Parliaments & Representatives

NAIROBI, Kenya, May 25 (IPS) - The theme of Africa Day 2026, “63 years of unity, integration and development,” offers a stark reminder of the gap that often exists between rhetoric and reality. While commendable regional legal frameworks have advanced legal protections for millions of women and girls, injustice remains written into the fabric of national family laws in many African countries, entrenching gender inequality in the home.

Such is the reality for the young woman in Kampala whose marriage was never legally registered and who, in the eyes of the State, does not exist as a wife.

For the woman in Lagos whose husband took their children after a divorce she did not want, and the law backed him.

For the Muslim widow in Nairobi who cannot inherit the home she shared with her husband for thirty years because property passes to his male relatives.

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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.

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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.

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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%.

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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).

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