Mexico is about to elect its first female president on Sunday, a historic leap in a country long known for its machismo and a big moment for all of North America.
Since the start of the presidential race, the only competitive candidates have been two women: front-runner Claudia Sheinbaum, a climate scientist for the ruling Morena party, and Xóchitl Gálvez, a former senator and businesswoman representing a coalition of opposition parties.
The milestone is a reflection of the country’s complex relationship with women, who face rampant violence and outright sexism, but are also revered as matriarchs and trusted in positions of authority.
How the country got here before the United States, its largest trading partner, has a lot to do with policies that forced open doors for women at all levels of government, experts say.
Driven by feminist activists, Mexico has, in recent decades, adopted increasingly broad laws that encourage greater representation of women in politics. Then, in 2019, it took the notable step of making gender parity in all three branches of government a constitutional requirement.
“Mexico, in this metric, is really a model for how other countries can do it.” said Jennifer Piscopo, a professor of gender and politics at Royal Holloway, a college at the University of London, who studies the region, adding: “There is no other country that I know of currently that has a constitutional amendment for gender parity that Is it that complete?
Today, half of the country’s legislature is made up of women, compared to less than 30 percent of the US Congress. The president of the Supreme Court of Justice of Mexico, the leaders of both houses of Congress and the governor of the Central Bank are all women. So are the ministers of the Interior, Education, Economy, Public Security and Foreign Affairs.
Now, a woman is called to become the most powerful person in the country, the commander of the armed forces, the CEO of the second largest economy in Latin America.
Alma Lilia Tapia, spokesperson for a group of families searching for their missing loved ones in the state of Guanajuato, said she believed both contenders would pay more attention to the pleas of the families of the nearly 100,000 missing in Mexico, compared to their male predecessors.
The New York Times interviewed 33 Mexican women in the run-up to the election and they said they knew this alone would not erase the many indignities they face. This continues to be a country where women die at an extraordinary rate, where they earn much less than men on average, and where machismo remains culturally entrenched.
But for many voters, and for the candidates themselves, the arrival of a woman to the highest office in the country does have symbolic weight.
“That Mexico has a female president is, for me, extraordinary,” Gálvez said in a radio interview. “We have taken a very important step in the women’s struggle.”
Sheinbaum has recognized what this could mean for the next generation.
“When a girl tells you, ‘I want to be head of government too,’ the truth is that it generates enormous emotion in you,” Sheinbaum told an interviewer, “not only because of what that recognition means, but also because “I see that “A girl thinks beyond the stereotypes that have been imposed on us as women.”
While many Latin American countries sought quotas for female politicians, Mexico was particularly aggressive in instituting them, first for local and then national governments.
In 2019, the country passed a constitutional amendment that called for equal gender division across the three branches of government.
The election of a president “could not have happened if it had not been for parity” said Mónica Tapia, who leads a group that trains women for political leadership in Mexico.
The United States has never considered gender quotas in politics, which are common in much of the world, Piscopo said. And unlike Mexico, which elects its leaders by popular vote, the United States operates under the electoral college system. (Hillary Clinton would have won the 2016 US election if it had been based solely on the popular vote.)
The massive entry of women into Mexican politics in recent years has been accompanied by seismic demographic and cultural changes that have transformed the country.
Half a century ago, Mexican families had an average of seven children each and approximately one in 10 Mexican women had a job. Today, Mexicans have fewer children than Americans, and nearly half of the country’s women are in the workforce.
Until 2021, abortion was prohibited in all but two states. It is now legal in most of the country.
Both candidates have promoted progressive social policies, such as opposing gay conversion therapy or creating clinics for transgender and non-binary people, that have left some conservative women feeling ignored.
“We are in favor of women’s rights, but those women’s rights do not include abortion” or “trans activism,” said Ángeles Bravo, a representative of the National Front for the Family, a conservative coalition that has opposed abortion. and LGBT rights. , in the State of Mexico. “And there are many of us.”
Some young feminists doubt that either candidate will prioritize addressing key issues that matter to women, such as domestic violence and the gender pay gap in Mexico.
They say that both women appear to simply represent the interests of men: in Sheinbaum’s case, those of her mentor, the current president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, and in Gálvez’s case, the male leaders of the three main parties she represents.
“It does us no good that a woman is going to be president if she continues under the shadow of patriarchy,” said Wendy Galarza, 33, a feminist activist from the state of Quintana Roo who was beaten and shot by police in 2020. agents during a demonstration in Cancun.
But while it’s unclear exactly how much change will come, there could be something transformative about a woman holding a top position in a country where presidents enjoy broad power and often widespread respect.
“Men will always be in the background, but the leadership of a female president in power is fundamental,” Tapia said. She tells Mexican women, she said, “that your family can’t tell you what a woman’s place is, whether it’s in the kitchen or with the family, it’s wherever you choose.”