Bridging the Leadership Gap: Women in Local Governments

Strengthening women’s political leadership at the local and subnational levels is not only a matter of representation. It is a strategic imperative for sustaining democratic legitimacy and ensuring that global commitments on gender equality, human rights, and sustainable development translate into tangible improvements in people’s daily lives.

Local governments constitute the primary interface between citizens and the State. It is at the territorial level where public policies are implemented, services are delivered, rights are either guaranteed or denied, and trust in democratic institutions is built or eroded. Yet women remain significantly underrepresented in executive leadership roles such as mayoralties, governorships, and prefectures across Latin America and globally.

Bridging these gaps requires stronger connections between global governance frameworks and local political realities. Ensuring that multilateral commitments are informed by, and responsive to, territorial experiences is increasingly critical at a time marked by democratic erosion, political polarization, weakening multilateral cooperation, and growing backlash against gender equality and women’s rights.

Against this backdrop, GWL Voices launched the Women in Politics (WIP) Initiative to strengthen the evidence base, policy dialogue, and advocacy around women’s political leadership at the local and subnational levels. As part of this initiative, the study Bridging the Leadership Gap: Women in Local Governments in Latin America provides new and systematically compiled evidence on women’s participation in mayoral and gubernatorial executive positions across six Latin American countries: Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, and Panama.

The report examines persistent structural barriers that continue to limit women’s access to local and subnational executive leadership, including discriminatory gender norms, gaps in the design and enforcement of parity frameworks, violence against women in politics, and the enduring burden of unpaid care work. It also highlights how these barriers intersect with inequalities linked to race, ethnicity, age, socio-economic status, territorial exclusion, and other structural factors shaping women’s political trajectories.

The purpose of this side event is to:

• Present key insights emerging from the WIP research
• Promote dialogue on policy and institutional reforms needed to accelerate parity in local executive leadership
• Position women’s local executive leadership as central to strengthening democratic governance and advancing global development agendas

The event will contribute directly to the priority and review themes of the 70th Session of the Commission on the Status of Women, focused on strengthening women’s access to justice, eliminating discriminatory legal and institutional barriers, and advancing women’s full and effective participation in public life, as well as the elimination of violence.

**The panel will be conducted in Spanish. Simultaneous interpretation will be available.

For more information, please visit www.gwlvoices.org

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