Editorial: The representation paradox

Malta’s gender-corrective mechanism had the aim of improving women’s representation and visibility in politics, by bringing up the share of women in the House to 40% by adding more MPs from the under-represented gender.

In 2026, women won 12 seats and more than doubled their tally over 2022, when just five seats went to women on counting day, marking the lowest tally for women in 20 years. They were later joined by several others elected through casual elections.

Women fared far better this time around, with 10 women winning 12 out of the 67 parliamentary seats. Minister Miriam Dalli was the only elected woman to lead her district in terms of vote count. Four more women were elected on Labour’s casual election last Friday.

Viewed from this perspective, the gender-corrective measure may have partly secured incumbency for the women already elected to the House.

If one could attribute a failure, indirectly, it’s that the main parties have been slow in ensuring equal representation in their candidates list. Of the 162 candidates contesting Malta’s 2026 general election, just 28% were women – 39% of Labour candidates were women; and just 20% of the PN’s were female.

Critics of the gender-corrective mechanism have at times failed to acknowledge their own positionality. Successful women who broke the glass ceiling and cut their teeth in all-male environments, often university graduates, some with middle-class backgrounds that gave them vast agency and dependable networks, tend to view the top-up as a demeaning promotion that belittles individualist ambition.

It can be a myopic view of class and social mobility, especially when it comes to female candidates. Unlike men, women in all aspects of public life in Malta tend to be on the receiving end of uncalled-for body-shaming, jibes on the way they look and what they wear, the way they talk, as well as about their past or family life.

This brand of scrutiny often finds a very harsh frequency among the social media commentariat. It tends to project a very unkind view of women in politics, often through a misrepresentative kind of ‘sophistication’ they are expected to bring to the job, and which is never expected from men.

Women from working-class backgrounds will find a harder route into public life; in part, a lack of social mobility means that their only realistic access to public life will come through the organisational force of the party, rather than say, a profession or family business, or a leadership position. As products of their party loyalty, these MPs tend to be judged differently from candidates who hail from established professions, political dynasties, or high-performance careers.

To this end, the gender-corrective measure is, for the time being, beneficial in ensuring the visibility of not just the under-represented gender, but also women from lower socio-economic positions, who might not necessarily have the same campaigning firepower as others. 

Interestingly, the duopolistic nature of this mechanism opens up a case for electoral reform for wider democratic representation.

Women candidates like ADPD leader Sandra Gauci will have secured a combined national vote that is greater than some of the unelected MPs promoted via the gender-corrective measure. Yet Gauci is ineligible since her party did not win representation in the House – an irony for an electoral system that actually elects MPs directly, not parties.

Questionable then, that women candidates with higher votes counts cannot be added to the gender-corrected cohort; without a national minimum threshold, third parties are currently unable to break through the high ceiling of the 4,000 average district quota.

And in this sense, the gender-corrective measure is also the duopoly’s selective top-up measure. While it does go a long way in correcting a gender deficit, it does so only within the democratic deficit that is enshrined in Malta’s electoral system – the oligarchy of the duopoly.