The five parliaments with the most women aren't high-income economies — they're Rwanda, Cuba, Nicaragua, Bolivia and Mexico, and not one ranks above upper-middle income

The Inter-Parliamentary Union compiles, and the World Bank republishes as series SG.GEN.PARL.ZS, the share of seats held by women in each country's national parliament — the single or lower chamber. For 2025, the latest database vintage (last updated 2026-07-13) carries a value for 184 sovereign governments once regional and income-group aggregates are removed. Ranked highest to lowest, the top of the list runs: Rwanda 63.8%, Cuba 55.7%, Nicaragua 54.9%, Bolivia 50.8%, Mexico 50.2%, then the United Arab Emirates and Andorra tied at 50.0%, and Costa Rica at 49.1%. Seven of the 184 governments seat women in at least half of the chamber; 29 seat them in at least 40%. None of the top five is a high-income economy: Rwanda is classed low-income, Nicaragua and Bolivia lower-middle-income, and Cuba and Mexico upper-middle-income — three income tiers and three continents before the first high-income entry appears, tied for sixth. The United States reported 28.9% — 82nd of the 184, just above the global median of 26.3%. The Group of Seven spans almost the full range of the table: the United Kingdom sits highest at 40.5% (28th), followed by France 36.2% (41st), Italy 32.8% (58th), Germany 32.4% (59th), Canada 30.3% (73rd), the United States 28.9% (82nd) and Japan 15.7% (141st). The Nordic countries, long treated as the ceiling for women's political representation, cluster in the top quintile without reaching its peak: Iceland 46.0% (9th), Finland 45.5% (13th), Sweden 45.0% (15th), Denmark 43.6% (19th) and Norway 40.2% (29th). By income group, the median high-income government (n=63) seated women in 31.3% of the chamber, against 22.8% for upper-middle-income (n=58), 23.3% for lower-middle-income (n=42) and 19.6% for low-income (n=21). Across the 94 governments with a recent gross-national-income-per-capita figure to join against, the correlation between income and the women's share is 0.32 (0.37 on unlogged income) — positive but loose, income accounting for about a tenth of the variation. At the bottom of the list, three chambers seat no women at all — Oman, Tuvalu and Yemen — and Papua New Guinea (2.7%) and Vanuatu (1.9%) sit just above them.

The following is analysis, not fact. The number measures one thing exactly: of every 100 seats in a country's single or lower house, how many are occupied by women. Sorted that way, the ordering that organizes most coverage of "gender-equal politics" — the wealthy liberal democracies at the top, the poorer states below — comes apart at the very top. The five governments with the most women in the chamber span low-, lower-middle- and upper-middle-income tiers, and the first high-income economy does not appear until the United Arab Emirates and Andorra tie for sixth. The Nordic states that supply the mental image of this metric are all present and all high, but none leads; the single highest reading among the 184 reporters belongs to Rwanda, a low-income economy. Income has not vanished from the picture — it has moved from the ceiling to the center. The median high-income government seats a larger share of women than the median in any poorer tier (31.3% versus roughly 20–23%), and the loose positive correlation is real. But the distribution's top is set elsewhere. Many of the governments clustered at the top legislate the outcome directly: Rwanda's 2003 constitution reserves a minimum share of seats for women, Mexico wrote gender parity into its constitution, and much of Latin America runs legislated candidate quotas — institutional facts the International IDEA quota database and the Rwandan constitution document. One hypothesis for the ranking, then, is rule design rather than wealth: where a reserved-seat or parity law sets the share, a chamber in Kigali or Mexico City can clear a bar that neither Washington (no federal quota) nor Tokyo has approached ^sspeculative. We did not test it — no quota variable was joined to this panel and no competing predictors (electoral system, party candidate rules, political history) were modeled — so this is an explanation the pattern is consistent with, not a mechanism these data isolate ^sspeculative. The G7 spread is the same point read from the rich end of the table. Seven economies of comparable wealth range from 28th to 141st — a gap of 113 places and 25 percentage points — which a purely economic account of representation cannot produce. What separates the United Kingdom from Japan is plainly not GDP: comparable income does not determine a common outcome. What does separate them is untested here — institutional factors (electoral rules, candidate quotas) are plausible but unexamined on this single-series panel ^sspeculative.

The most important caveat is what the number counts, and it cuts against reading the ranking as a league table of women's power. The series records occupancy of seats in the single or lower house — not the route to those seats, not the authority of the chamber, and not the upper house where one exists. A seat won in open competition and a seat filled under a reserved-seat quota register identically; so does a seat in a body with limited legislative power. A seat in a chamber whose members are not all elected registers the same way, so the count cannot, by itself, separate a competitively elected parity from one reached by other routes. And in some high-ranking chambers the body's independence from the executive is itself contested ^sspeculative; the number speaks to who sits, not to how contested the seat or how real the chamber's authority. A second limit is coverage and vintage. This is a single-year snapshot of 184 of roughly 197 sovereign states, and a share can move sharply with one election; the reading for a country between elections or in conflict may not describe a functioning legislature at all — Yemen's 0.0% may be one such reading ^sspeculative. The income correlation rests on the 94 governments with a recent GNI-per-capita figure to match, so it is computed on half the panel, and correlation on a partial set should not be read as a complete causal account. Finally, "82nd" and "141st" are ranks among the 184 reporters, not among all governments on Earth.

From the chair of a quota's architect, the list is proof of concept: representation that tracked only wealth and custom would, by this argument, have kept the Nordic countries at the top far longer, and the fact that Rwanda, Bolivia and Mexico now lead is exactly what a reserved-seat or parity rule is built to do — change the composition of the room faster than the surrounding economy changes. From the chair of a quota's critic, the same list is a warning about the metric: a high seat share engineered by law, or held in a body that is not competitively elected, is not the same as women exercising power through competitive election, and treating the two as one flatters governments whose chambers are weak or unfree. The middle position concedes both: the number is a real, reproducible fact about who occupies the seats, and it is silent on how they got there and on what the seats are worth — which is why the ranking reorders the world and, by itself, settles nothing about it.