Written as ‘he’: Colonial inheritance, constitutional language, and women’s representation in Anglophone Africa

Anglophone African constitutions retain masculine-default language inherited from British legal drafting, a register many of the region’s own languages cannot reproduce. Reform advocates and parts of the scholarship assume that gender-inclusive constitutional language supports women’s political representation. This article measures that assumption for the first time. A systematic census of gendered pronouns in the constitutions of Ghana, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, The Gambia, Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, and Rwanda reveals three drafting regimes: masculine-default texts (Nigeria 524:0 masculine-to-feminine tokens; Tanzania 373:0; Sierra Leone 439:1; Ghana 427:8), paired-inclusive texts (The Gambia, Uganda, Rwanda), and Kenya’s pronoun-avoidant 2010 text. Set against representation data for 2000–2023, textual inclusivity does not track women’s parliamentary presence. The weak cross-national association rests on Rwanda alone, while states with enforceable gender quotas average 36.8 per cent women against 9.0 per cent without. The masculine default emerges as a removable colonial inheritance that half the sample has already discarded. Constitutional text marks who a republic imagines holding office; allocation rules decide who takes the seats. Language reform is a dignitary and decolonial measure that complements structural provision and never substitutes for it.