opportunities in political, economic, cultural, and social spheres. Although the Electoral Act has been amended to include gender mainstreaming and gender equality in electoral processes, it is not explicit on how this should be done to ensure women are equally represented in political spheres. Even though women’s groups have been calling for ZEC to reject political party lists which do not have 50 % representation, ZEC made it clear that this was beyond its mandate. Figure 13.1: Women candidates in the 2018 Presidential Elections The continuing low representation of women in political parties points to the lack of compliance with the Constitution and international conventions. For the 2018 harmonised elections, none of the contesting political parties attained 50-50 representation between males and females for the National Assembly elections. Rather, 91% and 90% of the candidates for the major contending parties, namely ZANU-PF and the MDC Alliance respectively, were male. As illustrated in 13.2 below, the two major parties have fielded less than 10% female candidates as their contestants. Recording a relatively high figure is the Thokozani Khupe led MDC-T with 20% of its candidates being female. 74 | P a g e