'I want 50% women in every party': Can Israel's next Knesset achieve equal representation?

And for Yael Yechieli, there is one particular goal to achieve this election: a 50/50 split between men and women in power.

An activist for many years, Yechieli leads the 5050 project, a grassroots initiative to pressure all parties – regardless of their stances or demographics – to have equal gender representation.

And after the present government was widely criticized for lacking adequate women's representation in its ranks, this issue is sure to be more prominent than ever in the lead-up to the polls.

What made you want to get involved with the cause of having more women in Knesset?

Another activism I did was pushing for separation between religion and state. I always said, I love the religion, I love the state, and I think mixing them together is bad for everyone.

I started looking at how decision-making tables looked in California and other places. One day, one of my neighbors told me that Mexico voted for over 50% of parliament to be women. I was shocked that Mexico would do this, but as I did more research, I realized that this wasn’t an isolated case.

I learned about Rwanda, Finland, and other places where it could happen. It isn’t a new thing, but I needed to learn how they did it there so I could build a plan for Israel.

Tell me about the 5050 project.

We came back to Israel in 2021. Then we had the 2022 elections, and I saw the numbers. I realized the representation of women was going to be really bad when looking at women in the coalition and women heading different ministries and government agencies.

I didn’t even sleep the night after the elections. I founded the 5050 project the very next day, with the goal of having this last election be the last one ever where women weren’t represented equally or not in realistic slots on the party lists.

I said I had a plan to bring together the vision of 50% women representation in realistic slots on lists.

Surprisingly, thousands of people came to me to join the project.

Our first target was the municipal elections. I told everyone to open a 5050 WhatsApp group in their cities ahead of the vote and we can start working.

I live in Jerusalem, so I went to a public meeting with [Mayor] Moshe Lion. I asked him there if he would have 50% women in his party, and he said yes. Then I asked if it would be a “zipper” list (requiring parties alternate members of their list by gender, meaning each member would be the opposite gender of the previous slot on the list), and he said he hadn’t decided yet.

The next day, I told my neighbors in the city to also ask Lion if he was going to do a zipper list. Every day, when he went to these public meetings, he got the same question. And 60 other groups in 60 other cities all did the same thing.

We had the option to use our strength to pressure them into this. And after one month, Lion said yes to having a zipper list.

It wasn’t just male party leaders who were asked this. Women were also asked. The goal was to make all municipal councils 50% men, 50% women.

In the end, most of the people who promised to have zipper lists actually followed through on it.

We shared this on social media, praising the different politicians who went through with having zipper lists, large and small parties alike.

We pushed people to go vote for the parties that had zipper lists. And we saw that 21 municipal councils got to 50/50.

Did you work in all cities?

I must admit we mainly worked in liberal Jewish cities, and not in ultra-Orthodox and Arab localities – though we had some exceptions like Jerusalem.

Still, this had other results outside the cities we worked in, such as in the town of Kedumim, which got to 50/50.

What about the Knesset?

This is harder because we don’t always know when the next Knesset elections will be.

However, we already started working on it, and we’re doing it in the same way. We go to all the public meetings of party leaders – even with Arab parties – and ask the same questions.

So far, the Democrats Party has already committed to a zipper list in their bylaws. Gadi Eisenkot said he’d have 50% women, though he has not committed to a zipper list.

As for Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid, they were even asked by a journalist from Haaretz, which is a big deal for us, since it means the issue is growing beyond just us activists.

Bennett’s response, by the way, was that he doesn’t pick people by gender, but by skill, but at the moment his list had more women than men.

In Hadash, there was a prominent woman high on their list for years, Aida Touma-Sliman.

Now, they only have a woman in the No. 5 slot, which isn’t realistic. This is a big deal because Hadash is supposed to be a party that deals with equal rights.

But there are people in the Arab sector working for this goal, and I can tell you that Arab journalists and media figures are with us. They always ask politicians if they have 50% women on their list.

As for the haredim, we have a list of 30 women who say they want to be in the Knesset, but the rabbis and MKs don’t want them there. But you can’t say there aren’t any women who want to be in the Knesset.

But realistically, do you think they will be able to be in the Knesset?

It will happen, but not in the next election. It could happen in the next municipal election in 2028, which we will start preparing for immediately once the Knesset election is done.

What about right-wing parties like the Likud, Otzma Yehudit, and the Religious Zionist Party?

So the Likud has primaries, and we have Likud members who are part of 5050 trying to work on this. However, they don’t do meetings with the public, so we can only pressure the media.

We’re also waiting for Otzma Yehudit and the Religious Zionist Party to do public meetings, if they ever do.

I want 50% women in all of these parties, even the parties I don’t vote for.