Brazil has struggled to elect women to political office. Upcoming elections could change that.

On a sunny September morning, Joyce Trindade works her way around the stalls of a secondhand clothing market here, distributing hugs and political pamphlets in equal measure. A candidate in this weekend’s Rio de Janeiro city council elections, she’s in the bustling commercial neighborhood to show that a woman’s place is in politics, she tells the vendors, all of whom are women.

This is the first time that Ms. Trindade, in her late 20s, is running for a seat on Rio’s city council. She’s one of 158,000 female candidates participating in nationwide local elections, and seeking to break into the overwhelmingly male world of electoral politics.

Despite electing a woman president in 2010, Brazil has one of the lowest levels of female political representation in Latin America, ranking almost dead last. Women hold just 17.5% of seats in the lower house of Congress, and are similarly absent from state and municipal bodies, even after more than two decades of legislative and grassroots efforts to increase their presence. As many Latin American countries have reached political parity – a benchmark associated with policies that often better serve women and children – Brazilian political parties have found ways to work around the law, and cultural stereotypes about women are widespread, experts say.

But the sorry numbers don’t tell the whole story: Twenty years after Brazil’s quota law was first passed in 1997, the number of women in the federal lower house doubled. The overall number of women winning office has continued to gradually increase over the past six years, as affirmative action laws are strengthened, voters become more aware of the glaring gender disparities in politics, and more female candidates enter races.

“There is growing awareness among women [that] they can be part of this change,” says Débora Thomé, a political scientist at the Fundação Getúlio Vargas university in São Paulo and author of a new book on female candidates. It’s a slow process, but there are signs that Brazilian society wants this change, she says.

“If you invest in women, you transform society,” says Ms. Trindade, who served as Rio’s youngest secretary for women under Mayor Eduardo Paes. She decided to run for office after realizing “how necessary it is to have more women, especially Black women, on the council” to help shape everyday policies in a field that has historically been hostile to Black Brazilians and women.

Why politics?

Across the Guanabara Bay in São Gonçalo, a poor city on the outskirts of Rio, Luana Mota is on her third electoral campaign in four years. She arrives late for canvassing on a recent Friday because she was looking after her daughter. “It’s the same old, outdated crowd [in power]; we need renewal,” she tells three potential voters, sympathizing with their concerns about child care and public transport. “We women know firsthand what the problems are,” she says, to a chorus of assent.

Women are dominant in a number of ways in Brazil: They make up 52% of the electorate, serve as primary breadwinners in over half the country’s households (50.9%), and make up 52.2% of the workforce. They have more formal education than men do and increasingly occupy leadership positions in the private sector.

“And yet in this specific space that is electoral politics, we aren’t breaking in,” says Jacqueline Pitanguy, a sociologist and political scientist who fought to get women into the constituent assembly of 1988, responsible for drafting the current Brazilian Constitution. “It’s a discrepancy that’s hard to make sense of.”

Many point to Brazil’s patriarchal society and deeply ingrained sexism. “Gender-based violence starts at birth,” says Thânisia Cruz of #ElasNoPoder, a nongovernmental organization committed to increasing female representation. “Gender-based political violence begins when you tell a girl she isn’t capable of accessing positions of power.”

Brazil has a broad understanding of gender-based political violence that goes beyond physical aggression and includes any action or behavior that might limit women’s political rights. A law making this a crime was passed in 2021, but 58% of the country’s female mayors still suffer from gender-based political violence such as online hate speech, fake news, and verbal aggression, according to Instituto Alziras, another organization working to help women break into public office.

Brazil’s lack of political representation can’t be explained simply by sexism. Countries with similar cultures of machismo, such as Mexico or Bolivia, have achieved gender parity in Congress through laws requiring 50-50 representation on political ballots. Yet in Brazil, a 1997 law requiring a 30% gender quota on party lists for legislative elections at local, state, and national level has largely failed to get more women into office.

In the last municipal elections, four years ago, nearly a fifth of Brazil’s municipalities failed to elect even one woman to their local council.

Part of the problem lies with the electoral system: Imposing quotas on parties’ electoral lists does not guarantee the same gender division among elected representatives. “Brazil has an open-list system, where people vote for a specific person. ... Quotas work much better in closed-list systems,” says Dr. Thomé.

For years, political parties simply ignored the quota law. That was made harder by a 2009 electoral reform, but it’s still common for parties to circumvent the system by nominating uncompetitive female candidates who have little chance of winning. They’ve also made a practice of giving women fewer resources to run their campaigns.

“It’s a situation in which various women give up,” says Ms. Pitanguy.

“Bring other women with us”

The general election of 2018 was a turning point for Brazilian women, analysts say. That year, the Supreme Court ruled that female candidates must receive at least 30% of TV advertising airtime and, crucially, of the money in a public electoral fund, which the state provides following a ban on corporate donations. The number of women elected jumped more than 50% to reach 290 women at the federal and state levels.

Other key events brought women out onto the street that year and got them talking about their treatment in society in new ways, says Dr. Thomé. Then-far right candidate Jair Bolsonaro’s derogatory attitude towards women triggered concerns for the future of hard-fought rights. And the brazen murder of Marielle Franco, a Black, lesbian city councilwoman and human rights activist in Rio, sparked a movement to carry on her legacy.

This year, a record 34% of registered candidates are women – with over half of them Black like Ms. Trindade and Ms. Mota.

The real challenge is turning more of those candidacies into electoral victories, researchers and candidates say. That won’t happen without parties investing in women’s political careers over the long term.

“We really need to rethink how political parties operate, because basically politics is made of white men who control the whole financial structure,” says Ms. Mota. She wants to see more women in strategic positions, like treasurer or president, within party leadership.

“There’s still a lot to be done,” adds Ms. Trindade, as a nearby car equipped with a sound system blasts out her electoral jingle. “I hope we can pull together to bring other women with us.”