How Mexico, bastion of machismo, got a female president before the U.S.

Today, women hold half the seats in Mexico’s legislature — roughly double the percentage in the U.S. Congress. Women lead Mexico’s Supreme Court and central bank. While the United States has a record number of female governors — 12 — the percentage here is higher.

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

So many senior positions in government here are held by women that gender wasn’t a big topic in the presidential race. There was, of course, recognition of the historic nature of the campaign. Sheinbaum’s slogans included “It’s time for women,” and runner-up Xóchitl Gálvez proclaimed she had the “ovaries” to take on organized 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 gender theme isn’t all that important in and of itself,” said Lorena Becerra, a prominent pollster. “We had already internalized the idea that the next president would be a woman.”

How Mexican women led a political revolution

Mexico’s current president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, set a precedent in 2000 when he became mayor of Mexico City: The cabinet he appointed was half male, half female. He invited Sheinbaum, an environmental engineer, to be his environment secretary.

It was the start of an era of big gains for women in politics.

Mexico was rewriting its election laws as it transitioned from a one-party state to a democracy. A coalition of female politicians, activists, lawyers and academics pressed the Congress to adopt quotas for female congressional candidates. They were first set at 30 percent, then 40, then 50.

In 2019, Mexico passed a sweeping constitutional amendment establishing “parity in everything” — candidacies for all elected offices, and top jobs in the executive and judicial branches.

Not a single member of Congress voted against it. Female politicians had painted men who opposed affirmative-action measures as dinosaurs. It became too costly, politically, to oppose such initiatives.

By the time the amendment passed, López Obrador was president, and Sheinbaum — his protégée — had become mayor of Mexico City herself.

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

But passing laws wasn’t enough. During the democratic transition, Mexico established strong institutions to interpret and enforce electoral laws. The National Electoral Institute bird-dogged parties to ensure they ran an equal number of female candidates. Politicians who made sexist comments about female rivals could be stripped of the right to run themselves.

“The story of implementation is really important,” said Piscopo. The United States, in contrast, doesn’t have a comparable federal apparatus for elections, which are overseen mostly by local authorities.

Sheinbaum seen first as López Obrador’s protégée

Sheinbaum’s gender hasn’t attracted much fanfare in part because her political career has developed in López Obrador’s shadow. During the campaign, the low-key Sheinbaum emphasized she would continue the policies of the popular leader.

“What weighs more here is her loyalty, her closeness to him, the fact that he has absolute trust in her, rather than that she’s a woman,” said Carlos Heredia, an economist and political analyst.

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

Consuelo Bañuelos, a human rights activist in the state of Nuevo Leon, said the candidates didn’t want to provoke unease in a society still permeated with machismo.

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

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

But it was difficult to gauge whether Sheinbaum’s gender helped or hurt her in the election because her top competitor was also female. The lone man in the race, Jorge Álvarez Máynez, the candidate of a small center-left party, finished a distant third.

Feminists criticize Sheinbaum on women’s issues

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

As mayor, she criticized big demonstrations in 2019 to protest violence against women, after some participants shattered windows and scrawled graffiti on monuments. She did, however, pledge to make reducing femicides more of a priority.

In 2021, a group of women took over a major Mexico City traffic circle, erecting a statue of a girl with her fist raised. They rebaptized the site “the Plaza of the Women Who Fight” in honor of the activists battling femicides and searching for the tens of thousands of victims of forced disappearance.

Sheinbaum opposed their effort and tried unsuccessfully to install a less politically charged statue honoring Indigenous women.

“She handled that incident with clumsiness, with absolute rejection, with a direct attack on us,” said Marcela Guerrero, one of the activists who placed the statue. “We don’t see a hopeful future.”

Although López Obrador emerged from the left, he had a tense relationship with feminists, charging their protests had been infiltrated by his conservative opponents. He outraged feminists by defending an ally running for governor of Guerrero state, Félix Salgado Macedonio, after it was alleged that he’d sexually assaulted women. (Salgado Macedonio denied the charges; he was eventually disqualified due to campaign-finance violations.)

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

“As a consequence, the opposition realized that gender mattered in this election, that it was a decisive element,” she said. “And so they looked for a female candidate as well.”

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

“In every household, in every classroom across the country, the idea that a woman exists to serve and please a man is going to crumble,” she said.

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