Has Democracy Failed Women?

It's been seven years since Drude Dahlerup’s Has Democracy Failed Women? challenged us to examine the gap between democracy’s ideals and its realities. Reflect with us on where we stand and what we can do right now to give a more positive answer to this question and find a few references that highlight brilliant feminist initiatives.

Persistent gender inequalities in positions of political power show it: Yes, Democracy has failed women!

From the suffragettes chaining themselves to railings in Britain to the women of the Kasai region marching against colonial rule in the Democratic Republic of Congo, history tells us one thing: women have fought hard for a seat at democracy’s table. A century after winning the right to vote in many countries, women have made undeniable progress. Universal suffrage, legal protections, and increased political participation were milestones. Yet, women remain underrepresented in political power as these numbers show:

● Parliamentary Representation: Women hold just 26.7% of parliamentary seats worldwide (Inter-Parliamentary Union, 2024). In Europe, only one in three members of national parliaments are women (European Institute for Gender Equality).

● Heads of State and Government: Only 26 countries currently have a female head of state (UN Women, 2024; Women’s Power Index, 2025).

● Cabinet Positions: In 81% of global cabinets, men outnumber women (World Economic Forum, 2023).

● The Gender Gap in Politics: At the current rate, closing the global gender gap will take 134 years, and 169 years for the gender gap in politics (Global Gender Gap Report, 2024).

Political participation is about voting, joining a demonstration, but also running for office or joining an interest group. All this demands resources – time, energy, money, and so on. Women continue to earn 77 cents for every dollar earned by men (ILO, 2023) and perform 76% of the world’s unpaid care work (OECD, 2023). Violence against women constitutes another barrier. A 2022 Amnesty International report found that 70% of female politicians have experienced threats or harassment, leading many to leave public office. Online gender-based violence has become a major deterrent for women entering politics, reinforcing democratic exclusion.

Power abuse is ingrained in gender-based violence. It prevents women from reporting sexual violence and harassment, silences victims and deters witnesses and supporters from talking about it further, delays investigations or gets cases dropped altogether. Too often, power is abused to intimidate and bully women at every step of seeking access to justice, brutally compounding what is already a traumatic experience. The film Black Box Diaries includes recordings of police officers admitting to the movie director Shiori Ito that they could not help to arrest the man who raped Ito due to fears of being fired.

What Can Be Done?

We don’t have to start from scratch. Around the world, different strategies have been tested, and we know a few measures that work:

✔ Designing and multiplying participatory and deliberative formats to prioritize diverse women’s voices.

✔ Institutionalizing accountability mechanisms that force decision-makers to engage with women’s concerns.

✔ Strengthening gender quotas through financial and political backing of female candidates.

✔ Criminalizing gender-based political violence to ensure women’s safety in public life.

Women’s political participation and representation needs to be reflected within governments, parliaments, and public spaces to ensure their voices genuinely shape decisions. The challenge isn’t only about increasing numbers; it’s about making sure the political system listens, engages, and responds to women in meaningful ways.

Naivety will not serve well in this endeavour. As far right networks have organised and collected financial gains and translated it into political power, engaging with ideas of hyper-masculinity along the way (watch out for the Ecuadorian elections in April where incumbent Noboa is challenged by Luisa González who could become Ecuadors first female president!), it becomes clear that the fight continues.

Inspiration comes from the Indigenous. In Bolivia, for example, the Bartolina Sisa movement has demonstrated how indigenous women’s organizing shapes policy. In 2009, the Bartolinas coordinated with middle-class feminists to incorporate gender parity into a new constitution, which emerged as one of the most advanced in women’s rights in the world. Today, Bolivia stands out as one of the few countries where women make up approximately 50 percent of lawmakers across all levels of government. As Bolivian women only won the vote in 1953, this achievement is extraordinary. Feminist participatory democracy must take inspiration from such role models by designing deliberative spaces that value diverse forms of expression, not just the dominant modes of political debate.

Fighting for participation and representation alone is not enough—accountability structures must ensure that women’s voices lead to policy outcomes. An interesting idea is put forward by Professor Karen Celis from the Université Libre de Bruxelles and Sarah Childs from University of Edinburgh, who propose to require elected officials to meet with women’s organizations as an official, regular duty. They refer to these types of mechanisms as “moments of forced engagement”—structured encounters where decision-makers must answer to the communities they serve. Institutionalizing these mechanisms—whether through mandatory political reporting to women’s groups or formalized second-encounter accountability processes— could shift power dynamics in politics. This can be linked to official structures, such as women-led observatories for monitoring and evaluating public expenditure through a gender-based analytical perspective.

Men are still the majority in spaces of political power. They have many opportunities to support female struggles. They can and must be allies to change the culture of our deliberations and our governance structures. One thing is sure however, women don’t seem to count on them to get things done.

Sources

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