If it seems impossible to pass a law on electoral gender quotas, voluntary party quotas may be an alternative. Nothing prevents any political party from introducing gender quotas for its internal boards and electoral lists – tomorrow!

Usually it is easier to make a center or a left political party make this first move. If successful, a process of contagion may lead other political parties to start recruiting more women as candidates. Pressure from women’s groups within the parties combined with a vivid public discussion on the issue is necessary for making things start to move.

If the resistance in a country or a party is very strong against any type of gender quotas, be it legislated or voluntary quotas, other strategies are available.

In this work, it is important to focus on increasing the supply of female candidates as well as to focus on the demand side, that is, to make the political parties start looking, more seriously than they do today, for women candidates and for placing women in winnable seats in the election.

A public discussion on women’s under-representation may in itself make the voters – not least the female voters - demand more women candidates on the electoral lists, thus influencing the political parties’ nomination processes in their search for maximizing their votes.

At the same time it is important to focus on the supply side: Capacity building courses, may be cross-party courses organized by the women’s movement, have proved very important. Such programmes improve women’s capacity to stand for election, but often women who have attended such programmes themselves start making pressure within the political parties for nominating more women.

Thus there are several routes to increase women’s political representation. Gender quotas is just one method, however under the right circumstances a rather efficient method! But not the only method available to those who want to change women’s underrepresentation.

Drude Dahlerup, professor of Political Science at Stockholm University, and editor of the global study of gender quotas, “Women, Quotas and Politics”, Routledge 2006.