Gender and Governance: The Importance of Representation in Public Institutions

When we talk about good governance, we often focus on policies, budgets, and institutional processes. But there is a more fundamental question that rarely gets asked with enough urgency: who is sitting at the table when those decisions are made? Globally, women constitute roughly half the population, yet as of 2025, only 27.2 percent of parliamentarians in single or lower houses are women, up from just 11 percent in 1995. The slow pace of this progress is not accidental – it reflects deep structural barriers. Understanding why representation matters, and how to achieve it meaningfully, requires engaging with some of the most important theoretical debates in gender and governance today.

The politics of presence: why it matters who represents you 🔗

One of the most influential arguments for women’s representation in public institutions comes from political theorist Anne Phillips. In her landmark work The Politics of Presence, Phillips argues that democratic theory has long relied on a “politics of ideas” – the assumption that what matters in representation is what a politician stands for, not who they are. Under this view, a male politician can just as legitimately represent women’s interests as a female one, as long as his policies align with their needs.

Phillips challenges this assumption directly. She argues that the politics of ideas is an inadequate vehicle for dealing with political exclusion. When certain groups are consistently absent from elected assemblies, their specific experiences, concerns, and standpoints are structurally underrepresented – not because of bad intentions among those who are present, but because lived experience shapes the questions politicians ask, the issues they prioritize, and the solutions they imagine. The gender or ethnic composition of an elected assembly is, in Phillips’ view, a legitimate democratic concern in its own right.

This is what she calls the “politics of presence” – the idea that the physical presence of historically marginalized groups in governance is itself a form of representation that cannot simply be substituted by proxy. Reflecting on her arguments nearly three decades after the book’s publication, Phillips reemphasized the necessity of descriptive representation, particularly in the context of contemporary movements like #MeToo and Black Lives Matter, which have renewed attention to how embodied experience shapes political outcomes.

The case for political quotas 🔗

If the politics of presence is a valid principle, the practical question becomes: how do you actually get women into decision-making positions in systems historically designed to keep them out? This is where gender quotas enter the picture.

Quotas are not a single mechanism but a family of policies. Some operate at the candidate nomination stage, requiring that a percentage of a party’s candidates be women. Others reserve a fixed number of parliamentary seats exclusively for women. Still others use alternating gender lists in proportional representation systems. Phillips identifies four broad justifications for quotas: the role model effect, principles of justice between the sexes, the protection of gendered interests that would otherwise be overlooked, and the potential for women to introduce different forms of political behavior.

The empirical record lends considerable support to the case for well-designed quotas. According to the Inter-Parliamentary Union, in countries with gender quotas in place, 31.2 percent of seats were held by women in 2024, compared to just 16.8 percent in countries without them. Research on public health spending further shows that substantial increases in women’s parliamentary representation driven by quota policies were followed by increased government expenditures toward public health, with corresponding relative decreases in military spending. Women’s presence in governance is not merely symbolic – it shapes the priorities of the state itself.

The tokenism problem 🔗

The case for quotas does not come without complications. Critics – including some feminist scholars – raise the concern of tokenism: the risk that women are included in governance structures in ways that create the appearance of diversity without redistributing actual power. Research on gender quotas notes that token representation often occurs when women are placed in unwinnable constituencies or portfolios with little real authority, effectively rendering their presence symbolic rather than substantive.

Tokenism is not just about small numbers. It also operates through the pressure placed on the women who do gain entry to conform to existing institutional cultures rather than challenge them. As feminist research on women’s leadership observes, descriptive representation – simply increasing the number of women in leadership – is a necessary but insufficient condition for genuine transformation. Substantive and transformative representation demands that women leaders are empowered to challenge dominant norms and reshape institutional cultures, rather than simply occupy the same seats within unchanged structures.

Phillips herself was careful to note that quotas should not presume a single, unified set of women’s interests. Women are not a homogeneous group – they are divided by class, caste, race, religion, and geography. A quota system that produces a legislature full of upper-class women does not represent poor women, Dalit women, or rural women any more effectively than an all-male legislature does. This is why in many countries, demands for women’s quotas have intersected with demands for sub-quotas to ensure representation for women from marginalized communities – a debate that has been particularly visible in India.

Rights-based approaches to gendered governance 🔗

Alongside the structural argument for presence, there is a parallel theoretical tradition that grounds women’s participation in governance within a broader framework of rights and human capabilities. This is where the work of economist Amartya Sen and philosopher Martha Nussbaum becomes central.

Sen and Nussbaum’s capabilities approach shifts the question of governance away from what resources people have and toward what people are actually able to do and to be. The philosopher Martha Nussbaum provided an influential version of a capability theory of justice, deriving from the requirements of human dignity a list of central capabilities to be incorporated into national constitutions and guaranteed to all up to a certain threshold. These capabilities include, critically, political participation – the ability to take part effectively in political choices that govern one’s life.

For Sen, gender inequalities have been especially important in his thinking on social justice, and the achievement of gender justice in society has been among the most central goals of his theoretical enterprise. Where conventional economic metrics measure national wellbeing through aggregate growth, the capabilities approach insists on asking how deprived groups – and especially women – are doing. Economic growth that does not translate into expanded freedom, security, and political agency for women is, by this measure, incomplete development.

From formal rights to effective exercise 🔗

A key contribution of the capabilities approach to thinking about governance is its distinction between formal rights and effective exercise. Giving women the legal right to vote or stand for election is not the same thing as enabling them to actually exercise that right. If women face violent intimidation at polling stations, lack the financial resources to run campaigns, carry disproportionate caregiving burdens that leave them no time for political activity, or are systematically excluded from the informal networks through which power is distributed, then formal legal equality is hollow.

Nussbaum’s framework insists that capability is a demanding notion: in its focus on the environment of choice, it is highly attentive to the goal of functioning, and instructs governments to keep it always in view. Applied to governance, this means that states have an obligation not merely to remove legal barriers to women’s political participation but to actively build the conditions – childcare provision, campaign finance reform, anti-harassment measures, civic education – that make political participation genuinely possible for women across different social positions.

This rights-based and capabilities-centered framework also reframes the purpose of women’s representation. It is not just about fairness or symbolic inclusion. It is about ensuring that the governance structures of a society actually engage with and respond to the full range of human lives those structures are meant to serve. As one scholar of law and governance noted, the inclusion of women in policymaking gives the vast majority of the population a voice in how their lives should be run – a basic requirement of any democracy that takes its own principles seriously.

India’s Women’s Reservation Bill: a case study in delayed justice 🔗

Few examples illustrate the political struggles involved in achieving meaningful representation more vividly than India’s long journey toward the Women’s Reservation Bill. The story begins in 1996, when the first version of the bill – proposing to reserve one-third of parliamentary seats for women – was introduced in the Lok Sabha. It failed. It was reintroduced in 1998, 1999, and 2008. The first three bills lapsed with the dissolution of their respective Lok Sabhas, while the 2008 bill passed the Rajya Sabha but never came to a vote in the lower house before that parliament’s term expired.

The resistance was not incidental. It reflected entrenched interests within political parties who feared losing established vote banks, demands for additional sub-quotas for women from backward classes, and, in some cases, overtly sexist opposition. The bill became something of a symbol of Indian democracy’s structural reluctance to redistribute political power toward women.

The breakthrough came in September 2023, when the Constitution (One Hundred and Twenty-Eighth Amendment) Bill – Nari Shakti Vandan Adhiniyam – was passed in the newly inaugurated Parliament building with near-unanimous support. The Lok Sabha passed the bill with 454 votes in favour and only two against; the Rajya Sabha approved it unanimously. The legislation reserves one-third of seats for women in the Lok Sabha, all state legislative assemblies, and the Delhi legislative assembly.

However, the bill comes with a significant catch. Its provisions will only come into force after India conducts its next national census and completes a subsequent delimitation exercise. India’s political representation among women currently ranks 141st out of 185 countries globally, with women holding just 15.2 percent of seats in the Lok Sabha as of 2023. Experts estimate that the reservation could take effect as late as 2029 or beyond, given the delays in conducting the census that was originally scheduled for 2021 but was deferred due to the pandemic.

The gap between law and transformation 🔗

India’s experience illustrates the broader theoretical tension flagged by both Phillips and the capabilities approach. Passing a law is not the same thing as changing the conditions that have produced women’s political exclusion in the first place. Even with a reservation in place, the risk of tokenism is real: in contexts where women representatives are drawn primarily from the families of male political leaders, the formal presence of women can coexist with the continued exercise of power by patriarchal networks operating behind the scenes.

Yet the pessimistic view must be balanced against evidence that representation – even imperfect, even partial – does produce real change over time. Research on India’s village council system found that areas with women-led councils had 62 percent more drinking water projects than those with men-led councils – a tangible consequence of women’s increased presence in local governance. The women elected through the Panchayati Raj quota system, imperfect as it was, shifted priorities in measurable ways.

India’s panchayat experience also provided the empirical foundation that made the national Women’s Reservation Bill harder to oppose. Decades of evidence showing that women in local governance delivered concrete improvements in public goods built the political case for extending reservation to the national level. This points to one of the underappreciated arguments for representation: that even incremental, contested, and imperfect presence creates a record of governance that changes the terms of future political debate.

Moving beyond presence toward structural change 🔗

The theories of Phillips, Sen, and Nussbaum converge on a point that goes beyond simply counting women in parliament: representation is not an end in itself, but a condition for the kind of governance that can address structural inequalities. Policy frameworks can call for gender inclusion while in practice producing tokenism rather than transformation – where gender language is added after the fact rather than used to shape the agenda from the start. The system, as feminist critics point out, has learned to look inclusive without actually changing who holds power.

True structural change requires more than filling seats. It requires reforming how institutions themselves operate – their working hours, their cultures of deliberation, their internal hierarchies, their definitions of political competence and authority. It requires, in Nussbaum’s terms, building the environments of choice that allow women from all backgrounds and social positions to actually exercise their formal political rights. And it requires sustained political will over time, not just a single landmark piece of legislation.

The global picture in 2025 is one of genuine but halting progress. The Americas have seen a 22.7 percentage point gain in women’s parliamentary participation over 30 years, while Asia has recorded the slowest regional growth, gaining just 8.9 points since 1995. Six parliaments – Rwanda, Cuba, Nicaragua, Mexico, Andorra, and the United Arab Emirates – have now achieved parity or women-majority composition. But global average women’s representation sits at only 27.2 percent, and progress stalled markedly in 2024, rising by just 0.3 percentage points.

The lesson of the evidence, and of the theories that help us make sense of it, is not that representation is impossible or that quotas are always sufficient. It is that the question of who governs is inseparable from the question of how we are governed – and that a democracy that systematically excludes half its population from its decision-making bodies is not yet the democracy it claims to be.

What do you think? If formal legal equality – the right to vote and stand for election – is not enough to ensure women’s meaningful participation in governance, what additional conditions do you think governments have a responsibility to create? And when women do enter political institutions only to find those institutions shaped by deeply patriarchal cultures, is increased representation still worth pursuing, or does it risk legitimizing systems that need to be fundamentally transformed?

References

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