Women's History Month: Women's Special

This article was posted on Electoral Affairs' Substack, analyzing the struggle for effective measures to increase women’s participation and citing RepresentWomen's Egypt report. Read an excerpt blow:

Quotas are not obvious and it does take time and pressure to fight for them. In one of the most recent reports on the issue, DemoFinland flags that less than 7% of the world’s states have female heads of states or heads of government and, on average, less than 25% of the parliamentarians across the world are women. In the EU, 31.4% of national ministers are women. The International IDEA gender quotas database is the go-to research tool here.

Currently, the struggle for effective measures to increase women’s participation is ongoing in Liberia with the reform of the election law and in Somalia with the long-awaited, historical electoral process. In Egypt, 25% of seats for women in the parliament were recently secured by a constitutional amendment. But voices in favor of the safeguards of women’s participation in power-sharing can be heard in many other places, like Israel or Kenya.

In other places, less promising stories emerge. Yet, lessons for activists and civil society should be drawn also from there. Côte d'Ivoire, for example, passed a law in 2019 requiring political parties to meet a female candidate quota of 30% for parliamentary elections. But with less than a month to go before the upcoming elections, no party has reached this threshold.

Read the full article here.

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