Out of Sight, Out of Mind
When it comes to global governance, data indicate that women are overwhelmingly positioned “out of sight.” Despite comprising 51% of the world’s population, they represent only 13% of its leaders. In fact, women are out of sight the moment they decide to run for political office. And because people are conditioned to believe what they see, this lack of visibility perpetuates a false, pernicious impression—despite shifts in societal norms or personal beliefs to the contrary—that women cannot and do not lead.
The visibility gap begins long before women ever come to occupy seats of power. Studies by UN Women and the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance have shown that female political candidates receive less media attention than their male counterparts, while the type of coverage they do elicit exhibits stereotypically gendered biases, focusing on frivolous or spurious factors such as their physical appearance, perceived “likeability,” or status as wives and mothers.
How many men have had to field questions like those put to former New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern mere hours after her election, asking not about her policies but her plans to have children? Or, like Kenyan vice-presidential candidate Martha Karua, had their competency and trustworthiness cast into doubt because they were unmarried, despite two decades of political experience?
Because our minds normalize what we see, we come to believe that women can neither seek nor occupy positions of power. We instead default to the more visible (male) candidates at the expense of (female) ones who are absent from media coverage or have been skewed in our perceptions by unfair standards. Not only do we risk overlooking qualified women, but we also come to code “leaders” as male, which undermines female office holders, discourages others from running, and perpetuates the stubborn imbalance that keeps more than half the global population from claiming a proportionate say in how the world is governed.
Step Forward Global Initiative (SFGI) seeks to correct this disparity by advancing the visibility of women running for political office worldwide. SFGI offers a platform for those who are absent from mainstream media coverage while keeping the focus on what actually matters—qualifications, experience, achievements, and policy—not superficial or personality-based traits. By profiling candidates rather than winners, SFGI seeks to counter assumptions that the problem is a lack of ambition when, really, it is a question of visibility. After all, we cannot advocate for women we cannot see and whose candidacies we do not know exist.
On this International Women’s Day, SFGI invites you to consider the systemic barriers that prevent women from stepping forward and accepting the call to lead. Our Leadership Indicators Platform (LIP) is coming soon, offering contextual, comparative data at country and regional levels and objective analyses of female political candidates in elections around the world.
By uplifting women candidates, SFGI endorses a future where parity supplants partiality, qualifications outweigh appearances, and objectivity eliminates the biases that entrench the status quo and stand in the way of progress.
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Sources: Global Media Monitoring Project (GMMP); UN Women; UN News; International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (IDEA)