Mexico is poised to elect its first female president on Sunday, a historic step in a country long known for its machismo — and a big moment for all of North America.
Since the start of the presidential race, the only competitive candidates have been two women: frontrunner Claudia Sheinbaum, a climate scientist from the ruling Morena party, and Xóchitl Gálvez, a businesswoman representing a coalition of opposition parties.
This milestone reflects the country's complex relationship with women, who face rampant violence and rampant sexism, but are also revered as matriarchs and held in positions of authority.
How the country got here before the United States, its largest trading partner, has a lot to do with policies that opened doors to women at every level of government, experts say.
Spurred by feminist activists, Mexico has in recent decades adopted increasingly broad laws that encourage greater representation of women in politics. Then, in 2019, he took the extraordinary step of making gender equality in all three branches of government a constitutional requirement.
“Mexico, by this metric, is really a model of how other countries can do this,” said Jennifer Piscopo, a professor of gender and politics at Royal Holloway, a University of London college, who studies the region, adding: “There is no other country that I am currently aware of that has a constitutional amendment for gender equality that is so complete.”
Today, half of the country's legislature is made up of women, compared to less than 30 percent of the U.S. Congress. The chief justice of Mexico's Supreme Court, the leaders of both houses of Congress and the governor of the Central Bank are all women. The same applies to the ministries of the Interior, Education, Economy, Public Security and Foreign Relations.
Now, a woman is destined to become the most powerful person in the country, the commander of the armed forces, the CEO of the second largest economy in Latin America.
Alma Lilia Tapia, head of a group of families searching for their missing loved ones in the state of Guanajuato, said she believes both contenders will pay more attention to the pleas of the families of Mexico's nearly 100,000 missing people than their male predecessors.
The New York Times interviewed 33 Mexican women in the run-up to the election who said they knew this alone would not wipe away the many humiliations they faced. This is still a country where women are killed at extraordinary rates, where they earn on average much less than men, and where machismo remains culturally entrenched.
But for many voters, and for the candidates themselves, the arrival of a woman at the highest office in the country has a symbolic weight.
“For me it is extraordinary that Mexico has a female president,” Gálvez said in a radio interview. “We have taken a very important step in the women's struggle.”
Ms. Sheinbaum acknowledged what this could mean for the next generation.
“When a little girl tells you, 'I also want to be head of government,' the truth is that it causes enormous emotion,” Ms. Sheinbaum told an interviewer, “not only because of what that recognition means, but also to see that a girl thinks beyond the stereotypes that have been imposed on us as women.
While many Latin American countries have pursued quotas for women politicians, Mexico has been particularly aggressive in instituting them, first for local and then national government.
In 2019, the country passed a constitutional amendment requiring an even gender division in all three branches of government.
The election of a female president “could not have happened if it were not for equality,” said Mónica Tapia, who leads a group that trains women for political leadership in Mexico.
The United States has never adopted gender quotas in politics, which are common in much of the world, Piscopo said. And unlike Mexico, which elects its leaders by popular vote, the United States operates under the electoral college system. (Hillary Clinton would have won the 2016 US election if it had been based solely on the popular vote.)
The mass entry of women into Mexican politics in recent years has gone hand in hand with the seismic demographic and cultural shifts that have transformed the country.
Half a century ago, Mexican families averaged seven children each and about one in ten Mexican women he had a job. Today, Mexicans have fewer children than Americans, and nearly half of the country's women are in the workforce.
Until 2021, abortion was banned in all but two states. It is now legal in most of the country.
Both candidates promoted progressive social policies, such as oppose Gay conversion therapy gold creating clinics for transgender and non-binary people, which have left some conservative women feeling neglected.
“We are in favor of women's rights, but these women's rights do not include abortion” or “trans activism,” said Ángeles Bravo, a representative of the National Front for the Family, a conservative coalition that opposes abortion and LGBT rights. , in the state of Mexico. “And there are many of us.”
Some young feminists doubt that either candidate would prioritize addressing key issues that matter to women, such as domestic violence and Mexico's gender pay gap.
They say both women appear to represent only the interests of men: in Ms. Sheinbaum's case, those of her mentor, the current president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, and in Ms. Gálvez's case, the male leaders of the three main parties she represents .
“We don't need a woman to become president if she continues to live in the shadow of patriarchy,” said Wendy Galarza, 33, a feminist activist from the state of Quintana Roo who in 2020 was beaten and killed by police officers during a demonstration in Cancún.
Yet while it is unclear exactly what changes will occur, there may be something transformative about a woman occupying a position of top authority in a country where presidents enjoy broad power and, often, widespread respect.
“Men will always be in the background, but the leadership of a female president in power is critical,” Ms. Tapia said. She tells Mexican women, she said, “that your family can't tell you where a woman's place is—whether it's in the kitchen or with the family—it's wherever you choose.”
