CEDAW Article 7: Requires states to eliminate discrimination against women in political and public life
Article 7 asks who is physically in the room when a country decides what to do. A state can pass every equality statute Article 2 requires and still keep women out of the rooms where policy gets made. Article 7 exists because that gap doesn't close on its own.
What it states
Article 7 has three clauses. States must ensure women can, on equal terms with men:
vote in all elections and public referenda, and be eligible for election to all publicly elected bodies;
participate in formulating government policy, hold public office, and perform all public functions at every level of government; and
participate in non-governmental organizations and associations concerned with the public and political life of the country.
The first clause is the floor;the vote, the ballot. The second is the one that actually does the work, because it reaches past the right to vote into the right to govern: cabinet seats, the civil service, the judiciary, the diplomatic corps. The third clause recognizes that political power in most countries doesn't only run through elected office. It runs through the associations, unions, and civic bodies that shape what gets on the agenda before an election ever happens.
Vehicle for new protections
Article 7 has been used to justify machinery well beyond its own text. General Recommendation 23, adopted by the CEDAW Committee in 1997, is built directly on Articles 7 and 8. Women's underrepresentation in public life isn't explained by lack of qualification or interest, it's produced by structural barriers like how candidates get selected, how campaigns get financed, the unpaid domestic labor that competes with a public role for the same hours in the day.
GR23 is also where Article 7 links back to Article 4's temporary special measures clause. The Committee's position is that quotas for women in parliament, on candidate lists, or in appointed bodies aren't an exception to Article 7's equality requirement. They're a legitimate tool for meeting it, precisely because Article 7 asks for actual presence, not just formal eligibility. Article 7 supplies the target; Article 4 supplies the permission to use numeric tools to get there.
Reservations
Article 7 draws far fewer reservations than Article 2, 5, or 16, and the ones it does draw tend to be specific and short-lived, unlike a stereotype, "women cannot vote" is a single checkable fact a Committee can point to and a state can fix without touching anything else. Kuwait reserved Article 7(a) outright in 1994, restricting the vote and electoral eligibility to men under its own electoral law, and withdrew that reservation in 2005 once its domestic law changed. Austria reserved Article 7(b) specifically for armed forces service and withdrew that reservation in 2000.
None of that shows up across the countries I've lived in. The UK's relevant instrument isn't filed against Article 7 by name, it's a general exclusion, entered on ratification, carving "admission into or service in the Armed Forces of the Crown" out of the Convention's reach entirely, which would otherwise implicate both Article 7(b) and Article 11; part of it was narrowed in 2005 to cover only what's needed for combat effectiveness, and a related Article 15 reservation on women in ground close combat roles stayed in place until full implementation around 2018–2019. The US never ratified at all, so there's no reservation to read.
Which leaves the same shape I found with Article 5, from the other direction: Article 7 is lightly reserved, but lightly reserved isn't the same as fully met. The absence of a reservation tells you a state didn't feel the need to formally protect an exclusion in writing. It doesn't tell you whether women are actually in the room.