As a region, the Americas has the second-highest number of most women parliamentarians in the world, with an average of 28.1 percent of those elected to parliaments, according to a study by the Inter-American Commission of Women (CIM) of the Organization of American States (OAS) and International IDEA.

This achievement is attributed to policies aimed at increasing the number of women in national parliaments, also known as electoral gender-parity policies.

Costa Rica is one of the five Latin American countries, along with Bolivia, Ecuador, Mexico, and Nicaragua, that have adopted such gender parity policies in electoral candidacies at the parliamentary level.

With presidential election campaigns underway, Costa Ricans in 2018 will chose from four male presidential candidates from the country’s leading parties, but will see a more diverse selection of regional and local political candidates.

The most recent report of the CIM/OAS and International IDEA includes a regional analysis of the progress of gender parity in the region. The study found that gender parity applied to electoral candidacies is the policy that has worked best to increase the number of women elected in the lower houses.

In most of the countries that have adopted regulations on parity between women and men in candidacies for elected positions, the representation of women shows a significant increase, with historic number of women in the parliaments of the region exceeding 40 percent.

“With this study we demonstrate that parity is a policy that works to significantly reduce the inequality between women and men in access to political space; something significant in a context where public discontent over the issue of inequality is affecting levels of support for democracy,” said CIM executive secretary Carmen Moreno.

One of the central conclusions of the study is that parity should be approached from a holistic perspective, including the equal access of men and women to all positions of the state, and in general to all spaces of public life, and not only to elected offices.

The study also points to important challenges in more than half of the countries in the region, which have a percentage of elected women below 30%, as is the case of Brazil (9.9 percent), Guatemala (13.9 percent), Venezuela (14.4 percent), Paraguay (15 percent), Chile (15.8 percent), and others.

The study also highlighted the absence of national approaches to addresses the political rights of women from indigenous and Afro-descendant communities, and stresses that the first obstacle is the lack of official data on political participation disaggregated by ethnicity, race and sex, which would allow for diagnoses that serve as the basis for the definition of policies in this area.

The first study by the OAS on the topic, “Banking on Parity. Democratizing the political system in Latin America. The cases of Ecuador, Bolivia and Costa Rica,” published in 2013, looked at the processes that led to the adoption of parity laws in each country.