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In June, she garnered almost 36 million votes in Mexico’s presidential election – 59.75% of those cast, and the most ballots won by a presidential candidate in Mexican electoral history.
President Sheinbaum has one of the strongest mandates in Mexico’s modern history, with a supermajority in Congress capable of implementing far-reaching, profound changes up to the constitutional level.
She is, in addition to all that, Mexico’s first ever female president.
Historically, female national political leaders have been rare around the world. In 2024, 107 countries still have never had a woman leader at the highest levels of executive decision-making.
In 1960, Sirimavo Bandaranaike became the first woman prime minister in Sri Lanka. It was not until 1974 that Isabel Perón of Argentina became the first female president in Latin America.
Bandaranaike was one of only three women to become a national political leader in the 1960s. Perón was one of six in the 1970s. Through the 1980s and 90s, 26 more rose to executive power; from 2000 to 2010, 37 more.
Yet, still today, just 28 countries – now including Mexico – are led by a woman. After November’s United States presidential election, that number may rise to 29 – and, indeed, to two in North America.
Tellingly, it appeared clear to many that Mexico would have its first female president long before ballots were cast in June. Sheinbaum faced Xóchitl Gálvez in an extended season of election campaigning, with the two women each holding a strong polling lead over the male third-placed candidate, Jorge Álvarez Máynez, for many months.
Achieving that milestone has taken concerted efforts to strengthen equality legislation over a period of more than 30 years, but has certainly borne fruit: in 2018, both houses of Mexico’s Congress achieved gender parity, with the country ranking fourth on the Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU)’s list of gender-equal parliaments.
That gender parity continues after Mexico’s 2024 election, with affirmative action programmes also benefitting indigenous, Afro-Mexican, migrant, LGBTQIA+ and disabled people’s representation in Congress.
This stands in quite stark contrast to much of the rest of the world: the IPU observed limited progress in women’s parliamentary representation worldwide during the first eight months of 2024, with the global share of women MPs sitting at only 27%.
Despite Mexico’s status as the 12th-largest global economy, and its memberships of blocs like the OECD and G20, more than 36% of its people live in poverty. According to Coneval, as many as 23.7 million women (35.8%) in Mexico live at or below the poverty line. Almost five million (7.1%) faced extreme poverty, lacking sufficient income to meet basic needs like food.
In work and business, Mexican women remain greatly underrepresented. Just 46% of Mexican women were employed in 2023 (vs 77% of men), with a 35% salary gap between the average Mexican working man and woman. Out of every 100 CEOs of Mexican companies, fewer than two are female.
All the while, Mexican women are exposed to some of the world’s highest rates of gender-based violence. More than 2,500 women were murdered in Mexico in 2023. World Bank data suggests that Mexico’s femicide rate has trebled since 2007. Some have estimated that over 95% of perpetrators of gender-based and sexual violence in Mexico do not face justice.
Since her election, Sheinbaum has commonly repeated the slogan “es tiempo de mujeres” [“it’s women’s time.”] In a speech in Mexico City, she highlighted 100 of her new government’s proposals, including a package of reforms to improve women’s rights seeking wage parity and decrease violence, with a special focus on femicides.
A test for Sheinbaum, though, will be whether she can effectively mesh these efforts with the wide-ranging policy platform she has inherited from her predecessor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO).
She has pledged to continue AMLO’s efforts to improve the lives of Mexico’s poorest people – furthering programmes including welfare, cash transfers, pension payments and scholarships that contributed to a significant drop in poverty incidence during AMLO’s term.
Moreover, along with its Congressional allies, her party has pushed through controversial constitutional changes affecting Mexico’s judicial and military institutions, first proposed by AMLO earlier this year.
In other ways, though, Sheinbaum differs substantively from AMLO. She has highlighted, for instance, her plans for greater development of renewable energy sources; a strengthening of Mexico’s foreign relations, particularly with the United States and Canada; and a renewed openness to private investment in energy and technology.
Sheinbaum will hope, then, that she can bring Mexican women with her into something of a new chapter. In her own words, she described her victory as representing “the possibility of achieving your dreams without gender determining your destiny.”
The challenge for Sheinbaum, it seems, is to successfully navigate continuity, and change; to uphold AMLO’s weighty legacy, while pursuing her own vision; to translate decades of progress on political representation into the lived experience of tens of millions of Mexican women; and to do it all despite a large fiscal deficit and predictions of an economic slowdown.
Perhaps not an enviable in-tray for Mexico’s first presidenta – but, for many women in her country, it is one of urgency.
Susana is Head of Policy and Public Affairs at Canning House, and a Research Associate at the University of Oxford. She obtained her PhD in Government from the London School of Economics and Political Science with her thesis "Separation of Powers in New Democracies: Federalism and the Judicial Power in Mexico."
Freddy is Canning House’s Press and Communications Manager. He joined the organisation in 2019. His Master’s thesis, ‘A Cuban E-volution, for Business?’ (2023), examined the Cuban private sector’s use of the internet and digital tools, for his MSc in Globalisation and Latin American Studies from UCL.
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