Foreign Affairs. January-February 2020

JAMILLE BIGIO is a Senior Fellow in the Women and Foreign Policy Program at the

Council on Foreign Relations.

RACHEL VOGELSTEIN is Douglas Dillon Senior Fellow and Director of the Women and

Foreign Policy Program at the Council on Foreign Relations.

January/February 2020 131

Women Under Attack

The Backlash Against Female Politicians

Jamille Bigio and Rachel Vogelstein

I

n recent years, a rising tide of women’s activism has swept across

the world. Online and on the streets, millions of women have raised

their voices and called for action against systemic abuse, harass-

ment, and discrimination. This activism has translated to the ballot box,

with higher numbers of women running for office than ever before.

In 2018, women in war-torn Afghanistan and Iraq brought their

fight for equal rights to the political arena, with unprecedented num-

bers of female candidates running in parliamentary elections: 417 in

Afghanistan and 2,011 in Iraq. From 2005 to 2018, Lebanon saw more

than a 27-fold increase in the number of female parliamentary candi-

dates, from only four to 111. In the United States, over 500 women—

a record number—ran for Congress or for statewide office in 2018.

And this past spring, local elections in Ireland and national elections

in India and Japan featured more female candidates running for office

than in any prior election in those countries.

The result has been more women in power. For the first time in U.S.

history, women hold close to 25 percent of the seats in the House of

Representatives and the Senate. In Brazil, a historic number of female

candidates in the 2018 election produced a 35 percent increase in wom-

en’s representation in state legislatures compared with four years earlier

and a 50 percent improvement in the lower house of the National Con-

gress. In Sri Lanka, following a 2016 electoral quota law that reserved 25

percent of local councils seats for women, 2,000 were elected country-

wide, compared with 82 in 2011. Similarly, in Tunisia, a 2016 law de-

manding the alternation of women and men on political parties’ candidate

lists dramatically increased the number of women in local council