Challenges before Mexico's first woman president

On June 4 Claudia Sheinbaum made history by becoming the first woman president of Mexico, a country of 130 million people. Interestingly and equally relevant her opponent in the presidential race was also a woman.

This unprecedented victory didn’t come easily. It is the result of a long struggle of Mexican women fighting for their rights, the women’s movement in Mexico and in Latin America, it’s link with global women’s movements and the role of the United Nations in putting the agenda of women’s empowerment on the table.

In 1916, the First Feminist Congress took place in Mérida, Yucatán, with 620 delegates. The well-known activist and writer Hermila Galindo did not attend but sent a letter titled “Women in the Future,” advocating for sex education, legal rights, employment opportunities, and secularity. Some attendees found these topics radical and well ahead of their time. In the last session of the Congress, delegates submitted a proposal to modify the Constitution of the State of Yucatan to allow women’s vote. It worked. Elvia Carrillo Puerto, Beatriz Peniche Barrera, and Raquel Dzib Cicero became the first women elected to the state legislature in Yucatan.

Moving forward, in 1922, Rosa Torre González won a city council seat in Mérida and became an icon of the local struggles for women equality. These local achievements laid the groundwork for women’s rights movements in Mexico leading to a national struggle to get the right for women to vote, which finally happened in 1953.

Mexico has been a pioneer in implementing gender equality in elected office by pushing for quotas. The discourse on increasing the participation of women in leadership and policy making started in 1975 at the United Nations’ First World Conference on Women, coincidentally held in Mexico City. At the time, the UN recommendations emphasised the importance of women’s political inclusion, but women activists and elected officials knew party leaders would need more than words. So, in Latin America and elsewhere, women began pushing party leaders to set targets for nominating women.

Researchers in Europe in collaboration with the UN Division for the Advancement of Women (DAW) and the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) had been working on the theory of critical mass of women or exactly what percentages of women would be essential to make change in any institution, including governance, and not be coopted. This was the 33 percent. This then was included in the final document of the Fourth World Conference on Women in 1995, the Forward Looking Strategies.

In 1991, Argentina adopted a 30% gender quota law for women candidates. In 1996, Mexico followed with a law recommending that parties nominate 30% women for the federal Congress, and a 2002 law requiring them to do so. After this, there was rapid progress for women in elected office.

In 2018, women won half the seats in Mexico’s Congress and introduced a ground-breaking constitutional reform: Gender parity for all candidates for elected office, and for top posts in the executive and judicial branches. Called “parity in everything,” the reform was adopted in 2019. Not a single member of Congress voted against it.

The political reforms of 2014 in Mexico included a constitutional amendment mandating 50% gender parity in candidate nominations for federal and local congressional elections. This obligated political parties to actively ensure equal representation of women in the electoral process-which, in theory, would give women a fair shot at equal representation in elected positions.

By 2019, political parties were respecting the 50–50 rules when nominating candidates for the federal Congress, the state legislatures, and the municipal governments, including mayors. The last holdout was the coveted governor positions. Only seven of Mexico’s 32 states had ever elected a woman governor: That’s seven women compared to 344 men since Mexican women gained the right to vote in 1953.

Women in elected office have their share of harassment. The National Women’s Institute of Mexico analysed social media messages sent to women candidates during the 2018 elections, finding that 70% contained gendered language that was insulting, abusive or harassing.

Mexico has worrisome rates of violence against women. According to a Reuters report of April 2022, more than 70% of 50.5 million women and girls aged over 15 in Mexico have experienced some kind of violence. As of April 2020, femicides (or crimes against women and girls) had increased 137% in the last five years, and 93% of these crimes against women were not reported or investigated. And around 10 women are murdered in Mexico every day.

With a rich cultural history and diversity, and abundant natural resources, Mexico is among the 15 largest economies in the world and the second-largest economy in Latin America. It has solid macroeconomic institutions, is open to trade, and has a diversified manufacturing base connected to global value chains.

According to the World Bank report of March 2024, over the last three decades, Mexico has underperformed in terms of growth, inclusion, and poverty reduction compared to similar countries. Its economic growth averaged just above 2% a year between 1980 and 2022, limiting progress in convergence relative to high-income economies. The official multidimensional poverty rate fell from 43.9% in 2020 to 36.3% in 2022, lifting 8.8 million Mexicans out of poverty, although extreme poverty has decreased more slowly.

Claudia Sheinbaum, as the new president faces many challenges. She has a sound background in environmental science and energy engineering, local and global experience. She was Mexico City’s first female mayor, from 2018 until her resignation this year. But like women heads of states in developing countries, a powerful man mentors her. There are questions whether the legacy of López Obrador (her mentor) is truly desirable and as she has been reticent about her own public policy positions, many Mexicans ask: Who is the real Sheinbaum? How will she manage to define her own platform, separating herself from López Obrador, given that he is her mentor and hand-picked her as his successor?

Only time will tell.

This article is authored by Anita Anand, communications and development specialist, New Delhi.