Statsguru: Four charts explain how gender-equal are India's elections

Last week Congress leader Priyanka Gandhi made a promise that is yet to be achieved by any political party in India. She said that her party will ensure that 40 per cent of its candidates in the upcoming Assembly election in Uttar Pradesh (UP) are women. This begs an obvious question: How well are women represented in India’s elections? Courtesy the Ashoka University’s Trivedi Centre for Political Data, an analysis of India’s national and state elections shows the following.
 
As against their nearly equal share in population (48.6 per cent), women have not yet crossed the 10 per cent barrier among candidates to the parliamentary election (chart 1a).

But this has, nonetheless, grown from 4 per cent to 9 per cent since economic liberalisation. Women occupy a higher share among winners than among candidates, suggesting that non-serious candidates, or dummy ones, are less among women. In other words, they have a better chance to win once they contest (chart 1b).

Women have won with a slightly higher average victory margin than men (chart 1c).

In assembly elections, most states follow a similar trend. Representation of women in politics has been rising in UP, not just among candidates but among winners too (chart 2a).

Both the shares went up to a level close to 10 per cent in 2017, in the state which is among the handful few who have witnessed a full-term government led by a woman. But in Karnataka, which has better health, education, and economic conditions for women, the share of women in electoral politics is quite lower (chart 2b).

In Tamil Nadu, which was famously led by Jayalalithaa for a long period, improvement in women’s share has been reversed in the assembly elections earlier this year (chart 2c).
 

Another party led by a woman, All India Trinamool Congress (AITC), has led the way towards gender-equal electoral representation to date. More than a third of the candidates fielded by Mamata Banerjee-led AITC in 2019 general election were women. Apart from this, national parties tend to award better candidature to women compared to regional parties (chart 3).

Most parties show a very slowly improving electoral gender balance, though still only less than 1 in 6 candidates are women in general elections.

In assembly elections, a look at a few prominent examples show that parties are raising the pitch on fielding more women candidates. But the BJP had reduced the share of women leaders contesting the Karnataka assembly election of 2018 (chart 4).

Source: Ananay Agarwal, Neelesh Agrawal, Saloni Bhogale, Sudheendra Hangal, Francesca Refsum Jensenius, Mohit Kumar, Chinmay Narayan, Basim U Nissa, Priyamvada Trivedi, and Gilles Verniers. 2021. “TCPD Indian Elections Data v2.0", Trivedi Centre for Political Data, Ashoka University.

Interestingly, the share of women candidates fielded by the DMK drastically fell in 2021, a year in which it won the Tamil Nadu state election.
 
StatsGuru is a weekly feature. Every Monday, Business Standard guides you through the numbers you need to know to make sense of the headlines