Do gender quotas in elections work?
Supporters of Sierra Leone People's Party during a rally in Siaka Steven Stadium in Freetown. Earlier this year, the country passed a landmark gender quota law, which states that the workforce in any public or private institution must be at least 30 per cent female.
What you need to know:
- There’s a growing consensus among academicians that these quotas “work”.
- However, there is a conundrum as women who are elected in countries with gender quotas are often criticised as being less qualified.
Standing in the scorching afternoon heat, Aminata Bilkisu Kanu took off her sunglasses to wipe away the beads of sweat trickling down her face as she appealed to the crowd of mostly male voters.
“Think ‘women’ when voting in the June 24 elections,” she told them.
“We keep your resources within; the men take them away.”
The 24-year-old single mother was the first woman to run for the national parliament from Mamoi village, part of the Masimera Chiefdom in Port Loko District, located in the conservative north of the country.
Patriarchal culture runs deep in Sierra Leone, but it is even stronger in the north and parts of the east, where customs do not allow for women to become a paramount chief, the traditional name for the district leader.
30 per cent rule
But this election was the first since the country passed a landmark gender quota law earlier this year. The law clearly states that the workforce in any public or private institution must be at least 30 per cent female, and Bilkisu is hoping this will help her shake things up.
“It is very tough for us!” she told The Fuller Project and Foreign Policy.
Ever since they were introduced in modern form in Argentina in 1991, gender quotas for national elections have been criticised by opponents on the grounds that they are non-meritocratic, undemocratic, and nepotistic. But that hasn’t stopped their adoption by the majority of countries in the world, and on June 24, Sierra Leone will become the latest to hold elections with a gender quota in place.
Today, there’s a growing consensus among academics that these quotas “work”. Studies from across the world have shown that, besides putting more women in positions of power, quotas lead to legislatures with higher qualifications and greater diversity in terms of class, age, and experience, and can shift budget priorities from defence spending to education and health care.
“It depends on what ‘works’ means,” said Alice Kang, a University of Nebraska-Lincoln professor who coauthored a cross-national analysis on the effectiveness of gender quotas. “Does having a quota save a country from descending into authoritarianism? No, it doesn’t.
“[But] we found that quotas are perhaps the most impactful thing in terms of explaining why some countries have much higher levels of women’s representation than others. Back in the day, people thought religion, how wealthy a country was, or electoral systems made the difference. Compared to other factors, we found that [gender] quotas were having a significant and large effect.”
Scholars warn that the effectiveness of gender quotas varies widely from country to country, and their success is heavily influenced by factors such as the existence of strong enforcement mechanisms and the political will to implement them.
“The devil is totally in the details,” said Jennifer Piscopo, coeditor of The Impact of Gender Quotas, a book that dives into case studies from Europe, Latin America, Africa, and Asia.
“Most Latin American countries have a proportional representation system, which means that when voters go to the polls, they’re voting for a party list,” she said. “A lot of the first quota laws said parties [had] to nominate 30 per cent women.
“OK, great; so where do parties put their 30 per cent women? They put the women at the bottom 30 per cent of the list. If you’re at the bottom of the list, you’re probably not going to get a seat, because the further down the list you are, the less likely it is that the party won enough seats to get to you.”
Bilkisu was at the bottom of her party’s list. She’s candidate number nine out of 10 in her district for the All People’s Congress, Sierra Leone’s largest opposition party. Sierra Leone also has a proportional representation system; for Bilkisu to go to Parliament, her party had to win 88 per cent of the vote in Port Loko District to gain nine seats, far more than projected.
But Bilkisu remained sanguine.
“The men are warming up to us,” she said. “The turnout is great in my door-to-door campaign. I see a lot of cooperation from them. So there is a chance for me.”
Even in countries where quota laws are considered weak, researchers are finding that they still play a role in empowering women.
In Nepal, researcher Punam Yadav found that political quotas “not only accelerate women’s representation in politics, but also strengthen their position in society. [Quotas] establish women’s credibility, pave the way for future generations and shift the social perception of women’s presence in politics from being an exception to being an entitlement”.
Women who are elected in countries with gender quotas are often criticised as being less qualified than the men they replaced, or for being proxies of powerful men. But recent scholarship has begun to debunk these views.
A 2017 study from Sweden partially titled “The Crisis of the Mediocre Man” found that “far from being at odds with meritocracy, this quota raised the competence of male politicians.” The study said this was the result of the departure of mediocre male leaders who faced a more competitive landscape due to the increased participation of women.
On the nepotism charge, Piscopo says the perception had a lot to do with cherry picking examples.
“OK, maybe there’s a woman who’s the wife of the party boss,” she said. “Well, how many brothers, or sons, of party bosses end up running for office? At certain points, you run out of wives and daughters. There’s not an infinite supply, and you start tapping into networks that you ordinarily wouldn’t be tapping into.”
Parties reluctant to embrace quotas often claim they’re having trouble finding qualified women, Piscopo said, but she attributed this to a lack of political will to find them. She cited the example of Mexico, where women’s groups put out a full-page ad with the names of 1,000 women who were qualified to run for office after some political leaders said they couldn’t find any.
“Remember when Mitt Romney said he had ‘binders full of women’?” Piscopo said, recalling a famous campaign gaffe by the 2012 US presidential candidate.
“I love that quote. We all made fun of Mitt Romney, but actually, if we step back from the inartful phrasing, what he’s saying is civil society organisations made lists of qualified women for his cabinet and turned them over to him.”
Mexico is an example of how creative approaches can strengthen gender quota laws that are initially weak. Early efforts fell far short of reaching the gender quota, partly due to parties placing female candidates in races that were lost causes.
In response, the country’s electoral agency categorised each seat as an easy win, an easy loss, or a competitive race for each political party based on previous results and demanded that female candidates be fielded in equal numbers in each of the three categories. The result is that Mexico now has gender parity in parliament.
Piscopo, Kang, and several other academics said it was especially critical that strong penalties exist for parties that fail to meet quota requirements, such as removing them from the ballot. When countries lack this political will, the number of women in office can remain stubbornly low.
Ghost candidates
In Brazil, which implemented a 30 per cent quota in 1997 but has only 17.7 per cent women in its national parliament today, parties have been accused of promoting “ghost candidates”—submitting women as candidates to meet the quota without actually campaigning for them—sometimes without the women even knowing they’re on the ballot.
In Sierra Leone, a recent report by the Institute of Governance Reform, a civil society group based in Freetown, the capital, states the country is unlikely to hit its goal of electing 30 per cent women, with parties accused of placing female candidates too low on their candidate lists to win.
Meanwhile, the next Parliament of 149 members will include 14 paramount chiefs representing the country’s 14 geographical districts. Elections for the chiefs have already been conducted, and only one woman was elected. In nine of the districts, mostly in the north, women are still barred from becoming paramount chief.
Nemata Majeks-Walker, the founder and head of 50/50, a women’s rights group that advocates gender parity in Sierra Leone, said the passage of the quota was “mere lip service. I don’t feel there is the political will anywhere,” she said.
“I think it is just a show, a mere show. It’s as if the men in Parliament were scared of the women taking their places.”
Bilkisu held out hope that her party would make the changes needed to give women like her a fighting chance.
“I want to encourage my party to amend its constitution in the future so that it will not only give us 30 per cent on paper, but [also] ensure safe seats for women by enshrining the positioning of women at the top of the list,” she said.
“If not, the 30 per cent quota won’t work.”
This story is published in partnership with The Fuller Project and co-published with Foreign Policy
