Opinion | The unfinished project of gender equality in SA politics
Women make up roughly 55% of South Africa’s registered voters, yet they accounted for only about 42% of candidates in the 2024 elections and approximately 43% of those elected to Parliament afterwards. For South African women who vote in every national election, the gap between showing up at the ballot box and holding real political power has become impossible to ignore. The people most central to democratic participation remain underrepresented in the very structures where authority is exercised, and the consequences reach into policy, safety, and everyday life for citizens across the country.
The numbers raise a deeper civic question: does South African democracy serve all of its voters equally? According to the Commission for Gender Equality’s report, A Lack of Commitment? Assessing Women’s Participation and Representation in the 2024 National and Provincial Elections, women remain underrepresented in political leadership despite constituting the majority of voters. The report questions whether political parties have genuinely institutionalised gender equality, and whether current gains can survive without stronger accountability measures. The picture darkens further at the local level, where the Commission’s research found that women’s representation in municipal government fell from 41% in 2016 to 37% in the 2021 local government elections, a reversal of previously achieved gains.
These figures matter because they challenge a comfortable national story. Since 1994, South Africa has been celebrated internationally for women’s political representation, consistently ranking among the better-performing democracies in this regard. That reputation is often presented as proof of the country’s commitment to gender equality and democratic inclusion. But beneath it sits a harder truth: the country has placed women in political office without transforming the gendered power relations that continue to shape participation, leadership, and decision-making. Women are increasingly present in legislatures, yet disproportionately absent from the key sites of political authority. They are the majority of the electorate but not the majority of those who wield power.
For citizens trying to assess the health of their democracy, this points to the limits of counting heads. For much of the democratic period, debate has centred on descriptive representation, the sheer number of women in institutions. Numbers remain important, but presence does not automatically translate into substantive representation. Women can be visible without holding equal power, influence, or authority. Substantive equality offers a more meaningful measure: it asks how far women can genuinely shape policy agendas, access decision-making spaces, influence political outcomes, and change institutional cultures.
Viewed through that lens, the gains look less straightforward than global rankings suggest. Women remain underrepresented in senior party leadership structures, executive decision-making positions, strategic portfolios, and premier and presidential candidacies. Broader outcomes for women have also lagged. Gender-based violence remains endemic, economic inequality remains deeply gendered, and many women remain excluded from political and economic decision-making.
Meanwhile, at the centre of this challenge stand the political parties themselves, the gatekeepers of democratic participation. Parties decide who becomes a candidate, who receives campaign resources, who is mentored into leadership, and who becomes politically viable. Despite public commitments to non-sexism and inclusion, many operate within organisational cultures that privilege male leadership and reproduce patriarchal norms. Candidate selection is frequently shaped by informal networks, patronage systems, incumbency advantages, and factional dynamics that disproportionately benefit men. Women therefore face greater obstacles in accessing opportunities, securing resources, and advancing.
The evidence suggests that progress is not automatic but the product of deliberate political choices. The greatest gains have generally occurred in parties that adopted explicit gender quotas and parity measures, while parties relying on voluntary commitments or gender-neutral approaches have produced weaker results.
Beyond institutional barriers lies a political culture that remains deeply masculinised, often rewarding aggression over collaboration through adversarial leadership styles, factional contestation, political violence, and online harassment. Women politicians frequently encounter gender stereotyping, sexual harassment, intimidation, and disproportionate scrutiny of their appearance, personal lives, and family responsibilities. For young women, women with disabilities, LGBTQIA+ persons, and women from rural communities, these challenges are compounded by intersecting forms of exclusion. Women do not enter politics from equal starting positions.
None of this should overshadow what has been achieved since 1994. The country has produced women premiers, ministers, speakers, commissioners, judges, and senior public officials, supported by constitutional protections, feminist activism, Chapter 9 institutions, and international and regional commitments. Working alongside feminist movements and civil society, women politicians helped advance some of the country’s most progressive reforms: the Choice on Termination of Pregnancy Act, the Domestic Violence Act, the Criminal Law (Sexual Offences and Related Matters) Act, and more recent reforms linked to the national response to Gender-Based Violence and Femicide. Their advocacy also shaped policy on maternal and reproductive health, social protection, child support grants, equal employment opportunity, and women’s economic empowerment, and pushed issues such as domestic violence, unpaid care work, and economic inequality onto the national agenda.
These gains are real, but they are milestones in an ongoing struggle, not proof that the struggle is won. They teach a clear lesson: transformative outcomes emerge not simply because women are present in political institutions, but because they can exercise influence within them. Genuine equality requires stronger legislative and regulatory mechanisms for parity, greater accountability from political parties, transparent candidate selection, decisive action against political violence and harassment, and sustained investment in women’s political leadership. South Africa has opened the doors of political participation, but it has not yet transformed the corridors through which power flows. Until women enjoy equal access not only to office but to influence, authority, resources, and leadership, the promise of a truly inclusive democracy will remain unrealised.
Naledi Selebano is the Provincial Manager at the Commission for Gender Equality with a proven track record in Research.