the political gender gap.
The Impact of Gender Quotas in Mexico
Mexico’s 2002 first legislative quota passed by Congress required that 30 percent of candidates be women, with specific penalties for parties in cases of non-compliance. In 2008, the gender quota was raised to 40 percent, but parties were exempt from complying in cases where candidates were selected in democratic primaries. Six years later, in 2014, gender parity mandates were enshrined in Mexico’s constitution, marking the highest protection standard for women’s political rights. The impact of these hard-fought efforts has been undeniable; women’s participation in Congress has steadily increased with every reform.
Read here the full article published by Ms. Magazine on 11 June 2024.
Image by Ms. Magazine
In India, as in many democracies around the world, there has long been a discernible gender gap in citizens’ political participation. For decades, Indian men were significantly more likely to cast their ballots on election day compared to women. It is noteworthy, therefore, that in the country’s 2019 general election, the historic gap between male and female turnout came to an end; for the first time on record, women voters turned out to vote at higher rates than men (see figure 1). Predictions for India’s upcoming 2024 general election suggest that this trend is likely to continue.
Although the gap between male and female voter turnout in India has been gradually shrinking in recent years, the convergence in electoral participation is nevertheless surprising for multiple reasons. First, as noted by Franziska Roscher, the increase in female turnout in India is occurring while female labor force participation—an important driver of women’s political participation—remains low compared to peer economies. Second, national-level data from the National Election Study (NES), conducted by the Lokniti Program of the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, and other smaller studies confirm that women lag men across all measures of nonelectoral political engagement. For instance, data from two separate primary surveys—conducted in Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh by political scientists Soledad Prillaman and Gabrielle Kruks-Wisner, respectively—demonstrate that while the gender gap in voter turnout has closed, gaps are all too visible in other forms of sustained political engagement, such as contacting elected representatives, attending public meetings, and participating in campaign activities. Third, women continue to be underrepresented in India’s national parliament and its state assemblies.
Read here the full article published by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace on 5 April 2024.
Image source: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
Introduction
Over the last twenty years, the world has witnessed significant shifts towards greater gender equality in politics, which in turn has had positive implications for democracy and society at large.
Mexico has witnessed a systematic incorporation of gender perspective, equality, and parity in public life, signifying a transformation of women's ability to participate in the country's future. The prime example is the National Electoral Institute (INE) mandate, later ratified by the Electoral Tribunal (TEPJF), for political parties to guarantee gender parity in all upcoming gubernatorial elections of 2024: Chiapas, Guanajuato, Jalisco, Morelos, Puebla, Tabasco, Veracruz, Yucatán, and Mexico City.
Unfortunately, as women's participation in politics rises, an increase in political violence that explicitly targets women has also occurred. The 2020-2021 electoral process was the most violent against Mexican women.
Mexico´s political system is awash with political violence that explicitly targets and affects women, obstructs social justice, and hinders democracy. The advances in female political participation have been met with resistance as men, territorial interest groups, and political elites seemingly feel threatened by increasing female power and respond with violent actions to uphold the traditional system of politics to deter women’s independent participation.
Read here the full article published by the Wilson Center on 13 March 2024.
Image source: Wilson Center
In 1906, Finland became the first country in Europe to grant women the right to vote, with the adoption of universal suffrage, at the same time as it won its autonomy from the Russian Empire. The following year, Finnish women were able to exercise this right in the general elections. Throughout the twentieth century, women in Europe and around the world fought long and hard to gain the right to vote without any additional conditions to those required of men. In some countries, only widows were allowed to vote as a first step towards electoral emancipation (in Belgium, for example, until 1921). In other countries, such as Bulgaria, the right to vote was initially reserved for mothers of legitimate children and exclusively for local elections. In Portugal, only women with a university degree were allowed to vote from 1931 on. In Spain it was not until post-Franco democratisation and the 1976 elections that Spanish women regained the right to vote, initially acquired in 1931 before the civil war. This year France is celebrating the 80th anniversary of women gaining the right to vote. Cypriot women won the right to vote at the same time as their male counterparts when the Republic was created in 1960. This can be explained quite simply by the fact that, at that time, such discrimination could no longer be justified. So, it took a good part of the twentieth century to get there...
Read here the full article published by the Foundation Robert Schuman on 5 March 2024.
Image source: Foundation Robert Schuman