Gender Quotas for Elective Office
By 2006, forty countries had adopted some form of quota system, guaranteeing a minimum number of women in elected office. Scandinavian countries were at the forefront of using gender quotas for women in elected office, with legislation enacted in the 1970s and 1980s. Even before the quota legislation, women occupied about 20-30 percent of the seats in Scandinavian parliaments, the highest percentage in the world. In Finland, for example, the law requires that at least 40 percent of each sex should be represented in decision-making bodies.
Argentina was the first South American country to adopt gender quotas, now requiring 30 percent of women on electoral lists. By the 1990s, eleven other Latin American countries had adopted laws requiring between 20 and 40 percent of women’s participation in national elections.
By 2022, Rwanda topped the list of countries with female participation in parliament. Rwanda has been the most ambitious of African countries to bring women into elected office. The 1994 genocide saw roughly 800,000 Tutsi and Hutu tribesmen killed, with organized violence, including the systematic raping of Tutsi women. Part of the reason that so many women are in the parliament is because of the reaction against the genocide, but also because of the policies of President Paul Kagame, who backed ambitious policies of gender equality. In 2003, the Rwandan constitution was amended to require that 30 percent of the parliament and cabinet seats be reserved for women.
The International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (IDEA) maintains a database of countries that have gender quotas. In 2022, some 132 countries have established some baseline of gender equality for representation in elected office. Some of the quotas aim to have women constituting a “critical minority” of 30 or 40 percent; some countries have adopted a quota that states that neither gender may occupy more than 60 percent nor less than 40 percent of the legislative seats.
The United States has no quota system to ensure women’s participation at any level of politics. At the same time, there are no formal or legal barriers preventing women from participating.
Sources: On quotas, see Drude Dahlerup, Women, Quotas and Politics (London: Routledge, 2006), and the Quota Project, a global database on quotas for women, http://www.quotaproject.org; Lenita Freidenvall, “Women’s Political Representation and Gender Quotas – The Swedish Case,” Department of Political Science, Stockholm University (2003), www.statsvet.su.se/quotas; An Act on Equality between Women and Men (609/86) (1987), as amended in 1995. Finnish Institute of Occupational Health, “Overview of Gender Equality Issues in Finland.” From Socrates Grundtvig website, http://www.gender-equality.webinfo.lt/results/finland.htm; Tricia Gray, “Electoral Gender Quotas: Lessons from Argentina and Chile,” Bulletin of Latin American Research 22 (1) (2003), 52-78 at 54, http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1470-9856.00064/pdf; Stephanie McCrummen, “Women Run the Show in a Recovering Rwanda,” Washington Post, October 27, 2008; “Gender Quotas Database,” International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (IDEA), together with the Inter-Parliamentary Union, and the University of Stockholm, https://www.idea.int/data-tools/data/gender-quotas/country-overview.
