Representation, Complementarity, and Parity: Toward Gender-Fair Governance

Telibert Laoc

co-founding trustee of the Democratic Insights Group

on the Campaign Planning Session on the “Women in Politics Bills” organized by the Akbayan Party on April 27, 2026

Abstract

This paper advances a systems strategy for democratic representation in the Philippines anchored on representation, complementarity, and gender parity. It approaches women’s political participation not only as a question of candidacy, but as part of a broader effort to shape more complete and humane governance. The paper gives particular attention to three legislative tracks: encouraging the formation of new political parties with gender parity in membership, leadership, and candidates; subsidizing the set-up of policy units for political parties to move competition away from personality and toward issues; and requiring a 50-50 female-male quota in all sanggunian, including the barangay and the Sangguniang Kabataan, together with a relationship ban within the fourth degree of consanguinity and affinity. It also argues that the supply side is essentially a campaign question and that wider reforms—such as quantifying care work, eliminating the gender pay gap, requiring gender parity in boards, and adopting parity in university student councils—can help reshape the social foundations of political representation. The paper further underscores the crucial role of the Commission on Elections in providing timely and usable data to support gender-fair analyses, including data on the actual cost of getting elected and of sustaining a campaign. It finally proposes the creation by law of a Philippine Advancement of Society Through Gender Parity mechanism under the Office of the President to help align these reforms as part of a national democratic governance agenda.

Representation, Complementarity, and Parity

Representation, complementarity, and parity are the foundational concepts of this paper. Representation should not be reduced to leadership in the narrow and conventional sense. Representation is not mere leadership. It is the integration of the experiences, interests, and aspirations of the people into the institutions that govern them.

This is not only about equal capability, although capability should not even be in question. It is also about the value of different lived experiences, strengths, and insights. Women and men bring perspectives that enrich governance and society. Together, these contributions create better balance, broader understanding, and a fuller appreciation of our shared human experience. It is this complementarity that allows governance to approach public problems more holistically.

Parity gives this idea institutional form. It allows democratic representation to move toward a fuller inclusion of women and men in shaping institutions, laws, budgets, priorities, and public decisions. The most useful way to describe the goal is this: parity for 360-degree governance. The point is not competition between women and men. It is complementarity, parity, and fuller democratic representation. Governance becomes more complete when the perspectives of both women and men are present in shaping institutions, laws, budgets, priorities, and public decisions.

A Systems View of Gender-Fair Politics

The question, then, is what would help democratic representation in the Philippines move toward gender parity in a serious, structural, and sustained way. The Philippine case points to the value of a systems approach. In the 2022 elections, women made up 21 percent of all candidates, up from 17 percent in 2010. In the 2023 Sangguniang Kabataan elections, women composed 44 percent of the candidates nationwide.  In the barangay elections held at the same time, women composed 30 percent of the candidates nationwide The significant involvement of women in the SK and barangay elections is encouraging, and they point to the importance of building pathways by which gains in one layer of representation can support gains in larger and more powerful institutions.

That is the value of a systems view. It allows the country to look not only at what happens during elections, but also at what can be done before, around, and beyond elections. A serious strategy can, therefore, address the political pipeline, the campaign environment, party incentives, public expectations, and the wider social and economic arrangements that shape what is seen as credible, viable, and normal in public life.

A democratic system becomes stronger when representation is broadened in a structural and sustained way. A governance system that brings the perspectives of both women and men into public decision-making is more balanced, more complete, and better able to respond to the complexity of public life.

The First Legislative Track: New Political Parties with Parity Designed In

The first legislative track is to encourage the formation of new political parties and to require that these parties adopt gender parity in membership, leadership, and the fielding of candidates. This is important because many existing parties are not programmatic parties in the full sense. They are often vehicles for personalities, electoral convenience, local machinery, or patronage arrangements. Democratic representation will be helped by organizations built for issue-based competition from the outset.

New parties, if properly designed and encouraged, can enter the field with a different architecture. If gender parity is built into their membership, leadership, and nominating processes from the beginning, then parity becomes part of institutional design rather than an afterthought. This track addresses both supply and demand. On the supply side, it creates new entry points for women. On the demand side, it begins to normalize parity as part of what a political party is expected to look like.

New entities under this rule would have to first register with the Securities and Exchange Commission as a nonprofit before they are subject to the rules of the Commission on Elections. To remain a political party under the rules of the COMELEC, political parties would need to independently comply with the rules of the SEC, including the submission of timely audited annual reports and other compliance requirements. Failure to do so would result in automatic disqualification as a political party.

The Second Legislative Track: Subsidized Policy Units for All Parties

The second legislative track is to subsidize the set-up of policy units for all political parties. This is one of the more durable solutions, even if it is slower and less dramatic. The government already spends public resources on elections and democracy. A more strategic use of public resources would be to strengthen issue-based competition by enabling parties to develop policy, research, and analytical capability. Parties should not compete only through personal networks, name recall, patronage, or emotional branding. They should compete through programs, positions, and the capacity to think through public problems.

If parties have working policy units—whether through internal staffing or accredited relationships with think tanks, universities, and research institutions—the center of politics can begin to move away from personality and toward governance. This shift is especially important for women because issue-based competition is generally more open to new entrants and less dependent on the old masculine codes of political muscle, entitlement, and familial machinery. This track does not guarantee parity, but it changes the terrain on which parity becomes more plausible.

The subsidy would be in the form of a fixed and uniform amount released at the start of each quarter to provide for competitive salaries for the executive director and two senior research staff, office rental, and a fully functioning website about the party, its programs, and its policy proposals.

The fund would be conditioned with the quarterly publication of policy papers and corresponding bills filed before the Congress.  Failure to meet the requirements would forfeit the next quarterly subsidy. 

The Third Legislative Track: A 50-50 Quota in All Sanggunian

The third legislative track is to require a 50 percent female-male quota in all sanggunian—panlalawigan, panlungsod, bayan, barangay, and the Sangguniang Kabataan. Together with imposing a ban on relationships among candidates within the fourth degree of consanguinity and affinity, this would be the most consequential of the three tracks. It directly alters the structure of representation in institutions where collective deliberation and lawmaking occur. More importantly, it would shape both supply and demand. Political organizations would be required to recruit, prepare, endorse, and defend women candidates in much greater numbers. Voters, in turn, would encounter parity not as an abstract aspiration but as a normal feature of representation.

The barangay and Sangguniang Kabataan councils would also be required to institutionalize parity through female and male co-chairs in their committees and other internal leadership structures.

That repeated exposure matters. It shapes habit, expectation, and imagination. If a reform is serious enough to encourage both political supply and public demand to adjust at the same time, then it is likely to be consequential. This is why the sanggunian track deserves special attention.

The Supply Side Is Essentially a Campaign Question

The supply side deserves closer discussion because it is, in essence, a campaign question. Who gets recruited? Who is pitted against opposing candidates? Who gets endorsed to voters? Who gets media attention? Who gets party support? All of these are campaign questions. They help determine who is seen as winnable.

In this sense, the supply side is not merely about how many women are interested in running. It is about how the campaign machinery of politics selects, packages, projects, and sustains candidates. The campaign environment remains highly important in financing, message-making, endorsements, political introductions, and reputational defense. Politics remains male-dominated; parties have weak incentives to recruit and support women; women are often seen as less electable and are expected to self-fund; and little organized pressure exists for parties to move toward parity. These are not incidental problems. They are design questions in the campaign system itself, and they can be addressed more deliberately through reform.

The Role of the COMELEC in Supporting Gender-Fair Analyses

A crucial enabling role falls on the Commission on Elections. The COMELEC must provide timely, regular, and usable election data. This should include not only data on candidacies, turnout, and results, but also data that would allow the public to better understand the actual cost of getting elected, and most especially the cost of mounting and sustaining a campaign. At present, too much of the discussion on electoral viability rests on anecdote, impression, or the experience of a few. Yet if women generally have less access to independent resources and are more often expected to self-finance, then the cost of campaigning is not a peripheral matter but a central factor in representation.

More granular data on campaign expenditures, sources of funds, media spending, operational costs, and the real financial demands of contesting public office would help inform party reform, public policy, and possible measures to reduce the cost of entry into politics. With such data more regularly available, the country would be better positioned to understand the structure of electoral competition and to design reforms that support a more gender-fair politics.

Broader Reforms That Shape Political Representation

The political system does not begin with campaigns. It is fed by the broader society. For this reason, there are parallel reform tracks that should accompany the political and electoral measures.

One is to quantify care work. Women’s work in the household remains undervalued, undercounted, and too often invisible in the way society understands income, productivity, and contribution. If care work were more fully recognized and factored into the total household economy, this would help correct not only an economic distortion but also a political one. A society that gives fuller weight to care work also gives fuller recognition to the experience, discipline, sacrifice, and managerial competence embedded in it.

A second is to eliminate the gender pay gap for the same work and the same qualifications in both the government and private sectors. This is among the systemic interventions needed to support gender-fair representation. The correction toward gender parity is not confined to politics. It must also take place across society, where economic inequality affects confidence, access to resources, and the capacity to enter public life on fairer terms. The gender pay gap is therefore not merely a labor market issue. It is also a democratic representation issue.

A third is to require gender parity in the boards of government institutions, private institutions, and companies. This is significant both for mind-setting and for the actual practice of gender-fair governance. Boards shape institutional culture, strategic priorities, recruitment pathways, and definitions of competence. If parity becomes normal in boards and governing bodies across sectors, it becomes easier to carry the same expectation into politics.

A fourth is to establish gender parity in university student councils. This is future-facing. Student councils are training grounds for public voice, political negotiation, agenda-setting, representation, and accountability. If parity is introduced and normalized there, future political leaders will grow up within a more balanced understanding of representation and leadership.  The student councils could further institutionalize parity by having female and male co-chairs.

Why the Reform Case Should Not Depend on RA 9710 Alone

The Magna Carta of Women is useful as a springboard because it affirms substantive equality and allows the State to act against discriminatory structures and practices. It also provides specific support for incentives to political parties with a women’s agenda, the revision of gender stereotypes, gender-fair treatment in media, gender mainstreaming, incentives, and funding. But it need not be the center of the argument. The center of the argument is democratic representation, systems reform, and the national interest in building more complete and humane governance.

The case for gender parity does not rest only on compliance with a statute, however useful that statute may be. It rests on the deeper proposition that a democratic society is strengthened when the institutions that make binding public decisions more fully reflect the people they are meant to govern.

Human Rights, Parity, and the Future of Democratic Representation

There is, nonetheless, a human rights reason for taking this path. Equal political citizenship is more fully realized when representation becomes more balanced and inclusive. The positive human rights implication of a parity-centered strategy is clear: it treats women’s participation as part of equal citizenship rather than symbolic inclusion. The corresponding caution is that parity should always be linked to institutional design, issue-based politics, and durable reform, so that it becomes meaningful in practice and not merely formal in appearance.

From a futures perspective, the key question is whether the country will continue moving toward a political environment in which women are more fully fielded, better supported, and more fairly judged as part of democratic quality itself. If the demand side changes, parties will adjust. If parties adjust, candidate pools will widen. If women hold office in greater numbers, public expectations will also change. Over time, what today appears exceptional may become ordinary. That is the strategic horizon.

The Philippine Advancement of Society Through Gender Parity

A national mechanism may also be established through legislation under the Office of the President: the Philippine Advancement of Society Through Gender Parity. This is an institutional platform that looks into progress in parity representation, develops and helps carry out measures that would bring into fuller fruition the commitments already found in RA 9710, and identifies other courses of action arising from analysis and simulation of the demand and supply sides of political and electoral participation. In this sense, it is not merely a research body, but a policy, strategy, and implementation mechanism that helps keep the country’s movement toward gender parity coherent, evidence-based, and sustained.

Conclusion

This is not about competition between women and men. It is about complementarity, parity, and representation. It is about moving from a narrow and personalized politics toward one that is more programmatic, more inclusive, and more reflective of the society it claims to govern.

The task is large and it will take time. But if the Philippines is serious about democratic representation, then it can begin to act at the level of system design, not only at the level of individual aspiration. The three legislative tracks discussed here—new parties designed with parity from the start, policy units for issue-based competition, and a 50-50 quota in all sanggunian—may be treated as serious pathways, not side proposals. Together with broader reforms in care work, pay equity, institutional boards, and student councils, they point toward a more coherent and future-facing politics.

That is where the next serious effort may well lie.

-X-