Parliaments & Representatives
What happens to citizens’ perceptions of political decisions when legislatures achieve gender balance through quotas, policies that require parties to include women as candidates? Critics have long argued that mandating women’s presence casts doubt on elected officials’ qualifications and erodes the legitimacy of the decisions they make. Examining public attitudes across 12 democracies, Amanda Clayton, Diana O’Brien, and Jennifer Piscopo find the opposite. Citizens strongly prefer gender-balanced decision-making bodies, and this preference holds even when balance is achieved through quotas. The real threat to democratic legitimacy, they argue, is not affirmative action but the continued exclusion of women from political power.
Politics has long been viewed as a male-dominated arena, with only a handful of women daring to venture into it.
Even then, women politicians often face dismissal, branded as mere “flower girls” for party leaders.
In Kenya, where politics has historically been associated with aggression and at times violence; the challenge is even greater.
For women with disabilities, the barriers are multiplied.
A fight beyond the ballot
In Mombasa, Hamisa Zaja has twice vied for the Woman Representative seat in 2017 and 2022 without success. Yet she insists she is not giving up.
Hamisa, who has a physical disability and is the founder of Coast Association of Persons with Disability, says the political space is far from welcoming for women like her.
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.
Women in the Grand Duchy have less confidence in democracy than men, according to a survey from the University of Luxembourg.
Women surveyed repeatedly display a "more cautious, critical and nuanced" attitude towards society, institutions and the workings of democracy, while the men are generally "more assertive and confident", according to the study, published last week by the university’s political observatory POLINDEX.
While men give "a presumption of legitimacy to Luxembourg's institutional structures", women think "more critically [and] more vigilantly, surely reflecting a heightened awareness of the limitations and dysfunctions of the system".
Former Rajasthan chief minister Vasundhara Raje recently asserted that women have to work three times as hard as men to establish themselves in mainstream politics.
Addressing an event in Jaipur on Saturday, the BJP MLA stated, "At the time of Independence, the literacy rate of women in India was 9 percent, and today it is 65 percent. In the country’s general elections, the number of women contesting elections is 10 percent, whereas in 1957 it was only 3 percent."
Raje, who also serves as a national vice-president within her party, strongly emphasised that though the representation of women has increased noticeably in electoral politics since Independence, the growth is simply not sufficient.
She stated, "In the first Lok Sabha, the number of women Members of Parliament was 22, and today it is 74. In the Rajya Sabha, in 1952 the number of women members was 15, and today it has increased to 42. But this number is not enough. This number should be equal to that of men."
In both politics and public life in the UK, women have historically been underrepresented. In recent years women’s representation has increased, although in most cases men remain overrepresented, especially in more senior positions.
This briefing presents statistics on a range of positions in UK politics and public life held by women. Data on the demographic characteristics of different workforces tends to be limited, so it is not always possible to include intersectional analysis, for example, on disabled women or women from minority ethnic groups.
Click here to access the report.
Despite progress towards gender equality, women’s representation in Canadian politics continues to fall short. With only 30 per cent of seats in the House of Commons held by women, there is still a long way to go for Parliament to capture the diversity of the population it represents.
There are several factors that contribute to the persistent gender disparities in the political process. Research on women in politics has identified multiple obstacles that hinder women’s representation, with three factors emerging as the most prominent explanations.
Three obstacles to women in politics
The first is that voters might have gender bias. This is the idea that, for various reasons, voters might prefer a man over a woman candidate.
The second is that women may not be interested to run as candidates. This is the idea that women might be more risk-averse when it comes to campaigns and elections, or that women may lack self-confidence and have lower levels of political ambition compared to men.
Click here to read the full article published by the Conversation on 10 March 2023.
This paper provides an overview of Lebanese women’s participation in political decision- making through a case study of women’s participation in the parliamentary elections of 2022 from a gender perspective. The paper asks, why are the vital voices of Lebanese women still missing in politics? What progress has been made? Who are the gatekeepers? How can we accelerate equality and improve women’s political participation?
Source: Lebanese American University
The “Women in politics: 2023” map, created by the Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU) and UN Women, presents new data for women in executive positions and national parliaments as of 1 January 2023. Data show that women are underrepresented at all levels of decision-making worldwide and that achieving gender parity in political life is far off.
Women serve as Heads of State and/or Government in only 31 countries. Women make up 26.5 per cent of Members of Parliament. Globally, less than one in four Cabinet Ministers is a woman (22.8 per cent). New data show that women lead important human rights, gender equality, and social protection policy portfolios, while men dominate policy areas like defence and economy.
Source: UN Women
In 2022, women’s leadership in the world’s parliaments continued with a slow pace of incremental growth as the world re-emerged after two years of COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns and losses. Women reached new milestones in parliamentary representation around the globe and the context for women’s political leadership continued to expand.
Click here to see the report.
Women’s representation in India’s Parliament is an important metric to evaluate progress in bridging gender inequities in the country. India has a female population of 662.9 million and is the largest and one of the most resilient parliamentary democracies in the world. As the country completes 75 years of independence, this paper gives a historical account of the progress in women’s representation in Parliament over the past decades. It compares women’s parliamentary representation with their share in legislative positions at the lower levels. It notes that despite impressive increase in turnout of women voters in elections, opening up spaces for participation of women in electoral politics has been a slow process as a result of deep-rooted structural constraints. It argues that institutional transformation, coupled with socio-economic emancipation holds the key to increased participation by women in electoral politics.
Click here to read the full article published by Observer Research Foundation on 16 November 2022.