Elections
Despite women being at the forefront of the August 2024 uprising that toppled the Awami League government, political parties have largely failed to honour their pledge to nominate at least 5 percent women candidates in the parliamentary election.
Muhammad Yunus-led interim government had introduced reforms aimed at restoring democracy, including a commitment under the July National Charter that parties would nominate women in no fewer than 5 percent of the 300 directly elected seats.
Election Commission data show that while more than a hundred women submitted nomination papers, only around 65 survived scrutiny.
The final number of women contesting will be confirmed on Jan 20 after appeals.
Among the parties that signed the July Charter, the BNP nominated the highest number of women in absolute terms but still fell short of the five percent benchmark.
Women remain largely absent from the electoral race, with 30 of the 51 political parties contesting the upcoming national election fielding no female aspirants at all, Election Commission data shows.
The figures lay bare a stark imbalance -- despite women making up half the population, their presence among candidates remains marginal.
Of the 2,568 aspirants for the February 12 polls, only 109, just 4.24 percent, are women. Seventy-two of them were nominated by parties, while the rest are independents.
The exclusion is most pronounced among Jamaat-e-Islami, which submitted 276 nominations without a single woman, followed by Islami Andolan Bangladesh with 268.
On March 1, 2024, Iran held the first round of its parliamentary elections, marking the 12th time since the 1979 revolution that Iranians elected members of the national parliament. Meanwhile, on March 31, 2024, Turkey held its local elections throughout the country’s 81 provinces, electing metropolitan and municipal mayors alongside councilors and other neighborhood representatives.
When it comes to women and electoral politics, Iran and Turkey diverge from one another in fundamental ways, while they also share important similarities. A comparative study of the two countries reveals that, despite the notable backlash against women’s rights and the absence of free and fair elections (though to different degrees) in both countries, large sections of the feminist movement in Iran and Turkey assessed the elections differently in their respective countries.
Considering the institutional structures of their respective contexts, feminists in Iran actively campaigned for a boycott of the elections, declaring them illegitimate, while feminists in Turkey considered the elections as an opportunity to help reverse Turkey’s authoritarian and anti-woman turn.
On Sunday, 5 October, Syria held its first parliamentary elections since the fall of the Assad regime last year.
Despite concerns over inclusivity and repeated delays, the elections were seen by many as a step forward after decades of dictatorship — particularly for women — with Syria's interim president, Ahmed al-Sharaa, calling the parliamentary election "historic."
But despite women playing key roles in education, healthcare, relief work, and civil society — especially during the war when they took on significantly greater economic and social responsibilities — Syrian women’s political presence remains limited. This is mainly because politics is still viewed as a male domain.
Ahead of the vote, for example, a government decree allocating only 20 per cent of parliamentary seats to female representatives triggered widespread debate across both political and social circles.
While some described the move as a “token measure” that failed to reflect the scale of sacrifices made by Syrian women during the war — and those still being made as the country continues to face multiple crises — others viewed it as a necessary, temporary step towards addressing decades of marginalisation and exclusion.
Full article here.
As Kosovo prepares for its upcoming local elections on October 12, female candidates have faced hate speech, disinformation, and gender-based attacks—both online and offline—that threaten to silence their voices and discourage them from entering politics.
Despite years of advocacy for gender equality, women remain underrepresented in Kosovo’s local politics. Of the 206 candidates running for mayor in the October 12, 2025 local elections, only 20 are women—a figure that reflects limited support for female candidates from political parties and a political environment not welcoming to female leadership.
With a lack of support from political parties, women in Kosovo often hesitate to run for leadership positions because it makes them targets of hate speech and disinformation campaigns—attacks that affect their personal lives more than their political platforms.
Independent states in the Pacific region have the lowest levels of women’s political representation in the world. Fewer than 7% of Pacific politicians are women, compared with 27% globally. The absence of women’s voices in political decision-making has been consistently raised in regional forums, although progress has been slow. Yet, in November 2022, a milestone was reached: for the first time, there was at least one elected woman in every Pacific parliament.
Click here to read the full article published by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute on 17 October 2023.
Women’s representation in political offices continued to decline in the 2023 elections. Four main factors help explain why Africa’s largest economy is such a difficult space for women candidates.
Women’s representation in Nigerian politics has been on a downward slide since 2011, and the 2023 elections in Africa’s largest economy confirmed the expectations of poor outcomes for women. The number of women in Nigeria’s National Assembly has fallen by 19 percent compared to the last assembly, with women now occupying 3 percent of seats in the Senate and 4 percent in the House of Representatives.
To understand why Nigerian women performed so poorly in the recent elections, the 2022 primary elections provided insight into the challenges and barriers faced by women aspirants and candidates. The results of the various parties’ primary elections highlight enduring limitations to women’s representation in competitive politics in Nigeria. The country ranks in the bottom ten globally in women’s representation in national parliaments, according to the Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU). This challenge of representation persists in spite of the near parity of voter registration between men and women in past election cycles.
Click here to read the full article published by Carnegie Endowment For Peace on 09 May 2023.
Online abuse has a profound impact on the health of democratic societies, threatening progress on diversity and representation in politics. Research has shown that abuse can deter women and individuals from minority groups from pursuing careers in politics, and drive those already engaged to step down from political life. The 2022 midterm elections in the US saw a growing number of candidates from minority backgrounds running for office. Faced with growing public pressure, social media companies took steps to amend their policies and community standards to address illegal and harmful content and behavior on their platforms. Evidence has shown, however, that abusive image and video-based content can fall through the cracks of content moderation, pointing to a lack of adequate response from social media platforms. In the run-up to the November 2022 midterm elections, ISD investigated abusive content on Instagram and TikTok targeting prominent women in US politics. Researchers analyzed hashtag recommendations served to users on both platforms when searching for content related to several key women in US politics in the days before the election. This report finds that platforms recommend abusive hashtags when people search for the names of these female political figures, and also promote abusive content that violate their own terms of service, showing that harmful and abusive content targeting women running for, and in-, office remains in plain sight of the platforms.
Click here to access the report.
Diagnosing women’s under-representation in electoral politics often involves a “blame game,” seeking to identify the primary factor responsible for depressing the share of women among candidates as well as elected officials. The Danish electoral system – in which parties present ordered lists of candidates but voters have the option to cast preference votes that can rearrange the list order – provides an opportunity to assess the relative role of elite versus voter bias in shaping women’s electoral fortunes. Using data from local elections in 2009, we find greater evidence for elite bias against women. We also observe, however, that voters do not widely exploit their preference votes. In an original post-election survey, we discover that “candidate gender” is less important for male and female voters than a host of other characteristics when deciding for which candidate to cast a preference vote.
Click here to access the article.
From a gender perspective, three main lessons can be learnt from the general election. First, gender issues are on the rise, a fact shown not least by the appointment of the first-ever women running mate for one of the two main presidential candidates. Second, although the ratios of women representatives at all levels are slowly but steadily increasing, the gender quota is just window dressing, which the parties blatantly ignore or work around by nominating women candidates to top-up lists. Third, violence against women in politics poses a serious threat to women’s political inclusion and citizenship.
On 9 August, Kenyans headed to the polls to elect the country’s president. In addition to the executive, Kenyans also elected 290 members of parliament, 47 governors, 47 senators, 47 women representatives and 1,450 members of county assemblies in the elections. However, the executive race was the focus of attention. Both online and offline, the two presidential contenders William Ruto and Raila Odinga engaged in rhetoric to disparage the other, a tactic that succeeded because of – and was perpetuated by – the spread of misinformation.
Click here to access the report.
A nascent body of literature has highlighter the violence (broadly defined) that women sometimes face as they enter politics. Some interpretations depict this violence as primarily gender motivated: women politicians are targeted because they are women. Another interpretation is that violence in some contexts is an everyday political practice targeting men and women alike. However, because we lack large-scale, systematic comparisons of men’s and women’s exposure to election violence, we know little about the extent to which – and how – candidate sex shape this form of violence- We address candidates in the 2018 Sri Lanka local elections. Sri Lanka is a suitable case for analysis because it is a postconflict country in which political violence has been endemic and the number of women candidates has increased rapidly due to gender quota adoption. Overall, we find large similarities in men’s and women’s exposure to violence, suggesting that violence sometimes is part of a larger political practice. However, we find that women are exposed to forms of intimidation of sexual nature more often than men. This finding demonstrated the need for gender-sensitive analyses of election violence.
Click here to access the article.