Zócalo Public Square | She Was Mexico’s First, Forgotten Congresswoman

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Zócalo Public Square | She Was Mexico’s First, Forgotten Congresswoman

When Aurora Jiménez de Palacios took her seat in Mexico’s Congress in 1954, the country’s women still hadn’t been able to vote in a national election. The 28-year-old, showered with confetti and joined by her young daughter, climbed the steps of the Chamber of Deputies, becoming Mexico’s first congresswoman—and opening the door for seven decades of women’s rising legislative power.

In October 2024, Mexico inaugurated Claudia Sheinbaum as its first woman president. I started uncovering Jiménez’s story around that time, while doing research on the country’s path to political gender parity. Today, Mexico has an equal number of men and women in Congress, and among the highest global rates of women’s political representation. But gender equity in Mexican politics is paradoxical: If measured only by the share of women in political leadership, Mexico’s story is one of success; if measured by Mexican women’s lived experiences of violence and economic gaps, it falls short. Perhaps this paradox also explains why Jiménez’s rise to power, lauded at the time, was then largely forgotten in the decades before Mexican women gained their political foothold.

Mexican women gained the right to vote and be elected in 1953—but they weren’t able to exercise those rights in a national election until the 1955 midterms, and they didn’t get to elect a president until 1958. In the middle of it all, Jiménez won a 1954 special election in the state of Baja California. Her story caught my attention not only for its unexpected timing or because she broke a barrier that connects directly with Mexico’s political present, but also because her life story was—and is—unconventional for a woman’s rise to political power. 

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World Politics Review | In Mexico, the Push for a National Care System Is Gaining Momentum

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At the heart of unpaid care work in Mexico lies a paradox: The labor sustains the economy, even as it creates barriers to women joining the workforce. All told, the value of uncompensated domestic labor in Mexico amounts to more than 26 percent of GDP, outpacing both the manufacturing sector and trade, according to the country’s statistics agency. Yet roughly 20 million Mexican women are not employed because they are busy providing that unpaid labor.

Now, a push to build a national care system seeks to recognize and rebalance that work by creating a network of services covering care for children, people with disabilities, the elderly—and the caretakers themselves. President Claudia Sheinbaum, Mexico’s first woman head of state, created a Women’s Secretariat that, among other tasks, is charged with building the system. And earlier this month, one of the country’s main opposition parties said it would introduce an initiative enshrining the right to care in the Constitution.

But the devil is in the details, and building a national care system will take time and resources. Can Mexico get there?

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Wilson Center | How Latin American Women Shaped Human Rights

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Wilson Center | How Latin American Women Shaped Human Rights

Amid a global backlash against women’s rights, thousands of people head to New York City this month for the world’s largest annual event focused on women’s empowerment. Dubbed “Beijing+30,” the special session of the UN Commission on the Status of Women will evaluate progress implementing the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action, a 30-year-old blueprint for gender equality.

Silvia Hernández, a former Mexican senator who led her country’s delegation in 1995 to the first Women’s Conference, said the her country’s delegates in Beijing came from across the political spectrum. “It made us realize that the differences ran deep, but that there were some areas that ran even deeper and that could unite us,” she said in an interview.

The 1995 conference is perhaps best remembered for the famous declaration by then-First Lady Hillary Clinton, “Human rights are women’s rights and women’s rights are human rights.” But it was Latin American feminists who helped enshrine the concept in the UN Charter 50 years earlier–over US objections.

When 50 countries came together at the 1945 San Francisco Conference to draft the UN Charter, women made up just 3% of participants. Of the six women among the 850 delegates, three were Latin American, Brazil’s Bertha Lutz, the Dominican Republic’s Minerva Bernardino, and Uruguay’s Isabel Pinto de Vidal. Together, they fought for the Charter to include language that made gender equality central to modern human rights principles.

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Foreign Policy | Why Mexico Picked a Woman President First

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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?…

Read the complete article at ForeignPolicy.com, in the print edition, or via PDF.

World Politics Review | To Deliver for Mexico’s Women, Sheinbaum Must Overcome AMLO’s Legacy

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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.

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La Nación, El Mercurio, El Tiempo, El Universal | Cerremos la brecha de género en el mundo empresarial de América Latina

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Al conmemorar el Día Internacional de la Mujer, hay buenas razones para celebrar los avances en América Latina. Cuando se trata de elevar a las mujeres a puestos de liderazgo político, la región está a la cabeza. Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Perú y México han logrado o están cerca de lograr la paridad de género en sus gabinetes. Las mujeres representan el 35% de los legisladores nacionales en las Américas, superando a todas las demás regiones del mundo excepto los países nórdicos. Mientras tanto, Estados Unidos sólo está reduciendo ese promedio, ubicándose en el puesto 71 de 184 países y con más de una docena de naciones latinoamericanas y caribeñas ocupando puestos más altos en una lista de la Unión Interparlamentaria. Perú, Honduras y Trinidad y Tobago están en el pequeño club de 26 países en todo el mundo con mujeres como jefas de estado. Argentina, Brasil y Chile han tenido mujeres presidentas y es casi seguro que los mexicanos elegirán a la primera en junio.

Pero si hay motivos para alegrarse en el caso del sector público de la región, hay mucho menos que celebrar cuando se trata del liderazgo femenino en el sector privado.

En el caso de la alta dirección, un informe de Deloitte de 2022 encontró que las mujeres de la región ocupan apenas el 1,6% de los puestos de directora ejecutiva. En el frente de las juntas directivas, América Latina va a la zaga, con una representación general de sólo el 14,5%, según un estudio de 2023. Las economías más grandes de la región, entre ellas México (10%), Chile (17%), Brasil (19%) y Colombia (21%), están detrás de Estados Unidos (31%), donde las empresas también tienen trabajo por delante para lograr la paridad.

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El Universal | Es hora de cerrar la brecha de género en el sector privado de México

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Written in collaboration with Susan Segal.

En octubre, México cumplió 70 años desde que las mujeres obtuvieron el derecho al voto, pero hubo mucho más que celebrar que un aniversario.

El país se ha convertido en un líder mundial en cuanto a la representación de mujeres en la política. Las mujeres ahora constituyen la mitad del gabinete y presiden la Corte Suprema, el Banco Central y ambas cámaras de su legislatura. México es uno de los seis países del mundo en los que las mujeres representan al menos el 50% de los escaños del Congreso. Ocupa el cuarto lugar entre 185 países en el ranking de representación de mujeres en las legislaturas de la Unión Interparlamentaria, por delante de países considerados modelos de paridad, como Nueva Zelanda y Suecia. En comparación, Estados Unidos ocupa el puesto 68.

Ahora, México está a punto de romper nuevas barreras porque las dos principales candidatas compitiendo por la presidencia del país, Claudia Sheinbaum y Xóchitl Gálvez, son ambas mujeres. Cuando México celebre su próxima toma de posesión, el 1 de octubre de 2024, es más que probable que su primera presidenta preste juramento.

Aun así, a pesar de los motivos para regocijarse en el sector público, hay menos que celebrar cuando se trata del liderazgo de las mujeres en el sector privado de México…

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World Politics Review | "Don’t We Deserve More?" Mexico’s Spike in Femicides Sparks a Women’s Uprising

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A women’s rights march in Mexico City. (Photo by C. Zissis)

A women’s rights march in Mexico City. (Photo by C. Zissis)

MEXICO CITY—One Saturday night last month, Bianca Alejandrina Lorenzena left her home in Cancun and never came back.

Two days later, on Nov. 9, protesters took to the city’s streets to demand justice for her death. Authorities had found the body of the 20-year-old Lorenzana, who was known by her nickname, Alexis, dismembered and wrapped in plastic bags. Her brutal slaying was the spark for the protest, but activists also demanded a response to a spate of recent femicides—the killing of women and girls for their gender—in the state of Quintana Roo, of which Cancun is the capital. The state is part of a dire national trend: Government statistics show that an average of 10 women are murdered each day in Mexico, and femicides have jumped by 137 percent over the past five years.

The protest in Cancun started out peacefully, but it took a dark turn when demonstrators tried to storm city hall and municipal police used live ammunition to disperse the crowd. Two journalists sustained bullet wounds, and protesters posted footage online of a panicked stampede as people fled the gunfire. The message was stunning: Law enforcement officers, who are meant to protect women from violence, had instead used lethal force against them.

The resulting outcry eventually led to the firing of the city’s police chief and the resignation of the state’s security minister, but that night, officials ranging from Cancun’s mayor to Quintana Roo’s governor took turns denying they had given the order to shoot, raising questions about who was in control of local police forces. The initial lack of accountability was a reminder of the rampant impunity in Mexico, where, from 2015 to 2018, only 7 percent of crimes against women were even investigated.

Read the full article at World Politics Review.

AS/COA Online | LatAm in Focus: Mexico's Fight against Femicide Reaches a Boiling Point

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Photo by C. Zissis

Photo by C. Zissis

Abril. Ingrid. Fátima. Isabel. Laura. Joaquina. Florentina. Rosario. Francisca. Camila. Ten women are murdered each day in Mexico.

In a country where nearly 99 percent of crimes go unpunished, violence against women and the impunity that comes with it are sparking outrage and mobilizations—a movement reflected throughout Latin America.

This year on March 8, International Women’s Day, protests will take place across Mexico. The following day, using hashtags such as #El9NingunaSeMueve and #UnDíaSinMujeres, women around the country will strike from work and school, bringing to mind the impact of 10 lives lost daily.

Amid this clamor for justice, a question remains: how do we get results? After all, in recent years Mexico has poured resources into battling discrimination and violence against women. And yet, the femicide rate rose 138 percent from 2015 to 2019.  

“We’ve got very good legislation. Everything on paper looks great,” says Ana Pecova, executive director of EQUIS Justice for Women, a Mexico City-based organization that works to transform institutions, laws, and public policy to boost women’s access to justice. Pecova, who won a National Journalism Award in Mexico in 2016 for her op-ed “Derechos de papel” (“Paper Rights”) in Nexos magazine, says the problem is that women’s rights too often don’t stand up beyond the paper they’re printed on.

In her conversation with AS/COA Online’s Carin Zissis, she explains the Kafkaesque nature of women’s services offered in Mexico, whether it be understaffed justice centers closed during hours when women are most likely to face violence, to a lack of simple tools for conducting femicide investigations. “People are simply outraged at not only the cases of violence that are happening, but also the very basic lack of access to justice, where institutions fail women at every possible moment,” Pecova says. And harsher punishments are unlikely to help. “We have no evidence that increasing penalties is going to fix the problem,” she says. “It’s just a Band-Aid. It’s just patches.”

On top of that, there’s been a shift in the violence women face since Mexico took up a militarized approach to organized crime. “Starting from 2007, everything begins to change here in Mexico and violence—violence that women face particularly—begins to become much more complex,” says Pecova, pointing to the fact that women’s murders are often more brutal than those of men and increasingly involve firearms. “Now we have a whole other phenomenon of violence that takes place in the public sphere, and we have absolutely no policy to deal with that in place. We don’t even recognize that as a factor of risk for women.”

Pecova says there is an urgent need for solid, transparent data to evaluate and improve justice for women. She also suggests looking at preventative measures that start at home or in the workplace. For example, studies show women who have jobs or live in households where chores are shared are less likely to face domestic violence. Says Pecova, “I think we’re just feeling as a society an urgent need to do something, to start implementing policies that work.”

Produced by Luisa Leme.

U.S. News & World Report | Why the Americas Need More Women Leaders

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Come Sunday, Brazilians will turn out for an election in which the top two candidates are women. That President Dilma Rousseff and former Environmental Minister Marina Silva are competing to lead Latin America’s largest economy now comes as little surprise in a region that accounts for a third of the world’s women presidents.

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CFR.org | Pakistan’s Uneven Push for Women

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The women’s rights movement in Pakistan suffered a blow (Australian) when a religious extremist recently shot and killed cabinet minister Zilla Huma Usman as she prepared to address a public meeting without a veil covering her face. A prominent rights activist, Usman had previously drawn the ire of conservative Muslims when she helped organize a mixed-gender marathon. Her assassination came within days of Pakistan’s Women’s Rights Day, as well as the proposal of the new Prevention of Anti-Women Practices Bill, which outlaws forced marriages (Daily Times) and strengthens women's right to inheritance. 

Read the full text.

Amnesty International Magazine | Homegrown Progress

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Turkish human rights defender Cânân Arin takes a bricks-and-mortar approach to building a movement for women's rights.

Cânân Arin casually shrugs when describing the occupational hazards of being a leading women's rights advocate in Turkey. A few years ago, Arin recalls, a doctor in Istanbul survived a beating from her husband that left her spine broken in three places. When Arin helped the doctor initiate divorce proceedings, the abuser came after her as well.

"He threatened me, he tried to bribe me, he tried everything against me because there was no way to break me," says Arin, a lawyer who has pioneered the movement to provide shelter and legal services for domestic violence victims in Turkey. An unfaltering, powerful woman of 63, Arin knew she was the last line of defense for the woman; her family had turned her away and her abuser had evaded jail by paying a $2 fine.

Read the full article.

Amnesty International Magazine - Afghanistan Unveiled

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When the Taliban was in power, most of the women who filmed Afghanistan Unveiled could barely leave their homes, let alone study or work. But in 2002, the young documentarians - some still teenagers - traveled across mountains, rivers, and deserts to make the first film by and about Afghan women.

Download a PDF to read the print article.