Mexico and the United States both held presidential elections this year, but along the campaign trail, two different conversations were taking place. In Mexico, Claudia Sheinbaum rallied voters with the catchphrase: “It’s time for women.” She beat her next closest rival, also a woman, by 32 points—nearly 20 million votes. On election night, supporters in the capital’s main square greeted her with shouts of presidenta, celebrating at once her victory and, by using the feminine form of the word, their first woman president.
In the United States, eight years after Hillary Clinton championed the dream of breaking the ultimate glass ceiling, Vice President Kamala Harris avoided the issue altogether as a presidential candidate. As she sought to win over swing state voters, Harris leaned more into emphasizing her career as a prosecutor than the potential of marking a historic milestone, and even deflected when asked directly about it.
Mexico and the United States both held presidential elections this year, but along the campaign trail, two different conversations were taking place. In Mexico, Claudia Sheinbaum rallied voters with the catchphrase: “It’s time for women.” She beat her next closest rival, also a woman, by 32 points—nearly 20 million votes. On election night, supporters in the capital’s main square greeted her with shouts of presidenta, celebrating at once her victory and, by using the feminine form of the word, their first woman president.
In the United States, eight years after Hillary Clinton championed the dream of breaking the ultimate glass ceiling, Vice President Kamala Harris avoided the issue altogether as a presidential candidate. As she sought to win over swing state voters, Harris leaned more into emphasizing her career as a prosecutor than the potential of marking a historic milestone, and even deflected when asked directly about it.
But electing a woman president isn’t the only area where the United States lags behind Mexico. The steep rise since 2018 in the number of women in the U.S. Congress has slowed to a standstill. Election results were still being finalized at the time of writing, but only about a quarter of Senate seats will go to women and the House of Representatives still won’t break the 30 percent threshold in this round. Mexico, on the other hand, hit gender parity in both houses of its Congress three years ago. It ranks fourth worldwide when it comes to women’s legislative representation, per the Inter-Parliamentary Union. The United States holds spot 75.
The difference is startling, given that more than three-quarters of Mexicans say their country suffers from machismo. Mexico didn’t even give women the right to vote until 1953, more than three decades after its neighbor to the north. Still, in March, with official campaigning just underway, 61 percent of Mexicans said they would prefer a woman to be their next president, compared with 14 percent who said a man. Meanwhile, only one in four Americans believes it’s very or extremely likely the United States will have a woman president in their lifetime—and that was before Harris lost. Why are attitudes so different between these two neighbors?
The story of how women’s representation skyrocketed in Mexico dates back 30 years and involves tactical lawmaking—not to mention unity across political lines and parties—to build the world’s most sophisticated gender parity laws.
It started at a time when much of Latin America was leaving behind a period of authoritarianism and Mexico itself was shedding the constraints of decades of one-party rule. In 1991, Argentina became the first country in the world to pass a national quota law requiring that 30 percent of parties’ legislative candidates had to be women. Since then, most Latin American countries have passed some form of gender quota reform and at least 10 have upped the ante to gender parity laws. While countries around the world have adopted gender quota measures, “Latin America has always been at the vanguard,” says Dr. Jennifer Piscopo, professor of gender and politics at Royal Holloway University of London, adding that gender quota advocates took advantage of the region’s flurry of electoral reforms in the 1990s and 2000s to incrementally usher through measures in larger reforms.
No Latin American country has passed more reforms expanding women’s representation than Mexico. In 1996, the country started with a measure recommending that at least 30 percent of political parties’ legislative candidates be women. In 2002, it became compulsory, and by 2008, the quota level rose to 40 percent. A 2014 amendment upped the level to gender parity for candidates for federal and local legislative seats. Along the way, a network of women from across civil society, academia, media, and government worked strategically to win support and close loopholes that made it easy for parties to run women candidates in districts they were likely to lose anyway or swapping a man into a post after a woman wins a seat. Mexican women went from having single-digit representation in the national congress 30 years ago to holding an equal number of seats today.
Then came a 2019 constitutional reform backed by women from all major parties and called Paridad en todo: parity in everything. With it, not only is parity mandated across the legislative, executive, and judicial branches at local and federal levels, but 50 percent is a floor—not a ceiling—for women’s political representation.
The reform won unanimous approval, but it’s worth asking why Mexican men would concede power. Patricia Mercado, a federal deputy who ran for president in 2006, questions whether they have. She recalls that one of Mexico’s first women senators in the 1960s lamented that her male peers didn’t treat her as an equal, saying: “They give me the chair, but they don’t give me a space.” Mercado says that women have gained political space, but men still control the halls of power.
Indeed, while Mexico holds spot 14 out of 146 for political empowerment in the World Economic Forum’s latest gender gap report, it ranks 109th for economic participation and opportunity. (The United States ranks in spots 63 and 22, respectively.) When it comes to economic leadership, about 12 percent of corporate board seats are held by women in Mexico, compared with a U.S. rate that, while still low, is 28 percent.
Gender-based violence is an even starker contrast between women’s leadership gains and on-the-ground impact. Over the course of time that Mexico increased gender parity, its congress also passed laws aiming to prevent violence against women. But in Mexico, where only four in 100 crimes are even investigated, the impunity rate for domestic violence runs around 98.6 percent. It’s unsurprising that, in recent years, with roughly 10 women murdered a day in Mexico, a younger generation of women took to the streets with a new demand: Stop killing us.
Passing laws does little good if they’re not enforced. In Mexico, where legislative seats are filled through a combination of direct election and proportional representation, political parties pick their candidates based on internal processes, giving their leaders sway over who gets into office. Where improving rule of law or implementing public policy is complex, parity rules offer parties a chance to say they hit the numeric target. But, says Dr. Lisa Baldez, a professor of government at Dartmouth College, “You’re going to get women who, for the most part, are going to toe the party line.”
More than 130 countries have adopted quotas. That makes the United States, which has not done so, an outlier. It’s also one of a handful of countries that never ratified CEDAW, the United Nations convention on women’s rights, in large part due to polarization between the conservatives and religious groups against it and the progressive rights organizations in favor.
It’s only harder to imagine Washington ratifying such a convention or regulating women’s political presence taking action after an election cycle that saw the winning side belittle Harris as a “DEI hire.” In June, Vice President-elect JD Vance cosponsored legislation to eliminate federal diversity, equality, and inclusion programs, calling DEI “destructive ideology.”
But even if the presidential races led to different outcomes for Harris and Sheinbaum, both women carry the baggage of the men who backed their candidacies, not to mention the kinds of questions about leadership capacity that women leaders tend to face. Harris inherited the weight of President Joe Biden’s low approval and, during a short campaign, faced questions about whether she would carry on his unpopular mandate.
In contrast, Sheinbaum benefited from the high approval of her predecessor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, or AMLO. But she, too, has faced constant questions about whether she will be able to govern in her own right. Just as campaigns were getting underway, AMLO unveiled a massive reform package that made his legacy her agenda and saddled her government with controversial overhauls to the judiciary, energy sector, security, and more. The victory of Donald Trump, who has pledged to slap tariffs on Mexican goods, only complicates the scenario.
But Sheinbaum has taken steps to make her mark with women’s equality. For one thing, on October 3, just three days into office, she presented a reform package aiming to build substantive gender equality, close the wage gap, and protect women from violence. But, as Dr. Leticia Bonifaz, a professor at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, put it: “Building real equality is a practical matter, not a theoretical one.” The reforms build on existing laws and will take funding and policy to have an impact. Until then, they run the risk of being more words on paper.
Mexico’s congress unanimously approved them.
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