Gender Quotas in Elections
How electoral quotas for women work, why they were adopted, and their impact on women's representation worldwide.
Three Types of Gender Quotas
Gender quotas are rules requiring a minimum proportion of candidates or seats to be held by women (or the underrepresented gender). There are three main types. Constitutional or legislative candidate quotas mandate that a certain percentage of candidates on party lists must be women (common in Latin America and parts of Africa). Reserved seats guarantee women a fixed number of seats in the legislature (common in South Asia and parts of Africa). Voluntary party quotas are adopted by individual parties without legal requirements (common in Scandinavia, where Nordic social-democratic parties pioneered them).
The effectiveness of quotas depends on design details. A law requiring 30 percent female candidates means little if women are placed at the bottom of party lists where they have no realistic chance of being elected. France's parity law requiring parties to field equal numbers of male and female candidates allowed parties to pay financial penalties instead of complying, and some major parties chose to absorb the fines rather than run more women in winnable races. The most effective quotas include placement mandates (requiring women in every other list position, known as the 'zipper' or 'zebra' system) and strong enforcement mechanisms such as rejecting non-compliant lists outright.
