Female representation: How political parties failed the July Charter’s first test

Illustration: TBS

The upcoming national election in Bangladesh is significant for a number of reasons, one of the more significant of which is the issue of higher female representation and inclusiveness in Bangladeshi politics. 

As the signatories to the July Charter have pledged to uphold clauses related to female empowerment from this election, the nomination lists of political parties have become the first real measure of whether the Charter represents a political turning point or merely a reformist document with limited practical consequence. 

Regrettably, most parties have already fallen short.

The July Charter set a clear benchmark: political parties would begin with at least 5% women candidates in parliamentary nominations and gradually increase this figure by five percentage points in each election cycle until reaching 33% direct representation. All major parties signed it. 

Yet the current nomination landscape suggests that even this modest threshold has not been treated as binding. 

By the numbers

For the upcoming election, nomination papers were submitted for 300 parliamentary seats, with 2,568 candidates initially entering the race. The Election Commission (EC) has declared 1,842 candidates eligible to contest the upcoming 13th Jatiya Sangsad election across 300 parliamentary constituencies. Of them, 1,777 are men and 65 are women. This means that women make up just 3.53% of all candidates in the election.

This figure is not only below the July Charter's promised minimum; it is also strikingly out of step with Bangladesh's demographic reality. Women make up nearly half of the electorate, and in several districts, female voters outnumber male voters. Yet their presence as candidates remains marginal.

If you look at the nine months of meetings held by the Consensus Commission before the July Charter, political parties very clearly did not send women representatives. That, in itself, tells us they are still not ready to see women in political decision-making roles.

Samina Luthfa, Professor of Sociology, Dhaka University

Of the 51 political parties contesting the election, at least 30 parties have nominated no women at all. Several major and mid-sized parties have submitted dozens — or in some cases hundreds — of nominations consisting entirely of men. The gap between commitment and practice is therefore not confined to smaller or fringe actors; it is systemic.

Major parties, minimal compliance

Among the largest political players, performance varies in scale but not in principle. 

The Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), one of the country's two historically dominant parties and a signatory to the July Charter, has nominated 10 women candidates. 

Even if all are retained in the final list, this would still place the party below the 5% threshold, given the size of its overall slate of nominees.

The situation is more stark for other major opposition forces. 

Jamaat-e-Islami, which has submitted more than 270 nominations, has not nominated a single woman. Other ideologically aligned parties have followed a similar pattern, submitting large numbers of male candidates while excluding women entirely.

By contrast, only one party — Bangladesh Socialist Party (Marxist) — has come close to aligning nominations with the spirit of the charter, nominating women for roughly one-third of its candidate slots. 

The current figures also reflect a long-standing pattern rather than a temporary setback. 

Historically, women's participation in Bangladesh's parliamentary elections has fluctuated but remained consistently low. In the 1991 election, 39 women contested, with five winning. In the 2001 election, 59 women ran, and 19 were elected. In the 2018 election, a record 68 women contested, with 22 winning directly. In the 2024 election, 94 women contested, but only 19 won, most from a single party. 

While the absolute number of women candidates has increased over time, their share of total candidates has remained stubbornly low, rarely crossing single digits. The July Charter was meant to disrupt this incrementalism by introducing a mandatory escalation mechanism. The current nomination lists indicate that this mechanism is already being treated as optional.

Tokenism over transformation

A closer look at who gets nominated reveals another structural problem. A significant proportion of women candidates come from established political families. Very few emerge from grassroots political organising, labour movements, or local government pathways. 

This reflects a broader political economy in which campaign financing, muscle power, and patronage networks dominate candidate selection.

The July Charter did not directly address campaign financing reform for women, but its nomination targets implicitly assumed that parties would take responsibility for enabling women to contest. The nomination outcomes suggest that this responsibility has largely been abdicated.

Election campaigns in Bangladesh remain prohibitively expensive. For women — who historically have lower access to property, personal wealth and informal funding networks — this creates a near-insurmountable barrier. 

Parties, rather than compensating for this imbalance through institutional support, often treat financial viability as a prerequisite for nomination. The result is a self-reinforcing cycle in which male candidates dominate because the system is designed around male access to resources.

The pattern, according to Samina Luthfa, professor of sociology at the University of Dhaka, exposes how both major parties have turned politics into an inherited privilege. 

"Historically, women in Bangladesh have had little to no control over property or even their own earnings. So when the question of financing an election campaign arises, how are they supposed to manage it?" she asked.

She said the systematic erasure of women from public decision-making over the past 15 months appeared to be part of a deliberate strategy. "If you look at the nine months of meetings held by the Consensus Commission before the July Charter, political parties very clearly did not send women representatives. That, in itself, tells us they are still not ready to see women in political decision-making roles," she said.

She argued that responsibility increases with the size of the political party. 

"The larger the party, the greater its responsibility," she said, pointing out that even as parties spoke of reform, their actions told a different story. "Take the July referendum — one of the four questions explicitly calls for increasing women's representation. All political parties agreed in principle that the number should be increased, yet when it came to nominations, they failed even to meet a minimal 5% target."

According to her, this contradiction is revealing. "What they are effectively doing is blocking the process through which women enter decision-making spaces," she said.

While patriarchy is often cited as the explanation, she said the issue runs deeper. 

"Women now make up 50% or more of participants in many sectors, yet they remain absent from electoral politics and from bodies that shape the state and the constitution. This clearly reflects deep-rooted cultural barriers," Samina said.

"These barriers continue to prevent women from reaching decision-making positions and from being accepted as political leaders. That is the reality we are seeing," she added.

Jasmine Tuli, former additional secretary of the Election Commission Secretariat, said elections in Bangladesh are "neither women-friendly nor encouraging". 

"The financial cost of contesting an election is simply beyond the reach of most women. They do not have access to that level of resources," she added.

The credibility gap

The July Charter emerged from the uprising as a promise of political reset — an acknowledgement that the old rules had failed to deliver inclusive democracy. Women were highly visible during the uprising, active in mobilisation, organisation, and resistance. Yet when the formal political process resumed, that visibility did not translate into representation.

This disconnect has consequences beyond gender equity. If political parties cannot uphold a numerically modest, procedurally simple commitment such as a 5% nomination target, it raises questions about their willingness to implement more complex reforms embedded in the charter — ranging from electoral restructuring to institutional accountability.

In that sense, women's nominations have become the first credibility test of the July Charter. Most parties have failed. 

The current nomination patterns suggest that reform commitments remain subordinate to entrenched power calculations. Candidate selection continues to be driven by perceived winnability, financial muscle, and factional loyalty — criteria that systematically disadvantage women.

Samina Luthfa added, "You can't solve these deep-rooted problems through superficial reforms; you need to address the underlying structural gaps. Otherwise, none of these issues will truly be resolved for anyone.

"I think it was quite evident from the July consensus and the nine months of dialogue that followed. We hardly saw any new ideas emerge — it was all about how to reach power more easily. Their performance showed that much more clearly than their words did. I would say this applies to all political parties: they spoke of new arrangements, of ending autocracy and fascism, but in practice, everything revolved around negotiating who gets power and how. Nine months of discussions — all at public expense — were spent under the guise of 'building consensus'," she said. 

She also pointed out that women are often nominated in less competitive constituencies. 

"Political parties frequently choose women for seats where they expect weaker voter support. That discourages women from staying in electoral politics," Samina added.

To remedy the situation, Tuli stressed the need for institutional support. "Political parties must provide real backing — they need to create space, generate interest, and build a supportive environment for women," she said, adding that the government could also step in with targeted grants or campaign support for women candidates, whether party-backed or independent.

"Women make up nearly 50% of the population. If we want meaningful representation, political parties must create the conditions for women to enter politics not as tokens, but as leaders," she said.

On women's representation, the message from most parties is clear: The promise of July has yet to survive its first encounter with power. There is, quite simply, no conducive political environment for women in Bangladesh — and the outcome of the nomination process reflects that harsh truth, however unfortunate it may be.