The Global Assault on Women in Politics

This year, countries accounting for nearly half the world’s population are holding national elections. Instead of representing a triumph of democracy, however, the results suggest something darker: in many places, voters have flocked to the polls only to elect or reelect autocratic populists. They have notched victories this year in some of the largest countries, including India, Indonesia, and Russia. And these wins come on the heels of last year’s populist victories in Argentina and Turkey.

Today, more than 70 percent of the world’s population lives under autocratic rule, and a minority of the world’s governments are democratic, according to the most recent annual report from the V-Dem Institute, an organization that studies democracy. What the report does not reveal is that a central component of this assault on democracy is the targeting of women political leaders and women’s rights by far-right extremists and elected autocratic populists who represent the leading edge of democracy’s decline. For three decades, the share of women legislators across the globe was growing thanks to mandated quotas in many countries, but the rate of increase has stalled over the past two years, a signal U.S. Ambassador-at-Large for Global Women’s Issues Geeta Rao Gupta calls “scary.” Women today occupy only 27 percent of the world’s legislative seats. An even starker sign is that the number of women leading countries has sharply declined in the past year.

The decline in representation can be partly explained by the threats and violence women politicians face both online and offline. Almost half of women legislators have received violent threats and are vastly more likely to be targeted for their gender than are men, according to the Inter-Parliamentary Union, an international organization of national parliaments. Since it began collecting the data in 2019, the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data project, which tracks conflicts, has documented a global rise in physical violence against women in politics. Notable cases in the United States include the home invasion and attack on former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband (the assailant was seeking to target her) and the attempted kidnapping of Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer in 2020. Such attacks are often incubated online, but they are no longer confined to anonymous corners of the Internet. Online hate has gone mainstream, as right-wing politicians and media figures in the United States and elsewhere increasingly adopt extremist views.

With online attacks about to become even more ubiquitous and harmful thanks to the rapid advancement of artificial intelligence, it is time for government leaders and political parties to act decisively to stop the epidemic of violence against women and to pass laws requiring tech companies to combat online hate and violence. They also need to debunk myths that women cannot lead countries as competently as men. These measures should be coupled with a broader recommitment to political and civil rights for all, the underpinnings of a fully participatory and representative democracy.

OUT OF OFFICE

The proportion of women elected officials in government is one barometer of the health of a democracy, because women make up half of the world’s population and should possess full rights and representation. After decades of incremental progress, the number of women serving as head of state or government in 195 countries has declined from a high of 38 in 2023 to 27 today. Women leaders in Finland, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Slovakia, and Scotland have resigned or chosen not to run for reelection. One out of every six women parliamentarians around the world leaves before her term ends, according to the Inter-Parliamentary Union, and this year, 14 U.S. congresswomen have also decided not to run for reelection, setting a new record for departures. According to the Center for American Women and Politics, the number of likely women candidates has declined 21 percent since 2022, when the total was 513. Global statistics on candidacy rates are incomplete, but Rao Gupta and officials from other governments report that women they meet around the world are shying away from political office because of the onslaught of violent threats and online abuse. Studies show that women holding state and local office are three to four times as likely as men to experience gender-based abuse, and at the national level, the disproportionate abuse and threats against women increase the more senior the position.

Violent threats against New Zealand’s former prime minister, Jacinda Ardern, multiplied quickly during her tenure. Protesters chased her. She was threatened with assassination and rape, and her family was also threatened. During that time, the University of Auckland tracked an increase in online abuse and threats against members of Parliament, but Ardern suffered a volume 50 to 90 times greater than other prominent figures. It is no wonder she resigned, despite her widespread popularity. At the time, she said she did not have “enough left in the tank.”

And she is far from the only woman leader to face an unconscionable level of threats. Dutch Deputy Prime Minister Sigrid Kaag, under heavy police protection because of death threats, resigned after her daughters publicly begged her to do so for fear that she would be killed. And Sanna Marin, Finland’s youngest prime minister and third woman to serve in that role, resigned after winning reelection, dogged by a viral video of her dancing at a private party. A NATO study of her cabinet found that the majority of female ministers received ten times the online attacks as the male members. Slovakia’s crusading anticorruption president, Zuzana Caputova, declined to run for reelection despite high popularity. Even in the progressive countries of Europe, a backlash against women is taking place. In a sign of the times, the Netherlands’ far-right party, led by Geert Wilders, won the most votes in November. No longer a pariah, Wilders is now set to form a government in coalition with the party of the previous prime minister, Mark Rutte, who is expected to become NATO secretary-general.

Women today only occupy 27 percent of the world’s legislative seats.

Women have also played a part in democratic decline and attacks on women. They can also be autocrats and motivated by any range of issues or interests. Bangladeshi Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, who jailed her primary opponent and has held elections of dubious quality for much of her tenure, won a fourth consecutive term in January. Women leaders have also served in support of men leading autocratic governments.

Women also lead some of the far-right parties that have been gaining ground in Europe, where anti-immigrant, neo-Nazi, and Euroskeptic platforms are winning votes. The National Rally, a neofascist party in France, won 31.5 percent of the EU vote in early June, prompting French Prime Minister Emmanuel Macron to call snap national elections. Marine Le Pen, the leader of the National Rally, has moderated the more extreme national populist views of her father, who founded the party, even voting to approve the recent constitutional amendment to legalize abortion. The Italian government is led by Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, whose party also has fascist roots, although she has proved to be a study in contradictions. The fact is that women politicians hold views that span the political spectrum, and some women are not only opposed to feminism but are as prejudiced against women as men. The broad trends of rising autocracy and misogyny are largely perpetrated by men, however, who wield by far most of the power across the globe, and the fact that women have joined their cause does not alter the growing adversity that women face.

LOSING GROUND

The rising popularity of right-wing political parties in Europe and elsewhere poses a threat to women and democracy. Populist politicians explicitly attack feminism and gender equality or cloak their regressive stands behind the rhetoric of restoring “traditional family values.” Once in office, these leaders have reduced government funding and resources that support gender equality and equal rights, including access to abortion. In Hungary, Viktor Orban has coupled anti-immigrant policies with measures that undo gender equality. He has outlawed gender studies in schools and dismantled the government equality authority. Orban describes motherhood as a woman’s central role and a patriotic duty to rescue the nation from immigrants.

Even when voters oust far-right parties, as occurred in Poland in October, the parties’ continued influence has blocked attempts to restore rights and reverse policies. For example, during its eight-year rule, Poland’s Law and Justice Party severely restricted abortion rights and judicial independence, among other measures, but the new government has been unable to restore those rights. Conservative parties elsewhere in central and eastern Europe have embraced the movements against abortion and gender equality. The Czech Republic was the most recent of six European countries whose parliaments have failed to ratify the Istanbul Convention, which commits signatories to combat gender-based violence and promote gender equality. Turkey, under its autocratic leader, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, led the attack on the landmark convention by withdrawing from it in 2021, a decade after the country was the first to sign and ratify it.

The rollback of women’s rights is not restricted to Europe. South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol was elected by explicitly appealing to young men who believe that their prospects have been harmed by feminism. Yoon pledged to disband the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family, claiming that no “structural gender discrimination” exists in the country, even though South Korea ranks 105th out of 146 countries in the World Economic Forum’s Gender Gap Index. Argentina, once a leader in South America for women’s rights, made a U-turn when it elected Javier Milei in November. Three days after his inauguration, he eliminated the Ministry of Women, Gender, and Diversity. He also called abortion “aggravated murder” and seeks to overturn his country’s 2020 legalization of abortion.

FROM THE DARK WEB TO THE WHITE HOUSE

Two factors have propelled the erosion of democracy and the parallel attack on women’s rights: the migration of far-right extremism into mainstream politics, and an increasingly ever-present and untrammeled Internet, where the effects of virtual reality rival those in real life. As right-wing extremism moves into mainstream politics in the United States and elsewhere, its racism, anti-Semitism, and xenophobia are usually the focus of media coverage. Its integral elements of violent misogyny and male supremacy too often get little attention. Violent extremists are usually described as neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and Islamophobes without reference to the central role that control of, repression of, and violence against women play in their worldviews.

The connection is apparent to those who look: Anders Breivik and Brenton Tarrant, considered vanguards of modern-day right-wing extremism, gained infamy for mass killings in Norway and New Zealand, in 2011 and 2019, respectively. Their manifestos, published in tandem with their attacks, made their views clear. Breivik, who killed 77 people in a bombing and shooting spree in 2011, railed against feminism and said he aimed to kill Norway’s trailblazing first female prime minister, Gro Harlem Brundtland, in his 2011 attack. Tarrant, a white supremacist who killed 51 people at two mosques in New Zealand, wrote a manifesto titled “The Great Replacement,” which began with an incantation that signaled his fixation: “It’s the birthrates. It’s the birthrates. It’s the birthrates.” Tarrant’s words echoed a white supremacist conspiracy theory that had gathered steam on the Internet after it was first coined by a French writer in 2011. The idea that white people are being replaced by people of color is rooted in racist and anti-Semitic ideology, but it is equally misogynistic, as historian Kathleen Belew has pointed out, in seeking to punish and control women whom they see as primary agents of “white genocide.” Adherents of the theory not only justify exclusion and violence against people of color but blame women for interracial unions or not having enough children. Their proactive prescriptions are to ban abortion, oppose same-sex unions, encourage traditional marriage, and promote white births—alongside anti-immigrant and Islamophobic policies. Behind the “traditional family values” rhetoric of many right-wing parties is a pronatalist agenda. In France, the Reconquête party is to the right of the National Rally of Le Pen. As the name suggests, its founder, Eric Zemmour, embraces replacement theory and the pronatalism of Jean-Marie Le Pen (who called abortion “anti-French genocide”) with an antifeminist platform that calls for women to produce a new majority of white Frenchmen.

In the United States, replacement theory once circulated mostly in splinter groups and dark corners of the Internet. But extremist rhetoric is increasingly distributed by figures in mainstream U.S. media and politics. Former Fox News host Tucker Carlson advanced the great replacement theory, propagating the notion that the Democratic Party sought to use immigrants and people of color to dilute the voting power of white men. “Demographic change is the key to the Democratic Party’s political ambitions,” Carlson said in 2021. Meanwhile, Republican congressmen and state officials have also echoed replacement theory claims, and Mark Robinson, the lieutenant governor and Republican nominee for governor in North Carolina, earned the endorsement of former U.S. President Donald Trump despite a long record of offensive statements about women and victims of domestic violence.

More than 70 percent of the world’s population lives under autocratic rule.

Misogynistic views have been embraced at the highest levels by norm-breaking populists such as Trump, Orban, and former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro. The sexism and misogyny of right-wing discourse has steadily become more overt. Although some of these politicians may have embraced antiwomen views opportunistically to sow division and gain followers, in many cases they are in harmony with their own sexist views. In Trump’s case, he infamously boasted in 2005 of grabbing women “by the pussy.” He has also made tactical decisions to oppose women’s rights. Trump, who once supported abortion rights, assiduously courted white nationalists and evangelical Christians as a core constituency. Once president, his nominations to the Supreme Court paved the way for the historic overturning of abortion rights in the United States—which Trump now claims credit for on the campaign trail. Bolsonaro declared that he would fight “gender ideology” and defend family and Christian values, along the lines of the Orban playbook. Women activists organized to help defeat his reelection bid in 2022, which his followers attempted to annul with violent protests much as Trump’s did the previous year. His party still holds a plurality in the legislature and is seeking to further restrict abortion with harsher penalties than those imposed for rape.

Along with this mainstreaming of extremist ideas has come a shocking normalization of sexist and violent rhetoric, routine displays of toxic masculinity, and rape jokes. As president, Bolsonaro regularly attacked and insulted women journalists and infamously claimed a legislator was “not worth” raping. Trump often embraces known misogynists and continually lodges vitriolic attacks on women, especially those he perceives as political threats. When Trump had dinner with the white supremacist activist Nick Fuentes in 2022, there was an immediate outcry about his neo-Nazi views, but few noted Fuentes’s self-proclaimed identity as an “incel,” or involuntary celibate, a group of men who preach violence and subjugation of women. Incels are part of the so-called manosphere, a collection of male supremacy groups that assert that white men’s rights are being violated by gender equality, immigrants, and interracial marriage. Strident antifeminism has become standard fare at Republican political events and youth conventions such as those held by the conservative group Turning Point, which espouses a view in which “women are to submit to the husband in all ways . . . in recognition of his leadership,” according to a post on the group’s website titled “The Feminist Fight to Destroy the World.” At a recent gathering of the D.C. Young Republicans in Washington, an Australian-born Trump acolyte named Nick Adams was the featured speaker, promoting his book Alpha Kings. He advised the group on ways to control women, warning them that “nasty women are coming for two things: your mind and your testicles.”

IT’S ABOUT TO GET WORSE

Technology’s role in the tandem assault on democracy and women is only growing. The Internet has connected right-wing extremists in a worldwide network that communicates through online message boards and apps such as Telegram and Discord. Women are far and away the recipients of most gender-based attacks via an essentially unregulated Internet architecture that propagates and amplifies hateful content through algorithms designed to maximize clicks and retain people’s attention. Successive surveys dating from 2016 show that some 80 percent of women parliamentarians receive gender-based attacks, over 40 percent are threatened with rape, death, or violent attacks, and 25 percent have been physically attacked. In a recent gathering on the margins of the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women, Microsoft executives sat agog as women parliamentarians from Africa, Europe, and Latin America described the vicious threats that arrive in their inboxes several times every hour. Lucia Nicholsonova, the former deputy speaker of Slovakia’s Parliament and current European Parliament member, read a lengthy, graphic tweet from someone who vowed to silence her by threatening to rape, sodomize, mutilate, and murder her. Silvana Koch-Mehrin, the founder of Women Political Leaders, the group that convened the event, cited a study that found that rates of hateful tweets can average 2,000 per hour.

The advent of generative artificial intelligence is turbocharging these online harms, which can be devastating and potentially career ending. Readily available software has caused an explosion in the creation of deepfakes, the vast majority of which are deepfake pornography videos featuring women. Fake nude images have exploded by 290 percent since 2018, according to industry researcher Genevieve Oh, most often featuring faces of celebrities and politicians, such as U.S. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Women overwhelmingly are the subject of these highly realistic but entirely fake images, videos, and messages, and the problem is only getting worse. New immersive technology being used in virtual reality devices creates lifelike experiences for the viewers and game-players, which has led to simulated rape and violent attacks with terrifying and traumatic impact. The effects of the tsunami of porn and the highly realistic immersive technology have not been studied in depth, but one study found a correlation between young male consumers of porn and the wish to exert power over women.

What is clear is that the radicalization of politics on the right and the power of toxic tech are reinforcing and accelerating long-standing gender bias rather than breaking it down. Polls indicate that younger generations of men are less supportive of feminism than their elders. An Ipsos survey of respondents in 31 countries found that 60 percent of Generation Z men believe gender equality discriminates against them, compared with 43 percent of boomer generation men. These increasingly sexist attitudes about women are combining with structural barriers that women in politics continue to face, including a lack of childcare and family leave, wage gaps, and access to party leadership positions. The most recent World Values Survey reveals a dispiriting substructure of stubbornly persistent bias that has remained unchanged for the past decade. Half of those surveyed (men and women) believe that men, just because they are men, make better leaders. By much larger margins, people believe that women are less equipped to make the life-or-death decisions that heads of government need to make as they manage national security and foreign policy.

This prejudice against women leaders is not only wrong but is amply disproven by current and recent women presidents and prime ministers, many of whom have displayed extraordinarily sound and courageous leadership while handling crises. Taiwan’s two-term president, Tsai Ing-wen, successfully navigated acts of Chinese aggression, asserting Taiwan’s de facto independence from Beijing without overly antagonizing Chinese leaders. In Estonia, Prime Minister Kaja Kallas helped rally Europe in an unprecedented time of threat. The women presidents of Georgia, Kosovo, and Moldova boldly defended their countries from aggression and intimidation by Russia and its proxies. Yulia Navalnaya, the wife of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, stepped into a leadership role immediately following her husband’s death in a Siberian prison. Meanwhile, Belarus’s Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya heads the country’s opposition government in exile. Other women leaders are tackling issues such as domestic polarization (Slovenia and Tanzania), corruption (Slovakia), and international climate finance reform (Barbados). These leaders demonstrate that defending human rights—including women’s and LGBTQ rights—does not preclude governing for all and defending their democracies from internal and external threats.

Although large countries are leading the autocratic surge, much can be learned from the 18 countries that are democratizing, according to V-Dem’s analysis—mostly small countries, many of them led by women. Many of these democratizing countries have restored good governance and reduced polarization eating away at so many countries. Many have passed laws supporting women’s rights and marriage equality, but they also pursue economic, social, and security policies designed to benefit all their citizens. Men have not been marginalized, even though they are asked to accept the basic premise of equal rights and opportunity for all. These democratic women leaders have shored up and expanded political and civil rights, leaned into existential challenges posed by climate change, and mounted effective defenses against aggression. They have not succeeded in every goal, but they have established credible records that should begin to chip away at the lingering prejudice that women, somehow, cannot lead effectively and courageously.