By Daiva Repečkaitė

Four years after Malta’s two largest parties endorsed a gender-corrective mechanism to lift women’s representation in Parliament, gender equality in political power has barely budged, and the 2026 candidate list suggests little will change.

Of the 162 candidates contesting Malta’s 2026 general election, just 28% are women. The same share that currently sits in Parliament, brought through in 2022 after the gender corrective mechanism kicked in. 

Aħwa Maltin, a minor political party, is the only party fielding a gender-balanced list. AD-PD, another third party, is the only party led by a woman. Of the two parties currently in Parliament, Labour is fielding nearly 39% women; the Nationalist Party, 20%.

According to the European Institute for Gender Equality (EIGE), Malta ranks 16th in the EU for gender equality. EIGE notes a good state of equality in knowledge and health, but finds issues regarding money and power.

As Malta heads toward another male-dominated legislature, it’s worth asking: have reforms made a difference?

Power and democratic representation

In the 2022 election, the PL and PN endorsed the gender-corrective mechanism with the aim of bringing the share of women in parliament to 40%. With this mechanism, members from the under-represented gender are added rather than replacing members of the over-represented gender.

The result from the last election was 28% women. The corrective mechanism added 12 women to districts that would not otherwise have elected them. Without that top-up, five districts would have returned all-male MPs.

There was not a single district in which a woman won the most first-count votes.

“What we have here in Malta is not a gender quota, it’s a gender top-up,” says Sandra Gauci of AD-PD, the only woman leading a political party in this election.

Gauci favours mandating gender-balanced candidate lists and penalising parties that fail to comply.

2022 Election: Gender Corrective Mechanism Impact

District	No. of women elected directly	No. of women added by corrective mechanisms	Total share of women among district MPs
1	0	3	3/8
2	1	1	2/7
3	0	2	2/7
4	0 (+1 in casual election)	1	2/6
5	1	0	1/8
6	0 (+1 in casual election)	0	1/6
7	1 (+1 in casual election)	1	3/10
8	0	1	1/6
9	0 (+2 in casual election)	1	3/9
10	0	0	0/7
11	1(+1 in casual election)	0	2/6
12	1	1	2/6
13	0	1	1/6

What parties do once their MPs are in place matters too.  

Cabinet and shadow cabinet appointments are entirely within party control, and they signal who is taken seriously. A gender-balanced cabinet could send a clear message and give women greater visibility.

Currently, two-thirds of men and women in Malta think that men are more ambitious in politics than women.

Robert Abela’s cabinet has 24 members, five of them are women: two ministers and three parliamentary secretaries or just over one-fifth of the cabinet. 

With just one exception, the PL recruits women to positions of power only from among those who are electorally popular.

Ministers Miriam Dalli and Julia Farrugia, and Parliamentary Secretaries Alison Zerafa Civelli and Rebccea Buttigieg (casual election) were elected directly, without corrective mechanisms. Currently, 14 women represent the PL (3 directly elected), and 9 represent the PN in the parliament (1 directly elected).

Among the PL women added by the corrective mechanism, four are backbenchers, one became a parliamentary secretary, and one became a government whip.

The entire PN parliamentary group of 35 members was given some kind of shadow cabinet portfolio, with 9 of 35 shadow ministers being women, just over a quarter.

Name	Party	Method of election	Role
Cressida Galea	PL	Corrective mechanism	Backbencher
Davina Sammut Hili	PL	Corrective mechanism	Backbencher
Paula Mifsud Bonnici	PN	Corrective mechanism	Assistant opposition whip, shadow minister
Alison Zerafa Civelli	PL	Directly elected	Parliamentary secretary
Bernice Bonello	PN	Corrective mechanism	Shadow minister
Alicia Bugeja Said	PL	Corrective mechanism	Parliamentary secretary
Janice Abela Chetcuti	PN	Corrective mechanism	Shadow minister
Amanda Grech Spiteri	PL	Corrective mechanism	Backbencher
Katya De Giovanni	PL	Casual election	Backbencher
Miriam Dalli	PL	Directly elected	Minister
Rosianne Cutajar	PL	Casual election	Backbencher
Julia Farrugia	PL	Directly elected	Minister
Naomi Cachia	PL	Corrective mechanism	Government whip
Rebekah Borg	PN	Casual election	Shadow minister
Julie Zahra	PN	Corrective mechanism	Shadow minister
Eve Borg Bonello	PN	Corrective mechanism	Shadow minister
Rebecca Buttigieg	PL	Casual election	Parliamentary secretary
Graziella  Attard Previ	PN	Casual election	Shadow minister
Romilda Zarb	PL	Casual elections	Backbencher
Graziella Galea	PN	Directly elected	Shadow minister
Claudette Buttigieg	PN	Corrective mechanism	Shadow minister
Abigail Camilleri	PL	Corrective mechanism	Backbencher

*All of them except for Claudette Buttigieg are contesting the 2026 election.

Work and economy

For the 2022 elections, the ruling Labour Party (PL) manifesto featured a cover image of two children, with a smiling woman in the background watching them as they leave a playground and step onto a verdant meadow. But the current elections are profoundly shaped by an alarming demographic decline rather than economic output or equal representation.

Men’s average pensions are 40% higher than women’s, making it the largest gender pension gap in the EU. That single number sits downstream of nearly everything else: who takes career breaks, who works part-time, who absorbs the cost of caregiving.

Some of the women who are retired today were still subject to the marriage bar legislation, which was only removed in December 1980 and forbade married women from continuing their jobs in the public sector. 

This policy, imposed by the state, set the tone for decades to come, with research showing that the standard left women feeling guilty for seeking a career after marriage. The state has not fully compensated women for this past discrimination.

“That [affected] a lot of nurses, teachers – quite a lot of women work with the government. Even the data today shows that there are more women working with the government,” says University of Malta academic and Malta Women’s Lobby’s co-founder Prof. Anna Borg. 

She notes that especially women who are separated or divorced later in life are left without financial safety. “You will see that women are, as a category, more at risk of poverty than men overall,” she adds. 

These days, discriminatory laws are gone, but family pressures still hold women back. More than a third of women raising children under 11 years of age spend more than five hours per day on childcare. 

Only 14% of fathers report the same care intensity. Among men, 57% think that women should stay at home if childcare is unavailable, and 47% of women agree.

Although candidates are now promising more generous leave for parents, Prof. Borg points out that Malta effectively lost four years in implementing pro-family policies after choosing to transpose an EU directive on work-life balance in a reduced form in 2022. 

“When the directive was transposed into legislation, women’s organisations, and a lot of other NGOs, were very disappointed because the government did a very bad job in transposing that piece of legislation, and there was no extension of maternity leave. There was just the introduction of some paternity leave, which was positive, but when it came to parental leave, it was a mess, and the payment was extremely low,” she says. “It actually went against the spirit of the directive.”

She notes that the Nationalist Party put forward a private members’ bill in parliament to remedy these problems, but it was voted down.

“If you had to look at the proposals now, there has been a shift, definitely from the Labour Party, and I think it’s coming because there is now everyone is aware that we have a very low fertility rate,” Prof. Borg continues. “The resistance is there from the employers, but I think now the government is faced with the low fertility dilemma”.

Malta has one of the highest employment rates for women in the EU, counted in full-time equivalents. However, women are severely under-represented in the boards of publicly listed companies (17%).

The Equality Bill aimed to change this, but became a casualty of the parliamentary process. Proposed by Helena Dalli during the earlier (2017-2022) legislature, it reached the committee stage and never moved beyond. According to a MaltaToday editorial, this was due to backlash from the church, doctors, pharmacists, and teachers.

This bill would have banned advertising that promotes discrimination, discrimination in financial and insurance services, inquiries about private life and family plans during job interviews and more. 

It would have demanded that public administration ensure, not merely promote, equality mainstreaming in all policy areas. In appointments to public bodies, at least 40% appointees would have had to be women.

Parliamentary secretary Rebecca Buttigieg recently promised better pensions for women and longer parental leave, but did not return to the issue of the Equality Bill.

Consistent with PL’s 2022 electoral promise to support women’s start-ups, the Micro Invest incentive scheme has a higher maximum aid ceiling if an applying business is at least half female-owned – the same extra support that is available to businesses in Gozo and family businesses. But Micro Invest is for “innovation, expansion, and development” of businesses rather than for starting them.

Health

EIGE data shows Maltese men report feeling healthier than Maltese women, and the gap widens sharply among disabled persons.

This election campaign included a women’s health push. The prime minister promised free endometriosis medication, a dedicated women’s clinic and free hormone replacement therapy. Amid the flow of promises, voters are looking back at what happened to the previous batch.

The 2022 proposals that concern women’s health were:

• Free and accessible IVF – both parties: Free IVF was introduced already in the prior legislature, and costs are refunded to eligible parents.
• Free hormone replacement therapy and other medicines for women experiencing menopause – for both parties. Currently, female hormones are compensated only for people diagnosed with Gender Identity & Sex Characteristics Related Conditions, Hypogonadism, Hypopituitarism, Malignant Diseases, Turner Syndrome, Endometriosis/Adenomyosis, and Precocious Puberty.
• Free mental health care for women experiencing post-natal depression – PN. Help with moderate to severe perinatal mental health disorders is provided by the Perinatal Community Mental Health Service, available to mothers and fathers. There is also a screening programme for this.

Free medical aid may be offered to those diagnosed with endometriosis, osteoporosis, and Gender Identity and Sex Characteristics Related Conditions. Prof. Borg, having analysed both parties’ proposals, notes that free contraception had been promised previously but never implemented, and both major parties avoid engaging with the question of abortion.

Safety

Crime in Malta is overall in decline. However, domestic violence and sexual crimes are a particular concern.

Introducing femicide into Maltese law is recognised as a legal breakthrough, although its application in courts remains limited. Given the slow pace of justice, there is not enough case law to review how this change has worked in practice.

Femicide sits at the top of the iceberg of gender-based violence, which remains pervasive.

Official data reveal that 3 out of 16 women murdered in gender-based crimes between 2012 and 2022 had previously sought support from the national social welfare agency ahead of the crime. One in four women in Malta reports experiencing intimate partner violence. Police issued 17,486 domestic violence charges between 2021 and mid-2025 but secured only 933 convictions, roughly one for every nineteen charges.

As the 2026 manifestos roll in, some will repeat the promises of 2022. Voters might reasonably ask the candidates a different question this time: not what they promise, but how they want to go about delivering.