the only comparable data on a global scale are on the date of suffrage and the percentage of female seats in parliament which provide a very limited overview of gender disparities in politics because data on conventional forms of political participation such as voting trends are not available due to secret ballot systems and as a result of the difficulty of capturing unconventional forms of political participation such as protesting with quantitative methods it is very difficult to measure other forms of women s political participation a similar issue arises when using data on education