In this year’s local elections, women had a higher chance of winning against men. Yet, paradoxically, men remain overly represented. The reason is simple: not a single political party managed gender equality in the number of women candidates standing. As I showed in my prior piece, it’s gotten worse in the 2026 Local Elections. Primarily due to the party which won the most seats, but had the lowest gender ratio in their candidates, Reform UK. As a result, women out-polled men, but we now have fewer women in local government.
In a prior blog post, I outlined the use of Democracy Club (DC) data, and a methodology for inferring gender, to show a decrease in the number of women standing as local councillors compared to previous years. With woman making up fewer than 32.4% of all candidates in the 2026 Locals. However, due to the then poll leader Reform UK’s low recruitment of women candidates (23%) I set the expectation for a decrease in the number of women in local government following the elections.
Here, I return to the updated DC data, which now has data on which candidates were elected, to evaluate prior assumptions. It should be noted that Democracy Club did not some outcomes for 540 candidates, and my prior analysis did not include the final candidate list. So candidates added after my analysis, and those omitted in the DC data (~132 seats) are not included in the below. You don’t need to read the prior post, but it helps provide some context.
Overall, my assumption for a decrease in the ratio of women in local government is apparent. The last known gender snapshot showed that just 36% of councillors across the UK in 2022 were women. In the 2026 Local Elections only 34.6% of winning candidates were women. While this isn’t a direct comparison of 2022 and 2026 councillor cohorts, a decrease comparison between the 2022 body and 2026 intake will lead us to expect fewer women in local government. However, in consideration that the locals were predominantly for English council seats, which previously had a much higher percentage of women in local government, the decrease in the English context could be much higher.
2026 Local Election Results by Gender
| Gender | Results | % |
| Men | 3,078 | 62.4 |
| Women | 1,706 | 34.6 |
| They/non-binary | 7 | 0.1 |
| N/A or Unknown | 143 | 2.9 |
| Total | 4,934* | 100 |
*Note, there were 5,066 seats in contest during these Local Elections, there are 132 winning seat omissions in this data.
I will have to be honest here, however. My initial blog post suggested a more significant potential cut in the number of women in local government. So, I wanted to see why this was not the case. Firstly, I took a quick descriptive look at the success rates of candidates by gender. It seems that women have a slightly increased success rate than men. Women are not necessarily being filtered out at the ballot box – but gender disparity remains due to the number of candidates standing.
Success Ratio by Gender
| Gender of Candidate | N of Candidates | % | Successfully Elected | Successfully Elected (%) |
| Men | 16,066 | 64.1 | 3,078 | 19.2 |
| Women | 8,122 | 32.4 | 1,706 | 21.0 |
| They/non-binary | 21 | 0.1 | 7 | 33.3 |
| N/A or Unknown | 850 | 3.4 | 143 | 16.8 |
I found the vote performance of men vs women in this election an interesting finding. To assess this across the board, I took all candidates (winners and losers), and their votes cast. On average, women received on average 18.2 more votes than men (t = 2.18, p = .029; Cohen’s d 0.03 for those that way inclined). Although when analysing the data more, the gap is small enough that other variables dominate outcomes, but at least this highlights that women are not penalised at the ballot box in terms of votes across the board, but neither do they have a significant advantage on gender alone.
The Party Angle
My main argument (that the level of women would decrease) worked on the assumption that the highest polling party’s lower gender ratio would translate into fewer seats. Below I compare the percentage number of candidates to the percentage of successful candidates.
| Party | Wining Candidates (Men) | Winning Candidates (Women) | Winning Candidates (Total) | % of women standing | % women elected | % Gap |
| Conservative and Unionist Party | 522 | 245 | 767 | 31.1 | 31.9 | +0.8 |
| Green Party | 278 | 275 | 553 | 41.0 | 49.7 | +8.7 |
| Labour Party / Labour and Co-operative Party | 520 | 485 | 1005 | 41.8 | 48.3 | +6.5 |
| Liberal Democrats | 510 | 314 | 824 | 33.3 | 38.1 | +4.8 |
| Reform UK | 1,077 | 314 | 1391 | 23.0 | 22.6 | -0.4 |
| Other/Independent | 126 | 73 | 199 | 29.2 | 36.7 | +7.5 |
*Unknowns, NA, or They/Non-binary removed to aid in direct comparison. Results may also be somewhat skewed from official figures due to missing datapoints.
This provides some explanation for why the results were not as bad as I had expected.
Firstly, five out of six of the party groupings converted more women candidates into wins at a higher rate than male candidates. The Green Party, Independents/other parties, and Labour led the way in this regard, with the Liberal Democrats in a more moderate position and Conservatives on a much more neutral gap of 0.8. Only Reform UK converted fewer women to elected councillors, however it’s larger share of seats resulted in an outsized effect on the gender balance of the new 2026 cohort of councillors. Secondly, the Green Party and Labour both fielded more women than average, still hardly gender equality at 41% & 41.8% respectively, but potentially enough to soften the overall results.
Overall
While this is a very broad analysis, the number of women in local government has decreased following the 2026 Local Elections, in large parts this is due to Reform UK’s gender ratio of candidates and their success in the locals. For those who support gender equality in this level of politics, this will be disappointing news. But unexpected if you read my prior blog.
However, there is a small glimmer of hope in that women outside of Reform are more likely to win than men; insofar that women are outperforming men. The reasons for this sit outside the scope of the data available. But factors could be that women, in some parties, are being placed in more winnable seats after getting through the selection and recruitment process.
If I had more time, I would like to control for more variables (such as ward size), urban/rural effects, council types, direct analysis with the 2022 cohort, and a greater look into intra party effects.