For many young women, the slogan chaurasi ma mahila, hunu parcha pahila (In 2084 BS, women must be ahead) carried hope: That in the years ahead, we would finally have more women in visible leadership that we could look up to, learn from and imagine ourselves becoming. Yet today, even after a political revolution calling for change, the candidacy list for the federal elections in March has pushed those expectations further.

Nepal celebrates women through speeches, quotas and statistics, but Nepali women’s real representation is only in population statistics, where they are a majority. But when inclusion remains just symbolic and confined to numbers rather than to actual authority to bring about the change, it raises the question: Where are Nepali women in the system and structures of power?

The paradox of Nepali democracy is that even as women constitute 51.13 percent of the population (14,911,027), they are barely represented in power allocation. For the 165 first-past-the-post seats, of 3,486 candidates, only 396 are women (11.35 percent), while 3,090 are men (88.65 percent). Women are central to the electorate but are excluded during the nomination process.

On numbers, women’s representation in local government appears to have improved, rising from 40.95 percent in 2017 to 41.21 percent in 2022. But the headline figure and the narrative are heavily driven by two mandatory ward-level seats. The number is inflated by positions that are structurally reserved, not voluntarily opened by parties.

In mayoral positions, where power and decision-making actually sit in local government, the picture of the increasing presence of women in power collapses. After the 2022 local elections, only 15 of 753 local governments were headed by women, which is about 2 percent. Coalition seat-sharing widened this gap, as one party often nominated only one candidate for the mayoral position, while another party nominated its candidate for the deputy position in a single local unit. These shortcuts made women visible in numbers but absent in decision-making.

Nepal’s constitutional design appears progressive in terms of women’s representation, yet it has major caveats for implementation. According to the Constitution of Nepal 2015, the House of Representatives reserves 275 seats: 165 FPTP and 110 PR and strictly mandates that women must be at least one-third of each party’s total elected members. Theoretically, only if any parties fail to elect enough women under FPTP are they required to fill the quota through the PR list.

Historically, parties have reserved direct election tickets for male candidates and later met the quota requirement through PR lists, which are usually unrepresentative of citizens’ choices, turning constitutional inclusion into elite capture and class division. If parties can simply comply on paper while excluding women in practice, then the real issue is no longer constitutional design; it is the political will of those in power. And election after election, parties have shown they know how to work within the words of the law while evading its true spirit of inclusion.

That is precisely why only the ‘old vs new’ framing of political parties in the coming elections is not enough. New faces, or even younger ones, do not automatically produce new norms. What’s needed is a systemic intervention that accelerates the depth of Nepal’s political maturity. Women and marginalised communities have carried the struggle for political will across movements over decades. Yet they remain in the periphery at the most decisive moment: Federal elections, where leadership visibility and power are most concentrated.

Nepali women are often asked to ‘prove competence’ for a position of authority, but their competence is always assessed at the finish line, while opportunity is denied from the start. Women’s access to power is filtered at every stage, from being a daughter to becoming a prime minister, from sitting in a primary school classroom to earning the highest academic degrees, from managing households to owning one.

The numbers explain the dropouts long before their nomination in the candidacy list. Out of the country’s 666,937 households, only 2 percent are owned by women, and just about 9 percent of the land is registered in their names. Economically, nearly 90 percent of employed women still work in the informal sector, and 66.8 percent of them earn below the minimum wage. These data not only represent the economic status of women in Nepal but also their access to political discourse.

In a system where party candidacy depends on money, networks and time, this is not a balanced approach to test merit but a structural elimination process in which women always lose. By the time parties select their nominees, most women are already filtered out, which is not by their competence but by a corrupt system that narrows participation through the inaccessibility induced by patriarchal norms.

The demoralising numbers on the candidacy list for the upcoming elections cannot be undone. The structural exclusion in our system, built over decades, cannot be cured in a few election cycles. Yet opportunities will surface for the younger generation when we stop mistaking headline figures for the actual nuances of inclusion. Asking the right questions, layered far beneath the numbers, is a first step.

But this doesn’t imply that the political inclusion in the electoral office alone would suffice. Women’s leadership across academia, the private sector, civil society and public administrations directly shapes their credibility and integrity. The media plays a critical role in bringing these voices to the limelight. When the representation of women is never seen in the headlines because they are absent from the media house’s editorial leadership itself, the system is corrupt long before the results of the nomination.

There is still hope, opportunities and a space for accountability. Voters must view PR lists through an inclusive lens, questioning parties’ choices as they claim to be committed to inclusion. More importantly, citizens must begin asking questions of every political promise ahead of the elections: Not just the list of promises, but the values that drive them and the administrative and political processes by which they will be delivered.

Inclusive governance is not built solely on rage over certain days. Neither is it just a result of those ballot boxes. It is built through sustained scrutiny, an active civic engagement and the refusal to accept representation without power and inclusion without women.