Parliaments & Representatives
Yuliana García Mesa’s path to politics began with community work. “Since I was 14, I’ve been involved in social processes,” she recalls. “I started in my parish youth group, collecting food for the elderly and organizing activities for young people. Later, I joined the Municipal Youth Platform and became a youth councillor. That experience showed me the importance of young voices in decision-making spaces, especially women’s voices. She went on: “We often think our voice doesn’t count. We complain about what happens in our territories, but we don’t take responsibility. So I decided to run for municipal council and received the second-highest number of votes. Today, there are only two women among 11 councillors. That makes our presence even more important.”
But entering politics as a young woman was tough: “The hardest part has been making space in arenas dominated by men. Historically, women have been silenced, afraid to speak for fear of mockery or stigma. When I speak or present arguments, they invalidate me, question me, and ask how I can teach them when they’ve been in office for years. My training helps me stand firm, but it affects my personal life.” The hostility extends beyond council sessions. “In my community, people started making negative comments, spreading rumors to discredit me. Politically, I’m not part of the majority, so standing up to those who have held power for years is hard. They believe they have the only legitimate power and use it to influence people, creating rumors and stigma against me. This has affected me emotionally”.
During her first year as a councilwoman, this situation led her to decline a professional opportunity in Neiva in order to fulfill her public duties. Although she has endeavored to organize her academic schedule around the standard session days, these schedules are not always observed; adjustments depend largely on internal decisions that do not consistently take her personal circumstances into account.
Azerbaijan, in southwestern Asia, has a population of more than 10.2 million people, with more than 5 million women. While progress has been made through projects by the United Nations Democracy Fund (UNDEF) and the Women’s Association for Rational Development (WARD), patriarchal values and gender stereotypes continue to hinder socioeconomic and political equality.
Gender Disparity in the Workforce
Azerbaijan has made legal progress on women’s employment, but gender segregation and pay inequality limit women’s economic participation. Women make up 17% of the workforce in transport and storage, 11% in energy and 8% in construction. According to the World Bank, women in Azerbaijan earn 35% less than men on average.
According to the United Nations (U.N.) Women’s data, gender inequality in Azerbaijan remains a structural problem across both public and private sectors. Women and girls aged 15 and above spend an average of 25.4% of their daily time on unpaid care and domestic work. This unequal burden limits women’s ability to participate in paid employment, education and public life.
Women in Politics
According to the Baku Research Institute, the level of women’s political participation remains low. In 2024, women’s representation in Milli Majlis, the national parliament, reached 20.8%. In 2025, women’s representation in municipalities was 39.34%. According to 2025 statistics, there are no female heads of executive authorities or ministers in Azerbaijan, and there are only six female deputy members. According to the Global Gender Gap Index, Azerbaijan ranked 133rd out of 146 countries in 2024 in terms of political participation.
Furthermore, there is no evidence of a backlash among men.
That’s what I found in a study published in October 2025 looking at the impact of gender-parity quotas in Namibia, in sub-Saharan Africa.
In 2013, Namibia’s dominant political party, the South West Africa People’s Organisation, or Swapo, quietly rewrote its internal rules.
From that point forward, every spot on its parliamentary candidate list would alternate between a man and a woman.
Most prior research on measures to encourage gender parity in politics focuses on national or legislative policies rather than voluntary party quotas. Namibia offers an unusually ‘clean’ case in that Swapo is electorally dominant and did not face grassroots pressure to adopt its quota policy.
That makes it possible to isolate the effects of the quota itself, rather than any pre-existing trend in public attitudes.
And the impact on the subsequent 2014 election was clear. Women’s representation in the National Assembly nearly doubled overnight, rising from 21% to 41%.
Evidence on the policy impact of female politicians is mixed. This column uses data on bills sponsored in the Italian House of Representatives between 1987 and 2022 to show how female politicians’ engagement with women’s issues is systematically related to the gender norms of the environments in which they were born. The findings suggest that while increasing the number of women in politics remains essential to broaden representation and diversify policy priorities, if social norms remain traditional, progress on gender equality may still be slow.
Despite steady progress, women remain underrepresented in politics. In 2025, only 27.4% of parliamentarians worldwide were women, up from 11% in 1995 (UN Women 2026). At the current pace, closing the gender gap in political empowerment will still take more than a century (World Economic Forum 2025).
Yet, increasing the number of women in office does not necessarily translate into stronger substantive representation of women’s issues. Women’s political preferences are far from uniform. As women’s rights expanded over the last decades, women became increasingly divided along lines of marital status, employment, and religion far more than men, with reactionary movements often led by women themselves (Goldin 2023). Similarly, in more gender-equal countries, women’s support for gender-equality policies is often lower than generally perceived (Bursztyn et al. 2023).
President William Ruto last year established and mandated a 42-member task force to recommend solutions to the rising wave of sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV). The move came after cases hit record levels, triggering widespread public outcry.
Kenya has been grappling with a sharp increase in SGBV, with femicide cases in particular reaching alarming numbers over the past two years and targeting mainly girls and young women. Data from the Femicide Count Kenya shows the country has the highest rate of femicide in East Africa.
Now, the fight has received a significant boost. The National Police Service (NPS) has adopted the Policare Training Curriculum, a comprehensive framework addressing key competency areas required for an effective response to SGBV.
The Digital Rights Foundation has reported a sharp rise in technology-facilitated gender-based violence in its 2025 annual review, with 1,132 cases of male-perpetrated abuse recorded through its Digital Security Helpline.
According to the report, this was the most commonly reported form of online harassment during the year. The cases included blackmail, doxxing, and misuse of identity, with women and girls continuing to make up the majority of victims.
The report also flagged a rise in abuse carried out by anonymous perpetrators, driven by the increasing use of fake profiles and AI-generated content. These tactics have made it harder to trace offenders and have further complicated efforts to secure justice for survivors.
Another worrying trend highlighted in the review was the increase in intimate partner harassment. Such cases climbed from 218 in 2024 to 253 in 2025, showing how digital platforms are increasingly being used to monitor, threaten, and harass current or former partners across multiple channels.
While the helpline continues to offer support to survivors, the report said slow legal action and delayed platform responses are adding to the mental and emotional burden faced by victims.
The foundation also pointed to the continued vulnerability of marginalized groups, especially transgender individuals, who remain exposed to targeted online abuse. Many still avoid reporting incidents due to social stigma, fear of backlash, and weak legal protections.
The report said the scale and complexity of digital abuse now demand stronger coordination between civil society, tech platforms, and law enforcement. It warned that as online violence increasingly spills into real-life harm, survivor-focused support systems can no longer remain an afterthought.
Kenyan women are at the forefront of defending their democracy. Their recent leadership reflects a long history of pivotal contributions, both to women’s rights and the rights of all Kenyans. In a context of democratic backsliding, rising levels of gender-based violence (GBV), and accelerating human rights abuses in the lead-up to elections in 2027, women’s leadership is needed more than ever.
However, research shows that women’s leadership, especially in conflict or crisis, is often met with violent pushback. In Kenya and worldwide, violence targeting women in politics is deterring some women from seeking public office and punishing those who do run. This problem is not new to Kenya, but the dichotomy between the achievements of Kenyan women leaders and the lack of accountability for their attackers, online and offline, is starker than ever.
The United Nations, African Union, and government of Kenya are taking steps to analyze the problem and offer recommendations, but tangible implementation lags. Meanwhile, bilateral partners that used to support women’s participation in politics and fund efforts to prevent election-related GBV have pulled back. Despite the risks and limited tangible support, Kenyan women are pressing forward, but many fear the costs they are asked to bear are unsustainable, not to mention unconscionable.
When the public turns hostile: Political violence against parliamentarians reveals that members of parliament (MPs) are facing a worrying rise in intimidation and harassment from the public. The report draws on a broad survey of 519 MPs globally and case studies focused on five countries: Argentina, Benin, Italy, Malaysia and the Netherlands, to reflect diverse political and regional contexts.
The GQUAL Ranking, released annually, is one of our most powerful advocacy tools. It tracks data from 145 countries whose nationals serve in international bodies and mechanisms tied to the development of international law and justice and disaggregates this information by gender and geographical representation.
The three rankings we produce offer valuable insights into trends in the nomination practices of States and United Nations Regional Groups, as well as into representation records. Together, the Rankings provide a global and regional overview of women’s representation in international bodies at a given point in time, grounded in systematically collected, gender-disaggregated data.
This type of data is essential to advancing gender parity in international decision-making spaces, as it makes visible patterns of inclusion and exclusion that would otherwise remain obscured. The dataset allows for a clearer understanding of where women are being nominated and appointed, which bodies are performing better, and which countries are conducting nomination processes that take gender parity into account. This is critical to shedding light on one of the main obstacles to women’s equal participation in international decision-making: the lack of transparency and the limited consideration of gender parity in nomination and international appointment processes. States rarely track or make public their nomination records, and the information available through international bodies is often fragmented, incomplete, or difficult to access.
The GQUAL Ranking responds to this structural gap by providing the only comprehensive, publicly accessible tool that consolidates this information in a systematic and comparable manner. Its consistent application over the past 9 years makes it possible to identify patterns and trends over time, offering an evidence-based foundation to assess progress, stagnation, or regression in States’ approaches to gender parity in international appointments.
Nigeria’s renewed push to correct decades of severe gender imbalance in political representation has thrust one proposal to the centre of national debate: the Reserved Seats Bill, a constitutional amendment legislation seeking to create additional elective seats exclusively for women in the Senate, House of Representatives, and State Houses of Assembly.
The idea is simple: To increase women’s representation because, clearly, if deliberate steps are not taken, women will remain excluded from Nigeria’s political system. But the process of implementing this bill, particularly how political parties will nominate candidates and the emerging concerns over cost, campaign size, and electoral fairness, is far more complex.
This explainer unpacks the bill, breaks down how parties may eventually select candidates, examines potential drawbacks, and situates Nigeria’s conversation in a global context.
It also interrogates the argument that women contesting state-wide seats will face gubernatorial-level campaign burdens and what that means for the cost of governance.
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Why Women’s Political Participation and Representation Matters
Women’s equal participation and representation in political life is fundamental to inclusive democracy, responsive governance, and sustainable development. Despite global commitments and some progress, women across South Asia remain significantly underrepresented in decision-making roles particularly in legislative leadership, executive office, and youth political spaces.
At the current pace, gender parity in national legislatures will not be achieved before 2063, and parity among Heads of Government may take until 21501.
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Key Facts & Regional Snapshot
Global & South Asia Overview
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Women in national parliaments (global): 27.2%
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South Asia average:
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Lower/Unicameral Houses: 14.7%
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Upper Houses: 19.9%
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South Asian countries with women in top government leadership: India, Sri Lanka
Key Takeaway
Advancing women’s political participation and representation in South Asia requires more than quotas. Sustainable change depends on transforming social norms that fundamentally define the role of women in the politics. Only through transformative gender social norms can we address critical issues like violence against women in politics, and create an inclusive political space for all, contributing to a strong democratic system.
Full snapshot available here.
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UN Commission on the Status of Women 65th Session on Women’s full and effective participation and decision-making in public life, as well as the elimination of violence, for achieving gender equality and the empowerment of all women and girls: agreed conclusions E/CN.6/2021/3
Feminist scholars and advocates have long asserted that women’s rights and gender equality are fundamental prerequisites for democratic governance. The close correlation between women’s rights and democracy is becoming increasingly evident, as the erosion of women’s rights often signals early and unmistakable signs of democratic backsliding and the rise of authoritarianism worldwide (Allam 2019; Arat 2022; Chenoweth and Marks 2022). A gendered analysis of state institutions, policymaking, and elections provides crucial insights into the historical fluctuations in women’s rights and, by extension, the overall quality of democracy (Tajali 2022).
An overview of sexist repression in Iran highlights the depth of autocratic entrenchment, as evidenced by increasing gender-based repression and violence. These assaults on women’s fundamental rights are not new but are deeply rooted in the ideologies of Islamic fundamentalism, which have institutionalized patriarchal dominance and systemic gender discrimination (Hoodfar and Sadr 2010; Paidar 1995; Tajali 2024b). This analysis also exposes the contentious relationship between authoritarian elites and feminist advocates, who refuse to remain passive in the face of such attacks.
Feminist movements resisting systemic gender discrimination pose a significant threat to the Iranian regime, resulting in violent crackdowns on women’s rights advocates. A recent example is the regime’s harsh response to the nonviolent “Woman, Life, Freedom” protests, triggered by the killing of 22-year-old Kurdish-Iranian Mahsa Jina Amini in September 2022 while in police custody for allegedly violating Iran’s conservative hijab laws. To reassert control, the conservative-dominated Iranian parliament passed a controversial Hijab and Chastity bill in September 2023. This bill introduces harsher penalties for improper veiling, utilizing enhanced surveillance and artificial intelligence to identify those who defy mandatory hijab laws.
While the bill awaits approval from the unelected Guardian Council, Iranian authorities launched the “Noor (Light) Operation” in April 2024, enforcing the bill’s provisions through violent crackdowns on improperly veiled women and girls.