See Her Elected (SHE) is an Ireland-based initiative that supports women across rural Ireland to become county councillors. They do so by providing free political education to women aspiring to run for election. Their support includes a comprehensive guidebook on contesting polls, a series of online workshops covering all aspects of running for an election, as well as specialist masterclasses.

In this conversation with #WomenLead, Dr. Michelle Maher, the Programme Manager at SHE, shares more about their model of supporting women, their focus on rural areas, and their measures of success. This is the first interview we are publishing as part of a new series.

About this series: We are excited to share that #WomenLead and See Her Elected (SHE) have come together to build the “Women’s Political Collective”. Through interviews and learning sessions, we will understand how various organisations around the world are working to fix gender gaps in politics. Join us for our launch event [virtually] on September 24 to learn more about the initiative as well as about SHE’s work.

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Learnings, in brief:
 
* For women, especially those who are new to politics, lack of information about the political field can be a significant barrier to entering politics.

* Closing this information gap not only requires preparing knowledge products, but also delivering them in ways that work for women.

* SHE attempts this by trying to fit into women’s lives seamlessly – whether it is in the scheduling of their online classes, or planning the logistics of their in-person sessions comprehensively.

#WomenLead: Tell us a little about SHE’s story, and specifically about your focus on rural Ireland.

Michelle Maher: Ireland holds local elections on the same day across the country, every five years. The 2019 local election results made for dismal reading for women in rural Ireland. Most councils outside of Dublin (the capital city) and surrounding areas had between 5-15 percent female councillors.

Running for election in a rural area in a local government election requires a very different skill set than is required for urban areas or for national parliamentary elections. Populations in urban areas are generally more diverse and are less concerned with the background of the family and their connection to the locality. But in rural parts of the country, who you are (your work, what you are involved in locally, and who you are connected to) really matters.

From our experience conducting a short training session prior to the 2019 local elections we knew that there was an appetite among women in rural Ireland for practical knowledge on putting together an election campaign. A keen understanding of rural Ireland and its local politics set the parameters for the SHE programme. The Irish Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage have provided annual funding for the See Her Elected programme since January 2020 to support women in rural Ireland to become county councillors.

What has been your biggest learning so far through SHE’s work about the kind of support women actually need to get started on their political journeys (including, versus what you might have initially thought they would need)? And how to design programmes that can make a difference? 

Research in Ireland prior to the establishment of SHE pointed to things like childcare, confidence, political culture, how candidates are selected and the cost of running as key barriers to women entering local politics. However, when we started to have conversations with women, their question was really ‘How do I get started?’. If a woman was never in a political party, and didn’t know any politicians, it was very difficult to know how or where to start to become a councillor. Much of this information was held by political parties and experienced politicians who were not proactive at making that information readily available. We set out to change that.

Our response was to write Ireland’s first published book on how to run for election. Starting out we thought there would be various publications on running for election, but none existed in Ireland – so we wrote it ourselves! It laid out, in as practical a way as possible, step by step, how to put an election campaign together. We have re-written the Guidebook to bring it up to date for our second election cycle running from 2024 to the next local elections in 2029. The revised edition captures our own learning and feedback throughout our first election cycle.

In conjunction with making the Guidebook on how to run for election free to everyone doing our workshops, we also ran free online practical election workshops. Each month we covered a chapter of the book in an hour-long workshop. We repeated this course throughout the election cycle, often having two or three groups of workshops happening concurrently for women at different points in their election preparation.

To make sure we were fitting in with women’s lives, we repeated each workshop four times over the course of a week. Women could attend Monday evenings 8-9pm, Tuesday mornings 10-11am, Wednesday early mornings 7-8am, or Thursday lunchtimes 1-2pm. Where we had in-person training sessions, we provided transportation to the venue from the nearest bus and train station and on-site creche facilities. Closer to the elections we had online check-in clinics.

The SHE team delivered all our training ourselves, bar specialist masterclasses, meaning we were able to develop strong and trusted relationships with the women we were supporting and we worked hard to ensure our workshops fostered camaraderie among the women attending. The relationship-building aspect of SHE, both between our team and among our service users, has grown to be a key strength.

You help prepare women to contest local elections. But looking beyond the "how-to" of running a campaign, are there any subtle, everyday skills or shifts in mindset that your programmes aim to instill in women to help them thrive in political life?

If you are looking for women acting politically in rural Ireland, you don’t find them in formal government chambers. Instead, they are to the fore in almost every community and volunteer-based group. The work they do is often vital in keeping local amenities, support groups and advocacy organisations going and helping the communities or groups they represent to thrive.

We found that women tended to expect their hard work in communities to be spontaneously noticed and rewarded, but it rarely is. We encouraged women to work on their mindset and recognise that owning your achievements and drawing attention to them was NOT being self-centred. Instead, it shows you value your work.

We set out to help women recognise that valuable work for what it is, and to name it and not allow anyone else (especially male councillors!) to take credit for that work. We encouraged women to see that much of their community work fills in gaps in services. This makes them extremely well qualified to be local politicians. They know what the problems are, and have an important perspective and contribution to make in developing the policy solution. All these attributes are demonstrated in a short training film commissioned by SHE called The Streetlamp.

An extension of supporting women to claim credit for their community work is that they become well known. In Irish local elections a candidate has a strong advantage if they are already a councillor. This gives them name recognition and a positive association with council spending projects. In rural areas, the majority of those incumbent councillors seeking to retain their seat are men. Through working on their profiles and drawing attention to their community roles, women can start to mitigate against the advantages male councillors seeking re-election have.

What advice would you give to someone wanting to start a similar initiative in their own country/region?

We believe that the SHE model is very transferable. Our starting point was with women on the ground, in their communities, throughout rural Ireland. We listened when they told us they wanted unbiased practical information on how to run for election.

The SHE model is simply to make all the practical know-how on being a local election candidate out in the open and available for free and in as accessible a way as possible. Its two central pillars are a comprehensive publication (The See Her Elected Guide to Running in the Local Elections) and free online workshops to take women through each chapter.

Supplementing these two central pillars are in-person workshops and specialist masterclasses on specific topics as requested by women as they progress, and dedicated support and training for campaign managers. Acquiring all the practical information and having the SHE team as mentors/sounding boards helped create confidence among women in rural Ireland to get together to help a woman get elected, or to be that woman.

Our advice and workshops are designed to level the playing field between the mostly male councillors seeking (re-)election and the women running to bring their expertise, lived experience and community commitment right into the council chamber.

Closing the gender gaps in politics is tough and will take work and time – it is as they say, a marathon and not a sprint. So, what do you consider to be a measure of success beyond the change in the number of women who get elected (or rather, till we get there?). 

In our first election cycle we saw an increase in the number of women putting themselves forward for election. In 2024, 120 more women ran than in 2019. Only three local electoral areas had no female candidates, down from eight in 2019. They are our first two measures of success to build on in the 2024-2029 local election cycle. The interest now, years out from the next elections in June 2029, is also promising. Our most introductory session is being offered online in late September. At the time of writing, we have 76 new women registered, with four years still to go for the next election.

Have there been any "lightbulb moment[s]" you've witnessed – either from a participant or a team member – that truly capture the essence of what you’ve set out to achieve? 

Earlier this year I was invited to attend the annual general meeting of the council that governs the area I live in, Westmeath. The occasion was the appointment of the first ever female Mayor of the county council since it was established in 1898. In her acceptance speech, Councillor Aoife Davitt acknowledged the work of See Her Elected in making local politics possible for women. To hear the work of SHE validated and celebrated on such a momentous day for women in politics in my own locality was very special. It was a reminder that we are helping to create and shape an important part of political history.

Curious to learn more about SHE’s work and our initiative? Join us on September 24! Register here.

Disclaimer: This interview is part of our ongoing series that aims to understand the work being done by different initiatives working to close the gender gaps in politics in different parts of the world. The interviews are not meant to be an endorsement of any individual, initiative or political viewpoint.

As part of this area of work, ALIGN recently released a set of seven research reports examining local governance in four countries – Nepal, Nigeria, Peru and Zimbabwe. The reports focus on how gender norms shape women’s engagement with, influence over, and experiences in local governance institutions and decision-making processes.

At #WomenLead, we interviewed Ján Michalko and Ayesha Khan, Research Fellow and Senior Research Fellow respectively at ALIGN to understand the research and ALIGN’s work on women’s political representation better.

In this interview, they help us understand ALIGN’s focus on gender norms better, and explain why they think a norms analysis is essential to understanding why gender gaps in political participation remain some of the most difficult gender gaps to close.

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Could you start by sharing a brief overview of the work ALIGN does, particularly  your work related to women’s political participation?

Ján Michalko & Ayesha Khan: ALIGN is a flagship digital platform and programme of work of the Gender Equality and Social Inclusion (GESI) team at ODI – a global affairs think tank. ALIGN provides new research, insights from practice, and grants on gender norms and their transformation.

Through its digital platform, as well as its events and activities, ALIGN shares cutting-edge research and diverse resources produced in partnership with practitioners, researchers and thought leaders. Its resources have ranged from ALIGN’s flagship report on gender norms to a comic on feminist activism against period poverty and a toolkit on 10 ways to change gender norms.

Based on our review of existing evidence and research, we have identified various, reinforcing and interconnected pathways to changing harmful and unequal norms. These include the expansion of women’s political participation, investment in education and sexual and reproductive health, and women’s economic empowerment.

These norm changes are motivated by active feminist mobilisations. We research political participation because politics and gender are both about the exercise of power. Understanding how gender intersects with different power structures will, we hope, help to create more equitable power structures.

There is a strong focus on the role of gender norms in the work you do at ALIGN. Could you elaborate on why this particular focus?

Gender norms are the informal and implicit rules and expectations around how men and women should behave in contemporary societies. They are infused into our relationships, institutions and political systems.

Unless they transform these patriarchal gender norms, policies or programmes for gender equality cannot address the root causes of inequalities. While they may be ‘gender aware’ or ‘gender sensitive’, they tend to address the symptoms of inequality, rather than driving long-lasting and sustainable transformation. A norms analysis helps us to understand why gender gaps in political participation remain some of the most difficult gender gaps to close.

Historically, norms have not been the focus for policy makers or funders who have been interested in women’s political empowerment or gender equality. ALIGN, together with other leading experts on women’s rights, has helped to make gender norms more visible and organisations such as UN agencies or the World Bank are now paying attention to the transformation of harmful norms as a route to equality.

Research and advocacy efforts have highlighted the critical role that political systems – especially the presence of quotas and choice of voting systems – play in determining women’s political participation. In that context, how does a focus on norms help us make sense of the world of politics and women’s representation?

Gender quotas have been crucial in increasing women’s political representation. However, they must be designed and implemented in order to enable women’s meaningful, empowered participation in decision making. Gender norms can help us explain why that does not always happen.

For example, the so-called two-third gender quota system in Kenya – in which no one gender group can hold more than two-thirds of seats – was adopted in 2010 through a constitutional reform; but it has not been implemented. One reason is that many male politicians still believe that women should not be involved in public life. These gender norms are maintained by various strategies, most notably through violence against women in public life, which includes physical threats to their lives, sexual harassment and online attacks on their honour and integrity.

Similarly, many political parties that have adopted quotas continue to undermine women’s ability to exercise power through their mandates. Some parties, often led by men, can circumvent quotas’ impact by nominating women at the bottom of candidate lists so that they are unelectable, or for seats that are hard to win. Parties also operate on informal rules that shape where, when and how politicking is conducted. These can exclude women who, for example, would risk their safety or damage their reputation by meeting men alone.

You have recently released a series of reports that specifically look at gender norms and local governance. What are some of the broad findings? And are there any common patterns or variations across countries?

Many women around the world start their political journeys at the local level where they tend to have close ties to their communities and where their leadership is more visible. So if we can gain a better understanding of their experiences at this level, we can help to ensure that women succeed and thrive at the highest echelons of power.

Although local governance differs from politics at the national level, there are many shared norms and strategies that keep the patriarchal status quo and inequalities alive at both levels. Female councillors, mayors or members of state or provincial parliaments also face high levels of violence – including online – whether from their male colleagues, family members or citizens. At the same time, women who succeed in politics often have strong social networks. These include female colleagues who are role models and mentors, but also husbands, fathers and relatives who support their ambitions.

Our studies also tell us that it is vital to address structural barriers outside of politics, particularly in education and employment. Women often need higher levels of education and qualification than men to be accepted. But even those who are eminently qualified may still be overlooked, and find their credentials disputed. Women also need sources of income to finance their politicking.

Unfortunately, in many countries gender norms lead to women’s lower levels of literacy or exclusion from secondary and higher education. These norms also stop them from taking full advantage of opportunities and employment in the formal economy. Addressing these structural issues would increase women’s ability to participate in formal politics.

How does this new research advance our understanding of the world of politics, not only in the case study countries, but also more broadly?

Local governance and politics have received less attention within the political science discourse on women’s representation than national legislatures and executives. Our research partnerships, therefore, fill important knowledge and evidence gaps both in the countries where our partners work and globally.

For example, very little research had been carried out on the experience of women with disabilities in local politics or in traditional leadership roles. Our partners – Deaf Women Included and TechVillage – conducted unique feminist work by capturing the experiences of women who have been largely neglected by researchers in their studies and theories on politics.

Such exclusion is particularly notable in global political science knowledge production, which has been dominated by scholarship from the so-called global North. ALIGN intentionally supports research in the global majority countries and with institutions that would otherwise be unable to access funding for this important research.

Looking ahead, what are some ongoing and emerging concerns and themes related to women’s political participation that you feel deserve greater attention and research in the near future?

We are working on two key topics that require the urgent attention of scholars and funders as we work towards women’s political equality.

First, we need a better understanding of anti-gender backlash and its close interaction with democratic backsliding. With rising authoritarianism and the reversal of rights of women, LGBTQI+ people and other groups in many countries, there is an urgent need to map how actors who challenge these rights are financed and networked. Equally, we need to assess the policy responses and strategies that are the most effective for progressing global norms around gender equality and the prevention of any further erosion of democratic rights.

Second, we need to understand how to engage men at the highest levels of power in transformative feminist agendas. Some politicians have claimed a feminist identity or have taken on the mantel of gender equality. Yet, the social and political conditions that enable them to do so are under-researched, as is their impact on transforming unequal norms. Understanding if and how we could work with the most powerful men can help to remove barriers to women’s political empowerment and contribute to global gender equity.

This interview is part of our ongoing series that aims to understand the work being done by different initiatives working to close the gender gaps in politics in different parts of the world. The interviews are not meant to be an endorsement of any individual, initiative or political viewpoint.

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The USA scored 26.9 on the index for 2023 (the index spans from 0 to 100, and a score of 50 represents parity). A decade ago, when the index was started, the score was lower at 18.3. While progress has been made, it has not only been slow, but also uneven across states and over time, the report notes. 

#WomenLead interviewed Courtney Lamendola and Steph Scaglia, members of the RepresentWomen team who worked on putting together the report. Lamendola is the director of research and Scaglia a research associate at RepresentWomen. 

In this interview, they take us behind the scenes and give us a glimpse into what goes on into preparing the index, which findings stand out for them, why this index was launched, and how much it has been able to achieve. Read on: 

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Could you tell us about the Gender Parity Index? 

Courtney Lamendola: The Gender Parity Index (GPI) is a measurement and evaluation tool that tracks women’s representation in elected office at the national, state, and local levels of government in the USA. We assign a score to each state according to the number of women in office at a fixed point each year (April 2023); states can earn between 0 points if no women are in office and 100 points if women hold all offices. Each state is then assigned a letter grade and ranking according to their score, with states that receive at least 50/100 points (parity) earning an A, 49-33 a B, 32-25 a C, 24-10 a D, and 9-0 an F. Each state receives a “report card” (at the end of the report) that shows where they have made the most progress and where they still have room for improvement. 

The index usually takes 6-8 months to put together each year, with the first few months spent inputting data and approximately four or more months spent interpreting the results and drafting the report. While data on women’s representation in national and state government is readily available thanks to the Rutger University’s Center for American Women and Politics (CAWP), we usually collect data on the mayors of cities with populations of 30,000+ and county executives in the five largest counties in each state by hand. Finding reliable information on women’s representation at the local level is the biggest challenge since some localities don’t update their websites regularly, and finding self-reported data on the gender or race of local electeds is particularly difficult. 

You have just released the tenth edition of the index. Would you give us a brief overview of some of the most significant findings of this year’s edition? 

Courtney Lamendola: Two states, Maine and Oregon, have achieved an “A” for the first time in this year’s GPI. This is also the first year we have had two “A” states simultaneously. As exciting as this is, we also wanted to offer a note of caution. New Hampshire used to be the top-ranked state in the GPI and achieved an “A” grade between 2015-2018 and again in 2020; in this year’s report, it reached a “B” grade and ranks 10th out of all states because its score has dropped over the last few years, following the departure of a few high-profile women from Congress and state executive office. 

The GPI uses a weighted formula that awards additional credit to states that have elected women governors in the last three elections. As a result, states that have women governors tend to perform better than other states in the GPI -  six of the top ten states in the 2023 GPI have women governors, including Maine (1st), Oregon (2nd), Michigan (3rd), New Mexico (4th), Iowa (7th), and Massachusetts (9th). The flip side is that when these governors leave office, their state scores drop after every subsequent election where a woman is not elected. This is part of the reason why New Hampshire, which has gubernatorial elections every two years instead of every four, has lost so much ground over the last few years, while other states have surpassed it following the 2022 elections, where 12 women won gubernatorial elections, breaking the previous record of nine. 

Looking back at the ten years of the index, what are some of the most striking findings for this period, as seen through your indices? 

Steph Scaglia: When looking at the past ten years, the GPI does a great job of showing exactly how unstable progress toward parity in governance is. Progress has been made; the number of "F" states has gone from eight to one, and the number of "B" and "C" states have both gone from five to 12. But, the number of "D" states has consistently hovered around 30 and dropped to 23 just this year. The number of A states has varied between one and zero, with the exception of two in 2023. The index somewhat combats the headlines often displayed after each election cycle that emphasize how much progress women have made and how many records have been broken. It reminds us that although it is important to celebrate progress, we cannot leave reality behind. Only two states have gender-balanced governance, and that is far from sufficient. 

Let’s get a little into the history of the index. Could you tell us why it was launched all those years ago? What was the immediate motivation? Was there any inspiration for this, and what was your hope while launching it? 

Courtney Lamendola: As Cynthia Richie Terell, our executive director, has said a few different ways over the years, the Gender Parity Index helps establish a baseline for women’s representation in the United States. Before making suggestions for improving women’s representation, knowing how well women are represented is essential. I would add to this by saying that the GPI gives us a chance to re-assess the status of women’s representation each year; because we now have ten years’ worth of data, we are better equipped to comment on which states have made the most visible progress. In turn, this commentary helps to point us in the right direction when we try to figure out what combination of rules and systems works best and worst for women in politics and what needs to change to help elect more women in the United States. 

Steph Scaglia: This is my second time working on the Gender Parity Index, but the value of doing this exercise over a decade immediately becomes clear. For example, the 2023 index devotes several pages to state-specific case studies. Part of this is not just because those states are interesting in 2023 but because the impact of previous systems-level changes (or lack of changes) on women’s representation becomes much more apparent over ten years. The impact of redistricting, term limits, ranked choice voting, women’s leadership and training organisations, etc, is something that may help year-to-year, but whose true impact matters in the long term. 

At RepresentWomen, we care about increasing women’s representation in government quickly and efficiently but also sustainably. True solutions are those which allow women not just to run and win in a single election cycle but to serve and lead and allow other women to do the same. 

And looking at it now, do you feel you have been able to achieve that?

Courtney Lamendola: I’d say the GPI met our original goal. Of course, when RepresentWomen started in 2013, our original name was “Representation2020,” reflecting our hope that we might achieve parity in time for the Centennial of Suffrage. By 2018, when we separated from FairVote, formed a board, and became “RepresentWomen,” we knew it would take much longer to achieve this goal.

The GPI isn’t designed to estimate how long it will take to achieve parity, but it has helped us to identify a few roadblocks. In state legislatures, for example, nearly half of all Democratic legislators are women, up from 33% ten years ago; meanwhile, just one-fifth of all Republicans in state legislatures are women, which is a much smaller improvement from where they were ten years ago (17%). This suggests that, to achieve gender balance in state legislatures, either the Democratic Party will need to become the party of women and elect significantly more women than men, or the Republican Party will need to elect more women and make up for lost ground. Meanwhile, at the national level, recent estimates suggest it may take as long as 118 years to achieve gender parity. Overall, I think the U.S. has a lot of work left to do, and I don’t foresee a future where we’ll have been so successful that we can retire this project unless we adopt new strategies to accelerate progress. 

Steph Scaglia: As an add-on to my previous answer, I do think we approach our ultimate goal of gender-balanced governance every day. The Gender Parity Index allows us not just to survey women’s representation now and over time but to benchmark what works, what doesn’t, and what ought to be done in the future to ameliorate women’s political participation. 

Of course, gender parity will take time. But that does not mean we should stop striving to make it happen now. We’re lucky; the solutions to achieving gender-balanced governance already exist. Ranked choice voting, gender-balanced appointment rules, multi-winner districts, etc., have all been tried and implemented at least once either in the US, across the globe, or both. However, change is hard, and RepresentWomen research allows us to do two things: show that change is not just needed but possible. 

If someone else wanted to develop a similar index for their country today or in the near future, what advice would you like to give them based on your own experience? 

Courtney Lamendola: If it is possible to partner with universities, research institutions, or government agencies that have the means to centralise data collection on who is in office, that will save you a lot of time and effort. Part of the reason why the GPI is a half-year project and not a 12-24 month project is that we can count on CAWP and other institutions to provide timely and accurate information about who is in elected office. That is the first step.

The GPI is designed to weigh that information in a way that makes it easier to see the bigger picture of what representation in each state looks like at all levels of government. Some of the considerations the original authors had to weigh when designing the formula included making fair comparisons between states with fewer representatives in Congress than others since 13 states have two or fewer representatives. In contrast, states like California have as many as 52. To assess progress in states with smaller delegations, we look at the winners of the last three elections to more accurately gauge how likely it is for a woman to be elected to Congress from that state. 

The next best piece of advice that I could offer is to connect with elected officials and show them how well their state or region performs in your index. Some of the best feedback we have received comes from elected officials who page to their state, pull out a red pen, and make suggested edits, helping us to fill in the gaps on what rules and systems have the most significant impact on electing women that aren’t obvious to us, based on the information we found in our research. While the formula has stayed the same since 2013, we have made changes to the format and presentation of our findings over the years based on the feedback we have received, and I’m sure the index will continue to evolve in the future to adapt the needs of our partners and present new findings. 

Steph Scaglia: I certainly would echo what Courtney has said – data gathering takes time, and partnerships are a huge advantage. Another challenge we face every year is pinning down which case studies we deem the most important. Although not every state experiences drastic changes (either increases or decreases) in score over time, that doesn’t mean diving into their story isn’t just as interesting. In theory, an in-depth index could be created for each of the 50 states and be just as big a project. Especially as reforms gain popularity across the country, analysing their impact at the local, state, and federal level becomes not just increasingly interesting but increasingly complex.

Looking forward, how do you see this index shaping up, and what are your hopes with the work that you are doing with it? 

Steph Scaglia: In the future, I’m excited to see how the numbers, which the index provides a comprehensive summary of, will continue to compare against our systems-level analyses. RepresentWomen has been championing ranked choice voting and multi-member districts from the start, two reforms that have been linked to increases in women’s representation in governance both in the US and in other countries. We’ve expanded our research over the years and recently found that a twin-track approach, which combines systems-level changes with candidate-focussed support, is a much more effective route to achieving gender-balanced governance in our lifetimes. 

This interview is part of our ongoing series that aims to understand the work being done by different initiatives working to close the gender gaps in politics in different parts of the world. The interviews are not meant to be an endorsement of any individual, initiative or political viewpoint.

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At #WomenLead, we interviewed Shevika M, the founder of Kuviraa, about why she felt the need to launch the Ambassadors program and how she went about it. 

In a written interview, Shevika shares with us why she thinks we need to start discussing politics with adolescents and young adults from an early age, the hesitance of schools to discuss politics, and her fear that young people today know more about political movements in other parts of the world but little about politics in their own backyard. Read on: 

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What was your motivation/inspiration behind launching the Summer Ambassadors Program at Kuviraa?

Shevika M: In the past two years, we partnered with schools and NGOs to conduct workshops for young women but we faced resistance to discussing politics with young girls. Our partners would say that we could discuss “policy” but not “politics”. 

This is, of course, not surprising. My experience has shown that schools avoid discussing politics, and so do many parents. This is something that keeps coming up time and again in all my work at Kuviraa. 

In fact, we have just concluded a study in partnership with UCLA’s Luskin School of Public Affairs - it shows a consistent disparity in political interest, engagement and career aspirations between young boys and girls in India.

This is where the idea really came from - I wanted to create a safe space for young girls to talk about politics without being judged or trolled (even “cancelled”). I envisioned the Ambassadors program as this space where young women have the opportunity to meet politicians, ask questions and discuss their point of view without fear. I believe that these spaces are very important for us to have a healthy democracy where young girls can engage with politics and exercise their rights as citizens. 

Why is such a program/talking to young women about politics important? Why do we need an initiative like this? 

We are seeing a generation of young Indians who grow up caring about Black Lives Matter more than local issues that impact the lives of fellow Indians in their city and country. 

Indian schools through their civics curriculum and classroom activities restrict discussions to theoretical issues and children do not have the opportunities to interact with real politicians or talk about issues such as gender or disabilities in politics. 

When I started Kuviraa two years ago, I approached several schools across the country and they were all hesitant to discuss politics, and barring a few exceptions, most were opposed to the idea of bringing politicians to speak to their students. Some of them were worried that the parents would have issues if we discussed politics. Others were worried that it might make them come across as partisan. 

Unfortunately, we do not have too many organizations that create that space for young adults, and young girls in particular are sort of “shielded” from politics. I believe that we should start young to avoid building/reinforcing gendered stereotypes about politics. 

What was the highlight of the program for you? 

We ran a “campaign simulation” inspired by the high school program run by Running Start in the US, where participants were asked to form political parties, and design election campaigns for a mock district - this part of the program was the highlight for me.

Participants were divided into three groups and they came up with their party names, logos, fundraising pitches and campaign ads. We invited a few politicians to talk about how they design campaigns and share their learnings with the participants. The idea of 15-year-old girls thinking of running for elections and campaigning for what they thought was important was really powerful for me.

(For those who’d like, all the campaign ads from the Ambassador program are available here.)

What have been some of the biggest learning(s) for you from the Ambassadors program?

My biggest learning is that we need to keep doing more of this. The participants spoke about how before this program they did not have a platform to discuss politics in a peer group or talk about issues such as gender and disabilities in politics. This was the first time many of the participants were interacting with politicians and could ask them questions that had an impact on them.

One of the participants also spoke about how politics seems less complicated to her after the fellowship, which was a big win for me.

How do you plan to take this work forward?

India’s next general election is less than a year away – politics will be centrestage in many conversations: from campaign trails, newsrooms, social media to drawing rooms.  My goal is a humble one - in the run-up to this election, I’d like Kuviraa to build a community of 100 Ambassadors, many of them will be first-time voters, to be politically aware, engaged and who can encourage their peers to discuss politics.

This interview is part of our ongoing series that aims to understand the work being done by different initiatives working to close the gender gaps in politics in different parts of the world. The interviews are not meant to be an endorsement of any individual, initiative or political viewpoint.

It’s not just the office of governor where progress on representation has been made.

In 1991, there were only 21 women elected to the Chamber of Deputies (the Lower House of the National Congress) and two women to the Senate (the Upper House). By 2018, the country had achieved parity at the national level. 

How did the country manage this feat? 

To understand this better, #WomenLead spoke with Georgina De la Fuente, Senior Advisor at Instituto Nacional Electoral (INE), the country’s electoral management authority, who shared the range of reforms brought in to ensure equal participation and representation of women in politics. 

This interview was first published in Ms. Magazine under the title ‘“Rules Matter”: What Mexico’s Journey of Achieving Parity in Its Politics Shows the World’

The INE has played its part, but this remarkable progress has been possible because of the grassroots work of feminist organizations, push for reform from women in politics, and legislative reforms, De la Fuente told #WomenLead.

“This really is collective work: from committed leadership, political parties that are integrated in the decision making, legislative action, and feminist groups and women legislators pushing for legislative action. In general, electoral management bodies, and the conviction of their leadership have a decisive role in implementing changes that will favour women, but there is no substitute for legislative action,” asserted De la Fuente. 

Find edited excerpts from the conversation below:

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Q: How was the experience of the recent election in Mexico? Could you share some highlights about the participation of women in the electoral process, and their representation in Mexican politics?

Georgina De la Fuente: It was the largest election in Mexican history in terms of the number of positions up for grabs, including the 500 members of our lower house of Congress, and 21,000 positions at the local level. But this election was also remarkable because of the various novelties in terms of the participation of women and of other disadvantaged groups.

For the first time, we established a rule for gender parity at the gubernatorial level. 15 states across the country were electing governors, and INE mandated that parties register at least seven female candidates. Consequently, we had a record 53 women running for governors, alongside nearly 70,000 women running for other local posts, making up 51% of all candidates running for local office.

Six women were elected to head their states, which is quite remarkable, because we have only had seven women governors in our entire history. So, this is very good news, and a huge step forward. 

At the federal level, we had over 1,800 women running for a seat in the Chamber of Deputies, making up almost 54% of all candidates, a record number.

Additionally, we also enacted affirmative actions in favor of other traditionally disadvantaged and underrepresented groups, namely, indigenous peoples, people of African descent, people with disabilities, LGBTQI+ persons, migrants, with gender parity cutting across them all. We had nearly 900 candidates running who identified as part of these communities, of which 62% were women, making this the most diverse and inclusive electoral process in our history. 

We're still waiting for the final numbers - we have a very complex formula of assigning seats - but we can expect at least 49% of women making it to the lower house of Congress. That's definitely good news!

Q: What are some steps that helped Mexico reach this place of parity in its politics? 

Georgina De la Fuente: Mexico transitioned from a system of quotas in the early 2000s into gender parity in 2014 as a result of a constitutional reform that obligates political parties to register candidate lists with gender parity, and also prohibits them from sending female candidates from districts where the party is likely to lose. 

Additionally, the reform mandates that parties alternate candidates by gender from top to bottom of lists of proportional representation, ensuring “vertical parity”. This ensures that political parties wouldn't cover the requirement of 50 percent by placing women on the bottom spots of their lists. 

These new rules have guaranteed that a lot more women are elected to public office across levels.

After our 2015 midterm election, the first election where these rules came into play, we learnt that parity on candidate lists does not necessarily lead to parity among those elected. In that election, approximately 38 percent women were elected, which was still quite low. Therefore, INE decided to implement additional affirmative actions. This year, we had more women register as candidates (even beyond the mandated 50%), and that would eventually result in more women actually getting elected. 

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Q: All this sounds remarkable, especially because most of this has happened only in the last couple of decades. Could you share the role that the election management authority (INE) has played in pushing for parity in politics? 

Georgina De la Fuente: INE has played a key role in ensuring the effective exercise of citizens’ and particularly women's political and electoral rights. But this wouldn't even be possible without legislative action in the matter, I believe. 

INE can only operate within an established legal framework, right? And every one of its decisions can be challenged at the electoral court, either by citizens or by a political party. 

As more and more women have gained access to decision making positions and seats in Congress, they have also been able to gather the necessary support from their male counterparts to pass legislation that addresses the historical underrepresentation of women. The outgoing legislature, for instance, is made up of 48% women in the lower house and 49% women in the Senate. And it was this Congress that passed the law which is known as “Parity In Everything”. 

This law mandates gender parity in all three branches of government at all levels - the municipal, local and federal level, and also in different institutions and independent bodies in public administration. For instance, at INE our top decision-making body is made up of 11 members - six men and five women. 

As more women have gained seats at the table, they have been able to push for this, and it's been them, and the feminist movements, and other NGOs and activists that have pushed for all these reforms across time. In 2020, they were able to gain support of their male colleagues to pass legal reform on violence against women in politics. They argued that formal representation is only effective to the point of increasing the number of seats held by women. But this does not address the attacks, the abuse, the unequal conditions in which women compete. This reform recognizes political violence against women for reasons of gender as an offense, and it includes harassment, assault in person or online, and even in the media. 

Seeing all these changes at the legislative level, at INE, we began implementing changes to guard our legislation. For instance, after the constitutional reform in 2014, we set up a gender equality and non-discrimination unit to help us implement all these changes, not only in the electoral process, but within the institutions as well.

Q: Based on your experience in Mexico, what kind of roles would you suggest election commissions should play in improving parity in politics around the world? 

Georgina De la Fuente: In general, what election commissions can do is build networks and communities with civil society groups and feminist groups, and also with experts and academic institutions, and build a community where all players are involved in the electoral process. That is key in creating and building the trust needed to implement all these changes that generally generate so much resistance. INE has been a space where academic institutions, civil society have come together, and that has been key. 

But nothing really replaces legislative action. What INE has effectively done is materialize the legislative advances, which have been victories of feminist groups and women.

For example, we have a rule that prohibits parties from sending women to losing districts as candidates, but the law only goes so far, right? What we have effectively done is develop methodologies and models that help us verify compliance and create systems that can discourage or prohibit parties from not complying. 

Or, for instance, the latest reform on violence against women in politics established that parties cannot discriminate against women in the use of their resources and public funding. We have designed and implemented methodologies to help us apply the law effectively to oversee compliance in a way that is fair to all players.

Obviously, this wouldn't be possible without the firm commitment of our leadership, and of course, our female members. Additionally, political parties are part of the decision-making process at INE - they sit at every table where decisions are made. They don’t have a vote but they have a say in all that is discussed.

So, we have commitment at the top, we have transparency at every step of the way, in every single decision. In general, electoral commissions or electoral management bodies, and the conviction of their leadership, have a decisive role in implementing changes that will favor women.

But there is no substitute for legislative action, and that's a key element that we cannot neglect.

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Q: When parity is achieved through quotas and other reforms, as it has in Mexico, what are some challenges that emerge? Have you noticed any resistance and backlash? What can be done to mitigate these? 

Georgina De la Fuente: Any change that challenges preconceived notions about gender doesn’t go by without resistance, particularly from political parties. In fact, there are very few decisions by INE that have not been challenged at the electoral court. This is quite natural: political parties will seldom agree without at least a little resistance to regulations regarding the way they operate and make decisions. They don't want to be told what to do. 

What has been most alarming is the increase in violence against women as more of them take office. This past election cycle, we know of at least 21 female candidates killed during the campaign, mostly at the local level. There’s also sexism, insults, discrimination, threats, physical violence - perpetrated by male candidates, by the media, even by citizens, particularly through social media. 

While the Electoral Commission cannot do the job of law enforcement, we can set up mechanisms so that women can file complaints. And we can either address them directly, or set up cautionary measures until the responsible institution takes up the case and investigates, and issues a ruling. It is important that we also follow up on every single complaint, even if we don’t have the legal authority to address them. And that’s what we do. 

Our plenary sessions are public with all the political parties present. Transparency is key: from making these complaints public, to addressing them in public and following up on them in public. 

We've also made efforts in terms of communication about what women can do if they are subjected to different types of violence. We have a hotline - our complaints committee is practically in permanent session during campaigns addressing these issues. We've set up close partnerships with social media companies to help us spread the word on the tools available to female candidates, and also to monitor content that can adversely affect and threaten women’s participation in the political process.

We also provide training and information on these issues to women within political parties. We work with media networks to develop recommendations for covering electoral campaigns in a way that is free of discrimination and sexism so that they do not reproduce gender stereotypes and violence against women. 

Certainly, it is very difficult to change attitudes against women in politics, but there are tools available to electoral management bodies to address these issues, and to develop partnerships with different stakeholders that can help in ultimately mitigating these threats faced by women on the campaign trail.

Q: What is your key takeaway from the entire process, or rather, what is it that one can learn from the Mexican experience when it comes to improving women’s representation in politics? 

Georgina De la Fuente: I think this idea that “rules matter”. Women are not going to organically “just advance themselves” - we don’t live in societies where that happens. Setting up rules is important. Rules do matter. Rules can guarantee that women are able to exercise their rights like anyone else. Rules do make a difference.

Follow Georgina De la Fuente on Twitter

Read Next: Why women’s presence in political parties is crucial to closing the political gender gap

#WomenLead Conversations is a series of interviews with leading experts who help us better understand the world of women in politics. If you’d like to recommend someone whom we should interview, please write to us at: womenlead.project@gmail.com.

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Sangeeta thought streetlights would be a good thing, and offered her support. But the councillor was a woman, and the story didn’t stop there. She got Sangeeta to work actively with her on other local issues, and in 2013, even encouraged her to join a political party.

When Sangeeta was interviewed as part of a research investigation conducted by Tanushree Goyal, Sangeeta recounted how she went on to become the head of her party’s women’s wing in the constituency. Sangeeta’s journey, of being propelled into party politics by a fellow woman leader, is not an exception. Rather, it’s the typical route for several women who join party politics in India, Goyal told #WomenLead in a virtual conversation last month. 

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Goyal is an academy scholar at the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies, Harvard University. Her research focuses on women’s under-representation across political levels in India, and how recognizing the inter-linked nature of women’s exclusion is important to addressing this gap. 

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#WomenLead Conversations is a series of interviews with leading experts who help us better understand the world of women in politics. Subscribe to #WomenLead, a one-of-its-kind weekly newsletter that brings you the most important and exciting updates about women in politics from around the world.

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Odds were stacked against Padmawathi when she became the sarpanch (elected head) of her village in the Krishna district of Andhra Pradesh, India. Coming from a scheduled caste community, she came to office with a pretty clear agenda: she wanted to help women overcome the many challenges they faced in their everyday lives. 

Padmawathi’s exemplary work to empower women in her village now finds mention in a recent book by US academic Rachel Brulé. One of her innovations was to intervene in marriage negotiations, nudging parents to give daughters a share in land inheritance instead of monetary dowry. She began keeping marriage records of all women in her office, even if they were moving out after their wedding.

In doing so, Brulé says, Padmawathi was actively pushing back against established norms, where as soon as women are married, they become the property of their husband’s family. “Women who have experienced some kind of dispossession in their lives are often the most powerful advocates for other women,” Brulé tells #WomenLead.

Brulé, an assistant professor of Global Development Policy at Boston University, met Padmawathi during research for her book Women, Power, and Property: the Paradox of Gender Equality Laws in India released in October. The book documents Brulé’s research where she explores the links between political representation and economic empowerment.

In a virtual interview, Brulé tells #WomenLead that she got into investigating this while exploring the broader question of how to undercut “inegalitarian social conventions”. While looking at various Indian laws, Brulé chanced upon land reforms, and when she read the Hindu Succession Act, she found herself saying, “What a beautiful law and idea!”

As a political scientist, Brulé knew that when it comes to property rights, not just economics, but power is at stake too. This is how she got into exploring how these rights are negotiated, and how access to property rights could be broadened.

Her research, which uses Indian government data, shows that improved political representation of women ensures enforcement of their economic rights, but this also leads to backlash. Caste continues to play a role in these negotiations: women from the highest caste groups find it easier to claim property rights when they get political representation, Brulé finds.

In a conversation on women’s political representation, Brulé shares her apprehension about potentially “greater resistance to women’s reservations - not less” in the near future, “unless something changes”, such as a disruption in women’s shrinking labour force participation. 

Here are some edited excerpts from the full conversation: 

Q: Your research shows that improved political representation of women (owing to political quotas) leads to improved economic - especially property - rights for women in India. How is this relationship impacted by caste? Does it hold true across caste groups, or does the caste of the women elected make a difference?

Rachel Brulé:  I analysed data from the National Council of Applied Economic Research (NCAER)’s rural economic and demographic survey, 2006 to 2009. 

I found the strongest positive relationship between political representation and the ability to claim property rights amongst the relatively advantaged castes...there's a nine to 10 percentage point improvement in the likelihood that women will inherit land, if they're from these forward castes, conditional on having a female gatekeeper (a female pradhan or sarpanch).

But these are also the groups that see the strongest backlash. When gender-equal property rights are introduced, in addition to a woman elected leader, we see a decline of somewhere between 21 and 24 percentage points in the probability that women from forward castes will inherit any land. And that's significant at the 99% confidence intervals. 

So that's a really robust statistical relationship, and we see something similar but slightly less strong statistically for other backward castes (OBCs). 

We see something different with members of scheduled castes. For these groups, there's actually a negative relationship between claims to even symbolic property rights and female representation. So there, even the claim of symbolic property rights results in backlash.

To summarize that would be to say, we see backlash to female representation as a channel to claim property, inheritance rights across caste. But it's the strongest, and the kind of most statistically robust amongst the forward castes. 

When we look back at Irma Clots-Figueras’ 2011 research on women in state legislatures, she found that among women legislators, women coming from scheduled caste and scheduled tribe backgrounds were much more likely to promote legislation that favours women. They are strong proponents of these amendments to the Hindu Succession Act, and to similar kinds of gender progressive laws. And we don't see that kind of relationship/support from forward caste women.

It does seem like the most traditionally dispossessed women are the ones who are the strongest advocates for radical progressive change.

And I see something similar in my research (ongoing with Aliz Tóth). So, caste matters. And, certain women are more committed to these broader projects of egalitarian change than others. We could do more to advance the voices and the influence of the most disadvantaged women for everyone's benefit.

To me, trying to think about it all together, how do we think about the relationship between the caste system, political representation and property.  When we look early in the pre-independence days across these Dalit movements, particularly in southern and western India, they understood this struggle for equality to require overturning both caste and gender hierarchies.

To me, that is the broader project that we really need. Without equality in one domain, it's almost impossible to reach equality in the other domain. 

Q: How does the impact of political quotas for women vary by different states? Did you find a north-south/east-west divide? 

Rachel Brulé: It's a bit too soon to answer that. This particular set of reforms to equalize property rights came from the South, so the first states - Kerala, Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu and Karnataka...reforms were happening from the late 70s to the mid 90s, in many cases before we had reservations for women in local politics. Nationally, we see reform (on inheritance rights) only as of 2005. 

So, we have a longer time period to look at how reforms are working in the south, but we do see evidence of women's inheritance when they have this bargaining power across the country. This isn't just a story about what's happening in the south, but I would say it's a question to keep returning to, I think it will take one or two generations to really have a clear sense of what the net impact would be of these reforms. 

Q: In 1992, India mandated that one-third of those elected at the local level be women. Several states have even gone on to increase that quota. As we saw with Padmawathi’s example, once elected, many women are working actively to make the lives of women better.

How do we quantify the scale of the impact that political quotas are creating? 

Rachel Brulé: The first Minister of Panchayati Raj, Mani Shankar Aiyar, had told me during a conversation for my book, “It's important to remember that there are more women in elected office in India than anywhere else in the world, and in fact, probably more than the rest of the world combined.”

I don't know how you can’t think about that as a revolution...the scale of change is massive. And I think we have to keep paying attention to what’s happening. 

Q: But we don’t see that revolution translating to increased representation at the state and national level. If political quotas lead to improved lives for women at the local level, could this act as a disincentive for (our very patriarchal political system) introducing similar quotas at the state and central levels? 

Rachel Brulé: We're still in the early days of female representation. But at this point, I think the most consistent response we see is a backlash - a sense of pushback - against attempts to legislate reservations for women at higher levels of office, at the state or national parliament. 

What we are seeing, there is this reigning popular discourse about proxy politics about the Sarpanch-pati or Pradhan-pati (husband of a village head), and this was particularly widespread in the run up to the first round of reserved seats for women.  

This was sort of men telling themselves, “We don’t need to worry too much, because we are still going to be in control. We can symbolically give away these seats to women, we know it’s going to be their brothers/husbands/fathers who are going to be pulling the strings.”

What we see from this early experience in local governance for women is that women really are effective political agents, and they really are revolutionizing how politics works at the local level. 

But I imagine that we are going to see greater resistance to women’s reservations - not less - in the near future unless something changes. 

And the place where we see this resistance even more powerfully, is in women’s entry into the labour force. The female labor force is actually declining across the country - not rising - despite the fact that in terms of education, women have parity with men, and in some cases even better levels of education than men.

So, this really is about the exit of excellent women from the labour force, and from the political spectrum as a result of resistance to a systemic altering of power relations. 

Q: So, what could be a way forward? Are there examples from around the world we could learn from?

Rachel Brulé: Ideally, what we need is more work to collectively mobilize not just women, but also men in support of greater equality. If I were to look outside of India, I think Scandinavia presents the most hopeful case. And there, if we go back 100 years, we saw radical activism, jump started by women but with great support from men as well. 

They started early on, from giving women access, paid maternity leave, and paternity leave, and getting men to take paternity leave - basically, changing relationships within the household.

And that requires putting money into families, not just into individuals who can scale the corporate ladder. I think it’s a different way of investing in egalitarian social systems that can lead to a more egalitarian politics. 

Though of course, the direction can go either way - egalitarian politics can help us build more egalitarian social and economic systems. 

When we try to think of how we can create incremental change, one possible way is to see how we can build female mentorship networks among elected female politicians. If we can start to create small scale networks that enable women within them to flourish, and then enable women to actually start to move up the ladder of politics, and to really bring like meaningful agendas for change into the policy world as they go.

If women can help support other women, in all processes within and outside the household, we can provide incredible resources for each other to think about solutions to various challenges as they emerge on a daily basis.

Follow Rachel Brulé on Twitter.

Subscribe to #WomenLead, a one-of-its-kind weekly newsletter that brings you the most important and exciting updates about women in politics from around the world.

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#WomenLead Conversations is a series of interviews with leading experts who help us better understand the world of women in politics. If you’d like to recommend someone whom we should interview, please write to us at: womenlead.project@gmail.com.