From Afghanistan to Zimbabwe, there are over 180 parliaments in the world — but what percentage of their members are female?

The crazy thing is, there’s no definitive figure*.

So we created Gender Balance, an easy game that crowd-sources gender data across every parliament in the world. Try it! We hope you’ll find it fun.

Gender Balance isn’t just an enjoyable way to fill half an hour, though: users will be helping to build up a dataset that will be useful for researchers, campaigners, politicians, and sociologists. As the results emerge, we’ll be making them available in an open format for anyone to use, to answer questions like:

• Which country has the highest proportion of women in parliament?
• Do women vote differently on issues like defence, the environment, or maternity benefits?
• Exactly when did women come into power in different countries, and did their presence change the way the country was run?

Gender Balance’s underlying data comes from another mySociety project—EveryPolitician, a database which aims to collect information on every politician in the world.

And while it’s nailing down those stats on gender balance across every country, Gender Balance also aims to be a showcase of what can be done with the open data from EveryPolitician. That data is free for anyone who wants to build tools like this, and it’s easy to use, too. Find out more about that here.

*While the Inter-Parliamentary Union does collect figures, they are self-reported, often out of date, and only cover its own members.