Mexico and america each held presidential elections this yr, however alongside the marketing campaign path, two completely different conversations had been going down. In Mexico, Claudia Sheinbaum rallied voters with the catchphrase: “It’s time for girls.” She beat her subsequent closest rival, additionally a girl, by 32 factors—practically 20 million votes. On election evening, supporters within the capital’s foremost sq. greeted her with shouts of presidenta, celebrating directly her victory and, through the use of the female type of the phrase, their first girl president.
In america, eight years after Hillary Clinton championed the dream of breaking the last word glass ceiling, Vice President Kamala Harris averted the difficulty altogether as a presidential candidate. As she sought to win over swing state voters, Harris leaned extra into emphasizing her profession as a prosecutor than the potential of marking a historic milestone, and even deflected when requested straight about it.
Mexico and america each held presidential elections this yr, however alongside the marketing campaign path, two completely different conversations had been going down. In Mexico, Claudia Sheinbaum rallied voters with the catchphrase: “It’s time for girls.” She beat her subsequent closest rival, additionally a girl, by 32 factors—practically 20 million votes. On election evening, supporters within the capital’s foremost sq. greeted her with shouts of presidenta, celebrating directly her victory and, through the use of the female type of the phrase, their first girl president.
In america, eight years after Hillary Clinton championed the dream of breaking the last word glass ceiling, Vice President Kamala Harris averted the difficulty altogether as a presidential candidate. As she sought to win over swing state voters, Harris leaned extra into emphasizing her profession as a prosecutor than the potential of marking a historic milestone, and even deflected when requested straight about it.
However electing a girl president isn’t the one space the place america lags behind Mexico. The steep rise since 2018 within the variety of ladies within the U.S. Congress has slowed to a standstill. Election outcomes had been nonetheless being finalized on the time of writing, however solely a few quarter of Senate seats will go to ladies and the Home of Representatives nonetheless received’t break the 30 p.c threshold on this spherical. Mexico, then again, hit gender parity in each homes of its Congress three years in the past. It ranks fourth worldwide in the case of ladies’s legislative illustration, per the Inter-Parliamentary Union. America holds spot 75.
The distinction is startling, provided that greater than three-quarters of Mexicans say their nation suffers from machismo. Mexico didn’t even give ladies the appropriate to vote till 1953, greater than three many years after its neighbor to the north. Nonetheless, in March, with official campaigning simply underway, 61 p.c of Mexicans stated they would favor a girl to be their subsequent president, in contrast with 14 p.c who stated a person. In the meantime, just one in 4 Individuals believes it’s very or extraordinarily doubtless america may have a girl president of their lifetime—and that was earlier than Harris misplaced. Why are attitudes so completely different between these two neighbors?
Girls take photographs with Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum (heart) after her swearing-in ceremony in Mexico Metropolis on Oct. 1.Felix Marquez/image alliance by way of Getty Photographs
The story of how ladies’s illustration skyrocketed in Mexico dates again 30 years and entails tactical lawmaking—to not point out unity throughout political traces and events—to construct the world’s most subtle gender parity legal guidelines.
It began at a time when a lot of Latin America was abandoning a interval of authoritarianism and Mexico itself was shedding the constraints of many years of one-party rule. In 1991, Argentina turned the primary nation on the earth to go a nationwide quota legislation requiring that 30 p.c of events’ legislative candidates needed to be ladies. Since then, most Latin American nations have handed some type of gender quota reform and no less than 10 have upped the ante to gender parity legal guidelines. Whereas nations world wide have adopted gender quota measures, “Latin America has at all times been on the vanguard,” says Dr. Jennifer Piscopo, professor of gender and politics at Royal Holloway College of London, including that gender quota advocates took benefit of the area’s flurry of electoral reforms within the Nineties and 2000s to incrementally usher by way of measures in bigger reforms.
No Latin American nation has handed extra reforms increasing ladies’s illustration than Mexico. In 1996, the nation began with a measure recommending that no less than 30 p.c of political events’ legislative candidates be ladies. In 2002, it turned obligatory, and by 2008, the quota degree rose to 40 p.c. A 2014 modification upped the extent to gender parity for candidates for federal and native legislative seats. Alongside the way in which, a community of girls from throughout civil society, academia, media, and authorities labored strategically to win help and shut loopholes that made it straightforward for events to run ladies candidates in districts they had been prone to lose anyway or swapping a person right into a put up after a girl wins a seat. Mexican ladies went from having single-digit illustration within the nationwide congress 30 years in the past to holding an equal variety of seats right now.
A mixture of images taken on Feb. 19, 2019, present Mexican deputies (from left to proper, high to backside): Marivel Solís Barrera, Mary Carmen Bernal Martínez, Frida Esparza, María Lucero Saldaña, Marcela Torres Peimbert, Verónica Juárez Piña, Dulce María Sauri, Beatriz Manrique, Juanita Guerra Mena, Ana Lucía Riojas Martínez, Geraldine Ponce, Maria Jimenez, Martha Hortencia Garay Cadena, Martha Tagle, Rocío Barrera Badillo, and Tatiana Clouthier. In 2019, Mexico’s decrease chamber had 241 ladies in a complete of 500 representatives.Omar Torres/AFP by way of Getty Photographs
Then got here a 2019 constitutional reform backed by ladies from all main events and known as Paridad en todo: parity in every thing. With it, not solely is parity mandated throughout the legislative, government, and judicial branches at native and federal ranges, however 50 p.c is a flooring—not a ceiling—for girls’s political illustration.
The reform received unanimous approval, however it’s value asking why Mexican males would concede energy. Patricia Mercado, a federal deputy who ran for president in 2006, questions whether or not they have. She remembers that certainly one of Mexico’s first ladies senators within the Sixties lamented that her male friends didn’t deal with her as an equal, saying: “They provide me the chair, however they don’t give me an area.” Mercado says that girls have gained political house, however males nonetheless management the halls of energy.
Certainly, whereas Mexico holds spot 14 out of 146 for political empowerment within the World Financial Discussion board’s newest gender hole report, it ranks 109th for financial participation and alternative. (America ranks in spots 63 and 22, respectively.) In the case of financial management, about 12 p.c of company board seats are held by ladies in Mexico, in contrast with a U.S. price that, whereas nonetheless low, is 28 p.c.
Demonstrators protest in help of girls’s rights throughout Worldwide Girls’s Day in Guadalajara, Mexico, on March 8, 2023.Ulises Ruiz/AFP by way of Getty Photographs
Gender-based violence is a good starker distinction between ladies’s management good points and on-the-ground affect. Over the course of time that Mexico elevated gender parity, its congress additionally handed legal guidelines aiming to stop violence towards ladies. However in Mexico, the place solely 4 in 100 crimes are even investigated, the impunity price for home violence runs round 98.6 p.c. It’s unsurprising that, lately, with roughly 10 ladies murdered a day in Mexico, a youthful technology of girls took to the streets with a brand new demand: Cease killing us.
Passing legal guidelines does little good in the event that they’re not enforced. In Mexico, the place legislative seats are stuffed by way of a mixture of direct election and proportional illustration, political events choose their candidates primarily based on inner processes, giving their leaders sway over who will get into workplace. The place enhancing rule of legislation or implementing public coverage is advanced, parity guidelines supply events an opportunity to say they hit the numeric goal. However, says Dr. Lisa Baldez, a professor of presidency at Dartmouth School, “You’re going to get ladies who, for probably the most half, are going to toe the get together line.”
Girls lawmakers wearing white watch as U.S. President Donald Trump delivers the State of the Union deal with in Washington on Feb. 5, 2019.Alex Wong/Getty Photographs
Greater than 130 nations have adopted quotas. That makes america, which has not achieved so, an outlier. It’s additionally certainly one of a handful of nations that by no means ratified CEDAW, the United Nations conference on ladies’s rights, largely attributable to polarization between the conservatives and non secular teams towards it and the progressive rights organizations in favor.
It’s solely tougher to think about Washington ratifying such a conference or regulating ladies’s political presence taking motion after an election cycle that noticed the successful facet belittle Harris as a “DEI rent.” In June, Vice President-elect JD Vance cosponsored laws to get rid of federal range, equality, and inclusion packages, calling DEI “damaging ideology.”
However even when the presidential races led to completely different outcomes for Harris and Sheinbaum, each ladies carry the luggage of the boys who backed their candidacies, to not point out the sorts of questions on management capability that girls leaders are inclined to face. Harris inherited the load of President Joe Biden’s low approval and, throughout a brief marketing campaign, confronted questions on whether or not she would keep on his unpopular mandate.
In distinction, Sheinbaum benefited from the excessive approval of her predecessor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, or AMLO. However she, too, has confronted fixed questions on whether or not she is going to have the ability to govern in her personal proper. Simply as campaigns had been getting underway, AMLO unveiled a large reform bundle that made his legacy her agenda and saddled her authorities with controversial overhauls to the judiciary, vitality sector, safety, and extra. The victory of Donald Trump, who has pledged to slap tariffs on Mexican items, solely complicates the state of affairs.
However Sheinbaum has taken steps to make her mark with ladies’s equality. For one factor, on October 3, simply three days into workplace, she introduced a reform bundle aiming to construct substantive gender equality, shut the wage hole, and shield ladies from violence. However, as Dr. Leticia Bonifaz, a professor on the Nationwide Autonomous College of Mexico, put it: “Constructing actual equality is a sensible matter, not a theoretical one.” The reforms construct on current legal guidelines and can take funding and coverage to have an effect. Till then, they run the danger of being extra phrases on paper.
Mexico’s congress unanimously authorized them.
