Conclusion
This report examines women’s political participation in the 2025 Iraqi parliamentary elections with a
particular focus on how digital environments shape opportunities, risks, and outcomes for women
candidates across the entire electoral cycle. It traces the evolution of women’s political engagement
over the course of the electoral cycle, the operation and manipulation of the quota system, and
detailed patterns of TFGBV targeting women before, during, and after the vote. Together, these
sections show that while women’s numerical representation has improved over time, their
substantive participation and safety remain constrained by intersecting structural, social, and digital
barriers.
The 2025 elections combined record‑high women candidacy, equating to30 percent of all candidates,
alongside a decline in women’s parliamentary representation compared to 2021, and a heavy reliance
on the quota mechanism rather than direct electoral victory. Only 25 of 84 women MPs won through
direct votes, with 59 entered via quota allocation, indicating that the quota currently functions more
as a compensatory floor than as recognition of electoral strength. This pattern suggests that women
are increasingly present on ballots but remain disadvantaged in competitive races, shaped by party
nomination strategies, boycott dynamics, and entrenched gender norms in voter behaviour.
The report’s core empirical chapters document how digital spaces have become central arenas where
women’s political participation is undermined through coordinated harassment, hate speech, and
gendered disinformation. Across Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, and X, women candidates were
subjected to objectification, financial corruption accusations, moral shaming, religiously framed
defamation, delegitimization, political infantilization, and explicit dehumanization. These attacks
frequently relied on visual manipulation (including AI‑generated or manipulated content), miscontextualized videos, rumour‑based narratives, and symbolic imagery to question women’s morality,
honour, and legitimacy rather than their policy positions. Digital hostility did not subside with the close
of polling. In the post-results period, women's electoral losses were seized upon as vindication, cited
as proof of their supposed unfitness for public office rather than as an outcome shaped by the
structural and discursive barriers this report has documented.
INSM observations suggest that some high-reach pages may amplify hostility through provocative
framing to drive engagement, leading to repetitive cycles of insults and sexualized abuse. INSM also
noted that election-related threads often leaned more toward general distrust and criticism of parties
and elites, while still enabling targeted bullying of women candidates.
The report also demonstrates how digital hate campaigns intersected with structural and political
dynamics - including boycott calls, quota‑driven party strategies, and weak institutional safeguards to influence women’s decisions to withdraw from races. The withdrawal statements of many women
candidates referenced “fair competition,” personal considerations, loyalty to political leadership, and
disillusionment with party integrity or management. Online reactions overwhelmingly interpreted
these decisions through gendered stereotypes of lack of competency, weakness, opportunism, or
moral failure. In this sense, the digital sphere not only mirrors societal misogyny, but actively amplifies
and normalizes it, turning women’s participation into a site of public policing and symbolic
punishment.
The analysis of 33.000 annotated social media comments (17.452 Kurdish and 15.933Arabic) adds
quantitative confirmation that election-related online discourse contained a large volume of general
political commentary and rejection, alongside a substantial layer of harmful engagement that targeted
women through gendered and sexualized abuse. The analysis of this annotated social media
comments adds further validation to the report’s finding that election-related online discourse
contains a large volume of general political commentary and rejection, alongside a substantial layer
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