Women account for 35% of the people on candidate lists for municipal councils in Czechia this year, the highest share in the history of municipal elections. In 1994 the figure was 21.6% (Forum 50 %, based on data from ČSÚ, the Czech Statistical Office; Forum 50 % is a Czech NGO that promotes gender balance in politics). Women candidates, however, become councillors less often than men do: after the 2022 elections, 17,162 women and 42,066 men sat on municipal councils, so women made up 29% (Women and Men in Decision-Making, ČSÚ).
The gap between the share of women on candidate lists and among those elected has barely changed in thirty years. Both figures are rising, but in every election the share of women elected is four to five percentage points lower than the share who stood.
There are more women mayors than before, but in big cities they remain the exception
After the 2022 elections, a woman led a municipality, town or city district in 1,719 cases out of 6,263, or 27%. After the 2018 elections the figure was 24%. The data come from Ministry of the Interior records as of February 2023, published by the Office of the Government in its Report on Gender Equality for 2022. Women mayors are most common in the Karlovy Vary and Ústí nad Labem regions, where they lead 34% of municipalities, and least common in the Zlín region and the Vysočina region, at 20%.
Behind the average, though, lies a marked difference by size of municipality. According to data for 2019, which we analysed for Forum 50 %, women led 28% of municipalities with up to a thousand inhabitants, but just under 8% of cities with more than a hundred thousand. Of the statutory cities (the larger Czech towns with special status), only four had a woman mayor after the 2022 elections: Brno, České Budějovice, Karlovy Vary and Třinec.
The same pattern holds for councils. In the statutory cities and in Prague, 34.4% of candidates in 2022 were women, and 23.7% of those elected. In none of these cities was the share of women elected higher than the share of women candidates (analysis of the 2022 election results, Forum 50 %). Our analysis of the leadership of all municipalities for Seznam Zprávy (a Czech news site) at the end of 2023 reached a similar result: a quarter of municipalities had a woman in their leadership, compared with a fifth in the previous term. There were 18 women mayors in the towns, and women made up just under a quarter of town executive boards on average. Women held a majority on the executive board only in Beroun (57%), and six towns had boards made up entirely of men: Svitavy, Kralupy nad Vltavou, Slaný, Klatovy, Rakovník and Brandýs nad Labem-Stará Boleslav.
A big city also means more power and more money. Serving as mayor or as a member of the executive board in a big city is a paid, full-time job and is often a springboard into national politics. It is precisely where the most is at stake that there are the fewest women.
Why women candidates are less likely to win council seats
The most important explanation is the order on the candidate list. Most seats in Czech municipal elections go to people at the top of the lists, because a single "big cross" for a party gives votes to its candidates in list order, and to move up, a candidate needs at least 10% more votes than the average for their party. Whoever draws up the list therefore largely decides who will be elected.
Yet women stand in electable positions less often than their share of the candidate lists would suggest. This was shown both by the Forum 50 % analysis of the statutory cities in 2022 and by an earlier study of the 2010 elections by Josef Bernard of the Institute of Sociology of the Czech Academy of Sciences. According to Bernard, 30.9% of male candidates and 24.4% of female candidates won a seat at that time (Sociologický časopis / Czech Sociological Review, 2012).
Voters' crosses change little. In the statutory cities in 2022, candidates jumping the list order cost women three seats in total: two each in Jihlava and Mladá Boleslav and one each in Liberec, Pardubice, Přerov and Třinec, while it gained women two in Jablonec nad Nisou and one each in Brno, Olomouc and Prostějov. Forum 50 % sums this up by saying that the impact of the crosses was in no way dramatic. In the 2010 data, Bernard found that women were disadvantaged when candidates jumped the order mainly in large cities.
Which list a woman stands for also plays a role. In municipal leadership after the 2022 elections, there were more women among independents than among nominees of political parties, in municipalities of all sizes. In municipalities with up to two thousand inhabitants, women made up 30% of independent members of the leadership but 22% of party members. In towns with more than 20,000 inhabitants it was 25% against 14% (Seznam Zprávy). The data do not say why. One possible explanation is that local associations lack established party structures in which decisions about electable positions are made.
We explain how the crosses work, and why only votes for individual candidates decide whether a candidate moves up, in our guide to voting in municipal council elections (in Czech).
Municipalities do better than the regions and the Senate
Compared with other levels of Czech politics, municipalities are still doing relatively well. On regional councils, 145 of the 685 members after the 2024 elections were women, or 21.2% (ČSÚ), and two of the fourteen regional governors are women. As we showed in our analysis of women's representation in the regions (in Czech), three regions had no woman on their regional executive board. The Senate currently has 17 women out of 81 members, or 21% (senators' groups, senat.cz).
The exception is the Chamber of Deputies, the lower house of parliament. After the 2025 elections, 67 women deputies took their seats, 33.5%, the most in its history (Forum 50 %). For the first time, the share of women elected was higher than the share of women candidates (31.3%), mainly thanks to preference votes (Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung). In parliamentary elections voters circle their preferred candidates, and preference votes carry more weight there than in municipal elections, where the order on the list is what mainly decides.
By European comparison, Czech municipalities are below average. Women make up 29% of members of local councils in Czechia, against an EU average of 34.8%. In Sweden the figure is 42.9%, in Austria 26% and in Germany 24.6% (Gender Balance in Politics, EIGE).
What will decide this year
This year's candidate lists have the highest share of women in history. If the gap between candidates and those elected stays at four to five points, the share of women councillors will rise to roughly 30 to 31%. That, however, is only an extrapolation of the trend so far, not a forecast. The actual result depends on where on the candidate lists women stand this year, and nobody has yet calculated that figure in aggregate.
The share of women among candidates and those elected shown in the chart comes from ČSÚ data processed by Forum 50 %. Our analysis of the 2026 candidate lists (in Czech) estimates gender from first names, so in individual years it differs from these figures by a few tenths of a percentage point. For 2026, both sources agree on 35%.
