Women Rule 23.5% of the World’s Population

The Inter-Parliamentary Union maintains a database of women in national governments around the world. It shows the percentage of women in lower and upper houses of parliament, or single chambers if there is only one. I combined lower and upper here, and sorted them by percentage female, weighted by population. The distribution looks like this:

You can see India at 14.7% on the y-axis, showing their representation of women in parliament, and stretching 19% of the x-axis, representing the size of their population. China, about the same size, has 26.5% women in its parliament (it’s beyond me to calculate how much power parliaments actually have, of course). The USA has 28.4% women in both houses of Congress. Mexico, with 129 million people, is the only large country that has at least 50% women in parliament. (Rwanda, with 61% women, has a population of 14 million people.)

The median on the chart is 23% women, so half the world’s population lives below and half lives above that point (where Egypt and Greece are). The population-weighted mean is about the same, 23.5%. Hence, women rule 23% of the world’s population.

Note: These are pretty easy to make, but it would be easier if IPU included the country code in its data file. Sorting and fixing the names is a hassle.

I have previously done women in parliament by income, change in women in parliament, but those are both out of date now.

OK, fine – here is the relationship between women in parliament and total fertility rate, with Sub-Saharan Africa pulled out.

Stata code for the second figure:

twoway scatter tfr pctw [w=pop23], mfc(red%30) mlc(none) mlw(vthin) msize(2) /// || lfit tfr pctw [w=pop23] if wbregion !="Sub-Saharan Africa", lc(brown) lw(thin) legend(off) /// || lfit tfr pctw [w=pop23] if wbregion =="Sub-Saharan Africa", lc(blue) lw(thin) legend(off) /// || scatter tfr pctw [w=pop23] if pop23>25000 & pop23<100000, mlabel(iso3) mlabposition(0) msymbol(i) mlabc(black) mlabsize(1.5) /// || scatter tfr pctw [w=pop23] if pop23>=100000, mlabel(wpname) mlabposition(0) msymbol(i) mlabc(black) mlabsize(2) /// title(Women in parliament and total fertility rate) /// note("Linear fits separately for Sub-Saharan African (blue) and the rest of the world (brown), weighted by population. Markers scaled by population." "Women in parliament 2025, total fertility rate 2023. Data from IPU and UN. PN Cohen figure.", span size(2)) /// ylab(0(1)6, nogrid) xlab(0(10)60) xti(Women in parliament) yti(Total fertility rate)

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Previously Published on familyinequality with Creative Commons License

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