Challenges for the Constructing of Equity and Equality in Mexico

Abstract

Mexico stands ahead of the rest of Latin American countries in terms of legal transformation on behalf of gender equality, non-discrimination, and laws for the treatment and follow-up of gender-based violence. Yet, although significant progress has been achieved during the last two decades, thanks to the uninterrupted efforts of feminists and women’s networks in collaboration with female and male decision-makers, gender disparities continue to limit women’s empowerment in various areas. These inequalities include education, employment, teenage pregnancy, gender violence, and sexual division of labor.

Dedicated to Mujeres en Plural, a network of women fighting for women’s rights and norms to prevail in Mexico

1. Introduction

Mexico stands ahead of the rest of Latin American countries in terms of legal transformation on behalf of gender equality, non-discrimination, and laws for the treatment and follow-up of gender-based violence. Yet, although significant progress has been achieved during the last two decades, thanks to the uninterrupted efforts of feminists and women’s networks in collaboration with female and male decision-makers, gender disparities continue to limit women’s empowerment in various areas¹.

These inequalities include education, employment, teenage pregnancy, gender violence, and sexual division of labor. Thus, women in Mexico continue to face barriers to accessing equal opportunities, and cultural norms continue to limit their autonomy and perpetuate gender stereotypes. The seemingly contradictory outcome between the improved legal framework and women’s lives is the result of centuries of women’s submission to male norms and the building of a democratic system that has focused on the electoral arena. Considering the pending institutional transformations that lay ahead in terms of gendering institutions, it is highly relevant to stress the connections between formal and informal female political organizing to build parity democracy as a means to amend prevailing inequalities.

The argument of this chapter is twofold: on the one hand, we argue that women are raising to become critical actors not only in terms of building gendered public institutions but, more recently, in the defense of parity democracy. This type of democracy emphasizes the end of political violence, women’s representation, and the incorporation of a gender agenda through the working of plural coalitions, among other critical issues.

On the other hand, we argue that women are working in demanding a gender trans electoral agenda through the workings of plural coalitions that work to tamer the centralization of political power by Morena, the dominant party in power and which has held an ambivalent position: on the one hand, neglecting critical women’s demands in the area of gender violence; while, on the other hand, working to allow parity democracy to advance, mostly thanks to the work of women in this party in collaboration with women politicians from other parties.

2. Women’s role in the building of democracy in Mexico

To sustain our argument, we are content in favor of the relevance of present women’s ability to alter the existing legal order by stressing the role of women’s mobilization even before the transition to democracy in Mexico, which took place at the beginning of the twentieth century. Such transition found women already involved, since the decade of the 1970s, in the construction of a public voice that expanded traditional forms of universal citizenship. This feminist voice challenged dominant gender-blind institutions and encompassed, among other key topics in their gender agenda, bodily integrity, violence against women, the sexual division of labor, and the recognition of diverse expressions of sexualities [1]. This means that feminists engaged in gendering the (electoral) transition to democracy in Mexico, resulting in a partial and fragmented, but tangible, deconstruction of the public arena. This happened through the establishment of clear connections between the private and public divide at a time when the dominant party, the then located within the Partido Revolucionario Institutional (Institutional Revolutionary Party, PRI) sought to attract women to expand its social presence and leadership.

In this context, a relatively small group of women through their collective and individual work succeeded in securing for themselves—and for the rest of women—a contested but critical place in the transition to democracy [1]. In the background of women’s mobilizations stands out the fact that since the beginning of the 1970s, two tendencies manifested. On the one hand, an independent feminist movement that struggled to be acknowledged as a public actor; on the other hand, different forms of official feminism, that received informal support from PRI as this party sought to recapture feminists’ demands and transformed them into social not political concerns. For these reasons, commitment to equality became a leading force for feminist demand for legal change. Nonetheless, feminists debated among themselves regarding the extent of collaboration with the state that they should embrace. In any case, it can be argued that during the first half of the 1970s, women as a social group also provoked a legal and institutional change that secured the recognition of matters of personal and bodily integrity, health, and reproduction [2].

To be sure, Mexico hosted in 1975 the UN’s First International Women’s Conference, and this served to foster women’s legal status in the country, which began to be transformed at a fast speed. For example, federal labor laws were altered to abolish legal protections for women that were deemed discriminatory, as these dispositions limited women’s access to night shifts or prevented them from working overtime [3]. Similarly, following the 1975 UN Conference, women gained greater access to land ownership. A decade later, the transformation of the regulation of abortion started. This suggests that when Mexican women joined the 1995 Beijing Conference, whether they were coming from the official or social sectors, different forms of collaboration existed. Certainly, the Beijing Plan of Action, a worldwide landmark women’s conference, contributed to Mexico’s standing in the Latin American region. Relying on the worldwide government signature of the Beijing Platform of Action, women in Mexico, as well as in other latitudes, gained salience to demand governments to place political representation at the forefront. For example, in Mexico, in 1996, the Federal Code of Institutions and Electoral Procedures (Código Federal de Instituciones y Procedimientos Electorales, Cofipe) recommended not more than 70% of the same-sex candidates in electoral lists, favoring a female participation of 30%. Effectively this limited male presence in institutional politics.² In 2002, a quota law was passed that made it compulsory for parties to include at least a 70–30% split of male and female representation, and finally, in 2008 the law established a 60–40% split.

It was in the context of an uninterrupted feminist struggle and a transition to democracy that, almost 50 years later, Parity Democracy was issued as a Constitutional norm in 2019. Thanks to this measure Mexico stands one among a handful of countries in the world where parity democracy prevails for public representation posts as well as top-level designations in the Legislative, Judicial, and Executive power. Parity democracy prevails at the federal, state, and municipal levels. And this refers to the full integration of women, on an equal footing with men, at all levels and in all areas of the workings of a democratic society, by means of multidisciplinary strategies (European Institute for Gender Equality) [4].

In Mexico, Parity democracy applies also to decentralized, as well as state agencies that hold institutional budgetary as well as programmatic autonomy. Among these, we find the National Electoral Institute, responsible for organizing elections at the federal, municipal, and state levels, as well as the Banco de México, responsible, among other critical functions, for overseeing Mexican reserves, the national supply of Mexican pesos, the stability of its purchasing power and for the development of the financial system.

In 2020, Mexico established a legal disposition to deal with political violence against women, considering it a criminal, administrative, and electoral offense. This conceptualizes political violence on the ground of gender as actions or omissions that can be carried out against women candidates or elected officials in the public or private sphere. According to Law for a Life Free of Violence of Women Ley General de Acceso a una Vida Libre de Violencia, Article 20 Bis: political violence occurs when actions are carried out “with the purpose or with the result of limiting, annulling, or undermining the effective exercise of the political and electoral rights of one or more women. This legal disposition is allotted to give women access to the full exercise of the inherent attributes of their position, work or activity, free development of public function, decision-making, freedom of organization, as well as access and exercise of prerogatives” (this law applies extensively to the case of pre-candidacies, candidacies, or women carrying out public functions or positions of the same type).

Its normative progress includes engineering that covers a good part of the gaps that political parties have used to evade their responsibility in this matter, trying to ensure that parity in candidacies for popular representation positions translates into a parity integration of representative bodies.

The development of parity democracy includes the 2023 the “3 out of 3” initiative (which is in the process of being approved by local congresses) whose purpose is to impede men responsible for sexual assaults, family debts, or involved in cases of gender violence to hold public seats.

As the examples provided above show, tangible progress in terms of women’s political impact exists resulting from women’s uninterrupted reorganizing since, at least, the decade of the 1970s of the twentieth century.

The transition to democracy in Mexico was no exception, they had to rally in Electoral Tribunals while demanding in the public arena that the quota system was respected. It was only following the Trial 12624 that quotas began to be respected allowing women to enter the Chambers of Deputies and Senators. Once women found themselves in a self-built space for full interactions from within political parties, female legislators expanded the construction and advocacy of gender agendas. In this process, women have received limited funding when compared to their male counterparts while receiving signals from the top of the parties that moving forth a gender agenda is a risky activity in a male-dominated arena which is rarely taken by women candidates.

Recapitulating, new legal dispositions for the incorporation of gender representation have contributed to political diversity. Yet violent confrontation, political corruption, and an ongoing centralization of power in political parties and presidential hands are features that manifest almost after a quarter of a century that the transition occurred. Nonetheless, as most of these gains have been made within the electoral arena, several challenges remain. For example, a solid network of female legislators, and activists work intensely to defend that procedures are kept in place or to work in favor of the elimination of discrimination against women and to halter violence against women exists through the issuing of new laws or by requesting the position of women as heads of autonomous bodies or within the Executive power. We find that at present, data shows gender gaps which are addressed, mostly by women, through legislative and programmatic initiatives amidst a competition between old and new forms of making politics [2].

It is relevant to highlight women’s representation in the legislative as a salient feature of the Mexican transition to democracy. But also, that the initial privileging of the electoral arena, and, thus, that institutional transformation has lagged [5]. This suggests that, although theorists of transitions to democracy have paid attention to the enhanced role of legality as a means to construct a new social order, electoral politics still determine institutional and legal reconstruction. Therefore, the drafting of new constitutions—or at least bringing transformations to the existing one in Mexico—has preceded the edification of a new institutional apparatus [6]. Regarding women’s status, this means that institutions such as the Institutes for Women, in charge of the implementation of new laws issued, have been required to have at their backbone female coalitions collaborate with male allies who occupy critical political positions to foster and implement policies directed to eradicate inequalities and inequities in Mexico?

3. Positioning women gains as political actors within the electoral system

The connections between electoral politics and the transformation of women’s status are critical for our case study. Mexico has a mixed electoral system for the integration of its collective bodies of popular representation (congresses and city councils), which are composed of 60% seats by relative majority and 40% by proportional representation. For nominations, the rules contemplate candidate formulas of the same gender (owner and alternate); proportional representation lists and candidate slates with gender alternation from beginning to end; alternately headed by women and men in each elective period, with provisions in favor of women when there is an odd number of seats at stake in an election and prohibition of the use of partisan criteria for nominating candidates that place one gender in districts with lower chances of winning. Starting in 2023, it also foresees the parity integration of the two houses of the Congress of the Union, that is, parity of results.

The normative progress made allowed, starting in 2021, for the Chamber of Deputies and 27 state legislatures to be composed of women³ with only five falling one seat short of parity due to their odd number of seats. Parity is also visible in the slates of municipal councils.⁴

The current challenges are related to the definition of norms to guarantee parity in single-person positions, such as municipal presidencies, governorships, and the federal executive. For mayoral candidacies, which lead the slates of municipal councils, vertical criteria (in their composition), horizontal criteria (considering all presidencies at play per entity and electoral process), and in some cases, transversal criteria are envisaged which contemplate competitiveness blocks and size of municipalities. Thus, through electoral reforms women have achieved parity in municipal councils but not in municipal presidencies. After the 2021 electoral process, in which municipalities in 30 federative entities were renewed, only 20.9% of the country’s 2016 municipalities were under the presidency of women.

The first advances to apply parity in gubernatorial candidacies were made in 2021, 2022, and 2023, when by judicial mandate, national political parties had to apply the parity principle in their gubernatorial candidacies.⁵ This measure allowed for the triumph of five women in 2021, two in 2022, and one more is expected in 2023, for a total of 10 female governors by the end of 2023. More than the country had ever had in its history.⁶ Yet, the solution is provisional both because it is up to the federative entities to define the rule to be applied in their areas of competence and because the Electoral authorities had to intervene. Not surprisingly, four years after the transversal parity constitutional reform, only three states have advanced in regulating the subject matter.⁷ In addition, the rules that will apply to guarantee parity in the Presidency of the Republic are still to be discussed.

The progress stated above suggests that the achieved parity is mostly descriptive.⁸ This means women’s presence has not yet resulted in a full exercise of power or in the drafting of a comprehensive gender agenda. In addition, stereotypes in task allocation are reproduced within the collegial bodies given that the power of party leadership remains predominantly in the hands of male legislators. A recent study revealed that despite occupying 53% of seats in the plenary sessions of legislatures in Mexico, women only coordinate 23% of the caucus, which is 18% of the political force in the congresses, and preside over only 39% of the ordinary committees that dictate structural economic and political issues [8].

On the other hand, they must remain aware that their negotiations are made vis a vis political party structure. This dynamic slows down the political negotiating process of the gender agenda. Regarding this latter point, a group of researchers from the 32 federal entities analyzed the gender topics addressed by state legislatures during the first period following the approval of gender parity in legislative candidacies, which was in effect in Mexico between 2014 and 2019 [9]. The study found that the most addressed topic was gender-based violence in general, with one-third of the initiatives presented, approved, and promulgated, followed by political violence based on gender, with one-fifth of the initiatives focused on women’s labor rights, political representation, sexual and reproductive rights, as well as inclusive language, among others. However, the study also confirmed claims that while some female legislators promote gender-related legislation they also promote initiatives related to violence against women, reproductive and sexual rights, measures against discrimination, and in favor of equality [10].

Summarizing, regarding gender matters, progress is made topic by topic, given the lack of consensus on a general women’s agenda. Nonetheless, women’s exercise of political abilities requires also that they prove themselves constantly. This can be exemplified by the following data: according to the civil association Buró Parlamentario, female legislators in the local congresses of Mexico have been more productive and efficient than men, registering the approval of an average of 4.41 initiatives, 31% of the projects they present; compared to an average success rate of 3.15 initiatives, 26%, of male legislators. The data emerged from the study of over 40,000 initiatives presented in the 32 legislatures between 2014 and 2022, and the finding is significant given that women’s political trajectories are younger than men’s [11].

Instead of the above, we must stress that according to the Latin American Parliament and UN Women’s Framework Norm (2014), signed by Mexico, parity is acknowledged as one of the key forces of democracy. Democracy is seen in this view as a means to achieve equality in power, decision-making, social and political representation mechanisms. However, gatekeepers that allow for the eradication of the structural exclusion of women require a new architecture given that the pending agenda is still extensive. It is for this reason that the multilayered connections between democratic change and gender transformation need to be explored at length.

4. Gender agendas female political representation and present inequalities in Mexico

In the face of advances in women’s political representation, academic analyses are beginning to focus on the study of their legislative agendas, to verify whether parity begins to translate into substantive representation. Freidenberg and Gilas [12, 13] argue that “presence is not incidence,” since a significant number of female legislators do not support the “feminist” gender agenda. In contrast, Báez et al. [8] claim that women are marginalized from leadership positions in party groups in legislatures, only coordinating those parliamentary groups with little political representation, or being excluded from the leadership of committees that address critical issues. This suggests they lack sufficient strength to push initiatives and depend on multi-party coalitions to get equality issues addressed. Certainly, both assessments of women’s political participation take different sides on the matter. Freindenberg and Gilas analyze female participation by equating male and female input, resting aside the structural difference from which they build their interventions. In contrast, Baez and Bárcena highlight the structural differences. Possible contributions to this debate are first, assessments of female political participation are changeable and temporal in a climate where new strategies for lobbying and negotiations are taking place as Parity democracy is established. Second, more attention needs to be given to the institutional restructuration of state agencies and how women are placed in them as a result of the combined influence of transnational feminisms in institutional politics as well as the impact of female leadership in Mexico to direct their attention to gender inequities [14]. Promoting this debate around the institutional design of agencies, institutes, and ministries that have an uneven but tangible impact on attending to the needs and demands of the female population is relevant.

At this point it seems relevant to consider recent gender-disaggregated statistical analysis, the National Institute of Statistics, Geography, and Informatics (Instituto Nacional de Estadística, Geografía e Informatica, INEGI) to evaluate existing inequalities. In other words, INEGI provides data that can shed light on critical issues that need to be part of a common feminist agenda. A general overview would state that, according to the most recent official statistics on gender gaps [15], Mexico ended 2018 with a population of 124.9 million people, of whom 51.1% are women and 48.9% are men. On average, the fertility rate among Mexican women is 1.0 children, but among indigenous-speaking women, it rises to 3.3 children. This data confirms that fertility is higher when lower levels of maternal education exist if these are measured by the years of schooling that women attend, and vice versa. In addition, women construct their motherhood aside from economic independence: of the women who became mothers in 2017, 69.5% reported not engaging in any economic activity, and only 21.4% reported being employed. This suggests not only that the majority of women were financially dependent on their partners or their family. More importantly, this can be a tendency that will produce a long-lasting dependency due to the difficulties of joining the labor market as age progresses.

Given that in this chapter, we wish to connect political participation with female education and employment we would like to stress that among the issues to be analyzed first and foremost is clear that political representation is the area where the most progress has been made. Nonetheless, inequalities in this arena persist; for example, in 2021, women held 47.6% of senator’s seats versus the 52.3% that men hold; the lower house of Congress in contrast has a 50% for men and women. And as we stated earlier, only 9 out of 32 governorships and less than 10% of all municipalities have women as presidents.

Beyond female political representation, one of the most significant areas of gender inequality in Mexico is education. While girls’ enrollment rates in primary education are nearly equal to boys, they are less likely to complete secondary education, with dropout rates higher for girls than for boys. This disparity is even more pronounced for indigenous girls, who face additional barriers to education, including language barriers and discrimination. To better understand these dropout rates in education it must be remembered that domestic violence and teenage pregnancy reinforce each other and continue to hold women back. Domestic violence entails that many girls can initiate their sexual lives in the hands of relatives, and this led them to seek relief in the hands of boyfriends and men with whom they run away from home. It is not surprising that this early sexual initiation leads to prolonged engagements in relations where gender violence arises.

Women who can continue their studies at the university level focused on areas of study such as Education, Health, Social Sciences and Law, Business and Administration, Arts and Humanities, while men preferred Information and Communication Technologies, Engineering, Manufacturing and Construction, Agronomy, and Veterinary Sciences, among others. Thus, while the gap favored women by 48.8 percentage points in Education studies, it reached 51.8% in favor of men in Information and Communication Technologies.

Women in Mexico also face significant challenges in the workforce. They are more likely to be employed in informal, low-paying jobs with limited job security, and have limited access to leadership positions at work. In addition, the gender pay gap remains a persistent problem, with women earning less than men on average for comparable work.

Thus, we find a compound problem that includes education and work. Mexico has made significant progress in closing the gender gap in education, but inequalities persist in the workplace, where women receive lower salaries for the same work and are excluded from decision-making positions.

In 2019, the Mexican population aged 15 and over, of legal working age, reached 94.6 million people, of which 60.2% constituted the economically active population (EAP), and 39.8% did not. By sex, 45.0 million were men, eight out of ten of whom were economically active, and 49.6 million were women, four out of ten of whom participated in the labor market. The economic participation rate is 77.1% for men and 44.9% for women. Women with medium-high and higher education represent 41.3% of the total employed in the labor market, while only 36.5% of men have reached that level. Of the women who work in the labor market, 25.4% work in commerce, while 31% of men work in industrial jobs such as artisans and helpers. However, more than half of employed women earn up to two minimum wages, which is 12.0 percentage points higher than men. Women with incomes above five minimum wages represent only 2.4% of the total employed. In general, the remuneration received by women for their work is lower than that received by men in different economic activities. In addition, 77.7% of women with paid work do not have access to daycare or maternal care, since only 22.3% have access to these services.

In 2018, of the more than 13 million people aged 15 and over who had no income of their own and were not studying, 17.4% were men and 82.6% were women. Women devoted 39.1 hours per week to domestic work, while men devoted 14.1 hours; women were primarily responsible for caring for children under the age of six, and only men with higher education levels showed greater participation in domestic work [15].

The gender gap worsens when women belong to other historically marginalized groups and live in poverty. In 2018, 27.3 million women in Mexico were living in poverty compared to 25.1 million men. While the illiteracy rate was 3.1% among the population aged 15–59 years, it was 13.3% among the population who speak indigenous languages, 6.9% among the population who self-identify as indigenous, 4.7% among the Afro-descendant population, and 3.6% among the population with diverse religious backgrounds [15, 16, 17].

A difficult and uneven work-education equation for women seems to be heightened by the fact that women often simultaneously have greater responsibilities for household chores, childcare, and caring for sick and elderly family members, without access to public support. This unfortunate combination is particularly severe for women living in poverty, who constitute the group that experiences scarcity of resources the most and is exacerbated when these women also belong to historically marginalized groups, such as indigenous, Afro-Mexican, disabled, and others. Thus, leaving unattended the needs of working mothers, a social group on the rise, appears as a gender-blind failure of the present Andrés Manuel López Obrador administration.

Another aspect to be considered is that men and women have different lifestyles, which is reflected in higher male mortality rates, particularly among young men. For every 100 female deaths, 128 men die, with the highest rates of male excess mortality due to liver diseases, violence, and accidents. Between 2000 and 2008, the gender gap in the illiteracy rate in Mexico decreased, with literacy rates increasing from 96.9% to 99.1% in men and from 96.5% to 99.2% in women. However, the achievement was less significant in localities with less than 2500 inhabitants.

5. Conclusions

Mexico continues to face barriers to equal opportunities, including cultural norms that limit women’s autonomy and perpetuate gender stereotypes. Thus, the most significant areas of gender inequality in Mexico that stand out are employment, uneven care responsibilities, gender violence, and education. These continue to configure inequalities regardless of women’s greater access to decision-making. In this sense, positions gained by women in the political arena have resulted in normative advances. Nevertheless, resistance to gender parity persists in the male leadership positions within political parties, executive, legislative, and, to some extent, judicial power. This highlights the importance of the persistence of plural networks of women who work on behalf of a gender agenda and who direct their efforts to surpass the obstacles that individual women leaders can experience at the institutional level. This means that women’s forms of political representation are expanding well beyond the institutional arena to encompass the community, social and private sectors. This is so because a defense of existing democratic mechanisms requires that the fragile electoral mechanisms are strengthened in different areas. The above is due to the institutional erosion that has taken place due to the arrival of a presidential rule that remains aloof to the institutional mechanisms and public programs that worked since the first half of the twentieth century to end domestic violence, to promote women’s incorporation in the labor market by offering childcare facilities. Although it is true that during the Lopez Obrador administration, legislators work in favor of making abortion legal much more needs to be done to achieve gender equality and equity. It is for this reason that women’s plural networks play a key role in defining agendas in collaboration with deputies and senators in ways that are gender aware and hold a gender-conscious lens and perspective. For these reasons, researchers interested in gender contribute to building this agenda with a scientific data-focused perspective.

In this context, the time seems right for pushing again for transnational women’s networks to support women’s rights and open the conversation about state agencies and the use of technology to produce contrasting effects to the negative impacts of climate change, globalization, and inequality. State actions initiated in the last decades of the twentieth century in collaboration with civil society to bring about new policies need to be redrafted considering the international, regional, and national climate on gender within complex scenarios.

Normativity

Politican Constitution of Mexican United States.

Federal Code for Political Institutions and Electoral Procedures.

General Law for Women’s Access to a Life Free of Violence.

General Law for Political Institutions and Electoral Procedures.