World Politics Review | To Deliver for Mexico’s Women, Sheinbaum Must Overcome AMLO’s Legacy
/At her rallies and on the campaign trail ahead of Mexico’s presidential election in June, President-elect Claudia Sheinbaum made one phrase in particular her mantra: “It’s women’s time.” She repeated it in a speech at Mexico City’s Metropolitan Theater last month to mark the official certification of her election victory, while also highlighting the fact that, after 200 years of independence and 65 presidentes, Mexico will finally have its first presidenta—with the “a” in Spanish denoting the feminine.
Now that preparations are underway for Sheinbaum’s Oct. 1 inauguration, the historic moment gives Mexico an opening to champion women’s rights and leadership, not just at home, but globally—and at a crucial time. In what has been called the Year of the Election, with countries home to half the world’s population going to the polls in 2024, the number of women serving as heads of state is on the decline, from a peak of 38 out of 195 countries in 2023 to 25 as of last month. Around the world, women in politics are more likely to face violence and harassment than their male counterparts, giving them cause to think twice about running for office or reelection. As it is, though women count for roughly half the global population, they only hold one in four federal legislative seats.
Mexico, on the other hand, has gender parity rules for public office, resulting in women and men holding an equal number of legislative seats, as well as a rising number of women holding governorships, Cabinet positions and other leadership positions. Since 2002, when a law first mandated a 30 percent gender quota for congressional candidacies, Mexico has gradually raised the threshold, culminating in a “parity in everything” law in 2019 that sparked a rapid acceleration of women’s political representation in the country. The Inter-Parliamentary Union ranks Mexico fourth worldwide in terms of women in legislatures, and the Council on Foreign Relations ranks it second in its Women’s Power Index, just behind Iceland. With the outcome in the U.S. presidential election still uncertain, Mexico is for now the biggest country in the Americas with a woman head of state.
The Reality on the Ground
But for Mexico to truly be a model on the international stage will require changes at home. Though Mexican women are blazing a political leadership trail, they continue to face persistent economic challenges and violence. Mexico lags behind most of Latin America when it comes to levels of women in the labor force. And at more than 30 percent, it has one of the region’s widest gender gaps in terms of workforce participation. That labor force gap carries a cost for Mexican families overall, with the World Bank estimating that it causes up to a 25 percent loss of income per capita. Given the country’s uneven, limited childcare services, Mexican women of prime working age spend nearly a third of their time on unpaid domestic work, compared with 17.6 percent in Brazil and 18.2 percent in Argentina. The value of that unpaid work is equal to 24 percent of Mexico’s GDP—larger than the country’s manufacturing sector.
In addition to being economically marginalized, Mexican women face high levels of violence. Among women 15 years old and over, more than 70 percent say they have suffered some form of violence; nearly half have survived sexual assault. On average, about 10 women per day are murdered in a country where only 11 percent of femicide cases get resolved.
Will Sheinbaum break down the barriers that AMLO put up between himself and the women’s movement? There are signs of a rapprochement. But there are also caveats.
Names get lost amid these stark statistics. But in her speech at the Metropolitan, Mexico’s first woman president-elect made a pledge. “I will not tire of repeating that this is not an individual triumph. Today, all of us women arrive together,” said Sheinbaum, paying tribute by not only naming prominent women in Mexican history, but also by spotlighting the “invisible ones” who made her win possible.
The Catch
Even as Sheinbaum focused a portion of her speech on women, most of the rest of her remarks involved a pledge to keep building on the political movement started by her mentor and current President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, popularly known as AMLO. Presidents cannot run for reelection in Mexico, but AMLO, a populist with consistently high approval ratings throughout his six-year term, made his Morena party a broad-tent coalition that dominates Congress, state legislatures and governorships.
Once in office, Sheinbaum will have to corral the support of the coalition that AMLO built to advance her policy agenda. And while Morena has faced dwindling resistance from its political opponents over time, Mexico’s women’s movement proved to be one of AMLO’s fiercest adversaries.
When women staged protests to bring attention to the country’s epidemic of femicides, AMLO dismissed the nationwide marches, saying his conservative enemies were behind them. Calls to domestic violence hotlines soared during the COVID-19 pandemic, but AMLO disregarded the problem, claiming that 90 percent were fake. And in the name of economic austerity, he canceled federal programs for subsidized daycare and extended school days that provided childcare for working parents. Roughly 90 percent of the budget earmarked for gender equality went to direct cash programs that buoyed AMLO’s popularity—such as a tree-planting program and pensions for the elderly—but do little to bridge gender gaps. Funds to prevent gender-based violence and provide refuge for domestic abuse survivors were cut or stagnated. AMLO has taken advantage of a congressional majority to usher through massive constitutional reforms to Mexico’s judiciary before he leaves office, but a proposal to create a national care system for children, the elderly and people with disabilities to help incorporate women into the workforce has been stuck in the Senate since 2020.
Over the course of his tenure, as women took to the streets to protest in growing numbers—and largely peacefully—authorities erected steel barriers around the National Palace, where AMLO resides. For many, the metal walls signaled that the government was more concerned with protecting the palace than with protecting women’s lives.
Breaking Down the Wall?
Will Sheinbaum break down the barriers that AMLO put up between himself and the women’s movement? There are signs of a rapprochement. Within weeks of her election victory, she held a forum with 1,200 women, including feminist leaders who presented a 10-point proposal to eradicate problems such as the gender-based wage gap and discrimination against Indigenouswomen. At the same event, Sheinbaum announced that her government would implement a national care system, starting with a pilot daycare program tailored to supporting women agricultural and factory workers in Ciudad Juarez. The choice of the border city has symbolic significance, given that Ciudad Juarez is ground zero for Mexico’s femicide crisis, with prominent cases dating back to the 1990s. Moreover, when unveiling her Cabinet picks, Sheinbaum launched a Women’s Ministry, albeit to replace Inmujeres, a government institution focused on gender equity founded by a preceding government and rival party.
But there are also caveats. It will take more than one forum to carve out a women’s rights agenda. It will take more than a localized pilot daycare program to build a national care system. And it will take more than a woman becoming president to resolve Mexico’s gender-based violence and economic gaps—particularly if Sheinbaum will not break from AMLO’s track record on these issues.
Still, when she dons the presidential sash come Oct. 1, Sheinbaum has the chance to put her words into action and work toward building equality for Mexico’s “invisible” women, so that it may truly be their time.