How macho Mexico elected a female president before the United States

Women currently hold half of the seats in Mexico’s Congress, roughly twice as many as in the U.S. Congress. Mexico’s Supreme Court and central bank are headed by women. The U.S. has a record 12 female governors, but Mexico’s share is even higher.

Female politicians and activists have been lobbying political parties for years to impose quotas for female candidates. As in other parts of Latin America, when a succession of authoritarian regimes fell in the 1980s and 1990s, activists touted the idea that true democracy meant equal participation for women.

Gender wasn’t a big talking point in the presidential race, since many high-ranking government positions are held by women. Of course, the historic nature of the race was acknowledged — Sheinbaum’s slogans included “The time for women has come” and runner-up Xochitl Gálvez declared she had the “ovaries” to take on organized crime — but there was no sense of expectation like there was during Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential run.

“For most of the public, the topic of gender isn’t all that important in and of itself,” said prominent pollster Lorena Becerra. “We’ve already internalized the idea that the next president will be a woman.”

How Mexican women led a political revolution

Mexico’s current president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, set the precedent of having an equal number of men and women in his cabinet when he took office in 2000. He brought in Sheinbaum, an environmental engineer, to be his secretary of environment.

It was the beginning of an era of great progress for women in politics.

As Mexico was changing its electoral laws in its transition from a one-party state to a democracy, a coalition of women politicians, activists, lawyers, and academics pressured Congress to impose quotas for women candidates, initially set at 30 percent and then increasing to 40 percent, then 50 percent.

Mexico passed a comprehensive constitutional reform in 2019 that established “equality across the board” for running for all elective office and for the highest posts in the executive and judicial branches.

Not a single member of Congress voted against it. Women politicians saw male opposition to affirmative action as outdated: politically, it had become too costly to oppose such efforts.

By the time the amendment passed, Lopez Obrador had become president and his protégé, Sheinbaum, had become mayor of Mexico City.

“Equal quotas and the Equality Amendment create a really important context in which women’s political participation becomes the norm and parties are forced to think about and evaluate women as candidates,” said Jennifer Piscopo, professor of gender and politics at Royal Holloway, University of London.

But laws alone were not enough. During its democratic transition, Mexico created powerful institutions to interpret and enforce its electoral laws. The National Electoral Commission made sure that parties fielded an equal number of female candidates. Politicians who made sexist comments about female rivals could be disqualified from running for office themselves.

“The history of how it’s conducted really matters,” Piscopo said. By contrast, the United States has no similar federal authority over elections, which are mostly overseen by local governments.

Sheinbaum was initially seen as a possible successor to Lopez Obrador.

Ms. Sheinbaum’s political career has not received much attention, in part because her career as a woman has developed in the shadow of Mr. Lopez Obrador. During the election campaign, the low-key Ms. Sheinbaum stressed that she would continue the popular leader’s policies.

“What’s important here is not so much that she is a woman, but her loyalty, her closeness to him and the fact that he has absolute confidence in her,” said Carlos Heredia, an economist and political analyst.

Neither Scheinbaum nor Galvez ran policies that focused on women’s issues.

Consuelo Bañuelos, a human rights activist in Nuevo Leon state, said the candidates did not want to unsettle a society still permeated by masculinity.

“The word ‘inclusion’ is scary. The word ‘gender perspective’ is scary. The word ‘gender’ itself is scary,” she said. “So why create a stir when there’s no need for it?”

Pollster Becerra said voters still view female candidates differently than men. For example, about 25% of voters surveyed during the presidential election said it would be harder for women to address security and organized crime than men. There was little difference on issues like health and the economy.

But it was hard to tell whether Sheinbaum’s gender helped or hurt her in the election, since her main rival was also a woman. The only male candidate in the race, Jorge Álvarez Mines, from a small center-left party, finished a distant third.

Feminists criticize Scheinbaum on women’s issues

Feminists are excited about the prospect of Mexico electing a female president, but some say Scheinbaum has done little to advance women’s issues.

As mayor, she criticized mass protests against violence against women in 2019, during which some protesters broke windows and wrote graffiti on monuments, but she promised to make reducing femicide a bigger priority.

In 2021, a group of women occupied a major traffic circle in Mexico City, erecting a statue of a girl with a raised fist and renaming the site “Plaza of Fighting Women” in honour of activists who fight against femicide and search for tens of thousands of victims of enforced disappearances.

Sheinbaum opposed their efforts and tried unsuccessfully to install a less politically charged statue honoring an Indigenous woman.

“She handled it with clumsiness, with categorical refusal and with direct attacks on us,” said Marcela Guerrero, one of the activists who put up the statue. “We don’t see a hopeful future.”

Lopez Obrador rose to power from the left but had tensions with feminists, who he accused of infiltrating feminist protests with conservative opponents. He infuriated feminists when he defended his ally, Félix Salgado Macedonio, a candidate for governor of Guerrero state who was accused of sexually assaulting women (a charge he denied but was ultimately disqualified for campaign finance violations).

Sabina Berman, a writer and feminist who supports Lopez Obrador’s Morena party, said the president was initially slow to understand the importance of the women’s movement, but by endorsing Scheinbaum as his party’s presidential candidate, he showed he had changed, she said.

“As a result, the opposition parties realised that gender was an important and decisive factor in this election,” she said. “So they also looked for female candidates.”

Berman hopes Scheinbaum’s election will be a turning point.

“In every home and every classroom across the country, the notion that women exist to serve and please men will be shattered,” she said.

Rios reported from Monterrey, Mexico. Paulina Villegas in Mexico City contributed to this report.