End female quotas in elections

On September 8, the Federal Senate published a report to mark 30 years since the creation of female candidacy quotas in Brazil. The headline already offered a diagnosis: “Created 30 years ago, female candidacy quota has not yet led to equality.”

But what equality are we talking about? Equality before the law? Equality in the right to vote and be voted for? Equal access to candidacy? Or equality in election results?

The distinction matters because, over the past 30 years, the meaning of “equality” seems to have shifted. The policy began with the goal of expanding women’s participation in electoral contests. Today, the fact that women do not win half the seats is presented as evidence that equality has not yet been achieved.

But a democracy does not promise that men and women will be elected in equal proportion. It promises that both may run and that voters may choose between them.

This does not mean that low female participation in Brazilian politics is not a problem. However, there is an enormous difference between encouraging women to take part in politics and mandating by law the minimum number of them who must appear on a list of candidates.

The consequence of this difference is well known in party practice. As the deadline for registering candidacies approaches and there are still not enough women to meet the percentage required by law, a race begins to fill out the slate. How many women involved in politics have received invitations simply because a party needed to meet the quota? Or, in even more absurd cases, how many women with no political involvement whatsoever have had their names sought out because, to register a given slate, a percentage still needed to be filled?

So-called “shell candidacies” are the most serious manifestation of this problem, but they are not the only one. Between a competitive candidacy and a completely fictitious one lies a vast grey zone made up of women who actually appear on the ballot and may even genuinely wish to be elected, but never had the structure or any real expectation of winning an election.

This makes it especially misleading to celebrate the increase in the number of female candidates as a measure of women’s political participation. In 1994, women made up only 6.2% of candidates for federal deputy. By 2022, they were 35%. Over the same period, the proportion of women among those elected rose from 7.4% to 17.7%.

The second figure is positive, but attributing this progress to quotas requires demonstrating something the numbers alone do not show: that this growth would not have occurred without the quotas. After all, electoral rules were not the only thing that changed in Brazil over these same 30 years.

Women expanded their presence in the labour market, in universities, in the legal professions, in business, in political movements, and in organised civil society. They became more present in public debate and today make up the majority of the Brazilian electorate. It would be quite strange to imagine that female representation in Congress would have remained frozen at 1994 levels had the quota never existed.

It is entirely possible, therefore, that at least part of the growth in the number of women elected is the result of the natural maturing of democracy itself, and not of the obligation to fill 30% of slates. The fact that two things happened at the same time does not prove that one caused the other.

This is precisely where the Senate’s headline becomes either naive or cynical. Saying that, after 30 years, the quota “has not yet led to equality” presupposes that it eventually will, and that all that is needed is to persist, refine it, or increase intervention. Perhaps the conclusion that three decades of experience warrant is a different one: candidacy quotas are not capable of producing the result expected of them.

No arbitrarily defined percentage creates a political vocation, develops leaders, builds networks, convinces a woman to devote her life to politics, or makes voters choose a female candidate. The law can force a party to find enough women to fill a slate, but it cannot make them want to be there, nor can it force voters to vote for them.

The path to increasing female participation must begin long before the ballot box. It lies in organised civil society, in leadership development, in political movements, in organisations that offer training, networks, and opportunities for women, and in creating environments where they can discover that politics is also a possible space for them. It lies in convincing more women to participate, not in forcing parties to find a set number of them every election.

It is precisely because we need more women genuinely involved in politics that we should abandon a policy that, after 30 years, still confuses compulsory presence on a candidate list with participation. Worse still, without demonstrating any positive result.

Women do not need 30% of a list to prove they belong in politics. They need a society in which more women want to be on the ballot, and the freedom for voters to decide which of them deserve to reach Parliament.