At her rallies and on the marketing campaign path forward of Mexico’s presidential election in June, President-elect Claudia Sheinbaum made one phrase particularly her mantra: “It’s ladies’s time.” She repeated it in a speech at Mexico Metropolis’s Metropolitan Theater final month to mark the official certification of her election victory, whereas additionally highlighting the truth that, after 200 years of independence and 65 presidentes, Mexico will lastly have its first presidenta—with the “a” in Spanish denoting the female.
Now that preparations are underway for Sheinbaum’s Oct. 1 inauguration, the historic second offers Mexico a gap to champion ladies’s rights and management, not simply at dwelling, however globally—and at an important time. In what has been referred to as the 12 months of the Election, with international locations dwelling to half the world’s inhabitants going to the polls in 2024, the variety of ladies serving as heads of state is on the decline, from a peak of 38 out of 195 international locations in 2023 to 25 as of final month. Around the globe, ladies in politics usually tend to face violence and harassment than their male counterparts, giving them trigger to suppose twice about operating for workplace or reelection. As it’s, although ladies rely for roughly half the worldwide inhabitants, they solely maintain one in 4 federal legislative seats.
Mexico, however, has gender parity guidelines for public workplace, leading to men and women holding an equal variety of legislative seats, in addition to a rising variety of ladies holding governorships, Cupboard positions and different management positions. Since 2002, when a regulation first mandated a 30 % gender quota for congressional candidacies, Mexico has steadily raised the edge, culminating in a “parity in every part” regulation in 2019 that sparked a fast acceleration of ladies’s political illustration within the nation. The Inter-Parliamentary Union ranks Mexico fourth worldwide by way of ladies in legislatures, and the Council on Overseas Relations ranks it second in its Girls’s Energy Index, simply behind Iceland. With the end result within the U.S. presidential election nonetheless unsure, Mexico is for now the most important nation within the Americas with a girl head of state.
