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Guest Article: Harassment of Women Mayors Erodes Local Democracy — Addressing It Is A Shared Responsibility 

Publication Date:

19/06/2026

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African American Mayors AssociationEmpowering Women LeadersHarassment of Public OfficialsMayoral LeadershipMayors Innovation ProjectWomen’s CaucusWomen’s leadership

— 5 minutes reading time

When you’re the mayor, the phone never stops ringing.

Calls about the roads, the latest infrastructure project or repairs to a rundown ball diamond. You don’t expect to pick up the phone and be told that your grandkid’s daycare is being forced to implement extra security because strangers have been visiting the daycare asking which one is related to you.

But now calls like that are part of the job. This is what women mayors across our respective networks increasingly experience.

Calls about your grandkid’s daycare. Calls about death threats. Calls where your chief of police tells you to stay home, but not to worry, they have it covered. Calls from your police chief suggesting you should consider cancelling public outreach for a few months. Police escorts to your vehicle or your home. 

At this point, it’s a given that if you’re a woman in politics, you’ll face a flood of threats.

This spring, female mayors and other local elected leaders from across Canada and the United States met in Rancho Mirage, California, to share stories like this. Everyone who attended that meeting had a story to tell. About the emails. The voicemails. The messages left outside their homes at night.

A 2025 survey by the Mayors Innovation Project documented those stories — including the one about the daycare — though most remain untold publicly, because coming forward risks being labelled too weak for the job. Women mayors from across the Strong Cities Network, which spans 295 cities across more than 70 countries, have shared their stories in the network’s Women’s Caucus.

On each occasion, they have shared how they don’t talk often about this publicly. Election brings authority and influence, but women often find their legitimacy challenged in ways that their male counterparts do not. In fact, women are often threatened precisely because they exercise that authority. Politicians, especially women, are told that harassment is just part of the job. Data shows that this is a very male response to hardship; when deployed against women, it serves to undergird the impact of a sexist system on women. 

So, they endure it. Until they can’t.

The 2025 Mayors Innovation survey showed that 84 percent of women mayors reported experiencing harassment during election campaigns and, once in office, at more than twice the rate of their male counterparts. It’s not just a North American issue. A Swedish study of 8,000 local politicians found that female mayors experience more violence and intimidation than any other office holder — and that the more visible a woman becomes, the worse it gets. 
 
Fewer women are putting their names forward at all, and many are dissuaded from running for a second term or pursuing higher office. Cities are losing something key when that happens. When women don’t feel safe enough to run for office, cities lose a government that reflects the municipality’s population. When we make the role impossibly hard and don’t demand basic safety, we lose the qualified, compassionate and effective leaders we need more than ever right now. Research published by the United Nations confirms that when women lead, they propose and pass more equitable policies and services that focus on social issues such as healthcare, education, and community development, leading to a higher quality of life for all residents. Furthermore, studies consistently show that women are more likely to work across party lines and lead collaboratively. Women are effective, successful leaders, but their success comes at a much higher personal cost.

This is how democratic erosion takes hold. It cascades outwards into how cities are governed. The threats change which events women mayors attend, how they move through their own cities, and what they’re willing to say in public. With elections approaching in communities across the continent, the cost of this erosion is only going to be amplified. 

There is no easy fix. There is no single cause. Social media companies are not enforcing their own policies. Legal frameworks are not keeping up with coordinated online abuse. Smaller and mid-sized cities have few resources for their officials. All of these play their parts in the limited response to the threats we all face. And yet, like so many other forms of hate that take root locally, the conversation about solutions too often skips past what cities themselves can do.

What would help is not complicated — but it requires treating this as a systemic problem, not a personal one. Too often, women are left to manage threats alone, with untrained staff and little coordination across government. Most cities have no formal protocols, and the few measures that exist — reimbursements for installing video doorbell cameras outside their homes and for other security measures, social media guidance, coordination with law enforcement — are piecemeal at best.

In Rancho Mirage, our networks began developing a toolkit with women local leaders and others from around the world, but fixing this will require much more than any single convening can deliver. It will require the involvement of local governments, mayors’ associations, city networks, faith leaders, tech platforms, legislatures, universities, and businesses — and everyone who has never had to think about this until now. Perhaps most significantly, the responses need to include men as visible champions who share equal responsibility for addressing this challenge. This cannot be fixed by women alone.

Every mayor who resigned because of threats (let alone those who chose not to run because of the threats), every woman who quietly paid for her own security until it just didn’t make financial sense anymore—they didn’t leave politics because they were weak. They left because the system failed them, and nobody bothered to fix it.

Women mayors and other city leaders around the world, who continue to serve despite all the harassment and abuse, are paying for it — in more ways than one. They didn’t sign up for those calls. But they keep answering.

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