In the most recent US elections, America—ranked eighth out of nine countries included in our study—voted in a record number of women, breaking the record set in the 2018 midterm elections.

A total of 318 female candidates ran for the 539 seats available across the House of Representatives and the Senate, with a record 117 of these being women of color.

Promisingly, 144 women were elected, a 50 percent increase from the 96 female politicians who were serving a decade ago.

India also broke domestic records for representation of women in parliament but as a percentage, this puts the nation in last place in our survey at just 14 percent.

In the 2019 election, 78 female candidates were sworn in as members of parliament in India’s Lok Sabha—which currently has 543 members.

Tellingly, the nation with the highest percentage of female MPs is one with formal rules about improving gender balance.

A total of 44 percent of South Africa’s MPs are women, helped by a gender quota that reserves a certain amount of seats for women, something that also exists in 12 other African nations.

A forward-thinking attitude toward gender diversity in African public life no doubt helped South Africa lead our survey in terms of the representation of women in parliament.

The country, whose quota system began in its first form in 1994, was closely followed by Spain in our study.

Spain’s 2019 election led to it electing the largest share of women representatives of any European legislature. Even Vox, a far-right party with desires to roll back some equality laws, has nine women among its 24 legislators.

Australia’s parliament has struggled historically with claims of misogyny, most famously from its former Prime Minister Julia Gillard, but the nation is third in terms of representation of women in parliament.

The Labor Party’s affirmative action quota adopted in 1994 now means the party is close to a 50/50 split in terms of gender, which likely helped the rise in female MPs from the 2016 elections to the most recent ones in 2019.

The other European nations were fairly closely matched in our survey, with France (37 percent) taking fourth place, the UK (34 percent) taking fifth, and Germany (33 percent)—which experienced no change in proportion of female MPs since our last study—sixth.

Finance is the most gender-diverse sector

Dissecting which economic sectors are more progressive reveals that the finance industry stands out.

Finance is the most gender diverse sector in Australia, the UK, Spain, the US, and Singapore, while it is the second most gender diverse in India, Germany, and South Africa.

This could be because of the heightened focus on so-called ethical investing, which among various factors puts pressure on investment companies to be more diverse themselves and to focus their investment capital toward firms that achieve better gender equality.

Elsewhere, the consumer sector features in the top three most gender-diverse sectors of every country studied, except for Spain, and ranks highest in India, France, and Germany (see figure 5).

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