Mexican voters on Sunday elected Claudia Sheinbaum
From Washington Post / June 3, 2024
MEXICO CITY — Mexico is famous for its macho culture. Women here didn’t win the right to vote for president until 1953 — three decades after their U.S. counterparts. As recently as nine years ago, there wasn’t a single female state governor.
Yet Mexico has just elected its first female president, Claudia Sheinbaum, in what was essentially a race between two women engineers. As the United States gears up for another two-man contest for the presidency — Joe Biden vs. Donald Trump — Mexico is eclipsing its northern neighbor on gender parity in government.
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 12 female governors, Mexico will soon have 13, including three who won election Sunday.
How did Mexico do it?
Mexican voters on Sunday elected Claudia Sheinbaum the country’s first female president. The 61-year-old engineer defeated Xóchitl Gálvez to succeed her political mentor, outgoing President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, following a campaign marred by violence. López Obrador, the leftist founder of the Morena movement, loomed large over the contest.
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.”
