Women's Leadership

Advancing women’s political participation needs to go beyond legal and policy reforms. Deeply rooted social norms continue to keep women out of political leadership  — from unequal care burdens at home to media bias and exclusionary party practices. Seeing real progress means changing attitudes and daily practices across institutions and society.

 Change is possible, but it requires action from different stakeholders:

• Parliamentarians are lawmakers and play a role in passing gender-sensitive laws, enforcing protections against harassment and violence, and supporting women’s caucuses, which are critical steps to dismantle barriers. Parliaments shape not only laws and policies but also public perceptions of who belongs in decision-making.
• Local representatives can support a shift in public perceptions within communities through awareness campaigns, promote women’s leadership at the local level as an entry point for young women candidates, and can enact gender-responsive policies, such as public services and care systems to enable participation of diverse women.
• Political parties are gatekeepers to leadership. By adopting internal quotas for leadership positions, providing training and resources, enforcing gender-sensitive internal rules and procedures, and holding members accountable for harassment, parties can open the pipeline for women candidates and reshape internal cultures that too often exclude them.
• Women’s organizations, youth-led organizations, and grassroots organizations can elevate women’s leadership through training and mentoring, providing stepping-stones for decision-making at the local level, building confidence, agency, and skills for leadership.
• Media are storytellers and powerful agents of change. Highlighting diverse women leaders, rejecting stereotypes, and reporting responsibly on women in politics can normalize women’s leadership and inspire the next generation.
• Families and schools are the norm-setters. Social norms take root early. Parents and teachers can show children that leadership has no gender by modelling equality at home and in classrooms, providing inspiring role models, encouraging girls’ ambition, and teaching boys to value women’s leadership.
• Men in leadership have influence and they should use it.  By calling out discrimination, nominating women for decision-making positions, and promoting cultures of respect, they can help shift norms from within.

What can I do?

Everyone has the power to challenge harmful norms in daily life:

• Hear a stereotype or bias? Challenge it whether in the classroom, the office, or at the dinner table.
• Boost women’s voices: Share, support, and celebrate women leaders, especially on social media.
• Lift the next generation of girls to take leadership roles at school or in community initiatives. Future changemakers start young!
• Vote like gender equality depends on it. Support candidates who champion women’s rights and leadership. Be the example. At home, at work, and in public, show equality is possible and powerful. Lasting change takes all of us.

Shifting mindsets is as crucial as changing laws. From institutions to households, everyone has a role in creating societies where women’s leadership is not the exception but the norm. Together, we can build inclusive democracies that reflect the voices, experiences, and diversity of all women and girls.

Continue reading: Invisible barriers — how social norms keep women out of leadership roles

Invisible barriers: How social norms keep women out of leadership roles

Despite growing evidence that women’s leadership improves political decision-making processes, parity between women and men in decision-making is far off. According to data from UN Women and the Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU), 27.5 per cent of parliamentarians globally are women. In only 28 countries, women occupy positions in the highest office, while 101 countries have not had a woman leader. Women represent less than a quarter of Cabinet ministers and account for 36 per cent of locally elected officials. 

What factors account for these figures?  The answer lies not only in concrete barriers — including unequal laws, limited funding or opportunities, and violence against women in politics — but in the unwritten rules of society: social norms.

• What are social norms? 

Social norms are the unwritten rules about what is considered “normal” or “acceptable” in a community. They shape perceptions of who is deemed fit to lead and participate in public life, and whose voice counts, limiting women’s access to decision-making roles and driving men’s domination. While some norms help societies function smoothly, others reinforce discrimination — including the norms that block women's path to political leadership, explored below. 

Social norms directly influence individual behaviour, family and community expectations, and institutional practices. They often reflect historical, cultural, and gendered assumptions about authority, power, and public engagement. Social norms can change, as time, culture and societies evolve. Though adaptable over time, these norms can be deeply rooted and often intertwined with culture, religion and other community-based beliefs, making transformation extremely difficult and slow. 

• How do social norms limit women’s political participation?

These invisible barriers can be both explicit and implicit, enforced through approval or disapproval of behaviours, or social pressure. They are present in private and public spheres:

• At home, women are often expected to shoulder a disproportionate amount of unpaid care and domestic work, compared to men, leaving little time for political engagement. Boys are often taught to be assertive and ambitious, while girls learn to nurture.
• In politics, women are often confined to “soft” portfolios in education and social protection, while men dominate areas widely perceived as more prestigious or powerful, such as economy, finance, or defense – limiting women's influence over major resource and policy decisions.
• Political parties often provide women candidates with less funding or support due to doubts about their leadership abilities.
• Media tend to portray men as competent, but women often have to repeatedly prove themselves and face stereotypes. 
• Monuments, textbooks, and movies celebrate men as leaders, shaping ambition long before adulthood.

As a result, harmful social norms often exclude, silence, or discourage women from pursuing leadership roles. 

When women lead, decision-making is more representative, inclusive, and effective. Studies¹ show that women in parliaments push for childcare, healthcare, pensions, and gender equality laws. Yet as long as norms keep politics a “man’s world,” democracy itself remains incomplete.

• Can social norms change?

Social norms can change and evolve - but not overnight. Some shifts happen quickly, with, for instance, norms related to women’s employment in paid work - which unintentionally changed following the two World Wars, to make up for the gap in men’s employment due to military mobilization. This period transformed roles of women and men and therefore expectations tied to women's participation in economic and public life altogether. But most social norm changes require decades of advocacy and tireless actions from different parts of society.

UN Women research shows that social norms can change - when three approaches come together:

1. Transform the story – The stories we hear and tell shape what we think is “normal.” Too often, they reinforce stereotypes and inequality. To shift norms, we need new narratives—ones that challenge harmful narratives and open up new possibilities for women and girls.
2. Change everyday realities of women and girls: Norms don’t shift if people don’t have real alternatives. Women won’t step into public life if it means facing violence, having no financial support or juggling with care responsibilities. Change happens when women and girls have access to opportunities, services, and safety—backed by laws that are not only in place, but actually work in practice. And for those laws to work, public support and ongoing advocacy is important.
3. Build collective power – Social norms are shaped by power—who has it, and who doesn’t. To change them, power needs to shift too. This means supporting women and marginalized groups to organize, speak out, and lead, while also building alliances with others—from community leaders to unions, from the media networks to academia. Lasting change comes from collective, sustained action. 

No single intervention works alone; it takes all three, at the same time, to make change happen.

• What is UN Women doing about it?

UN Women supports efforts to transform the social norms that hold back gender equality and women's leadership through its country, regional and global programmes, in partnership with governments, civil society organizations, women's rights movements and other stakeholders. One of these efforts is the WYDE | Women’s Leadership Initiative, funded by the European Union and implemented with partners including International IDEA, the Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU), United Cities and Local Governments (UCLG), and civil society organizations. Through WYDE, UN Women and its partners are working globally to:

• Shift harmful narratives through advocacy initiatives, intergenerational dialogues, training of the media, parliamentarians, local representatives and civil society leaders.
• Reform institutions by promoting quotas, mentoring women candidates, and training parliaments to address violence against women in politics.
• Strengthen feminist movements by funding grassroots organizations working on innovative social norms change projects and building bold coalitions for systemic change.

Explore more: WYDE | Women’s Leadership: Strategy on Social Norms Change.

Continue reading: Time to act — everyone has a role in making women's leadership the norm.

Quotas designed to bring gender parity to parliaments have an overall positive impact on support for female political leadership – especially after women members of parliament take office. 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 Organization, 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 preexisting trend in public attitudes.

Full article.

This data story looks at the economic empowerment of women over the past decade and a half across selected Middle East and North Africa (MENA) countries (Algeria, Bahrain, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Liban, Libya, Morocco, Oman, Palestine*, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Tunisia, and the United Arab Emirates). It sets out a few stylised facts on how education, labour markets, laws, and public opinion shape women’s opportunities**. It also looks at how economic realities interact with cultural norms and legal structures across the region. Most importantly, it asks a central question: are women agents of change in their own economic and political trajectories, and how is that visible in the data that follows?

This issue goes beyond human rights or social and economic concerns and directly affects the region’s political and security landscape. As women gain greater opportunities to work, earn and participate in public life, they strengthen the resilience of families and communities, which supports broader social stability and – as research has consistently shown – contributes to higher levels of security and peace.

Full article.

• Despite notable normative advances, after 25 years, the effectiveness of the Women, Peace and Security Agenda is threatened by a fragmented global panorama and faces significant challenges and setbacks.

• In the new context, the following stand out: (a) the increased frequency and complexity of armed conflicts; (b) the rise of ‘anti-gender’ movements and the erosion of women’s rights in many regions; (c) geopolitical divisions, which make it difficult to prioritise comprehensive solutions to conflicts; (d) the Agenda’s funding crisis; (e) the crisis of multilateralism; (f) the reduced representation of women as negotiators and mediators; and (g) the loss of policy coherence and its transformative potential due to the instrumentalisation of the Agenda, often used for geopolitical purposes.

• For the Agenda to remain relevant, it is crucial that it evolves and adapts to the new global situation and updates its principles with an understanding of the local contexts in which it must be applied.

Full article.