Elections
Mexico will have its first woman president following a landmark vote on June 2, 2024.
After an election period marred by violence, ruling Morena party candidate Claudia Sheinbaum, a former Mexico City mayor, emerged as the victor with about 60% of the vote – a larger share of the vote than her mentor and predecessor, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, won in 2018. Sheinbaum beat rival Xóchitl Gálvez, a senator for the center-right National Action Party, who trailed with less than 30% of the vote.
Acknowledging the significance of the occasion, Sheinbaum said: “For the first time in the 200 years of the republic I will become the first woman president of Mexico.”
But as scholars who study politics and gender in Mexico, we know that optics are one thing, actual power another. Seventy years after women won the right to vote in Mexico, is the country moving any closer to making changes that would give women real equality?
Read here the full article published by The Conversation on 3 June 2024.
Image by The Conversation
Claudia Sheinbaum went to her voting center on Sunday and marked her ballot with the name of Ifigenia Martínez, the first Mexican woman to graduate from Harvard University with a master’s degree and doctorate and one of the first women to reach a position of responsibility in Mexico’s public administration. Martínez — one of the most influential women in Mexico — is also founder of the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) and a senator in Congress.
Sheinbaum’s symbolic vote was a nod to the women who have forged the path for women to win their political rights. A tortuous path full of violence and blood, in which despite the achievements achieved so far, there are still problems with gender equality, the economic independence of women, sexist violence and femicides. The big question now is whether the fact that Sheinbaum has been elected Mexico’s first female president will translate into more political rights and protection for women in Mexico, where 11 women are murdered a day.
Read here the full article published by El País on 6 June 2024.
Image by El País
On 29 December 2023, the Solomon Islands National Cabinet approved the introduction of temporary special measures (TSMs) to improve women’s political representation in the Provincial Government Assemblies (PGAs). Slated as an amendment to the Provincial Government Amendment Bill, the measures are expected to be voted on in the National Parliament this year, marking a momentous milestone in the fight for gender equality in Solomon Islands.
Women’s political participation and representation has been an ongoing challenge in Solomon Islands. Since independence in 1978, only eight women have been elected to the National Parliament. At the provincial level there are currently only five female members out of 173 members (2.8%). Women seeking leadership roles face many barriers including a patriarchal culture, religious norms, lack of education, and money politics. For example, in the recent 2024 election it was announced that two serving female MPs would not stand for re-election, stepping aside so that their husbands could contest their seats. The fact that only six per cent of candidates in the 2024 election were women, with only eight elected across national and provincial levels, further underscores the existing gender disparity in political representation.
Read here the full article published by Devpolicy.org on 28 May 2024.
Image by Devpolicy.org
Earlier this month, I laid out where things stand for women in 2024 congressional elections, showing that the number of women running for the U.S. House is down, Republican candidacies have dropped more than Democratic candidacies from 2022 to 2024, and Republican women’s representation among their party’s U.S. House candidates has declined from 2022 to 2024. But do these trends persist in state-level elections? The analysis below provides a first look at gender and partisan differences and trends in state legislative candidacies at this point in the 2024 election cycle, while also offering an outlook on women’s election 2024 prospects in gubernatorial elections.
Among the major findings at this point in the 2024 election cycle are:
¨The number of major-party state House candidates is down from 2022 to 2024, with drops greatest among men (v. women) and almost entirely concentrated among Republicans (v. Democrats).
¨At the intersection of gender and party, the only group seeing a rise in state House candidacies is Democratic women. State House candidacies are down from 2022 to 2024 among Democratic men, Republican women, and Republican men.
¨Women are a larger proportion of all major-party state House candidates in 2024 than 2022, with Democratic women much better represented among their party’s candidates than Republican women. In fact, women are nearly 50% of Democratic state House candidates in 2024.
¨Both the raw number and proportion of women who have filed as major-party candidates for governor are up from 2020 to 2024, and women are likely to increase their gubernatorial representation – at least by one – as a result of the 2024 election, which would yield a new record high.
Read here the full article published by the Center for American Women and Politics on 23 May 2024.
Image by Center for American Women and Politics
MEXICO - Mexico is on course to elect its first woman president this weekend, with two front-runners competing to break the highest political glass ceiling in a country with a history of gender violence and inequality.
Ruling-party candidate Claudia Sheinbaum and opposition hopeful Xochitl Galvez, both 61, have dominated the presidential race in the world's most populous Spanish-speaking country, home to 129 million people.
The only man running, Jorge Alvarez Maynez, is trailing far behind with just days left before the Sunday vote.
"It's a huge change," said Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera, a professor at George Mason University, in the United States.
"A woman president will be an inspiration for women in every single sector of the economy, politics, society and culture," she told AFP.
Read here the full article published by New Vision on 27 May 2024.
Image by New Vision
TOKYO -- Women account for a mere 18.1% of prospective candidates to be fielded by Japan's six major political parties in the 289 single-seat constituencies in the next House of Representatives election, a Mainichi Shimbun survey has found.
The figure is only around half of the 35% target the government hopes to achieve by 2025, exposing the abysmal progress in promoting women's participation in Japanese politics despite legislative measures enacted in 2018. May 23 marked six years since the Act on Promotion of Gender Equality in the Political Field, which aims to make the numbers of male and female candidates as even as possible in elections, came into force.
In its survey, the Mainichi Shimbun tallied and compared the proportions of women among the approximately 790 prospective candidates in the next general election that each of the six parties had announced by May 10. As the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) will not unveil its list of candidates until the lower house is dissolved, the survey instead counted the number of female LDP branch heads released by the party's 47 prefectural chapters.
Read here the full article published by The Mainichi on 28 May 2024.
Image by The Mainichi
The 2022 midterms have led to some new records for women candidates for the U.S. House, U.S. Senate, and governor in various race and ethnicity groups, according to an analysis of candidate filings from CAWP. Asian American/Pacific Islander, Black, Latina/Hispanic, and white women have all set new candidacy records this year, though not at all levels of office.
CAWP began collecting data on candidate race in 2004 using a system of self-identification for candidate race and ethnicity determination. Because this data relies primarily on candidate response to CAWP’s self-ID query and our queries occasionally go unanswered, there remain a small number of candidates for whom we were unable to determine racial identification. This is alluded to when we say “at least” preceding a reported figure below. Additionally, because candidates may, for various reasons, exit political races and no longer appear on ballots, these numbers can change slightly moving forward.
Beginning this year, CAWP no longer reports an aggregate number of “women of color” in our data collections on candidates and officeholders and instead provides disaggregated data for all women by race and ethnicity. This change was guided by our desire to move away from treatment of women as monolithic and challenge the centering of whiteness as a default racial/ethnic category. Of particular note here, because multiracial women are included in counts for each group with which they identify, adding the numbers below will not yield the total number of women of color running for various offices in this year’s midterms.
Click here to access the data.
On 26 September 2021, Germans elected the 20th Bundestag. This election was special in many ways. The article analyses the electoral campaign, voting behaviour, turnout, and the formation of a new coalition government by using a gender and intersectional lens. Against the conceptual background of descriptive, substantive, and symbolic representation, we outline the implications of the election for gender and intersectional politics in the new German Bundestag and the government. In descriptive and symbolic terms, we find higher numbers of women (and of minorities) in the Bundestag and its leadership as well as in government; in substantive terms, we observe the presence of ‘critical actors’ and the commitment to progressive politics in the new ‘Ampel’ coalition. Hence, we see at least a chance for change in several key policy areas and social progress in the next 4 years.
Click here to read the full article published by Sage Journals on 7 July 2022.
With more and more women running for office, races between women candidates will become the norm — not a novelty. Shared Hurdles reveals how candidates’ race, political party, and gender interact to influence voter opinion when more than one woman is on the ballot.
Research on gender dynamics in politics has seldom studied races between two women candidates. This research helps to fill that gap — and give women the tools they need to resonate with voters in races against other women. Shared Hurdles shows that in an election between two women candidates, gender biases are still prevalent, and voters hold both women to a higher standard than they hold male candidates. Shared Hurdles is a timely update on how gender shapes politics, and it provides a framework for women candidates who are campaigning against other women.
Click here to access the report.
Despite repeated warnings, Australia’s two major political parties continue to make one big mistake – and one MP has issued a scathing rebuke.
The women chosen by Australia’s two major political parties to run in the upcoming federal election are predominantly chosen for seats they are unlikely to win.
Shocking statistics gathered by news.com.au reveal a huge disparity in the chances of women entering parliament compared to their male counterparts, with men more likely to be chosen to run for a seat already held by their party.
Click here to read the full article published by News.com.au on 23 March 2022.
In December 2020, a leading Kenyan political party official, Edwin Sifuna, made vulgar remarks against a woman member of parliament. While campaigning for their political allies in a by-election, Sifuna said the woman is “not attractive enough to rape”.
In January this year, controversial bishop David Gakuyo, who is seeking election as a member of parliament, made demeaning remarks about two women politicians. He accused them of seeking votes while “swinging bare behinds”.
Sifuna and Gakuyo later made half-hearted apologies through the police after complaints were lodged about the language they used. The National Cohesion and Integration Commission, a government agency tasked with taming the excesses of politicians, was largely silent.
Click here to read the full article published by Daily Maverick on 17 March 2022.
In this In brief, the authors consider lessons learned in the aftermath of women candidates’ defeat in the 18 November 2021 general election. They identify five intractable barriers to women’s election in Tonga: voters’ expectations of reciprocity in exchange for electoral support; deeply entrenched perceptions of men’s legitimacy as political leaders; untimely support for women candidates; an inhospitable political environment for electoral gender quotas; and a lack of accountability on gender equality commitments.
Click here to read the full article.