Published on May 19, 2025 – Updated on May 19, 2025

A New Vox EU Column by Sophie Hatte, Jordan Loper and Thomas Taylor

Women remain strikingly underrepresented in the public sphere worldwide, whether in traditional news media or in politics, and particularly so in many fragile democracies. This column uses data on almost 9,000 parliamentary races since 2001 to study how the provision of free access to a social media platform, Facebook, impacted female political representation in 17 sub-Saharan African countries. The findings suggest that the deployment of free access significantly increased female political representation. Political parties realigning their endorsement strategy to shifting gender norms is an important explanation for this.

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Photo : Confidence Nwezi, Alamy-Canva