by Joe Black

For women to be taken seriously within the political sphere, they need the ability to vote within elections.

According to the Inter-Parliamentary Union, most countries that allow elections extend the right to vote to women. Most recently, Kazakhstan, Republic of Moldova and South Africa (for black women) extended voting rights to women.

Sarah Brewer, associate director of American University's Women & Politics Institute, said however in some countries women are less likely to vote because a variety of factors, including a historic trend that women have lower level of education. Another reason includes less access to income, which is seen as a determinant of voting trends.

"The higher the socioeconomic level, the higher rate that people will vote," Brewer said. " ... with women having less access to income, in many cases, there is less of propensity to vote."

About the overall trend of less voting Brewer said: "There are multiple reasons and multiple outcomes from this. But no one has a big answer for that big question ... Any number of different scholars would say any number of reasons."

According to the union, the flood gate of women's voting rights were opened in the early 1900s before World War I.

Notably, the United States was one of the first by allowing women to stand for election in 1788 (though women weren't allowed to vote themselves until 1920). And the last country that is listed within the directory is South Africa, which extended voting rights to black women in 1994.

Within that time gap, Europe appeared the most progressive in the promotion of women's suffrage. Countries in Scandinavia were some of the first to extend voting rights. Eastern European countries came next.

African and Asian countries are some of the slowest in extending the right of taking office and to vote for government officials in the world, according the union's data.

However, some of these later countries just started allowing the voting rights in general to the populous, so the lagging timetable for women's rights falls in line with their own internal struggles with popular sovereignty.