The country may not have the answer for why there are still so few women MPs, but the election odds are clear - women outperformed men in securing victory this election.
While more than eight per cent of the women candidates have come out triumphant, the winning percentage of men was lower at about 6.5 per cent.
This simply means, one in every 12 women candidates won the elections, while only one out of more than 15 men managed a win in the elections to the 543 Lok Sabha seats.
Although the overall representation of women continues to be abysmally low, on the brighter side women leaders Sonia Gandhi and Mamata Banerjee have emerged taller after ensuring a grand victory for their respective parties.
Others like Jayalalithaa and Mayawati failed to live up to their claims. But, their performance in the polls was any day commendable as they put forth a tough challenge to the winning candidates in their respective states.
Jayalalithaa's AIADMK fought the winning DMK-Congress combine in Tamil Nadu, while Mayawati's BSP did fairly well in the four-cornered fight with Gandhi-led Congress, Mulayam Singh Yadav-led SP and BJP.
This is despite the overall women-power remaining low among Indian lawmakers as an estimated 46 candidates from the fairer sex have won their way to the 15th Lok Sabha, as against 45 in the outgoing house.
In the 13th Lok Sabha, there were 49 women MPs.
But, despite women enjoying a better winning probability in the just-concluded polls, there would be just 46 of them in the new Lok Sabha, as compared to 497 men.
A total of 8,070 candidates - 7,514 men and 556 women - contested the general elections this year.
This represents women accounting for just 6.9 per cent of all the candidates contesting the elections.
The winning women candidates in the just-ended elections include 12 from UP — Sonia Gandhi, Maneka Gandhi, Annu Tandon, Jaya Prada, Kamlesh, Raj Kumari Chauhan, Sarika Singh, Usha Verma, Sushila Saroj, Seema Upadhyay, Tabassum Begum and Rajkumari Ratna Singh. Besides, there are six from West Bengal — Mamata Banerjee, Deepa Dasmunshi, Mausam Noor, Kakali Ghosh Dastidar, Ambika Bannerjee, Sushmita Bauri.
Punjab has also elected four women MPs — Santosh Chowdhary, Paramjit Kaur Gulshan, Harsimrat Kaur Badal and Preneet Kaur, while three are from Rajasthan — Jyoti Mirdha, Chandresh Kumari and Girija Vyas.
Six women candidates have won from AP — Ponnam Prabhakar, Vijaya Shanthi M, Killi Krupa Rani, Jhansi Lakshmi Botcha, Daggubati Purandeswari and Panabaka Lakshmi. Two have won from Assam — Bijoya Chakravarty and Ranee Narah, three from Bihar — Meira Kumar, Meena Singh, Rama Devi and four from MP — Meenakshi Natrajan and Sumitra Mahajan, Yasodhara Raje Scindia and Sushma Swaraj.
Two are from Haryana — Selja Kumari and Shruti Choudhry, while Maharashtra, Chhattisgarh, Delhi and Meghalaya have also elected one women MP each — Supriya Sule, Saroj Pandey, Krishna Teerath and Agatha Sangma respectively.
The Election Commission said recently that the number of women MPs in the 545-member Lok Sabha has never touched 50.
The lowest number of women elected to the Lok Sabha was in 1977 when only 19 women reached the lower house. It was only 3.5 percent of the total seats (542 at that time).
There was no other occasion in the history of Lok Sabha when the women did not even reach the mark of 20.
This is the fifth time when women candidates have crossed the figure of 40 in the Lok Sabha.
There were 42 women MPs in the 8th Lok Sabha (1984), 40 in the 11th Lok Sabha (1996) and 43 in the 12th Lok Sabha (1998).
As far as the number of women contestants is concerned, there were 599 women aspirants in the fray in 1996 followed by 355 women candidates in 2004 and 326 in 1991. The number was always below 100 before 1980.
