Mexico’s first woman president was elected 5 years after it started requiring gender parity in government

On Sunday, Mexico elected its first female president ever, Claudia Sheinbaum. The soon-to-be world leader is a physicist with a doctorate in energy engineering, and was a part of the United Nations panel of climate scientists awarded a Nobel Peace Prize.



“I will become the first woman president of Mexico,” Sheinbaum said, shortly after the majority of the votes had been counted, and her win appeared almost certain. “I don’t make it alone. We’ve all made it, with our heroines who gave us our homeland, with our mothers, our daughters, and our granddaughters.”



Sheinbaum is no stranger to politics. She is the former mayor of Mexico City and a protégé of the country’s outgoing president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, whose policies she closely aligned herself with leading up to the election.



Women coming into political power in Mexico is also the result of hard work and policy change around gender in recent years. Most notably, Mexico’s 2019 constitutional reform required that political parties present equal numbers of male and female candidates for all offices. That meant congressional seats, governorships, municipal government positions, the Supreme Court, and the country’s highest office would be required to present female candidates. Interestingly, not a single lawmaker voted against the reform at the time.



Almost as soon as the gender parity law was passed, the political arena in the country started to shift dramatically. By 2012, 50% of lawmakers in Mexico’s lower house of Congress were women. Currently, women lead close to a third (10) of Mexico’s 32 states. And important changes, like decriminalizing abortion, soon followed.



Given Mexican women didn’t gain the right to vote for president until 1953, the shift is drastic and compelling. And that trend is sprouting up all over the globe in recent years. Laws promoting gender parity are becoming more widespread, and 2023’s Global Gender Gap report shows that parity is increasing. More than two-thirds of countries that have 40% or more females elected to office have some form of gender parity quotas to meet .



Politically speaking, Iceland is paving the way with the gender gap 91.2% closed: Women have been head of state for 25 of the past 50 years, and 48% of parliament members are women. In Norway, the gap is 87.9% closed; in Finland, the gap is 86.3% closed; and in New Zealand, 85.6% closed. The United States ranks 43rd with the gender gap less than 75% closed. Total gender parity won’t be achieved worldwide until 2063 , according to UN Women.



Still, gender parity depends greatly on what you examine. While some countries are gaining more female political leaders, thanks to the kind of constitutional reform Mexico embraced, other aspects of life for women, such as health, education, and the pay gap, haven’t quite caught up. Perhaps that’s inspiration for even more gender parity laws to emerge—including right here in the U.S. As the threat of criminalizing not just abortion, but even birth control looms, more women in politics are ever so needed.