Parliaments & Representatives
Women from minority ethnic and religious groups in Sri Lanka continue to be systematically discriminated against and marginalized in mainstream politics, new research shows.
Quotas for women’s representation have not enabled enough minority women to enter politics; just 3 minority women sit in Parliament among 22 women – less than 2 per cent of all MPs, despite majority women’s representation having improved. Only 11 minority women have ever been elected.
‘Minority women in politics are not just underrepresented — they are systematically excluded. Though determined to represent their communities, they are shut out by cultural, religious, language and patriarchal barriers from their own communities and all political parties’, said lead author Dr Farah Mihlar of the Centre for Development and Emergency Practice, Oxford Brookes University.
The report finds that the quotas have not circumvented the specific obstacles faced by minority women, such as tokenistic nominations, exclusion from leadership and limited access to financial resources and networks. A crucial finding is that minority women unanimously identified their own community as presenting the greatest obstruction to their political careers.
Tekan Cochrane is an Australian Indigenous lawyer with Kooma, Yuwaalaraay and Torres Strait Islander heritage, as well as diverse European heritage. Raised on a farm in central Queensland, away from major population centres, and the first in her family to attend university, Tekan’s work is grounded in lived experience, community accountability, and a deep commitment to justice and systemic reform.
In 2025, Tekan was a finalist for the Australian Human Rights Commission’s Law Award, selected from more than 100 national nominations and recognised for her work supporting First Nations peoples and individuals in disadvantaged and marginalised communities.
Tekan is the Executive Officer of Tarwirri Indigenous Law Association of Victoria, a not-for-profit membership organisation representing Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander legal professionals, graduates and students. Tarwirri is funded through the Victorian Aboriginal Justice Agreement due to the strong need for more Indigenous lawyers in Australia.
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’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.
Ensuring GSP principles are embedded in political institutions is vital for a healthy democracy. It highlights that women’s inclusion and equality does not just stop at the ballot box. All groups must be able to fully participate within our elected institutions for our democracies to work effectively and to the good of all in our societies. This interim report comes at a timely moment for the GSP agenda.
More recently, the CPA and CWP updated its gender sensitive guidelines providing a ‘checklist’ for parliamentary change. Not only this, but COVID-19 has offered a moment of significant reform (albeit temporary in many cases) to parliamentary practices and procedures across the Commonwealth and many political institutions around the world are reflecting on the experience and the lessons learnt.
The 2020 CPA Gender Sensitising Parliaments Guidelines set out four dimensions of Gender Sensitive Parliaments (Figure 1). This interim report focuses on the first two dimensions: ‘Equality of participation within Parliament’ and ‘Parliamentary infrastructure’. It documents the current state of play regarding GSP practices in institutions across the British Islands and Mediterranean region (BIMR), particularly in light of institutional responses to COVID-19 and recommends ‘best practice’ reforms for the short and medium term.
Click here to access the report.
Gender and politics scholars are increasingly making appeals to ethnographic methodology to bring important contributions to understand the reproduction of gender, gender hierarchies, gendered relations, and their redress in parliamentary settings. This article draws upon fieldwork conducted in the U.K. House of Commons and the European Parliament and finds distinctive gendered cultures and norms in debating and working parliaments. Focusing on one dimension of this distinction—the parliamentary debating chamber—the article argues that parliamentary ethnography provides novel empirical insights into this conceptual distinction and into empirical understandings of gendered debating and working parliaments. While parliamentary ethnography is a fruitful innovation, the article discusses the drawbacks of this methodology and provides feminist reflection on ways to make it more accessible.
Click here to read the full article published by Cambridge University Press on 3 August 2022.
This report highlights the key findings from research conducted by Equal Voice on sexual harassment in Canada’s legislative Assemblies.
Click here to access the report.
The performance of women legislators is analysed by looking at the nature of questions posed by them over a span of 20 years (1999–2019) in the lower house of the Indian Parliament. The analysis, however, is a contestation of claims that suggest women act as silent members, and if at all they speak, they do on “softer issues” like women and child development, food processing, health, and sanitation, thus trying to escape the discussions on national security, finance, agriculture, railways, etc. These are otherwise considered as male bastions. This paper is a quantitative analysis of women’s political performance during the Question Hour session, which is considered as an important plenary space where legislators act on their own, free from the party regulation.
Independent India claims to be the world’s largest democracy, turbulent and vigorous but ever so evolving. Elections form the animating spirit of Indian democracy. It is held religiously every five years with enough pomp and show. Indian democracy flourishes with exceptional rates of citizen participation. The Lok Sabha elections of 2019 manifested 67% voter turnout with decreasing rates of gender gap (ECI 2019). These figures indicate the undying credence citizens have in Indian politics and its democracy, despite the limitations of electoral democracy. The Indian Parliament acts as a theatre of democracy regardless of the people’s sneering disbelief and despondency in political institutions of the country to which Parliament is no exception (Rai and Spray 2019: 2). Electoral democracies all over the world are faced with criticism about their substantive representation1 to which they retort by translating democracy into electoral representation. How can the democratic institutions in India include all its citizens? In other words, how can these institutions be representative of its entire population? (Jayal 2013: 25). Here, what concerns this paper is the study of the impact of systematic exclusion of women from the political life on their political representation and in turn on their political performance.
Click here to read the full article published by Economic and Political Weekly on 1 August 2022.
In this study, we report results of a survey of U.S. state senators about their experiences of psychological abuse, physical violence, and sexualized abuse and violence on the job, as well as gender differences among senators. Overall, our results indicate that more than 80% of state senators reported having faced abuse and violence, and women senators reported more physical violence than men. Moreover, we found differences in the factors that contributed to abuse and violence among women and men state senators. Most notably, women with higher levels of power (party or committee leaders) were more likely than other women to experience psychological abuse and sexualized abuse and violence, and Democratic women senators faced more sexualized abuse and violence than Republican women. The implications for continued service by state senators in the face of these experiences, the likelihood of attracting future candidates, and the implications for gender diversity in office are explored.
Click here to read the full article.