The Republic of the Congo guarantees women equal access to political office under a 2015 constitutional parity mandate and has ratified the principal international and regional gender-equality instruments. Yet women won only 16.56% of National Assembly seats after the 2022 elections and zero of the core ministerial portfolios. This article argues that the persistence of this gap is best understood not as an electoral-outcome problem but as a public-administration implementation problem: a divergence between adopted policy and administrative outcome located at identifiable institutional sites. Drawing on 17 key-informant interviews, an urban citizen-perception online survey (n = 86), and analysis of the statutory framework, the study extends the glass-ceiling and representative-bureaucracy lens, established for women’s advancement within the bureaucracy, to the elective and ministerial tier. The legislature and cabinet are treated as the apex gatekeeping stages of a public-governance career ladder. The analysis locates the reform-representation gap in four institutional mechanisms: non-transparent party candidate selection, gender quotas designed without placement rules or sanctions, a two-round single-member majoritarian electoral system that amplifies party gatekeeping, and executive-appointment discretion lying outside the electoral-quota architecture. Read through implementation theory and feminist institutionalism, these mechanisms constitute a formal-informal institutional mismatch in which parity statutes are layered onto candidate-selection and appointment institutions that retain their gendered logic. The diagnosis specifies, in bounded and applied terms, where inclusion policy must intervene.
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