The Illusion of Progress: The Unfulfilled Promise of Gender Quotas

When Claudia Sheinbaum was officially inaugurated as the 66th president of Mexico on October 1, 2024, she became the first female president of Mexico and the first Latin American president of Jewish heritage—all after running in the first majority-female Mexican election. Mexico’s election system is fascinating, and an extreme example of a trend that can be generalized across countries with similar electoral frameworks. Mexico’s representation of women in politics is ranked fourth in the world, but the country is ranked only eighty-fourth in the world in terms of gender equality outside politics. 

For an array of reasons, who the next elected representative of a given area will be is determined far more by the institutions and laws surrounding the electoral process than by the voters themselves. Individual party selection processes eliminate thousands of potential candidates before voters even have a chance to choose between the final two or three. In the US, the Electoral College could decide a presidential election with as little as 23% of the popular vote. In 138 countries worldwide, electoral gender quotas are responsible for ensuring that politics becomes or remains representative across gender lines. 

Political theorists involved in the democratization processes of a large portion of the globe in the 1980s and 1990s were adamant that electoral quotas would directly increase the status of women. Their theory was that more women in government would lead to women having more of a voice in government, in turn improving the status of women as a whole. Prominent political scientists like Gloria Bonder and Marcela Nari believed that if women were able to influence the legislative agenda, they could reach a “critical minority”—the 30-40% mark a minority needs to reach in order to have an “influential voice and to make substantive contributions to the legislative process.” Since the 1980s and 1990s happened to coincide with a large period of democratization as the Cold War came to an end, many states codified these gender quotas in their new constitutions. 

Those political theorists weren’t basing their hypotheses on nothing. Amanda Clayton, researcher at UC Berkeley, finds that female political candidates are far more likely than their male counterparts to emphasize “women’s issues.” These typically refer to issues that emphasize women’s rights, are associated with women’s traditional role in the household, or are seen as being far more “empathetic”: healthcare, poverty alleviation, and education being among the biggest. Men, on the other hand, tend to focus more on traditionally masculine issues: national defense and the economy are good examples. It logically follows to assume that legislatures with women as a critical minority would devote significantly more time to “women’s issues.” However, in the case of Mexico, this seems to be untrue. 

Across the 138 countries with gender quotas, there are 138 different types of gender quotas. Generally, there are three categories: reserved seats, candidate nomination, and voluntary political party quotas. Each quota category is implemented differently in every country, operating within a different political landscape, performing a different function, and dealing with different gendered attitudes during the elections themselves. Quotas are generally successful at increasing the proportion of women in politics—quota countries have an average of 31.9% women in parliament, while non-quota countries have 19.5%. However, each individual quota is so inherently different that it is difficult to tell if the umbrella concept elevates women’s rights. Some of these methods have had success, some haven’t. Six countries with gender quotas have exactly zero women in their legislatures. Two have more than fifty percent. 

Many gender quotas were implemented to give their governments a veneer of legitimacy. These are a token effort to elevate women without any real follow-through or commitment to enforcement. Pictured here are countries with gender quotas that have effectively increased their proportion of women in the legislature to 30% or above, with this proportion plotted against each nation’s score on the UN gender equality index. The goal here is to determine whether serious gender quota implementation and enforcement actually fulfills its ultimate goals. We would need an R² statistic of at least 0.5 to determine moderate correlation. The statistic we get is 0.0097, meaning that the correlation depicted is flimsy at best. 

Perhaps narrowing the field to only countries with gender quotas is a little too myopic of a focus. Shown here is a similar graph of every country with elections. The correlation is a little better—0.132—but still nowhere near what any researcher would need to declare causation. 

Mexico is one of the most prominent examples of this discrepancy. Fourth in political representation and eighty-fourth in gender equality, Mexico has proven that perhaps the two aren’t correlated. Claudia Sheinbaum, Mexico’s first female president, is head of a congress made up of 50.2% women. High rates of political representation have been the norm since the constitutional amendment for gender quotas was passed in February 2014. 

Still, despite the opportunities for women in government to improve the status of women in Mexico, the statistics have remained dire. Women spend more than twice the time men do on unpaid domestic work, and the World Economic Forum estimates that “women’s estimated earned income is only 52.3% of that of men.” Femicide increased by 127% from 2015 to 2022, and rates of family and sexual violence have more than doubled since 2015. More than 70% of women older than 15 years old experience some form of sexual violence in their lives. 

Theories on why representation does not lead to equality are many. Perhaps the political will to address women’s equality simply doesn’t exist. Legislative fixes require political capital, effort, and financial resources, not simply the presence of female people. Perhaps the political will is there, but it is not being enforced outside Congress. Mexico, in particular, suffers from a wide gap between what is legislated and what is actually enforced. Perhaps status has insulated a majority of congresswomen from the realities of existing as women for most of the country. Across genders, those who have the time, money, and political connections to successfully run for office are distinctly wealthy.

Equal representation in politics does not mean equality for a population. But that doesn’t mean there’s no benefit to quotas or representation. Every woman in office is a role model for young girls learning where they fit in their country’s political landscape. Women in office both present politics as a possible career for young girls and force the populace to recognize that women are capable of being strong leaders. The efforts of today’s women in politics will slowly create a better environment for their children and grandchildren. 

Featured Image: Human Rights Watch