Adrian Kavanagh, 15th October 2025

Here are the ten constituencies that were the most successful constituencies (as ranked by vote share) for female candidates at the 2024 General Election. Women won more votes than men in just five of the forty three constituencies being contested at this election. Nationally, female candidates won 31.7% of the overall first preference votes cast at this election. It’s obviously far from a 50-50 split in terms of a gender voting breakdown, but it is a vast improvement on how things stood at the 2011 General Election, where women accounted for only 15.2% of the candidates. The level of change over the past decade and a half has been driven by the introduction of a gender quota, in the wake of that 2011 election contest, with political parties standing to lose half of their state funding if they fail to achieve the gender quota target (and political parties in the Republic of Ireland are very much reliant on this state funding(. The quota was initially set at 30% (as used at the 2016 and 2020 elections), but the legislation made provisions for this to increase to 40% within seven years of the first general election at which the quota was used (i.e., from 2023 onwards) and the 40% gender quota target was in place for the first time at the 2024 General Election.

The quota only applies to general (Dáil) election contests, but it does have a knock on effect in terms of increasing female candidate levels at local election contests, as success at local elections is often a springboard to success at subsequent general election contests. Hence, it makes sense for political parties who might be potentially looking to run new/first-time female general election candidates to encourage these potential new candidates to run in local elections (City and County Council elections) beforehand.

Over the past fifteen years there has been an overall increase in female candidate levels (up from 15.2% in 2011 to 35.8% in 2024 – the reason why this percentage was not at least 40% can be put down to the fact that the quota obviously does not apply to non-party candidates), as well as the number of votes won by women (up from 350,044 (15.8%) in 2011 to 697,569 (31.7%) in 2024). The level of increase in female representation levels has not been as dramatic (up from 15.2% of all TDs in 2011 to 25.3% of all TDs in 2024), although the 2024 election did see a record number (44) of women being elected as TDs (members of the Irish parliament). Female candidates were the runners up in twenty of the forty three constituencies at the 2024 election.

The quota is applied nationally and this can lead to some interesting geographical variations in terms of female candidate, vote and representation levels. Women, on average, are usually more likely to be selected to run as candidates in the more urban constituencies (and especially in Dublin) and are more likely to win more votes (and to win Dáil seats) in the more urban areas. Female candidates, as the table above shows, did fare well in some, more rural, constituencies, such as Offaly, Carlow-Kilkenny, Cavan-Monaghan and Clare, at the 2024 election. They fared less well, as the table below shows, in other rural constituencies, such as Donegal, Tipperary North, Tipperary South and Galway East, although there were some urban constituencies (Dublin North-West and the two “Cork City constituencies”) in which female candidates also won low vote shares.