How Quotas Can Help to Make Women’s Participation Meaningful

Quotas as a standalone measure have struggled to guarantee women’s influence over peace processes. This blog presents tangible complementary measures, which when combined with quotas can help to catalyse women’s meaningful participation.

Quotas have featured prominently in research and practice-oriented debates on how to realise the WPS agenda’s participation pillar for years. Over the past quarter-century, several states and inter-governmental bodies have embraced gender quotas. Two particularly recent examples stand out.

The National Dialogue Commission (NDC) in Ethiopia has adopted a 30 percent gender quota for the country’s ongoing national dialogue. A new policy framework from the Peace and Security Council of the African Union (AU PSC) also includes a commitment to a 30 percent minimum gender quota for AU-led formal peace processes as well as conflict prevention, management, and election observation missions.

Quotas can enhance their influence over a peace process but do not automatically do that in and of themselves. Men political and security decision-makers have found various ways to sideline women who are directly represented in formal peace talks. They have excluded women negotiation delegates from informal decision-making spaces; stigmatised women who they depicted as dishonourable and incompetent; and threatened, harassed, and intimidated women delegates in offline and online spaces.

Political, ethnic, religious, and other divisions have also prevented women from speaking with one voice and thereby capitalising on their quota-induced presence in formal peacemaking spaces. Weak monitoring and enforcement mechanisms have further undermined gender quotas’ impact.

These multi-faceted constraints indicate the need to both properly design and implement gender quotas and also think about them not in isolation but as one tool among a variety of mechanisms and measures that, when combined, can holistically advance meaningful women’s participation. Twelve tangible entry points stand out in this regard. They draw on comparative evidence as well as potential ideas for how to make quotas work.

Quota Design

The early adoption of gender quotas can strengthen women’s presence in a formal peace process from the outset, which puts them in a better position to counter early forms of patriarchal backlash. Women’s guaranteed representation throughout the post-agreement phase can amplify their influence as implementation-related activities unfold. Yemeni women, for example, drew on a 30 percent gender quota that applied throughout the entire National Dialogue Conference (2013-2014) to ensure that the emerging outcome document was gender sensitive.

More ambitious quotasthat set women’s minimum representation at 50 percent and grant women access to decision-making power are also conducive to their meaningful participation. In Colombia, for example, women’s rights organisations’ and activists’ advocacy for a 100 percent gender quota regarding the Gender Sub-Commission contributed to women’s majority in this innovative body.

Gender quotas that account for women’s intersectional identities will ensure that the voices of women from various backgrounds can be heard in a peace process. Political, ethnic, religious, geographic, and socio-economic affiliation as well as age are some of the identities that gender quotas would ideally account for. The Local Level Election Act (LLEA) in Nepal from 2017, for example, stipulates that at least one woman and one Dalit woman must be represented in each municipality ward.

Complementary Measures

Combining gender quotas with other inclusion modalities can strengthen women’s influence over a peace process. Extra (standalone) women-only delegations comprised of gender experts and representatives from women-led organisations can amplify women’s voices in peace and political transition processes in various ways, including:

➜  Mitigating the negative effect of women’s potential co-optation by men in negotiation delegations or women voting in accordance with their political, ethnic, or regional interests.

➜ Moving beyond women’s tokenistic inclusion in negotiation delegations.

➜ Promoting women’s collective voice and facilitating consensus-building among them.

Women-only delegations included in formal peace and political transition processes in Yemen (2013-2014), Northern Ireland (1996-1998), and Ethiopia (ongoing national dialogue), as well as Colombia’s Gender Sub-Commission (2014-2016) are pertinent examples. In Nepal (2008-2012) and Yemen (2013-2014), women capitalised on their direct representation in technical and thematic working groups to shape the negotiations under the respective constitution-making process.

Tangible and legally binding monitoring and accountability mechanismsare also important complements to effective gender quotas. This includes sanctions for negotiating parties who refuse to comply with a gender quota.

Frequent reports that assess the progress made regarding the implementation of a gender quota as well as quotas’ quantitative and qualitative impact on women’s influence over peace processes could inform any accountability measures. An effective monitoring system that traces physical or online attacks against women negotiation delegates will also enhance their protection.

Access to context-specific, targeted, and needs-based capacity strengtheninginitiatives can help women negotiation delegates to acquire or deepen the required technical skills and knowledge to shape a peace process as well as strengthen coordination amongst themselves.

Consultations, Coalition Building, Advocacy —What Women Can Do.

Women negotiation delegates’ willingness and capacity to overcome internal divides, represent the voices of all women, and engage in constant advocacy around a minimum shared agenda determine gender quotas’ impact.

Intra-women coalition building efforts have taken various forms. Women from the Somali region in Ethiopia have joined tribe-based dialogue spaces as members of a women’s tribe rather than individual women over the past couple of years. An internal problem-solving workshop in 2002 helped women negotiators from the DRC to agree on a common agenda ahead of the inter-Congolese Dialogue in Sun City (South Africa) in 2003. Over 400 women organised a national summit in Colombia in 2013 to coordinate their outreach and advocacy activities regarding the peace process between the government and the FARC.

Consultations with women at the grassroots level can help women negotiation delegates to affect gender-transformative change that benefits all women. Inter-women consultations can be formal or informal. They would benefit from logistical, technical, and financial support from domestic actors and inter-governmental organisations like the AU.

Constant lobbying, advocacy, and mobilisation for women’s meaningful participationcan create the necessary level of public pressure on negotiating parties to adopt and subsequently implement gender quotas. Women-led civil society organisations, women members of unions and political parties but also third-party mediators and moderate traditional and religious leaders can play a key role in this regard.

Tapping into the various entry points presented above will require significant political will and funding. The establishment of a dedicated fund could be effective in this regard. Any such fund could also support the work of women-led civil society networks and organisations to dismantle patriarchal norms and values, which is key to transforming women’s position in society.

Philip Poppelreuter | Researcher, Inclusive Peace

Photo credit: UN Women/Pedro Pio 2022 ©

This blog is part of Inclusive Peace’s 2025 series on women’s effective participation in peace processes. The series examines context-sensitive strategies women have successfully pursued or could pursue to shape peacemaking and peacebuilding in a changing geopolitical context marked by increasing levels of armed conflict, greater multipolarity – both in general and more specifically in terms of mediation actors – and a decline in comprehensive peace processes and agreements led by the UN. It is based on comparative findings of a project Inclusive Peace is undertaking in partnership with the Irish DFA in the run up to the 25th anniversary of UNSCR 1325 in October 2025.