Ireland’s quota yields results, Africa gets two firsts: All the important updates about women in politics from December
#WomenLead (Issue 157): Your monthly round-up on women in politics
Hello, and welcome to the first edition of #WomenLead for 2025 where we will look at developments from December 2024!
First of all, a very happy new year to all our wonderful readers. We hope you all had a warm, wonderful and joyful start to the new year. 🥳🥳
The “super” year of elections is behind us – 2024 indeed saw so many elections around the world and through the year. But despite presenting a golden opportunity for the world to move forward on women’s political representation, it turned out to be anything but a super year. We are really sorry – that’s clearly not the best news to begin the year with (and we are not pleased to be doing it this way, either).
Even as the results of some of the December elections are still coming in, the world made little progress in 2024 – while women’s parliamentary representation stood at 26.9 percent at the beginning of the year, it stood right there by December 2024, data from the Inter Parliamentary Union (IPU) shows. For a couple of years now, IPU’s annual reports have flagged slowing progress, and the promise that 2024 held, remained unfulfilled.
Will 2025 be different? We hold on to hope.
In this edition, we bring you updates from Ghana, Iceland, India, Ireland, Namibia and more. In case you missed any of our previous editions, you will find them all here.
Election Watch
Tracking women among candidates and winners
🇬🇭 GHANA: Forty women were elected to Ghana’s parliament in December’s election. Together they will comprise 14.8 percent of all MPs, an analysis by Bauer and Darkwah published in The Conversation shows. This will be only a marginal increase from the previous polls, when women’s share was 14.5 percent. Women comprised a relatively smaller share of candidates in the 2024 polls (12.8 percent) versus the previous election (13.8 percent).
“This won’t change much until the west African nation addresses certain stumbling blocks, notably Ghana’s single member district or “first past the post” electoral system and its lack of a gender quota for parliament,” argue the authors. Read more here. (Ghana also got its first female vice president; more on that in a bit.)
🇮🇸 ICELAND: Women comprised 46 percent of the winners in Iceland’s parliamentary polls held at the end of November, data from the IPU shows. While this is a small decline compared to the previous share of 47.6 percent, Iceland remains a remarkable example – along with its Nordic counterparts – of a country that has achieved high representation of women consistently without any mandatory gender quotas, because political parties in the country have adopted internal quotas voluntarily. Women comprised 47.1 percent of all candidates in the 2024 polls.
🇮🇪 IRELAND: In late November 2024, Ireland held an important parliamentary election – this was the first time when political parties were required to ensure that women comprise a minimum of 40 percent of candidates. The quota law had existed since 2012, but the quota limit has now been increased from 30 percent to 40 percent. It resulted in the highest representation of women among candidates. The share of women who were finally elected was 25.3 percent, an improvement over the previous share of 22.5 percent. Hoping that it is only an upward journey from here!
Leaders
Updates about women leading countries, states and movements
Just as 2024 was not the best year for women’s parliamentary representation, it was also a year with limited progress on women’s leadership at the very top. Only five women were elected in direct presidential elections in 2024, UN Women reported last month.
Netumbo Nandi-Ndaitwah is among those five, becoming the first woman to occupy the position of Namibia’s President. She was the incumbent Vice President before winning the election to the top office. Read more about her in this profile in the BBC.
Naana Jane Opoku-Agyemang was elected as Ghana’s Vice President after last month’s parliamentary polls. This is the first time a woman has been elected to the position in the country. But it is not the first time Opoku-Agyemang has made history – she previously became the first woman to become Vice Chancellor of a public university in the country, and also the first to be the Minister of Education.
Naana Jane Opoku-Agyemang during the 2024 election campaign. Image from social media platform x/@NJOAgyemang
“The victory is for all of us, but especially for our daughters, for our youth, for our women... I know this is a big responsibility... My job was to open the door, and it doesn’t end there. Actually, that is where the work begins. I will hold the door open.”
Policy Watch
Because policy shifts matter
In February 2013, the Indian Parliament passed the historic Sexual Harassment of Women at the Workplace (Prevention, Prohibition and Redressal) Act, 2013, (commonly referred to as the POSH Act) to protect “against sexual harassment of women at [the] workplace and for the prevention and redressal of complaints of sexual harassment”. The act adopts a wide definition of what constitutes sexual harassment, as well as of the workplace.
However, do political parties come under its mandate?
That was the question that a litigant brought to the attention of India’s Supreme Court in December. The petitioner wanted that the law be interpreted to include political parties, and that they be directed to constitute the Internal Complaints Committees (ICC) as envisaged under the law. “Failure to mandate the compliance of POSH Act for political parties will dissuade able female politicians from entering politics, ultimately compromising their right to equal representation and an unbiased and holistic governance of the country,” the PIL argued.
The Court directed the petitioner to reach out to the Election Commission (the authority responsible for administering elections in India) instead. But even if the appeal didn’t lead to any direction, it surely generated some conversation on the matter. Whether or not the law can technically apply to political parties remains a moot question for now, but there is ample evidence to show that women politicians face some very toxic and sexist behaviour at their workplaces. And it’s high time political parties took it seriously. But with political parties and spaces predominantly occupied by men, it remains to be seen who will bell this cat.
Reading List
The more one learns, there’s only more to learn
“Women in politics: Three MPs on the ups and downs of being in the public eye”: The Straits Times
“Fighting for change: why the road to parliament is still rocky for women across Africa”: The Guardian
“Women at the forefront of South Korea's martial law protests”: DW
“Women in Baltic politics and political leadership”: Foreign Policy Research Institute
“‘The women are talking!’ Up close and personal with women world leaders at the 2024 Reykjavík Global Forum”: Ms
“The 119th Congress: Some history makers, but fewer women overall”: The 19th
Community Watch
A quick round-up from the community working at the intersection of gender x politics
To celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the journal ‘Politics & Gender’, its editorial team is organizing a two-day conference at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, USA, on May 28-29, 2025. They have opened the call for participation for the same.
See their page to learn more and to apply.
That’s a wrap for this December 2024! Liked this edition? Then press the ❤️ button and show us some love! And please, please do share this with a friend or on your social media accounts. There’s frankly nothing quite like reader love and endorsement, so please keep it coming! Thank you!
Disclaimer: #WomenLead is a non-partisan newsletter produced in a personal capacity, and does not reflect any institutional affiliation/opinion. In case of any questions, please drop in a message at womenlead.project@gmail.com.