Mexico's next president will be a woman (and four other stories)

Five reads on gender (in)equality and the backlash against feminism to end your week.

This week, my faith in humanity was somewhat reignited. On Thursday I found myself in a room full of people working towards practical change, and it was a moving experience. I was at the launch of a coalition looking to influence Britain’s policy on childcare and early years education. This isn’t necessarily a women’s issue, but it certainly is a feminist one: In heterosexual couples it tends to be women who stay home with the kids because of lack of childcare, most of those working in early years education are women on low pay, and the vast majority of single parents are women. Earlier this year, the British government announced reform, but the policy is full of holes (funding, capacity, workforce strategy, etc).

As we head for a general election in the UK, very possibly next year, the Early Years and Childcare Coalition sees an opportunity to gain public and political support for change. Their first report, which looks at British voter attitudes to reforming the early years sector, found that nearly half of voters said childcare policy would be key in deciding who gets their vote. In their slogan — “for children, for parents, for the economy” — the coalition wisely leaves out that such reform would be particularly significant for women and gender equality, too. They know that if childcare is fought for as a “women’s issue”, certainly as a feminist one, it will likely be sidelined.

Now on to the reads….

1) We aren’t on track to achieve gender equality by 2030

In 2015, UN member states pledged to achieve the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by 2030. This week, the UN released its annual “Gender Snapshot” looking at progress on achieving gender equality, which is the fifth SDG, as well as assessing gender parity across the goals in general. Unsurprisingly, the findings are bleak:

The gender gap in power and leadership positions remains entrenched, and, at the current rate of progress, the next generation of women will still spend on average 2.3 more hours per day on unpaid care and domestic work than men. No country is within reach of eradicating intimate partner violence, and women’s share of workplace management positions will remain below parity even by 2050. Fair progress has been made in girls’ education, but completion rates remain below the universal mark.

As for why progress has been lacking, the report points to the backlash against feminism, among other things:

Active resistance to gender equality and chronic underinvestment are key factors in slow progress and, in some cases, reversals of gains already made.

Nature published an editorial on SDG 5 this week, part of a series on the SDGs. It details achievement against this goal:

Of the 14 indicators for SDG 5, only one or two are close to being met by the 2030 deadline. As of 1 January 2023, women occupied 35.4% of seats in local-government assemblies, an increase from 33.9% in 2020 (the target is gender parity by 2030). In 115 countries for which data were available, around three-quarters, on average, of the necessary laws guaranteeing full and equal access to sexual and reproductive health and rights had been enacted. But the UN estimates that worldwide, only 57% of women who are married or in a union make their own decisions regarding sexual and reproductive health and rights.

This is a reminder, if we needed one, that gender inequality is a global issue, the indignities of which are felt in the lives of real people everywhere — not just in slanging matches on social media. One does wonder whether anyone round the table in 2015 really believed there was even the slimmest chance of the world being gender equal by 2030.

(P.S. The Nature editorial contains a fascinating detail on research showing that, in matrilineal societies, women have better health outcomes for hypertension and inflammation than in patrilineal ones).

2) Mexico’s next president will be female

Mexico’s next presidential election takes place in June 2024, and both the governing party, Morena, and the opposition are fielding women candidates. Claudia Sheinbaum, former Mexico City mayor, is the left-wing Morena’s choice. Xóchitl Gálvez is running for an opposition coalition including Mexico’s longest-running parties, the PAN, PRI and PRD.

The El Pais newspaper ran an editorial on Friday declaring “the time of women in Mexico”:

[With Mexico being] a country weighed down by machismo, with 10 women dead every day due to gender-based violence, this is without a doubt a a step forward that has been achieved thanks to a feminist movement showing a never-seen-before push.

This too:

Time will tell is all of this translates into a more just Mexico, but it is indisputable that the cycle has changed.

Also this week, Mexico’s Supreme Court decriminalised abortion. As per the AP report:

Mexico’s Supreme Court threw out all federal criminal penalties for abortion Wednesday, ruling that national laws prohibiting the procedure are unconstitutional and violate women’s rights in a sweeping decision that extended Latin American’s trend of widening abortion access.

The high court ordered that abortion be removed from the federal penal code. The ruling will require the federal public health service and all federal health institutions to offer abortion to anyone who requests it.

Here is a link to UN data on gender equality indicators in Mexico.

3) The view from Spain on that kiss

Last week, The Backlash opened with the ongoing saga of Luis Rubiales who, at the time of writing, still refuses to resign from his role as president of the Spanish Football Federation. His non-consensual kiss of forward Jenni Hermoso after Spain’s Women’s World Cup win has led to what has been described as Spain’s #MeToo moment, with the #SeAcabó (trans.: “it’s over”) movement sparking a national conversation on women’s rights and sexism. The BBC World Service’s “What in the World” podcast has an episode all about it, produced by Maria Clara Montoya, with the Spanish perspective on the kiss and its aftermath. (Muchísimas gracias to the subscriber who told me about this. You know who you are..!)

4) UN experts say Iran’s draft hijab law amounts to gender apartheid

In August, it was reported that Iranian lawmakers were considering draft legislation — the “Bill to Support the Family by Promoting the Culture of Chastity and Hijab” — that would crack down further on women who don’t wear the head covering. Last week, the UN released a statement from a group of experts warning against the bill. The experts said:

“The draft law could be described as a form of gender apartheid, as authorities appear to be governing through systemic discrimination with the intention of suppressing women and girls into total submission.”

5) The politics of care — and community

In this review of two books on care and “the history of not being a mother”, Sarah Stoller reflects on the complicated relationship between motherhood and feminism, and asks whether there are ways of reimagining community to bridge the ostensible divide between women who do and don’t have children. She writes:

As a feminist and a new mother of the Covid-19 era, it is hard for me not to be swept up in the very beautiful odes to community, care, and creativity that have emerged over the last couple of years. And yet, I wonder how hopeful I should be. I worry that calls for community reliance are just an expanded version of the impetus to self-reliance. I worry about the political: if and how we can find ways out of our immediate communities, shaped as they so often are by class, race, and other axes of identity, to ones that are more diverse. It is one thing to emerge from isolation—whether the isolation of new motherhood, or the isolation of being a woman without children in our culture—into personal redemption, be it artistic, professional, or otherwise. It is quite another to practice mothering outside of our families and most intimate communities. The material barriers to doing so are profound. The undulations of the market suggest none of the beauty of the undulations of caring bodies. Yet that, too, deserves our attention if we are to create a powerful new politics of care.

Thank you for reading. See you next week.