UN Geneva - Multimedia Newsroom : IPU Press Conference: report on women in parliament

Good afternoon everybody.

Welcome to this Inter Parliamentary Union IPU press conference.

We're here on the eve of International Women's Day on the 8th of March to present our latest findings of women's representation in Parliament.

I'm very happy to be joined by the IPU Secretary General Martin Chung Gong in person, which is a good the silver lining to some of the global disruption that we're seeing because he was able to come in person and also Mariana Mutzenberg, who is one of our gender experts at the IPU.

So without further ado, Secretary General, the floor is yours.

[Other language spoken]

It gives me pleasure, so to speak, to come before the press this afternoon to present the state of women's representation in Parliament in 2025.

I say so to speak because the picture that we are seeing is not very, very bright in the sense that in 2025 we noted stagnation in the women's representation in parliaments as we speak today and the statistics we are publishing today are current for the 1st of January 2025.

And as of that date, women accounted for 27.5% of national parliamentary seats worldwide.

And this records a slight increase of 0.3 percentage points when compared with the data for 2024, if I'm not mistaken.

So there has been a modest increase, but this increase if we look at the past two years has stagnated.

And so we can ask the question whether in this landmark year of 2025, when you had the celebration of 30 years of Beijing, you had the Women, Peace and Security Agenda celebrating its 25th anniversary and even the Inter Parliamentary Union women's movement celebrating 40 years of existence.

Whether the gender we can ask the question whether the gender equality movement is losing steam and it's yielding to the pressure that we have experienced from anti rights movements, people who are really against gender equality.

So it when we we did notice some signs of stagnation a few years ago, we thought this was a passing phenomenon, but we're worried that maybe it has come to stay.

And that is why we think that gender equality and the progress that has been made in women's political emancipation cannot be taken for granted.

We need to be vigilant.

I say this because when we look at parliamentary leadership, there again we have a disquieting picture in the sense that in 2025 women's leadership in of parliaments, that is presiding officers of parliaments, stood at 19.9% of speakers worldwide.

That is some 54 speakers in the world where women in 2024 that percentage was 23.7%.

So we see that there has been a 4% decrease in women's political or parliamentary leadership.

So the picture is very worrying and we need to pay more attention to this and be more vigilant.

Also now when we look at distribution of women's representation in parliaments across the world, the Americas continue to shine the light.

The Americas continue to lead the pack and the statistics we have show that women in Latin America are those that are representing, or rather they account for, the most parliamentary seats held by women globally.

We have 35.6% of parliamentarians in the Americas that are women across chambers and countries, and we are pleased to note also that in this region, four out of the seven countries that have now achieved gender parity or more women in parliament, four of those countries come from the Americas.

Bolivia has not joined the group with Cuba, Mexico and Nicaragua.

The others around the world are Rwanda, Andorra and the United Arab Emirates.

So we want to congratulate the Americas.

They continue to perform above the global average.

The other points that we have made year in year out is that given the fact that women are not in many instances playing on a level playing field with men, we need special measures that would allow also have a critical mass of women in parliament so that they can now begin to perform under their own steam.

And experience again has shown this year that quotas have been a major driver of women's parliamentary representation.

And when we look at the statistics, we see that in those countries that are implementing some form of legislated quota or voluntary quota, women tended to be the number of women or percentage of women being elected to parliament tended to be high when compared with the countries where there are no such quotas.

Our statistics show that in countries with quotas, 30.5% of women were elected when compared with the ones that do not have porters, where only 23.3% of women were elected.

So we have 7% increase when we have quotas.

So we can continue to make the case for the implementation of quotas as special temporary measures to increase the percentage of women represented in parliaments.

We could also go and see some of the highlights in the individual countries that are covered in our report.

I hasten to point out that 49 countries held elections in 2025 for some 62 chambers, parliamentary chambers.

And we see some bright spots, for instance, in Australia where women have recorded the highest ever share of seats in parliament, 46% in the Netherlands was 43.3%.

And also we want to mention Japan, that last year was a landmark year for Japan given that parliamentary representation of women stood at 24 point 29.4% and for the first time in the country's history, the Prime Minister is a woman.

This is something that we can salute in terms of progress.

We also want not because we want to name and shame regions or countries, we also want to point out those countries or regions that have been lagging behind when it comes to gender equality.

And we do think that there are far too many countries that are not having women in parliament.

We have Oman, Tuvalu and Yemen, where there is no woman in parliament.

The original picture shows, as I mentioned, that the Americans account for 35.6%, Europe 32.3%, sub-Saharan Africa 27%, Asia 22.2% and the Middle East and North Africa region is tailing the list with just 16.2% of seats in parliament held by women.

So I think that the image, the picture that we see for 2025 is a mixed one.

We have some bright spots.

I forgot to mention that Kyrgyzstan also recorded a major increase in women's representation.

I think they recorded 12.2% increase in women's representation in parliament and there again it is largely due to the fact that they implemented quotas that were favourable to women's representation.

In All in all, we, as I said, we have a mixed picture and also in 2025 we did continue our work to identify some inhibitors of women's political representation.

And so one thing that we have always mentioned is the fact that there is the prevalence of violence against women on account of the fact that they engage in political activity.

This year we have just published a a report on public intimidation of women.

And one of the findings of that report is that women are more often than men subjected to intimidation and violence online or offline.

We have 76% of the women that we were were interviewed for the report who responded that they had been subject to some form of intimidation of violence, whereas that figure is 68% for men.

So women continue to be disproportionately affected by violence of various types.

So in this introduction, I can conclude at this stage to say that 2025 has not been as bright as we had hoped, given the major anniversaries that we were celebrating in that year, when we would have hoped that there would be a resurgence of enthusiasm for promoting gender equality.

That will be reflected in the political emancipation of women, especially in Parliament.

That has not been the case and I continue to make the point that we need to be more vigilant.

We should not rest on our laurels, we should not minimise the impact, the negative impact of the anti rights movement on women's emancipation, whether it's political, economic or social.

So I my message is let's keep our eyes open, let's be more robust in our efforts to promote gender equality, especially regarding parliamentary representation of women.

Thomas Yeah, thank you very much.

Secretary General more robust in our efforts to promote gender equality in Parliament's.

And whilst we wait to see if there's any questions from from the media, perhaps I can turn to Marianna.

We, the Secretary General was talking about violence against women politicians.

We've done a lot of work at the IPU on how to eliminate that violence.

In the report we mentioned a couple of countries, the Philippines and Colombia, who've taken measures to to mitigate this, this risk.

Perhaps you could tell us a little bit more about those countries.

Sure, Thomas.

It is true that violence is rampant when it comes to politically active women, and the IPO has been documenting this phenomenon for over a decade now.

What we have seen also is that there's more awareness of this phenomenon and countries are taking steps.

And indeed, in 2025, Bolivia adopted legislation specifically, you know, to take steps to prevent and address and condemn all forms of violence against women in politics.

In the case of the Philippines, in the context of the elections that took place in 2025, the Electoral Commission has stepped up its efforts to address this phenomenon.

[Other language spoken]

It's understood that this is happening everywhere in the globe.

IPU regional studies show that it there's no region that's immune to it.

So awareness race is important, but so is legislation and strong measures by Electro bodies as in the case of the Philippines.

[Other language spoken]

Thank you very much, Mariana.

[Other language spoken]

Maybe a question in in the room from Catherine.

Hello, Catherine.

Hello, good afternoon.

I just heard that some decisions have been taken into parliaments in Colombia, if I'm not mistaken.

Do you have other examples in Africa?

And I have also a questions related to the fact that in the report, if I'm not mistaken, you, you see a slight increase of the presence of women in parliaments.

How do you think that the conflict that we're witnessing for the moment is going to impact the the presence of women in parliaments, particularly in the GCC region?

[Other language spoken]

Thank you very much, Katherine.

Secretary General, maybe you talk about the whether the conflict is going to affect gender equality and then Mariana, which parliaments have taken up steps?

Yeah, well, The thing is, during conflict we do know that women are disproportionately affected by hostilities.

And so we can assume, we can extrapolate and say that in the aftermath of such conflicts, the ability or capacity for women to compete for political office will be weaker than for men.

And it is yet to, it's yet to be seen whether this place of actual facts.

But we cannot, we cannot take for granted that conflicts will not adversely affect women when it comes to their political emancipation.

[Other language spoken]

And Marianna, African parliaments have taken measures.

[Other language spoken]

Actually, Tunisia was the first country in Africa to adopt specific legislation to address violence against women and politics.

It was followed on by Tanzania that took measures and intellectual law to address this phenomenon.

We also know of parliaments in Africa that have taken measures, looking into their own codes of conduct to, to, to address this phenomenon.

I can think of Benin and Sierra Leone.

[Other language spoken]

This is also something that Africa is tackling in their own national contexts.

In the global rankings, Africa is not doing badly.

They're just slightly under the global average of 24 of 27.5% in Africa.

In South Africa, South of the Sahara, women account for 27.1% of parliamentary seats.

So they come third.

The that region of the world comes third after the Americas and Europe.

So I think that they must be doing something good, but we want them to do more of more of these efforts in order to drive up the number of women in political office.

Thank you very much.

I don't see any other questions.

Secretary General, thank you very much.

The report comes out today in English and in French and Spanish next week.

And we will also be launching the Women in politics map that we that publish with UN Women and that will be next week on Wednesday, the 11th of March.

So looking not only at the parliamentary aspect of women, of women decision making, but also the executive size in government and in heads of state as well.

Thank you very much to everybody.

Have a good afternoon.

IPU Press Conference: report on women in parliament - 06 March 2026