Australia leads from the front in a month of electoral gains, and more: All the important updates about women in politics from May
#WomenLead (Issue 162): Your monthly round-up on women in politics
Hello, and welcome to the May 2025 edition of #WomenLead!
Last week, #WomenLead turned five. Thanks a lot for all your messages of support and celebration! And ICYMI, to mark the occasion, we decided to honour some of our most outlandish, eye-rolling, and jaw-dropping moments that this publication has chronicled across these years. Available here:
In this edition, we bring you updates from Albania, Australia, India, Kenya, the Netherlands, Portugal, Singapore, and more. And we are very glad to report that women’s representation has seen improvements in several elections held last month. We hope you’ll like reading this edition. In case you missed last month’s wrap, it is available here.
Election Watch
Tracking women among candidates and winners
🇦🇺 AUSTRALIA: Australia’s incoming federal parliament will have the highest representation of women ever. There are 69 women among the new batch of 150 MPs elected to the House of Representatives, up from 58 in the previous polls. The Labor Party – 56 percent of whose newly elected MPs are women – has helped drive this progress. The elected MPs include Charlotte Walker, who at 21 years, becomes the youngest-ever woman MP. The election brought back Anthony Albanese to power for a second term, and his new cabinet includes 12 women and 11 men.
Read more: ‘A big shift’: Australia has elected its most diverse parliament. What impact will it have?, The Guardian
🇦🇱 ALBANIA: An estimated 50 women will be part of Albania’s newly elected parliament, comprising 35 percent of all members, Politiko reported. This will be a small improvement compared to the previous legislature (33 percent).
🇸🇬 SINGAPORE: Thirty-one women were elected to Singapore’s 97-member parliament in elections held in May, a three-percentage-point improvement compared to the previous election of 2020. This was also an election that had seen an increase in the number and share of women who contested the polls – 53 women contested the election this year, comprising a quarter of all candidates, an improvement from the previous election when their combined share was 20 percent.
🇵🇹 PORTUGAL: Portugal, which held a snap election in May (and its third in as many years), elected 76 women MPs, the same number as last year, Sul Informação reported. Together, they comprise a third of all MPs.
🔮 WATCH OUT FOR: On Tuesday, South Koreans will vote for a new President in a snap election necessitated by the impeachment of Yoon Suk Keol. Presidential elections have been very gendered in the country in recent years. There are notes of discontent among women voters this time around, BBC has reported. In fact, for the first time in 18 years, there is no woman running to be president. We’ll be tracking those results closely over the next few days.
Inside the Ranks
Examining the space for women’s participation within political parties
In the Netherlands, delegates of the political party Staatkundig Gereformeerde Partij (the SGP), “overwhelmingly rejected a motion to enshrine in the party’s core statutes that women are welcome to hold political or leadership positions”, as per a report in the NL Times. The SGP, a conservative political party, continues to maintain a stance to limit women’s participation.
Its founding regulations state that women in politics are acting “in conflict with their calling”. Following court orders, the party had to amend its statutes in 2013 to allow women to run for political office (they were previously barred from doing so). The following year, Lilian Janse, became the first woman to hold office for the party when she joined her local city council. It was Janse and her local chapter that introduced this proposal. However, it was voted down by 299 party delegates, against 53 in favour.
Read more in this full report in The NL Times.
But more encouragingly, some change is brewing in another conservative party elsewhere. In India, the Indian Union Muslim League (IUML), a party based primarily in the southern state of Kerala, has finally welcomed women in its ranks. The party recently appointed two women – Jayanthi Rajan and Fathima Muzaffer – to its national leadership, a first in its 75-year-old history. Notably, Rajan hails from the Dalit community. The move is being seen as an attempt to “project a more progressive image amid criticism about the poor representation of women in Kerala politics”, as per a report in ThePrint. Another report in The New Indian Express notes that while women leaders had been demanding their place in the decision-making bodies of the party, the party had thus far refused to give in to the demand, “fearing opposition from the orthodox sections in the community” and the latest development points to a shift in the party’s approach.
In Kenya, political parties must ensure that no more than two-thirds of their total members should come from the same gender. This also applies to their internal leadership. And yet how many parties are led by women in the country? Only nine, of the total 91. Some good principles, but many more miles to go. Read more in this report in Daily Nation.
Reading List
The more one learns, there’s only more to learn
“Nigeria: Can a gender bill bring political inclusion”: DW
“Mark Carney’s cabinet: A course correction on gender, but there’s more work ahead”: The Conversation
“Power and parity: Women in African political positions”: Centre for Strategic and International Studies
“[Ghana’s] Female MPs express frustration over low representation despite Affirmative Action law”: 3News
“Gender power play [in India]”: The Hindu
“How a Gen Z gender divide is reshaping democracy”: Reuters
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