Where Are the Women?

These words, that open the 2017-2018 UN Women’s Annual Repport, belong to Coumba Diaw, the only female mayor in the Senegalese region of Louga[1].

2018 has been a record year for women and their role in democracy: it has brought the biggest number of elected women in the United States Senate, the appointment of the first female President in Ethiopia, and the designation of a female-dominated cabinet in the Spanish government. Democracy’s glass ceiling was starting to break.

Democratic systems are built on the possibility of representing and listening to all the different groups that form a community. However, this is not always the case. Since the establishment of the first democracies in the Greek polis, women have been systematically excluded from the public sphere, and denied the right to take part in democratic processes. Hence, they have been involved in a constant fight for the recognition of their citizenship and their right to political participation.

Even if women’s fight for democratic representation has been slowly advancing towards the achievement of some of its goals, today only 23.3% of the members of national parliaments in the world are women[2]. What these numbers reflect is a big issue, as no political structure can be deemed genuinely democratic should it not incorporate a satisfactory representation of women[3].

Although democracy is not to be solely reduced to election processes, it is important to acknowledge the crucial role that the latter play to ensure its stability and advancement. In fact, elections can become a very useful tool that allows measuring and testing democratic resilience. The barriers or opportunities that women encounter when they register to vote, present their candidacy, and participate in different processes decision-making determine their level of democratic inclusion.

Thus, the inclusivity of democratic structures is heavily reliant on the organization and development of election events. In fact, the Inter-Parliamentary’s Union (IPU) 2017 report “Women in Parliament”, points towards the idea that the typology of electoral system is a profoundly decisive factor to foster women’s – and other minorities – inclusivity.  According to this report, only 26.7% of women MPs are elected in the so-called majoritarian systems. In these cases, the IPU highlights the slight increase of female representation in those chambers that have introduced quotas: women obtained around 30% of the seats in Parliaments that combine majoritarian systems and quotas, whereas only 15.4% of the elected representatives were women in chambers where there is no form of gender quota used[4].

Nevertheless, many scholars from different schools of gender studies (intersectional, standpoint, transnational, poststructuralist…) consider the need to rethink political and democratic culture to be one of the keys to ensure inclusive democratic systems.

This is due to the fact that many of the obstacles that women face are determined by social norms and prejudices that act as a foundation where democracy is built. These have a variety of negative impacts on electoral processes, ranging from cultural barriers that stop women’s access to education and consequently difficult their participation; to violence against women in elections (VAWE).

The UN stresses the interconnectedness between a system of cultural beliefs that discriminate women and insecurity, which is considered to be one of the main factors that influences women’s role in democracy, limiting their right to citizenship. VAWE is “a way of violence against women that intends to affect women’s exercise of political rights in an election context”[5]. This violence can take different forms: physical, psychological and sexual; and it is accentuated as a consequence of the intersection of structures of race, age, class, (dis)ability, education, sexuality and gender. VAWE affects multiple aspects and actors of election processes, and it burdens the advancement of democratic principles. For this reason, the UN emphasizes the need to apply a gender-oriented framework during electoral processes that ultimately allows preventing VAWE.

VAWE is a global phenomenon that requires from collective efforts to achieve women’s full access to democracy and citizen participatory processes. In fact, a study from the IPU shows that 82.5% of European women in Parliament have suffered some kind of psychological VAWE; and 40.5% have experienced sexual VAWE[6].

Consequently, international organisations emphasize the importance of awareness-raising campaigns, as well as empowerment and citizen mobilization campaigns. Taking social actors as agents of change and culturalisation it is possible to change the social beliefs that define and shape the political culture that acts as the foundation for democracy.

The value of the role of women like Coumba Diaw goes beyond their contribution to Senegalese local politics. Besides her role as a representative, Coumba has become an agent of change in her community, who challenges social norms that usually stop women from moving towards democracy. Like this, she has raised awareness about the importance of female participation in the public sphere, and she has proved that women also have political leadership skills[7].