Introduction
Claudia Sheinbaum, president of Mexico since October 2024, stated in her inauguration speech that she did not come to power alone, but rather, “we have all arrived”. That is to say, that the election of the first female president in the country’s history represents a collective triumph and means that it is, in Sheinbaum’s words, “the era of women”.
The election of a female president is nothing short of historic, especially considering that fewer than 30 countries in the world have female heads of state or government, according to data provided by UN Women. The UN agency points out: “At the current rate, gender equality in the highest positions of power will not be reached for another 130 years.” The representation of women in national cabinets, legislative bodies and local governments is also far from meeting the goal of gender parity adopted by countries 30 years ago in the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action.
Sheinbaum won the election with 60% of the vote, surpassing the percentage of the vote received by her predecessor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador (53%). Beyond the presidency, data from recent years show that Mexico is one of the countries closest to achieving gender parity in political representation in Latin America and the Caribbean, thanks in large part to a series of legal reforms in recent years that make such parity mandatory.
All of the above could lead us to conclude that Mexico is characterized by progressive social beliefs on gender equality, at least when it comes to the exercise of power and decision-making, and that the arrival of the first female president will undoubtedly translate into progress for the feminist agenda in the country.
However, the panorama is not so simple. Mexico has an historic opportunity to advance women’s human rights, but there is still a long way to go to dismantle structures of discrimination and patterns of gender-based violence. To advance these struggles, there is a need for public policies with sufficient resources and a focus on human rights and intersectionality.
Sheinbaum’s first actions on gender equality
Among the first actions announced by President Sheinbaum was a series of measures on women’s rights. These include various constitutional reforms, which came into force in November 2024. The reforms stipulate, among other things:
- “The State shall guarantee the enjoyment and exercise of the right to substantive equality for women.”
- The State “has reinforced duties” to protect “women, adolescents, girls and boys” against violence.
- Public security and investigative institutions must act with a gender perspective, and public prosecutors’ offices must have specialized prosecutors for gender violence against women.
- “Mechanisms aimed at reducing and eradicating the gender pay gap” will be established. This is in relation to the constitutional mandate, “Equal pay for equal work.”
Sheinbaum also elevated the government body dedicated to women’s affairs to the level of a Ministry, thus creating the Ministry of Women. Sheinbaum’s government likewise announced the drafting and dissemination of a Handbook on Women’s Rights “so that everyone knows the full rights to which a woman has access.”
In order to overcome gender inequality and violence, legal reforms and the creation of institutions are important steps, but they alone are not enough: among other things, it is crucial that such measures are accompanied by public policies and implementation strategies that have sufficient infrastructure and budget. Likewise, in order to achieve the desired results, it will be essential to listen to the feminist movement, civil society organizations and standing international recommendations in these areas. Finally, guaranteeing women’s human rights and gender equality are not tasks limited to the federal government, but also require sustained action at the state and municipal level.
To give us an idea of the type and size of the tasks ahead in the women’s rights agenda in Mexico, below we review some key areas. We clarify that this is not an exhaustive list.
Gender stereotypes: a key issue in dismantling discrimination
As the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) has pointed out, factors that perpetuate gender-based discrimination include “machismo, patriarchy and the prevalence of sexist stereotypes”. In the same vein, stereotypes about the attributes or roles that men and women should fulfill “are not only manifestations of discrimination, but also causes and consequences of violence directed against women and LGBTI persons”.
In other words, sexist social norms are not a secondary priority when it comes to combating gender-based discrimination and violence. On the contrary, they motivate or underlie discriminatory practices. Thus, dismantling stereotypes and proactively promoting institutional and social recognition of equity between all genders is vital.
The challenges in this area, in Mexico and in the world, are not minor. The 2023 Gender Social Norms Index (GSNI) of the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) indicates that almost nine out of ten people in the world agree with at least one gender stereotype. In the case of Mexico, according to this source, almost 73% of the population expresses at least one belief that represents a gender bias in the area of physical integrity; 58% in the political sphere; almost 33% in the economic sphere; and almost 19% in the educational sphere.
Based on an analysis of data from Latinobarómetro 2023, Mexican organization Data Cívica notes that 35% of Mexican men and 33% of Mexican women think that men make better political leaders than women. This contrasts with the findings in the other 16 Latin American countries included in the survey, where, on average, 27% of men and 17% of women agree with this stereotype. Data Cívica highlights that:
“Of the most populous countries in the region, Mexico is the only one where women do not differ significantly from men with regard to the idea that men make better leaders. In addition to this lack of difference by sex, Mexico is (by far) the country where more women support this position… […]
[…] Likewise, Mexico is the country where the most women reported agreeing with the statement that it is better for women to concentrate on the home and men on work…”
The same analysis indicates that, unlike in some other countries, the political position reported by the Mexican people surveyed (between left and right) does not predict significant variations in beliefs about the sexual division of labor or sexual and reproductive rights.
Official data from Mexico’s National Institute of Statistics and Geography (INEGI) likewise show the persistence of stereotypes about the roles of men and women. In a survey conducted in 2021, 28.5% of women aged 15 and over did not approve of mothers working if they do not need to. 22.7% of the women surveyed believed that women do not have the same right as men to go out at night to have fun, while 28.8% agreed with the statement, “Women who wear revealing necklines provoke men to bother them.”
Gender-based discrimination and violence
Like sexist stereotypes, gender-based discrimination can be found in all areas of life. It intersects with other identities, such as a person’s membership in an Indigenous group, socioeconomic status, age, migratory status, disability status and others, to produce differentiated and aggravated impacts. Gender-based discrimination encompasses both discriminatory acts against women—the main focus of this text—and discrimination based on gender identity and expression more broadly, and it intersects closely with discrimination based on sexual orientation. Gender-based discrimination includes violence.
Gender-based violence
Mexico has a General Law on Women’s Access to a Life Free from Violence (2007), a corresponding inter-institutional National System, as well as multiple other legal provisions that seek to address and punish violence against women. Among other mechanisms, it has a system of Alerts of Gender Violence against Women (AVGM) designed to respond to contexts of lethal violence against women in concrete places. Even so, violence against women continues to be an everyday phenomenon that manifests itself in different ways.
The National Survey on the Dynamics of Household Relationships (ENDIREH), carried out by INEGI, collects data on the different types of violence experienced by women aged 15 and over in the school, work, community, family and relationship spheres. According to the ENDIREH 2021, 34.7% of women in Mexico have experienced physical violence at some point in their lives, and 10.2% of all women experienced such violence during the 12 months prior to the survey. In addition, 49.7% of women have experienced sexual violence (23.3% in the last 12 months).
In total, in the 12 months prior to the survey, 20.2% of women experienced some type of violence at school, 20.8% in the workplace, 22.4% in the community, 20.7% in their relationship with their partner and 11.4% in the family sphere.
Among the most extreme forms of violence against women are femicides, or murders of women for gender-based reasons. On average, almost ten women are murdered every day in Mexico, and approximately a quarter of these cases are considered by the authorities to be suspected femicides. Thus, in 2024, the Executive Secretariat of the National Public Security System reported 797 presumed femicides, in addition to another 2,598 women presumed to be victims of intentional homicide.
Ending femicide has been one of the central demands of the feminist movement in Mexico for decades, and a growing number of states have created specialized prosecutors’ offices to investigate these and other crimes of gender violence. The creation of such offices has led to an increase in the investigation of homicides against women as femicides, but in itself it is not enough to overcome the deficiencies that frequently characterize criminal investigations in Mexico, nor to guarantee a gender perspective and avoid revictimization. Further, reducing impunity is an important step to reduce femicides, but we must understand it as just one of several elements needed to reduce violence, recognizing the importance of prevention measures.
In addition to femicides, in 2024 Mexican authorities reported 21,484 presumed rapes and 278,220 presumed crimes of family violence, forms of violence that disproportionately affect women. Both types of crimes tend to be underreported because many victims do not file formal complaints.
Violence against women is committed not only in the private or family spheres, but also directly by state agents. This occurs, for example, when female detainees are subjected to sexual torture or other forms of torture based on their status as women or mothers. Far from accessing justice, torture survivors are often unjustly imprisoned and have to fight to regain their freedom while facing countless obstacles to having the acts of torture investigated and punished. Meanwhile, both they and other women imprisoned in Mexico often experience aggravated impacts of incarceration due to their status as women.
Mexico’s disappearance crisis also impacts women differently. Currently, more than 120,000 people are recognized by the government as disappeared or missing. Approximately 77% are men and 23% are women. However, if we consider the victims aged 0 to 17 years old, the picture changes: of the total of approximately 17,000 people in that age range, 52% are girls and female adolescents.
The disappearance crisis also has another impact on women, as it is they—mothers, sisters, daughters—who have disproportionately taken on the search for their disappeared loved ones. Searching not only impacts the time they have available for work, family life or any other activity, but can also mean risking their lives. This happens, for example, when family collectives search in areas controlled by organized criminal groups. Dozens of searchers have been killed, including a number of victims in 2024.
Violence against women intersects with violence based on gender identity, gender expression and/or sexual orientation. In this regard, both national organizations and international bodies have expressed serious concern over the alarming number of murders of trans women reported in Mexico. This occurs in a regional context of lethal violence against trans people: the Trans Murder Monitoring Project reports that at least 255 trans people were murdered in Latin America and the Caribbean from October 1, 2023 to September 30, 2024. Brazil had the highest number of cases with 106, followed by Mexico with 71 and Colombia with 25.
The information presented here is far from an exhaustive analysis of gender-based violence. Even so, this brief look illustrates the need to understand the centrality of gender-based violence in Mexico as an issue not only of human rights but also of security, avoiding reducing the concepts of ‘security’ and ‘violence’ to phenomena associated solely with organized crime or the overall homicide rate.
Caregiving and the sexual division of labor
One of the structural inequalities that most affects women’s lives—in Mexico and in the world—is the sexual division of caregiving work, encompassing the care of children, adolescents, the elderly, people suffering from illnesses and people with disabilities who require care. Women are the ones who carry out the majority of this unpaid work, which tends to limit their access to paid employment opportunities or generate double working days outside and inside the home. It also limits their participation in other activities in life.
As pointed out by Oxfam Mexico, the sexual division of care work is a manifestation of stereotypes about the nature and role of women:
“Femininity is assigned emotional traits that would seem to justify women’s work for others as a natural disposition. In part, femininity is constructed through care. This has been made possible by the ideas that exist around this hegemonic logic, in which caring for the family constitutes femininity, and women ‘are for others’.”
In 2022, the National Institute of Statistics and Geography (INEGI) carried out the National Survey for the Care System (ENASIC). The results show that more than 75% of caregivers aged 15 and over are women, who dedicate an average of 37.9 hours a week to these tasks. When asked who was the “principal” caregiver, the imbalance in the distribution of care increased: 86.9% of principal caregivers were women.
President Sheinbaum has committed to creating a National Care System, starting with childcare centers. In December 2024, the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) announced it would support the Mexican government in this endeavor. It will be important to ensure that the system is accessible to the entire population.
Achieving equity in household tasks also requires action and reform in the workplace, including redoubling efforts to eradicate gender-based discrimination. In the ENDIREH 2021 survey, 21.7% of female employees reported having experienced workplace discrimination in the previous 12 months. Reforms are needed to eliminate discrimination based on gender and sexual orientation in maternity and paternity leave policies. Likewise, as mentioned above, President Sheinbaum recognizes the need to combat the gender pay gap.
As Mexican organization Intersecta highlights, closing the gap between men and women in the workplace goes beyond the mandate of equal pay for equal work: it also requires overcoming the undervaluation of women’s work (not only between “equal” positions but also between different positions of equal value), eliminating gender violence in the workplace and breaking the glass ceiling. On this last issue, it is worth recalling that in the private sector in Mexico, men still far outnumber women in the highest positions of power.
Sexual and reproductive rights
As in other countries in the region, the feminist movement in Mexico has achieved significant progress in people’s access to sexual and reproductive rights, but the struggle to guarantee these rights in practice and for the entire population continues.
Following decades of feminist activism, multiple cases of strategic litigation and a series of relevant decisions by Mexico’s Supreme Court (SCJN) in recent years, abortion has now been decriminalized in more than half of the country’s 32 states, normally up to 12 weeks of gestation. Despite this progress, abortion is still criminalized in various jurisdictions’ laws.
Mexican organization Grupo de Información en Reproducción Elegida (GIRE) highlights the historical relationship between the criminalization of abortion, gender stereotypes and inequality, explaining:
“In Mexico there is still a strong stigma surrounding abortion, based on the idea that motherhood is the obligatory role of women… This stigma forms the basis for the legal and social criminalization of abortion, which specifically affects women and other pregnant people — generally those coming from contexts of violence, economic marginalization and lack of access to reproductive information…”
In states where abortion remains criminalized, the penal codes provide for certain grounds on which it is legally permitted, such as cases of rape. However, obstacles to accessing abortion have been documented even when one of the grounds is met. Human Rights Watch states in its World Report 2025:
“Barriers to access include healthcare providers denying or delaying services, withholding information, questioning the veracity of sexual violence survivors’ statements, subjecting women to mistreatment, and imposing arbitrary requirements for access that contradict existing law and regulations. Fear of legal repercussions also deters both healthcare personnel and people seeking abortion.”
Continuing to make progress on including abortion in health laws rather than penal codes, guaranteeing access to this service without discrimination and ensuring compliance with the applicable guidelines are some of the pending tasks in the field of sexual and reproductive rights in Mexico. At the same time, we should remember that the agenda in this field is not limited to abortion: it covers such fundamental issues as guaranteeing access to comprehensive sex education, contraceptive methods and quality health services during and after pregnancy, among others.
The importance of an anti-discrimination budget
The issues mentioned above represent just some of the reasons why the Sheinbaum administration’s reforms on substantive equality must serve as a starting point for strengthening and implementing comprehensive, holistic and intersectional gender equity policies. It will be essential that the relevant institutions and programs have sufficient resources and infrastructure, as well as mechanisms for measuring results.
In light of the above, the first annual federal budget presented during Sheinbaum’s six-year term raised concerns, as it included reductions in some areas of expenditure aimed at addressing violence against women, such as shelters for women victims of violence, within a broader context of budget cuts. Likewise, a large part of the resources currently allocated to promoting women’s equality correspond to social programs, which were not necessarily designed to reduce gender gaps as their main purpose.
In this regard, the Network for a Feminist Fiscal Policy (Red por una Política Fiscal Feminista, RPFF) maintains:
“[T]he way in which the Budget Proposal has historically been shaped is contrary to the advancement of substantive gender equality, showing that this has not been a priority for the Mexican State. Priority social programs and projects have concentrated a significant percentage of the budget and, although they are necessary to address the immediate needs of the population, they do not address the roots of structural inequalities in the country, including gender inequalities.
[…] The previous six-year term witnessed the weakening of policies for substantive equality and the eradication of gender-based violence, partly due to the underfunding of the programs and institutions that were supposed to guarantee their effective implementation. It is therefore essential to rebuild those policies that fulfill the objective of promoting substantive gender equality, for which it is crucial that there is sufficient public money and that it is adequately budgeted.”
Militarism and punitivism: the persistence under the Sheinbaum administration of anti-feminist policies inherited from previous governments
Finally, gender policies in Mexico are not implemented in a vacuum: they occur in a national context that includes a number of public policies inherited from previous governments that are harmful to women’s rights. One example is the militarization of public security, a counterproductive model that has a differentiated impact on women.
Militarization as a paradigm has been denounced, among other reasons, precisely for being anti-feminist. In fact, a Feminist Antimilitarist Network of organizations has formed in Mexico to advocate against militarization and “contribute to the construction of truly inclusive notions of peace and justice.” Meanwhile, in 2023 the sentence “The military pact is also patriarchal” was displayed on a giant banner that the search collective Hasta Encontrarte, made up of relatives of the disappeared, unfurled on the monument known as the Estela de Luz in Mexico City to protest against the militarized model.
Another example is the application (and recent expansion) of mandatory pretrial detention. Under this system, people accused of a range of crimes are automatically imprisoned during their criminal proceedings, without the public prosecutor having to justify the need for this deprivation of liberty. Mandatory pretrial detention is incompatible with human rights. In addition, pretrial detention in general disproportionately impacts women and other vulnerable groups. According to official monthly statistics for December 2024, in state-level jurisdiction in Mexico, the percentage of the imprisoned population that had not been convicted—that is, people in pretrial detention, whether mandatory or not—was 35.7% for men and 46.1% for women. At the federal level, the percentage was 40.2% for men and 51.9% for women.
Another reform inherited from the previous government is the judicial reform, which establishes the election by popular vote of judges and magistrates from lists of candidates constructed in a way that favors the political capture of the judiciary. In a democracy, the courts should not be ruled by political interests, but by the Constitution and the law. This makes the judiciary a key institution in guaranteeing the rights of historically discriminated-against and marginalized groups. Thus, any reform that reduces judicial independence also poses a particular risk to the rights of such groups, including women and LGBTQIA+ people. In addition, if guaranteeing a gender perspective in the administration of justice throughout the country was already a pending task, the new reform generates more uncertainty than guarantees about the priority that will now be given to this issue, as well as about the possible results of the elections in terms of gender parity.
Conclusions
It is undoubtedly positive that the new administration of President Sheinbaum is naming and addressing a range of gender equity goals through government commitments, especially in a national context in which deep-rooted patterns of discrimination, gender stereotypes and violence against women persist.
The extent to which those commitments will translate into reductions in violence and discrimination remains to be seen and depends on several factors. It will be difficult to make progress at a structural level without reversing various policies inherited from prior governments. In addition, long-standing institutional problems persist, such as deficiencies in the actions of the public prosecutors’ offices, which present important challenges for ensuring accountability for crimes of gender-based violence, as well as for crimes in general.
With regard to federal policies and measures aimed specifically at closing gender gaps, combating stereotypes, eradicating discrimination and reducing violence, it is essential that the new administration ensures that the programs and institutions involved have adequate resources, infrastructure and measurement tools, as well as an intersectional approach. Finally, the fight for equity will be strengthened to the extent that the government takes into account and takes advantage of the knowledge, recommendations and experience of the feminist movement and organizations.
