Claudia Sheinbaum, President of Mexico. REUTERS/Daniel Becerril

In a year of significant elections, Global Insight examines why women are underrepresented as candidates for office in many countries.

Almost a quarter of the world’s population will go to the polls over the course of 2024 to elect presidents, governments or local legislators. But, globally, such positions remain overwhelmingly held by men. According to UN data, as of 1 June 2024, there are 27 countries where 28 women serve as heads of state or government. Three of these women are both heads of state and government. The UN has said that at the current rate, gender equality in the highest positions of power won’t be reached for another 130 years.

The hostile atmosphere

Even in the world’s oldest democracies, women have only been able to hold senior elected roles for just over a century – before that, they simply weren’t permitted to stand for positions of power. Adele Poskitt, Head of Practice, Political Parties and Movements at the Westminster Foundation for Democracy in London, explains that ‘the whole system was designed by men, for men'.

Today, women can stand for elected positions, but they’re in the minority compared to men in terms of numbers of candidates. For example, in the UK general election in July, women represented an estimated 31 per cent of candidates – a fall of three percentage points from the previous election in 2019, according to data from the country’s House of Commons.

Elected representatives have long been the target of criticism, but the problem has escalated in the age of social media, and many now report sustained abuse, especially online. Leading parliamentarians, such as Diane Abbott in the UK and the former New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern, have spoken about the abuse they have received. Research carried out by Sofía Collignon, a senior lecturer in comparative politics at Queen Mary University of London, and Wolfgang Rüdig, a reader in politics at the University of Strathclyde, following the UK’s 2019 general election suggested that women had a higher chance – by nine percentage points – of suffering harassment than men. Collignon expects the number of women suffering harassment to have risen during the UK’s election in July.

Collignon’s research suggests abuse has an immediate impact on candidates for election. ‘What I found in 2019 is that when candidates suffer any form of abuse or intimidation they’re more likely to change the way they campaign as a result of it’, she explains.

Sinzdak says harassment is certainly a factor in discouraging women from standing or in them stepping down from their roles early. ‘You get in office and then you’re constantly harassed, especially online. I don’t know if it’s consciously depressing candidacies, but it’s something that we’re going to have to grapple with because people aren’t going to want to serve […] if you’re constantly being abused’, she says.

Hiding their emotions

Although they represented less than a third of candidates in the UK general election and despite the barriers they face, women now make up 41 per cent of MPs. ‘Representation and numbers is one element of the conversation. 40 per cent sounds pretty good, but then when you looked on election night at almost every single count and you saw the candidates, and you saw the candidate list, it was very often only one woman, if that’, says Poskitt. ‘That 40 per cent is a bit misrepresentative of some of the inequality that’s happening in the process’.

She says Ardern was a rare recent exception – the then-New Zealand prime minister was praised for the empathetic way in which she responded after a terrorist attack on a mosque in Christchurch in 2019. Theresa May, the UK’s second female prime minister, was meanwhile criticised for her lack of emotion, and in a 2023 interview with the BBC said she had been hiding her feelings deliberately. ‘One of the challenges still, sadly, for women in public life is that if a man shows emotion, it’s “oh, it’s wonderful he’s showing that side of himself”. If a woman shows emotion, it’s weakness’, said May.

Making history in Latin America

One woman breaking down barriers in 2024 is Claudia Sheinbaum. In June, Sheinbaum was elected as Mexico’s first female president, having previously been Mexico City’s first female mayor. Indeed, the country was practically guaranteed a woman as its head of state, with the other front-running candidate during the election being Xóchitl Gálvez.

José Visoso, Scholarship Officer for the IBA Latin American Regional Forum and a partner at Galicia Abogados in Mexico City, says that in many ways, Mexico has for some time been leading the way on gender parity in terms of its elected representatives. Mexico instituted constitutional reform in 2019 to require gender parity in elections at all levels. Now, the country’s parliament is equally split between men and women. The country’s Supreme Court is led by a woman, Norma Lucía Piña Hernández. The Central Bank governor is also female. ‘Things have changed a lot and we have women in very relevant roles now’, explains Visoso. Generally speaking, he says, ‘society has been open to choosing the best talent’ rather than restricting certain roles to men.

Visoso doesn’t believe there’s been much push-back against the gender parity law, despite Mexico – and Latin America more generally – remaining somewhat patriarchal in many areas of society. ‘We’ve seen very talented politicians. Everybody in the country has got used to seeing more women in that role’, he says.

Fabiola Cavalcanti, Diversity and Inclusion Officer on the IBA Latin American Regional Forum and a partner at FAC Law in Rio de Janeiro, recognises Sheinbaum’s achievement, but says the Latin American region as a whole still has steps to take when it comes to gender parity. Her home country of Brazil elected its first female president, Dilma Rousseff, in 2011. Although Rousseff’s time in office ended prematurely in 2016 after she was impeached for breaking budgetary laws – charges she denied – Cavalcanti says as a woman her election was still a landmark moment. ‘For Brazil this was the first movement that we had showing the world that we as women may stand for power and be in a very high position’, she says.

An exhausted US

In stark comparison to Mexico, women are underrepresented in US politics. Although a woman first ran for president there in 1872 – Victoria Woodhull, who represented the Equal Rights Party before women could even vote – all those elected to the highest office in the country have been men. Kamala Harris made history in 2021 when she took office as the first female vice president.

In the forthcoming 2024 presidential elections, there’s been a decrease in the number of female candidates. CAWP’s Sindzak says that women’s enthusiasm for standing for office has deteriorated, perhaps partly due to ‘redistricting’ – whereby state electoral district boundaries are redrawn, pushing women candidates out – since the 2022 elections, but also because of exhaustion and frustration about the current state of US politics.

This stands in contrast to 2016, where, following Hillary Clinton’s unsuccessful presidential campaign against Donald Trump, an increase in the number of women putting themselves forward as candidates, alongside a greater interest in politics more generally among women, was observed. ‘The conventional wisdom at the time was that if Hillary Clinton had won the presidency that would have been a galvanising moment for a lot of women – probably there would have been a role model effect for sure’, Sindzak says. ‘What happened is that it seemed like her loss was almost more galvanising to women’.

She points to events such as the worldwide Women’s March protest the day after Trump’s inauguration as an example of the grassroots political activity that took place. But, since then, enthusiasm has waned. Some commentators point to the stifling effect of the Covid-19 pandemic on grassroots support. For Sindzak, much ‘of our formal political structure is still overwhelmingly male and overwhelmingly white; those groups and those formal political actors are not asking women to run at the same rates they’re asking men to run'. 

She says both main political parties in the US are making efforts to recruit women to run for office. However, in her view it’s not enough. ‘We know that women when they run they win at the same rates that men do in comparable races. The biggest problem we have is the number of candidates’, says Sindzak.

Despite the current situation, Sindzak remains confident that the US will at some point have a woman leader. ‘There were record number of women candidates who ran for the presidential nomination in 2020, and I do believe it’s just a matter of time. Many people ran for the presidency before Hillary Clinton, she just went further than anyone had gone before. She’s opened the doors’, she adds.

Diversity at policymaking tables

The common theme globally is that women aren’t running for office in great enough numbers. In an attempt to tackle the issue, some countries employ a quota system of some kind – either a legislative requirement as seen in Mexico, reserving a number of seats for women, or voluntary political party quotas. The WDF’s Poskitt suggests these measures are more effective when used in a proportional representative democracy, rather than in ‘first past the post’ systems such as the UK’s. In proportional representation, it’s easier to mandate how many candidates should be women – for example, it would be possible to alternate candidates by gender, so the first on the list to be elected might be a woman, the second would be a man, and so on. Sindzak says the US system isn’t set up for quotas, but some kind of list could work and may be easier to implement.

Bringing in measures to enable women to run for office while also facilitating childcare could also make a difference. There’s currently legislation before the US Congress to allow candidates to use election funds for campaign-related childcare, while the UK Parliament has a family room and nursery for elected representatives and staff who need to bring their children to work.

Addressing the problem of abuse and harassment is also critical. Poskitt says all stakeholders should be taking action – parliaments can introduce stronger complaints and grievance procedures, political parties can take sterner and swifter action against members harassing others, and social media companies must implement further measures to tackle online abuse. The latter area is the most challenging because, in Poskitt’s view, since social media platforms earn revenue from posts that receive clicks, they therefore aren’t incentivised to fully address the problem.

‘You have to reach a very high threshold before the issue is taken seriously. We want social media [platforms] to do more, and for [platforms] to make it much easier to remove comments on the timeline for example, or to flag things as potentially abusive’, says Queen Mary’s Collignon.

Collignon says that legislation designed to deal with online abuse often has a high bar. In the UK, for example, the victim must collect the evidence to prove they’ve been harassed. She also believes that political parties can do more to address the issue. ‘We might have to rethink about what’s acceptable and what’s not, and that’s a broader discussion we need to have’, she says. ‘Activists and supporters need to be much more aware about what’s acceptable, and that’s why parties need to put a clear line [in place] about what is not’.

It’s worth remembering why, ultimately, this all matters. Cavalcanti of the IBA Latin American Regional Forum highlights that ‘it’s proven that diversity is more profitable in all terms’, while Poskitt says that ‘women policymakers prioritise issues that benefit the most vulnerable in society, such as healthcare, welfare and education. As such, more women leaders seem to make for more equal and caring societies'. 

‘The research shows that women make a difference when they’re in office’, agrees Sindzak. ‘They bring distinct life experiences to the table. They are more likely to bring underrepresented, marginalised groups into the process, more likely to work across the aisle and build consensus. We fundamentally just know that we need diverse perspectives at policy making tables and you don’t get that if seven out of ten or more of the office holders look like each other and have similar life experiences’.

Joanne Harris is a freelance journalist and can be contacted at joannerharris@gmail.com