Women's Representation in Canadian Municipalities

Introduction

What factors account for variation in women's representation in municipal politics? In Canada, women make up 31% of municipal politicians. However, this figure masks wide variation, with 16% of municipalities having no women and another 16% reaching parity among councillors. With a comprehensive data set of 22,333 municipal elected positions in 3,363 municipalities in Canada – nearly every municipality in the country – we test the main factors that previous research has found to be consequential in explaining the proportion of women elected: district type, council size, urban setting, women's workforce participation, and degree of conservatism among voters. These factors capture how institutional, socio-economic, and ideational factors relate to women's inclusion. Our data further allow us to test whether the factors that predict women's presence among councillors also shape their access to mayoral offices, or whether women's election to more visible and prestigious offices requires different explanations.

Current research on the proportion of women elected to municipal office across Canada is relatively scarce, with the most comprehensive studies having been conducted more than a decade ago (Tolley 2011; Tremblay and Mévellec 2013). More recent research explores municipal representation in specific provinces or cities (Breux and Van Neste 2022; Breux and Mevellec 2023; Lucas et al. 2021; Mévellec and Tremblay 2016; Spicer, McGregor, and Alcantara 2017). Ours is the first comprehensive, large-scale study of women across nearly all municipalities in Canada. Because municipal electoral data are not centrally collected at the national level, and not all provinces collect such data, building the dataset used in our study required collecting data for hundreds of municipalities on a municipality-by-municipality basis.

Canada is a valuable case study because municipal councils vary on a number of factors that have been found to be relevant in previous research, namely, institutional, societal, and ideological factors. Canada offers ample institutional variation on electoral rules and council size. Some councillors are chosen through at-large elections, in which voters across an entire municipality can select candidates for every available city council seat. Other municipalities are divided into single-member or multi-member wards. Still others combine at-large and ward representation in hybrid councils.

A consistent finding in gender and electoral politics research is that women do better in multi-member rather than single-member districts (McAllister and Studlar 2002; Rule 1987). There are two possible theoretical reasons for this common pattern. First, voter preferences for diverse slates over homogeneous ones incentivize parties to include women (and other minorities) on candidate lists. Second, single-member districts are zero-sum games where a woman must displace a man to be selected as a candidate by a party, and subsequently elected (excluding rare cases in which all candidates are women). At the local level, however, studies are less conclusive about the impact of ballot structure on the election of women. Trounstine and Valdini (2008) find that women do better in at-large elections compared to ward elections. However, Crowder-Meyer, Gadarian and Trounstine (2015) find that women are more likely to win ward rather than at-large elections. Men in their study also do better in wards than at-large elections, leading the authors to conclude that women benefit from the less competitive nature of ward versus at-large elections. Other studies find no effect of wards versus at-large elections on the election of women (Smith, Reingold, and Owens 2012). In light of competing findings from U.S. studies, we are inclined to draw our expectation from the theoretical link between larger district magnitudes and the election of women, namely, that women are disadvantaged by having to compete directly with men and when there are fewer available seats. Therefore, we expect municipalities with at-large elections to have higher proportions of women than those using wards or hybrid election methods.

Council size is a second relevant institutional factor. Studying municipalities in New Jersey, Ulrik, Dittmar and Carroll (2018) find that larger city councils predict larger proportions of women. Webster and McGregor (2017) examine the effects of amalgamation to form a super-sized city authority in Auckland, finding tentative signs of entry-level improvement for female candidates. Using the case of Denmark, Ulrik and Elklit (2013) find that as local council sizes increase, so does women's representation. However, other researchers find no correlation between council size and women's inclusion (Kellogg et al. 2019; Welch and Karnig 1979). There are good theoretical reasons to think that council size matters. Women are socialized into exhibiting greater aversion to risk than men and this dynamic can explain women's greater hesitancy to seek elected office (Kanthak and Woon 2015). When there are fewer council spots available, competition increases, which in turn might reduce the number of women willing to compete. Taking both theoretical reasons and previous findings into account we expect that women's representation increases with council size.

Moving away from institutional factors, researchers also explore economic and cultural factors that may be related to women's political representation. Urban areas, for instance, foster more educational, social, and economic opportunities for women, providing women with the resources needed to run for elected office (Artiles et al. 2023; Holman 2017; Iversen and Rosenbluth 2008; Smith, Reingold, and Owens 2012). Studies from Europe and Japan confirm that women's representation in local politics is higher in more urban areas than those with smaller populations (Bochel and Bochel 2006; Dahl and Nyrup 2021; Sundstrom and Stockemer 2015).

A second factor that more directly captures changes from traditional to modern gender roles is women's labor force participation. Theoretically, two mechanisms link labor force participation with increased representation among women. First, where communities have lower female labor force participation relative to men, that may reflect more traditional attitudes toward women, which, in turn, suppresses women's political ambition and also makes voters less comfortable with women in decision-making arenas (Iversen and Rosenbluth 2008). Second, workforce participation enables women to accrue the social and economic resources needed to run for office. With data on women's representation in municipal offices across twenty-nine European countries, Sundstrom and Stockemer (2015) find that higher female labor force participation correlates with higher proportions of women's representation. We therefore expect that urban municipalities and those with more women in the workforce will have higher proportions of women elected to local councils.

Beyond institutional and socio-economic factors, research on gender and politics shows that ideology is associated with variation in women's representation. Political behavior research consistently finds gender gaps in public opinion and electoral preferences, with women being more supportive of socially progressive public policies and more likely than men to vote for leftist parties (Erickson and O’Neill 2002; Norrander and Wilcox 2008). Left-leaning parties, therefore, are more likely to actively recruit women to run for office and to elect more women (Caul 1999; Paxton and Kunovich 2003). In Canada, however, most municipal elections are non-partisan, meaning that parties do not play the same role in recruiting women to run for office. Instead, the link between ideology and the election of women may be more direct, with conservative political contexts producing fewer candidates who are women and seeing fewer women elected to office.

Previous studies indicate that voters’ ideology does matter for women's representation. For example, Dahl and Nyrup (2021) show that Danish voters who affiliate with left-leaning parties are more likely to support female candidates at the local level. Sundstrom and Stockemer (2015) find that support for leftist parties positively influences women's representation in European municipal councils as do Smith, Reingold and Owens (2012) for cities in the U.S. In light of consistent findings in previous research, we expect that a smaller proportion of women are elected to local office in municipalities with more conservative voters.

Our final expectation concerns women's election to council seats versus mayoral office. In Canada, mayors are nearly always elected at-large, separately from municipal councillors, but all mayors sit on council. ¹ Although the features that distinguish executive from legislative offices at the provincial and national level are not mirrored in Canadian municipalities, mayors are certainly more visible, and being a mayor is more prestigious than holding a council seat (Kushner, Siegel, and Stanwick 2001). Past research has also found that women are more likely to serve as councillors than mayors (Hinojosa and Franceschet 2011; Kushner, Siegel, and Stanwick 2001; Smith, Reingold, and Owens 2012). We thus expect a higher proportion of women elected as councillors and fewer councils to have women mayors.

Data and Methods

To examine the political and institutional correlates of women's representation at the municipal level, we introduce an original cross-sectional dataset on women's representation for 22,333 municipal elected positions in 3,363 Canadian municipalities. The database was created in late 2022 and early 2023 from several sources. Firstly, the Canadian Municipal Barometer collected data for 441 Canadian municipalities with populations over 9,000. Secondly, to complete this initial database, data were collected from official provincial government sources and/or provincial-municipal associations. When centralized data were not available, it was hand-coded from official municipal websites and telephone calls to municipal officials. Table 1 shows the scope of the data collected.

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Table 1.

Data Collection by Province.

Province	Data Sources	Coverage
Alberta	Alberta Open Data's Alberta Municipal Officials Directory	100%
British Columbia	CivicInfo BC	100%
Manitoba	Association of Manitoba Municipalities	98%
New Brunswick	Government of New Brunswick, Canadian Municipal Elections Database	83%
Newfoundland and Labrador	Emails; telephone calls	82%
Nova Scotia	Municipal websites, other publicly available sources	100%
Ontario	Municipal websites, Ontario Municipal Association, other publicly available sources	100%
Prince Edward Island	PEI Coalition for Women in Local Government	100%
Quebec	Elections Québec	100%
Saskatchewan	Saskatchewan Municipal Directory	99%

We took several steps to determine the gender of all municipal officials. For all politicians who had completed the Canadian Municipal Barometer annual survey, we relied on respondents’ self-reported gender identity. We also relied on self-reported data when using official provincial or provincial-municipal association sources. For all remaining officials, we relied on pronoun use in official biographies on municipal websites. When these were unavailable, we used a two-source rule, coding an individual's gender only after verification with two sources (name, photograph, pronoun use in news coverage). In the absence of two independent sources, we verified our gender codes by contacting the municipality directly. ²

Results

Before we turn to our models, we begin with a descriptive overview of women's representation in Canadian municipalities. Overall, 31% of elected municipal politicians in our dataset are women. In keeping with our expectations, women's representation is much higher among councillors than among mayors: 33% of councillors are women, compared with just 22% of mayors. About 16% of Canadian municipalities have majority-women councils, and an equal share (16%) have councils with no women on council.

Figure 1 summarizes women's representation rates across our independent variables of interest. In the top-left panel, women's representation appears related to council size, with substantially lower representation on very small councils (20%). In the top-right panel, district types also appear to be related to women's representation, with substantially higher representation in at-large and hybrid municipalities than in municipalities with wards.

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Figure 1.

Descriptive Results.

We summarize the remaining variables in the second row of Figure 1. Women's representation is positively associated with municipal urbanity, with expected values approaching 50% in the country's most urban municipalities. As expected, the opposite is true of municipal conservatism, with declining rates of women's participation as local Conservative support increases. In the case of women's labour force participation, the relationship appears to be weakly positive, with increased rates of women's representation in municipalities with more egalitarian labour force participation rates.

The results in Figure 1 provide a useful descriptive overview of bivariate relationships for each independent variable. In Table 2, we provide a richer and more structured comparison. Each column summarizes an OLS model of the relationship between women's representation and our independent variables: the first column models women's overall representation on council (including both mayors and councillors); the second column models women's representation as mayors in our municipalities; and the third column models women's representation on municipal councils when mayors are excluded from the calculation. ⁸ As we noted earlier, all models include region-fixed effects.

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Table 2.

Factors Associated with Women's Municipal Representation.

	Overall	Mayor	Council
	(1)	(2)	(3)
Conservatism	−0.11***	−0.22***	−0.09***
	(0.02)	(0.05)	(0.03)
Urbanity	0.20***	0.12**	0.21***
	(0.03)	(0.06)	(0.03)
Labour force	0.02	−0.01	0.02
	(0.04)	(0.10)	(0.05)
Districts: hybrid	−0.04	−0.01	−0.05
	(0.03)	(0.06)	(0.03)
Districts: ward	−0.08***	−0.04**	−0.08***
	(0.01)	(0.02)	(0.01)
Council size: 4–6	0.05***	0.01	0.04**
	(0.02)	(0.04)	(0.02)
Council size: 7	0.004	−0.05	−0.01
	(0.02)	(0.04)	(0.02)
Council size: 8–9	0.03	−0.05	0.02
	(0.02)	(0.05)	(0.02)
Council size: 10 +	0.03	−0.01	0.01
	(0.03)	(0.06)	(0.03)
Region FEs	Yes	Yes	Yes
Observations	3,180	3,164	3,180
Adjusted R2	0.19	0.02	0.16

*p < 0.1; **p < 0.05; ***p < 0.01.

The results in Table 2 add considerable nuance to the bivariate relationships. Across all three models, municipal conservatism is significantly and negatively associated with women's representation: as expected, more conservative municipalities tend to have fewer women on their municipal councils. These relationships are substantively significant: an overall difference of 11% in women’s representation on council as a whole and a difference of 22% in the probability of having a woman as mayor when comparing the most conservative to the least conservative municipalities.

The relationships are similarly significant and robust for municipal urbanity: more urban municipalities tend to have more women on council overall. They are more likely to have women mayors – even when we compare municipalities that are otherwise similar in ideology and the other variables in the model. Substantively, the urbanity relationship is also large: an expected difference of 20% in women’s representation and 12% in the probability of a woman as mayor when comparing the least urban to the most urban municipalities.

In contrast to the first two variables, the results for women's labor force participation do not support our expectations. The relationship is substantively small and not statistically significant in all models. In Canadian municipalities, women's presence relative to men in the local labor force is unrelated to women's representation on council. ⁹

Turning to district types, we find that women's presence on municipal councils is higher in municipalities with at-large elections than in ward elections. Here, too, the difference is statistically significant and substantively large: an overall difference of 8% in women's overall representation. Notably, the relationship between district type and women's representation holds for municipal council and mayoral representation. In other words, at-large municipalities tend to have more women on council and are also 4% more likely to have a woman as mayor. This difference may originate in the opportunities that at-large municipalities provide women to prepare for a mayoral race. In many municipalities, individuals are first elected as councillors before running for mayor; if women are more likely to be elected to council in at-large municipalities, this may provide them with more opportunities to run for mayor. Of course, this relationship might also arise from other unmeasured factors that distinguish wards from at-large municipalities – such as divergent histories or local contexts that led to the adoption of ward vs. at-large district types in the first place. These possibilities are worth additional research employing longitudinal datasets that permit analysis of women's presence on municipal councils over time. ¹⁰

Finally, we find limited evidence that larger councils create opportunities for women, independent of the other variables in the model. While small councils (4–6) may have slightly higher levels of women's representation than very small councils (3 or fewer, the baseline category), these relationships do not hold for councils with seven or more members. In addition, we show in the appendix that the relationship is not statistically significant when we replace our categorical measure with a continuous or logged continuous measure of council size.

Conclusion and Discussion

Women's presence among municipal politicians matters for several reasons. Previous research from Canada and elsewhere shows that elected women are more likely than men to pursue issues related to women's well-being (Franceschet and Piscopo 2008; Rayment and McCallion 2023). Because municipal governments provide many of the services that relate directly to women's lives and caretaking roles, such as schools, childcare, and public transit (Coffé 2013), electing more women might improve policy outcomes for women. Previous research confirms such a link. Studying Brazil, Funk and Philips find that electing women at the local level leads to greater public spending on education, health, and social welfare. A study of urban mayors in Europe found that women place greater priority on social issues than men (Medir et al. 2022). A second reason to be concerned about women's presence among local office holders, especially at the mayoral level, is the role model effect. Research has shown that seeing women in elected office affects how women and girls perceive of politics, and, more importantly, whether they can imagine running for office themselves (Alexander and Jalalzai 2018).

Decades of research on women's political representation shows that institutional, socio-economic, and ideological factors all play a role in determining how open political offices are to women. Among the factors associated with larger proportions of women in office, however, institutional factors are the only ones amenable to immediate change. Changes in the socio-economic and ideological context in which women decide to run and compete for office typically take decades. While institutions are not easy to change, they can be redesigned to secure specific objectives, like electing more women. We know, for example, that changing electoral rules from single-member to multi-member districts would increase the presence of women, as would adopting well-designed gender quotas (McAllister and Studlar 2002; Paxton and Hughes 2015).

Our results speak to the role of institutional factors like district type and council size in accounting for women's municipal representation in Canada. Previous research, notably from the United States, offers competing findings on whether district type matters for women's presence among councillors. Findings from local politics thus stand in contrast to studies of national legislatures where the findings are clearer and more consistent: Where electoral rules compel women to compete directly with men for a single seat, smaller proportions of women are elected (McAllister and Studlar 2002; Rule 1987; Thames 2017).

Our findings further support the importance of ballot structure. We show that municipalities with at-large and hybrid elections are associated with more women councillors than those with ward systems and a greater likelihood of having a woman mayor. This finding has intuitive appeal: if councils are more open to women, women are more likely to gain the political experience needed to compete successfully in mayoral elections. Given women's challenges in reaching higher levels of elected office—such as mayor—our findings indicate that a simple rule change—moving from ward elections to at-large or hybrid elections—can create more opportunities for women as councillors and mayors.

Concerning council size, another institutional factor presumably open to change, existing research on women's municipal representation in Europe and the United States provides ambiguous and inconsistent results. Our findings align with studies offering scant evidence that women's presence is likely to increase when there are larger numbers of councillors. Based on our findings, adding more council seats would not have a discernable effect on the number of women elected. Those wishing to design institutions more amenable to women's inclusion can find support in our findings that ballot structure matters, but council size does not.

Our study also finds that factors subject to more slow-moving processes of change, such as urbanity and conservatism, also shape women's inclusion in local politics. Urban municipalities elect more women, and those with more conservative voters elect fewer. Importantly, these same factors are associated with the presence of women mayors. The effect of conservativism on having a woman mayor is substantively large: comparing the most to the least conservative municipality produces an overall difference of 22% in the probability of having a woman as mayor.

The contribution of our study is twofold. First, it introduces an original open-access dataset of broad interest to political scientists across subfields, including gender and politics, democratic representation, and electoral reform. Second, it is the first review of the municipal-level demographic, economic, and ideological factors that shape women's representation. Our study provides several avenues for future work on women's representation. Scholars should continue to explore the correlates of women's representation at the local level across different federal systems. Periodic updates of our dataset – perhaps every four years, capturing changes across election cycles – would clarify how these correlates are evolving over time. Moreover, scholars should continue exploring how women's local representation – or a lack thereof – influences policy outcomes.

Supplemental Material