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To mark 20 years since the launch of the Beijing Platform for Action, ODIHR has published this compendium of good practices to reflect on where progress has been made and identify some of the continuing challenges in achieving gender equality in politics. The compendium explores the participation of women through political parties, in elections, local politics and in parliaments, recognizing that these should be seen as connected and related areas.

The objective of this paper is to outline the level of political participation of Maltese women in local councils, national and European parliaments. When the level of participation of women in these political structures falls drastically below that of Maltese men – as in the case of national elections- this paper sets out to delineate what obstacles might prevent women’s representation at this level and what might need to be done to ensure that more women are elected. The paper takes into consideration the six possible areas of intervention proposed by the OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR) in the baseline study entitled “Gender equality in elected office: a six-step action plan” (Norris and Krook, 2011), namely constitutional rights, electoral system, legal quotas, party rules and recruitment procedures, capacity development and parliamentary reform.