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The use of all-women shortlists (AWS) is the political practice intended to increase the proportion of female Members of Parliament (MPs) in the United Kingdom by allowing only women to stand in particular constituencies for a particular political party. Only the Labour Party currently uses this practice, and it began doing do in 1993.[3] Political parties in additional countries, such as South Korea and Latin American countries have also used practices analogous to AWS, especially in relation to government gender quotas. AWS and practices similar to it have had mixed impacts in terms of the percentage of candidacies and offices women hold as a result of their use.

Latin America

Latin American political parties’ gender quotas for candidates are often a result of their respective countries’ gender quotas for governing bodies. Fourteen Latin American countries have such a quota for their legislatures; these countries consist of Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Guyana, Honduras, Mexico, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, and Uruguay (Torregrosa). Political parties in Latin American countries utilize a variety of systems to pick their candidates for office, with Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay having “fairly informal selection rules” for their candidates, in which party elites have large amounts of influence, while those in Paraguay and Costa Rica use more stringent methods of selection described by formal and written rules within the political parties (Bjarnegård and Zetterberg). Political parties with more bureaucratized, stricter candidate selection processes in Latin American countries with legislative-body quotas run women as, on average, 37.8% of their candidates for legislative bodies, while in those parties with less formalized selection processes, on average, women constitute 31.5% of candidates (Bjarnegård and Zetterberg).

South Korea

South Korea has a system in which gender quotas exist for its single national legislative body, the National Assembly, with a requirement that women hold 30% of the National Assembly’s 246 single-member constituency seats and 50% of its 54 proportionally elected seats (Lee and Shin). However, “neither of the two major political parties has thus far nominated women to more than 10 percent of the single-member district seats,” resulting in women constituting 15.7% of National Assembly members (Lee and Shin). This situation is largely due to the candidate selection process of South Korean political parties, whose “rules governing candidate selection lack routinization,” allowing party leaders to have significant influence regarding candidates and the ability to circumvent gender quotas (Lee and Shin).  

Criticisms of all-women shortlists and similar policies