Gender Balance Politics: A man's world?

Looking for Gender Balance?

Gender Balance was a mySociety project to crowdsource data on the gender balance of the world's legislatures.

Gender Balance was an attempt to gamify crowdsourcing data on the gender of the world's politicians, so that we could answer questions such as:

  • Which country has the highest proportion of women in parliament?
  • Do women vote differently on issues like defence, the environment, or maternity benefits?
  • Exactly when did women come into power in different countries, and did their presence change the way the country was run?

This data was difficult to find, so we created a simple game that presented the names and pictures of politicians from legislatures all around the world and asked users to identify their gender. The data was then put into the public domain via the EveryPolitician project.

Why have we closed this site?

Since we've had to suspend activity on EveryPolitician, this includes the Gender Balance project. We are looking at ways of making the data gathered available for posterity.