In Panama's general elections of May 5, 2024, women were the majority at every stage of the process except one: the stage that hands out power. That contrast is the central finding of the report on women's political participation in the 2024 elections (Informe de la participación política de las mujeres en las elecciones de Panamá, 2024). It was prepared by the research department of the Electoral Tribunal (Tribunal Electoral), the independent body that runs Panamanian elections, with support from International IDEA, the intergovernmental Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance. The report follows the regional Atenea assessment, and its conclusion is uncomfortable: thirty-six years after the return to democracy, half the population still faces structural barriers to exercising political rights on equal terms.
The funnel from voters to officeholders
The clearest way to see the problem is to follow women through the electoral process, stage by stage. Their share is very high at the start and collapses at the end:
- voter roll: 52.3% of the 3,004,083 people registered to vote;
- turnout: 1,218,024 of the 2,328,497 people who voted were women, or 52.31%;
- party membership: close to half of the members of every party;
- electoral boards, the citizen bodies that staff polling stations and count the votes: 72% of polling station members, 72% of the community boards, 70% of the district boards, and more than 60% on every board;
- candidacies: only 19% of the total;
- elected offices: 119 women out of 864 popularly elected posts, or 13.7%.
Read from top to bottom, it is a free fall from 52% of voters and 72% of the people running the process to 13.7% of those elected. Panama's electoral machinery is kept running mostly by women, while the power it produces is held mostly by men.
Where representation breaks down
The breakdown by office shows that no level comes close to parity. Panama elects deputies to the National Assembly, mayors for each district, representatives for each corregimiento (the smallest local administrative unit), and a handful of councillors (concejales).
| Office | Women elected | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Deputies | 15 of 71 | 21% |
| Mayors | 12 of 81 | 14.8% |
| Corregimiento representatives | 88 of 701 | 12.5% |
| Councillors | 4 of 11 | 36.3% |
| All offices | 119 of 864 | 13.7% |
Councillor is the only office above 30%, and it has so few seats, eleven in total, that it barely moves the national average. The National Assembly, whose deputies are elected through the electoral circuits of Panama, ended up with the same 15 women as in 2019, so there was no progress in five years.
The regional comparison is unflattering. Panama sits below the average share of women in Latin American legislatures, 35.8%, and below the Central American average of 30.8%. Mexico and Nicaragua exceed 50% women elected, and Costa Rica, Ecuador, Argentina and Peru pass 40%, while Panama is among the countries moving away from parity.
The presidential race is the most visible glass ceiling. Both women on the 2024 presidential ballot got there through independent candidacy (libre postulación), which requires collecting voter signatures, rather than through a party. Zulay Rodríguez gathered 176,145 signatures and Maribel Gordón 163,859. It was a first, with two women on the presidential ballot, and at the same time evidence that parties still do not nominate women for the offices that matter most.
The escape valve that neutralizes parity
How does this result coexist with a parity law? The answer lies in a mechanism that political scientist Flavia Freidenberg named the escape valve (válvula de escape). Since the first 30% quota, introduced by Law 22 of 1997, Panamanian law has always included a clause that switches it off: when female participation falls short of the required percentage, parties may complete their lists with men.
Article 373 of the Electoral Code, as amended for the 2024 elections, requires parties to nominate 50% women and 50% men. It keeps the same exit. If the party's women's secretariat (Secretaría de la Mujer) certifies that there are not enough female aspirants, the seats are filled with other candidates, and in practice parity becomes optional.
In 2024, no party presented parity lists, and most women nominated ended up as alternates (suplentes) rather than as principal candidates, the opposite of what a placement mandate putting women at the top of the lists would achieve. The law declares equality, and the exception takes it back.
Two more gaps add to the problem. There is no pre-election political funding aimed at women, who tend to find it harder to pay for campaigns, and there is no alternation mandate to stop men from always heading the lists.
Online political violence against women candidates
The report devotes a chapter to what it calls the last space colonized by the culture of political violence: social media. Two monitoring studies of the 2024 campaign, one by UNDP with the Universidad Católica Santa María La Antigua (USMA) and one by IPANDETEC, found that online aggression hit female candidates unevenly.
Toxic attacks were concentrated on X, formerly Twitter, with 52.9% of the toxic content detected, followed by Instagram with 38.1% and Facebook with 8%. The type of attack also differs by gender. Women were attacked for their identity and religious affiliation and with obscene language, while men were attacked over their competence.
On Instagram, 56% of the attacks on female candidates were based on gender roles and stereotypes. The study's conclusion is direct: digital violence discourages women from running and limits their freedom of political action.
Panama has had a law on political violence since 2020, Law 184, along with tools that were pioneering in the region, such as the Electoral Tribunal's Digital Ethics Pact (Pacto Ético Digital). The challenge, the report says, is to move from declarations to concrete action: define the offenses clearly, sanction them and coordinate across institutions.
A long-standing democratic debt
The history explains part of the picture. Panamanian women were not always full citizens. The Constitution of 1904 granted citizenship to all Panamanians, but electoral laws restricted it to men, and the 1941 Constitution made women's vote conditional on holding a diploma.
Women first voted in the election of the 1945 Constituent Assembly, after decades of mobilization led by, among others, Clara González and the first National Feminist Party, founded in 1923. The current Constitution settled the matter in Article 131: all Panamanians over eighteen are citizens, without distinction of sex. Today the Electoral Tribunal also issues the national identity card (cédula) that goes with that citizenship, as the guide to Panamanian nationality by descent explains.
That achievement accounts for the bright half of the report: women now vote and staff the electoral process in greater proportion than men. The other half is unfinished work. As the Electoral Tribunal itself puts it, the change from dictatorship to democracy thirty-six years ago has not yet translated into political participation and representation on equal terms.
What the report proposes
The authors do not stop at the diagnosis. Their recommendations target the specific mechanisms described above:
- remove the escape valve from the parity rule;
- introduce placement mandates on the ballots;
- strengthen independent candidacy;
- regulate online political violence.
None of these is impossible, and all of them depend on the will of institutions and party leaderships. A democracy in which half the population runs the election but does not get to govern is only half built, and correcting that, the report says, is within reach.