How did macho Mexico get a female president before the US?

While the United States prepares for another two-person contest for the presidency — Joe Biden vs. Donald Trump — Mexico is outpacing its northern neighbor in terms of gender equality in government.

Today, half of the seats in Mexico’s legislature are held by women — nearly double the number in the U.S. Congress. Mexico’s Supreme Court and central bank are led by women. While the United States has a record 12 female governors, Mexico will soon have 13 female governors, four of whom won elections on Sunday.

Women politicians and activists lobbied for years for parties to set quotas for female candidates. As in other parts of Latin America, when a wave of authoritarian governments collapsed in the 1980s and 1990s, activists sold the idea that real democracy meant equal participation for women.

Here, so many senior positions in government are held by women that gender was not a major issue in the presidential race. Of course, the historic nature of the campaign was recognised. Sheinbaum’s slogans included “It’s women’s time”; Galvez declared that he had the “ovaries” to tackle organised crime. Yet there was nothing like the sense of anticipation that accompanied Hillary Clinton’s presidential run in 2016.

“For most of the population, the topic of gender itself is not that important,” said Lorena Becerra, a prominent pollster. “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 a precedent when he became mayor of Mexico City in 2000: The cabinet he appointed was half men and half women. He appointed environmental engineer Sheinbaum as his environment secretary.

This was the beginning of an era of great success for women in politics.

Mexico was rewriting its election laws while transitioning from a one-party state to democracy. A coalition of female politicians, activists, lawyers, and academics pressured Congress to adopt quotas for female congressional candidates. First they were set at 30 percent, then 40, then 50 percent.

In 2019, Mexico passed a sweeping constitutional amendment establishing “equality in everything” — including candidacy for all elected offices, and top posts in the executive and judicial branches.

Not a single member of Congress voted against it. Women politicians portrayed men who opposed affirmative action measures as dinosaurs. Politically, opposing such initiatives became very costly.

When the amendment passed, López Obrador was president, and his protégé Sheinbaum had herself become mayor of Mexico City.

“The gender quotas and equality amendments create a really important context where women’s political participation is considered normal, and where parties are forced to think about and value women as candidates,” said Jennifer Piscopo, professor of gender and politics at Royal Holloway University of London.

But passing laws was not enough. During the democratic transition, Mexico established strong institutions to interpret and enforce electoral laws. The National Electoral Institute pressured parties to field an equal number of female candidates. Politicians who made gender-discriminatory comments about female rivals could be stripped of their right to run for office.

“The implementation story is really important,” Piscopo said. In contrast, the United States has no comparable federal mechanism for elections, which are mostly overseen by local authorities.

Sheinbaum was first seen as a protégé of López Obrador

There hasn’t been much discussion about Sheinbaum’s gender, as her political career has developed in the shadow of López Obrador. During the campaign, the quiet-natured Sheinbaum insisted she would continue the popular leader’s policies.

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

Neither Sheinbaum nor Gálvez focused on women’s issues in their platforms.

Consuelo Banuelos, a human rights activist from Nuevo Leon state, said candidates did not want to cause unrest in a society still steeped in machismo.

“The word inclusion is scary. The phrase ‘gender perspective’ is scary. The word ‘gender’ is scary,” she said. “So why bother if it’s not necessary?”

Pollster Becerra said voters still judge female candidates differently than men. For example, about 25 percent of voters surveyed during the presidential campaign said it would be harder for women to address security or organized crime problems. There was almost no difference on issues like health or the economy.

But it was hard to gauge whether Sheinbaum’s gender helped or hurt her in the election, since her top opponent was also a woman. The only man in the race, Jorge Álvarez Máñez, the candidate of a small center-left party, received 11 percent of the vote.

Feminists criticized Sheinbaum on women’s issues

While feminists were thrilled at the prospect that Mexico would elect a female president, some say Sheinbaum did little to advance women’s issues.

As mayor, he criticized large protests against violence against women in 2019, when some participants broke windows and sprayed graffiti on monuments. However, he pledged to make reducing killings of women a priority.

In 2021, a group of women took over a major traffic circle in Mexico City, and erected a statue of a girl with her fist raised. They renamed the space “Plaza of the Women Who Fight” in honor of activists who fight femicides and search for thousands of victims of forced disappearances.

Sheinbaum opposed their effort and attempted unsuccessfully to have a less politically charged statue installed honoring indigenous women.

“He handled that incident very clumsily, with total denial, with a direct attack on us,” said Marcela Guerrero, one of the activists who put up the statue. “We don’t see any promising future.”

Although López Obrador was a leftist, his relationship with feminists was strained, accusing them of infiltrating his protests by his conservative opponents. He angered feminists by defending his ally Félix Salgado Macedonio, who was running for governor of the state of Guerrero, after he was accused of sexually assaulting women. (Salgado Macedonio denied the allegations; he was eventually disqualified for campaign finance violations.)

Sabina Berman, a writer and feminist who supports López Obrador’s Morena party, said he was initially slow to understand the importance of the women’s movement. But she said supporting Sheinbaum as his party’s presidential candidate showed how much he had changed.

“As a result, the opposition realised that gender matters in this election, it is a decisive element,” he said. “And so they also looked for a female candidate.”

Berman hopes Sheinbaum’s election will mark a turning point.

“In every home, in every classroom across the country, the idea that women exist to serve and please men will be demolished,” he said.

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