Gender Representation in South Africa

Gender representation in the National Assembly has steadily increased since the 1994 election from 27% to 43% of women occupying seats in the National Assembly following the 2024 election (Table 1). The decline following the recent election can be attributed to the loss of support for the largest party, which applies internal gender quotas. Gender representation in the regional constituencies varies provincially, with the two smallest constituencies, the Northern Cape (5 seats) and Free State (10 seats), showing the highest rates of women elected to the National Assembly. In the 2024 election, more women were elected in the regional constituencies (45%) than the national compensatory tier (43%).

Women’s representation in provincial government has similarly increased since 1994, albeit at a slower pace than the National Assembly. Following the 2024 election, women occupy 38% of seats of all Provincial Legislature seats (Table 6). There is, however, wide variations between Provincial Legislatures with rates of female representation ranging from 47% in the Northern Cape Provincial Legislature to 30% in the KwaZulu-Natal Provincial Legislature (Figure 18). Again, this is largely due to the significant decline in support for the major party in KwaZulu-Natal and Gauteng.

At the local government level, gender representation has similarly improved over the years, albeit with the 2021 election presenting a setback in the overall rate of women’s representation. As expected for mixed systems, single-member constituencies skew towards males based on political parties’ candidate selection strategies, but the party list component helps correct gender parity (Table 7). On average, rates of women’s representation have been similar at local (34% overall) and provincial government (35%) and there is a clear regional dimension to women’s representation with statistical tests showing a moderate correlation (0.4) between rates of female representation across provinces, suggesting that provincial level dynamics including party candidate selection processes influence gender outcomes despite the use of different electoral systems at the provincial and local government level (Figure 19).

In terms of electoral system design, statistical tests show a very weak correlation (0.19) and non-significant (P-value 0.14) relationship between the size of multi-member constituencies and rates of female representation across PR systems. This tells us that the size of multi-member constituencies does not affect rates of gender representation in different countries (Figure 20). Among PR systems, rates of gender representation are instead determined by a range of other factors separate from the electoral system. The South African experience similarly finds a non-significant relationship between the size of regional constituencies and rates of gender representation, as well as between the size of provincial legislatures and rates of gender representation (Figure 21). As previously indicated, in South Africa, the smallest regional constituency (Northern Cape) with the smallest provincial legislature has the highest rate of female representation.