The looming landmark moment was all but guaranteed in September after the country’s leading parties each nominated a woman as its candidate – the ruling Morena party named former Mexico City Mayor Claudia Sheinbaum as its nominee days after the main opposition coalition, Broad Front for Mexico, announced Xóchitl Gálvez, a senator for the center-right National Action Party, as its own.
Women now represent half of Congress, after electoral reforms nearly a decade ago mandated gender parity in nominations to Mexico’s legislatures. And two women, Ana Lilia Rivera and Marcela Guerra Castillo, occupy the top posts in both chambers of Congress. Meanwhile, Norma Lucía Piña is the first woman to serve as chief justice of Mexico’s Supreme Court.
But electing women to high office doesn’t necessarily shift power in meaningful ways. It’s what experts on women in politics call “descriptive representation” – when political leaders resemble a group of voters but fail to set policies designed to protect them. In contrast, “substantive representation” occurs when officials enact laws that truly benefit the groups that they claim to represent.
Scholars who study the difference between the two, including Sonia Alvarez, Mala Htun and Jennifer Piscopo, have found that wins in public spheres, such as the right to vote or hold office, have rarely led to progress for women in private spaces – such as the right to reproductive freedom or protections against domestic violence.
The looming landmark moment was all but guaranteed in September after the country’s leading parties each nominated a woman as its candidate – the ruling Morena party named former Mexico City Mayor Claudia Sheinbaum as its nominee days after the main opposition coalition, Broad Front for Mexico, announced Xóchitl Gálvez, a senator for the center-right National Action Party, as its own.