Israel is heading toward an election with only one woman leading a political party.
The absence is particularly striking for a country that was once an international outlier. When Golda Meir became prime minister in 1969, she was only the third woman in the world to reach her country’s highest political office. More than half a century later, she remains Israel’s only female prime minister. Every Israeli prime minister since her resignation in 1974 has been a man.
But the story of women in Israeli politics is not simply one of persistent underrepresentation. Between 1999 and 2015, the number of women elected to the Knesset more than doubled, from 14 to 29. Since then, progress has largely stopped. Across the last five elections, between 28 and 30 women were elected to the 120-seat parliament. As of February 2026, 31 women were serving as MKs.
While Israel has stalled, other democracies have continued moving ahead. Women account for 25.8% of Israel’s parliamentarians, placing Israel 31st among the 38 OECD countries. In 2015, Israel trailed the OECD average by roughly five percentage points. Today, the gap is around nine.
The question heading into the election is why that progress reached a ceiling – and why the ceiling appears even lower closer to the top.
Where power narrows
Having women in the Knesset doesn’t automatically mean having women in the most powerful jobs.
The Netanyahu-Gantz government formed in 2020 included a then-record eight female ministers. The Bennett-Lapid government that followed had nine, one-third of the cabinet. The current government represents a significant retreat: As of February, women held five of 24 ministerial positions.
No woman has ever served as Israel’s defense or finance minister. Only two – Meir and Tzipi Livni – have served as foreign minister. For 17 years, no woman has held any of Israel’s four most senior political positions: prime minister, defense, finance, or foreign minister.
A little over a decade ago, meanwhile, three parliamentary parties were simultaneously headed by women: Livni led Hatnua, Zehava Galon led Meretz, and Shelly Yachimovich led Labor. In the current election race, there is just one: former deputy foreign minister Sharren Haskel, who launched the right-wing Israel First party on July 15.
Haskel describes Israeli politics as still being “a very male and macho environment,” particularly in the places where the most important decisions are made. Women, she told The Jerusalem Report, are also often required to pay “a very heavy personal and public price” to reach the top and remain there.
Anat Thon Ashkenazy, director of the Israel Democracy Institute’s Center for Democratic Values and Institutions, sees the lack of women at the top as part of a larger decline in representation.
“Until the last Knesset, it’s not that we saw gender equality, but we could see a slow increase in the numbers,” she told the Report. The subsequent “significant decrease,” particularly in government, is concerning.
The party gatekeepers
One place to look for an explanation is inside the parties themselves.
Israelis vote for party lists rather than individual candidates. Who appears on those lists – and who receives a realistic position – can shape the gender balance of the next Knesset before votes are cast.
Heading into the election, Thon Ashkenazy sees a mixed picture. Some parties are promising equal representation, while others remain overwhelmingly male. She pointed to Yashar, led by Gadi Eisenkot, as one of the new parties publicly committing to equal representation. At the other end are the ultra-Orthodox parties, Shas and United Torah Judaism, which do not include women on their electoral lists.
In July, an independent initiative dubbed the “Haredi Women’s Primaries” invited the public to vote for women they would like to see represented in the Knesset. As reported by Ynet on July 30, the ballot featured 84 haredi women from fields including media, business, education, and social activism. The women did not nominate themselves; their names were proposed by members of the public.
The initiative was not affiliated with a political party but was intended to challenge the absence of women from haredi political representation.
Yet the haredi parties alone cannot explain a decade-long national plateau. Representation varies across the political system. According to IDI’s February analysis, Yesh Atid had 10 female MKs and Likud seven, while Shas had none. Three of Labor’s four MKs were women.
That raises two questions: whether the way parties choose their candidates puts women at a disadvantage, and whether parties with few or no women are simply winning more seats.
Support without priority
A recent IDI survey showed that more than 70% of the public supports greater or equal representation of women in government, ministries, and the civil service. That preference has not translated into comparable political power.
Thon Ashkenazy explained that it’s not necessarily that voters oppose female politicians. Rather, gender representation competes with everything else determining their vote.
“Gender equality doesn’t get the priority that it should get,” she said, arguing that when weighed alongside other issues, it is often pushed down voters’ and party leaders’ priorities.
A voter can support more women in politics while ultimately choosing a party based on security, economics, religion, ideology, or its leader. Parties, in turn, may face limited electoral consequences for failing to promote women.
Haskel believes some of the barriers also come before women reach that stage.
“Many women still feel that they need to prove that they are worthy of the position and the role, while for men, self-confidence alone is often enough to make them believe they can be prime minister,” she said.
For Haskel, changing the numbers also means convincing more women that politics is a place for them. She wants women to see it “not as an arena where they need to ask permission to enter,” she said.
At the same time, women have become increasingly visible elsewhere in Israeli public life, including through their military roles and actions on October 7. But Thon Ashkenazy sees another force moving in the opposite direction: more conservative attitudes in parts of Israeli society about the role women should play in public life.
“These vectors are not going in the same direction,” she said.
The 2026 test
The coming election will show whether a decade of little progress is about to change.
Some parties are promising to put more women in realistic spots on their lists, while others are likely to remain dominated by men. But how many women are elected will tell only part of the story.
Israel has already shown that women’s political representation can rise. Between 1999 and 2015, the number of women elected to the Knesset more than doubled, from 14 to 29. Since then, it has barely moved.
The 2026 election will show whether those numbers begin moving again. But the bigger question is what happens to the women who do get elected – and whether more of them can make the jump from a seat in the Knesset to the places where political power is actually held.■