Foreign Policy | Why Mexico Picked a Woman President First

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?…

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