Additional information about gender quotas

The first time women voted in Afghanistan was in 1965  but, since 2001, Afghan women have the right to vote and stand but also a quota system reserving them seats. 

In the 2005 elections, the voters cast their ballots for individual candidates, sometimes on candidate lists which included 400 names. The Joint Electoral Management Body (JEMB), which was co-managed by the United Nations and the Afghan Government to administer the elections, decided the order of candidates on electoral lists by a ballot lottery, so that the sequencing would not be biased toward any candidate, and so that every elected representative was elected by virtue of the number of votes as opposed to a favourable placement on the party list (JEMB 2005:12).

According to the Afghanistan Analyst Network, in 2018, as happened in 2010, about 400 women out of a total of about 2500 candidates. However, women still face difficulties to be part of the political life.