How democracy survives through elevating women

Why anti-authoritarian movements are stronger with women in leadership

We probably don’t need to tell you that — in the weeks after the 2024 election — there’s been a wave of discussion, debate, and uncertainty over how civil society will stand up to the authoritarian movement in the United States. Those debates are not settled. Nor should they be. The playbook is going to have to look different this time around, and protecting our democracy is going to take experimentation and innovation.

But regardless of what civil society mobilizations and movements look like, they should probably involve women in leadership roles. Why?

Political scientists have documented an interesting pattern in mass movements fighting against authoritarianism in the U.S. and around the world: where women are on the frontlines of pro-democracy movements, those movements are more likely to succeed, and the movements’ success is more likely to result in a more equitable society.

But why? How?

Erica Chenoweth (an advisor to Protect Democracy) and their co-author Zoe Marks have studied this phenomenon in-depth, drawing on over 70 years’ worth of data about women’s frontline participation in global pro-democracy movements. (They also note that participation by people who openly identify as LGBTQ+ is so recent as to be hard to study, and that the data they draw on reproduces gender binaries.)

Their conclusions are striking. Check out how much more likely to succeed mass resistance campaigns are if they have women at the front lines:

Source: Erica Chenoweth. 2019. “Women’s Participation and the Fate of Nonviolent Campaigns: A Report on the Women in Resistance (WiRe) Data Set.” One Earth Future Foundation.

Chenoweth and Marks point to at least five interconnected reasons why women’s participation and empowerment in anti-authoritarian movements is so important, and how it can translate into results for pro-democracy movements around the globe:

First, raw numbers — movements that do not or cannot draw in women and gender minorities leave behind a significant chunk of the population

To win, pro-democracy movements need to mobilize majorities, and history/global examples have shown these movements need to be broad and diverse along a whole range of identities to build a durable majority.

Over the past five years, Polish women and members of the LGBTQ+ community led the charge against their country’s illiberal rule after the co-opted Constitutional Tribunal restricted reproductive rights, resulting in the country’s largest public demonstrations since the fall of communism. This women-led mobilization influenced the pro-democracy coalition that ultimately defeated the autocratic Law and Justice party in the 2023 parliamentary elections. Without the successful mobilization of Polish women, the pro-democracy coalition would not have defeated the incumbent illiberal government at the ballot box.

Elsewhere, Ukrainian women played a central role in the 2013-2014 Euromaidan protests, which culminated in the ousting of the pro-Russian president. In Brazil, women helped build the pro-democracy electoral coalition that ousted autocratic president Jair Bolsonaro. Leading up to the 2022 presidential election, female leaders mobilized civil society and successfully drew an explicit connection between Bolsonaro's misogyny and other socioeconomic concerns held by the broader electorate. And while its effectiveness and inclusivity were hotly debated, the 2017 Women's March drew 3-5 million participants and indicated that women would be central to political organizing efforts during the first Trump administration.

It is no wonder, then, that those in the U.S.’s authoritarian movement, including the officials and activists who attempted to overturn the results of the 2020 election, have been building a pseudo-intellectual scaffolding for delineating narrow, racialized roles for women and gender minorities. As Chenoweth and Marks explain, by wholly “tying women’s value and worth to childbearing, parenting, and homemaking in a nuclear [heteronormative] household,” authoritarians “roll back [women’s] claims to public power,” and thereby entrench their own anti-democratic movements.

And while President-elect Trump has made several historic selections for staff and cabinet positions, those in the authoritarian movement have worked to sideline groups that might stand in the way of regressive policies that help them consolidate power. Indeed, adherents of the contemporary authoritarian movement coordinate with leaders like Hungarian strongman Viktor Orbán, whose "patriarchal populism” enforces traditional gender roles and undermines the rights of women and LGBTQ+ people — all in a bid to cement his own political power.

Second, women-led movements can harness tactical innovations

Because people are so often shoehorned into gendered roles in society, women’s participation and leadership in pro-democracy mass movements open the door to tactics that aren’t available to those performing masculine gender roles.

Think about the grandmothers protesting in Algeria, the cries of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo in Argentina, and other forms of gendered non-cooperation.

In 2019, Algerian women joined protests against the country’s entrenched ruling party in “unprecedented numbers” — with older women in particular playing a key role in keeping the demonstrations peaceful. In their fight to restore a more open and democratic Algeria for their children and grandchildren, grandmothers encouraged peaceful sit-ins, cooked meals for protesters, and threatened to report bad behavior by police officers to their mothers.

During Argentina’s military dictatorship, the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo became “walking billboards” to call attention to the mass disappearances of their loved ones at the hands of the repressive regime. In 1977, the mothers began protesting at the Plaza de Mayo in front of the presidential palace — screaming and weeping to demand answers. Their cries for justice brought international scrutiny to the disappearances, as they leaned into their identities as mothers “to legitimate their struggle” and emphasize the regime’s brutality.

Meanwhile, when gender roles are chosen and wielded by the women participating in public life rather than imposed upon by an authoritarian government, their identities can be transformed into pro-democracy tools. For example, social taboos against public violence toward women means the presence of women likely moderates the violence of police and other protesters, although those taboos apply unevenly across racial and social classes.

Third, women bring legitimacy to pro-democracy movements

It turns out that, thanks to longstanding gender stereotypes (e.g. that women are less violent, more caring, etc.), having large-scale women’s participation and leadership in anti-authoritarian movements can increase the perceived legitimacy of these movements in the eyes of the public at large, making them more likely to persuade others and expand the pro-democracy coalition. For example, Chenoweth’s research has shown that “nonviolent campaigns with high degrees of frontline women’s participation are likelier to elicit loyalty shifts from security forces,” a key achievement for non-violent pro-democracy movements.

Source: Erica Chenoweth. 2019. “Women’s Participation and the Fate of Nonviolent Campaigns: A Report on the Women in Resistance (WiRe) Data Set.” One Earth Future Foundation.

This frontline participation, in turn, is more likely to arise in those movements with “gender-inclusive ideologies,” possibly because “gender-inclusive groups create lower barriers to entry for women participants, encouraging them to join such groups.” This stands in contrast to certain inside-the-beltway dogmas in the U.S., which have long held that political movements with gender-inclusive ideologies are unduly “divisive” and therefore less legitimate.

Fourth, women-led movements tend towards discipline and resilience, especially around violence

Mass movements are more likely to succeed when they have the discipline to reject violence and the resilience to outlast countermobilization and state violence or repression. Historical practice shows that when women are on the frontlines of pro-democracy movements, these movements are less likely to turn violent.

Source: Erica Chenoweth. 2019. “Women’s Participation and the Fate of Nonviolent Campaigns: A Report on the Women in Resistance (WiRe) Data Set.” One Earth Future Foundation.

Consider Poland in 1980, when the retaliatory firing of welder Anna Walentynowicz precipitated the rise of the Solidarity movement, which emphasized inclusivity and non-violent tactics. It was the women of Solidarity who “found the formula” for managing a successful pro-democracy opposition, including the publication of its underground newspaper (aided in part by gender stereotypes that made their involvement underestimated by the secret police).

Similarly, in Belarus, protests in 2020 against the country’s autocratic president, Alexander Lukashenko, were led by three women at the forefront of a unified pro-democracy opposition. The mass demonstrations remained peaceful, and the opposition leaders appealed to a broader audience of conservatives by referencing the plight of their imprisoned relatives and shared family values. Despite increased repression since 2020, the Belarusian opposition is still largely led by Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya and other female leaders from exile.

Fifth, women’s inclusion builds sustainable democratic reform

Not only are movements that include and empower women more likely to succeed — they also build better democracies, ones that are more egalitarian and resilient.

Here, U.S. history speaks loudly. Black women in the U.S. played a pivotal role in securing voting rights and transforming our country into a democracy. These women’s gendered and racialized experiences of authoritarianism — after all, the antebellum and Jim Crow South were perpetuated in significant part by the sexual and reproductive abuse of Black women and the destruction of Black families — were intertwined with their successful resistance and advocacy.

Rosa Parks’ refusal to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus and subsequent arrest in 1955 was part of a planned campaign conceived by the Women’s Political Council and rooted in the daily injustices Black women encountered on the city buses as they went to work, often in white homes and segregated businesses.

Black women likewise led the movement that resulted in the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Ella Baker, a longtime organizer for the NAACP and Southern Christian Leadership Conference, was among the first to recognize the value in harnessing the power of the young people who instigated the lunch-counter sit-ins of the early 1960s. Her efforts eventually led to the founding of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, where she was the organizing force behind Freedom Summer and the founding of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. Fannie Lou Hamer, a sharecropper with no formal education who harnessed her own experiences as a survivor of sexual abuse (including forced sterilization) to lead the voting rights movement, was a key participant in the latter. Hamer’s riveting testimony to the Democratic Party’s credentials committee in 1964 is widely regarded as a pivotal moment in the fight for passage of the Voting Rights Act. Notably, her graphic testimony about her own abuse at the hands of white men was key to its narrative power.

As Chenoweth and Marks write, “[i]t turns out that frontline participation by women is a significant advantage, both in terms of a movement’s immediate success and in terms of securing longer-term democratic change.”

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Which brings us to a final question: why does the authoritarian movement seek gender retrenchment? (J.D. Vance’s mentor and biggest backer has even criticized the consequences of women being allowed to vote. And just before Pete Hegseth was nominated to serve as Secretary of Defense, he publicly stated that women should not be allowed to serve in combat roles — at a time when the military already faces a recruitment crisis).

That’s a big question with lots of different answers to it.

But at least part of the reasoning is clear: because women’s participation and leadership in democracy movements are part of how authoritarian movements fail. And how democracy survives.