Women in Spanish Politics: Breaking Barriers Amid Persistent Challenges
A new book exposes the challenges and progress of women in Spanish political leadership, emphasizing ongoing barriers and the need for systemic change.
- • Despite progress, women represent only 22.5% of local mayors in Spain as of 2023.
- • Women's political leadership often faces more scrutiny and pressure to resign than men's.
- • Political parties sometimes promote women only to later replace them with men.
- • The book 'Ellas quieren' calls for quotas and a revolutionary change in political party dynamics to improve women's participation.
Key details
The recently presented book "Ellas quieren. El liderazgo excepcional de las políticas," by Ángela Paloma, highlights the ongoing struggles and progress of women in Spanish politics. Featuring testimony from female politicians across ideologies, the book exposes the cultural and systemic barriers women face despite increased visibility in leadership roles. Although women held 49.5% of executive political positions in 2024, their representation at the local level remains low, with only 22.5% of mayors being women in 2023, according to the book. The author argues that political parties often promote women only to push them aside later, maintaining a status quo favoring men perceived as threats by entrenched political figures like Santos Cerdán and José Luis Ábalos. The book calls for quotas and revolutionary changes in party dynamics to enable real equality, echoing Carme Artigas's preface statement: "they want, they just need the opportunity." This therapeutic work reveals a shared experience among women politicians of unequal treatment and media scrutiny. It stresses that the core issue is less about women's leadership capabilities and more about the power perception in a traditionally male-dominated space. The discourse underscores the necessity of transforming political culture to ensure women's substantive participation and recognizes that meaningful equality in political leadership is still a work in progress in Spain (source 146774).
This article was synthesized and translated from native language sources to provide English-speaking readers with local perspectives.