The professor and researcher has watched gender quotas transform the political landscape in Mexico over the last two decades. Here’s what she thinks feminists in the U.S. can learn from their example.
Jennifer M. Piscopo, director of the Gender Institute and professor of gender and politics at Royal Holloway University of London, is an expert on women’s political representation and gender and elections—and her top priority is making sure that her research into women’s political power globally turns into action.
Piscopo’s reporting on Mexico’s gender parity laws for Ms. has offered inspiration for feminists to pull from in these challenging times in the U.S. In the first episode of Looking Back, Moving Forward—a Ms. limited series podcast exploring the history of the magazine and the feminist movement—Piscopo talked to me about the decades-long journey to “parity in everything” in Mexico that led to their election of a feminist woman president, and what feminists in the U.S. can learn from their fight for political equity.
Piscopo is joined in the first installment of the new series by She the People founder Aimee Allison, New Mexico state Sen. Angel Charley, RepresentWomen founder Cynthia Richie Terrell, pollster and leading political strategist Celinda Lake and professor Julie C. Suk, an expert in gender and the law. Together, we explored the promise of a truly representative democracy—and the lessons feminist history offers for how we can advance a feminist future.
Make sure to like, follow and subscribe to Looking Back, Moving Forward today so you won’t miss a second of the conversations and revelations to come. And be sure to keep an eye out for bonus content from every episode in the podcast portal and here on the Ms. website!
This interview has been edited and re-organized for clarity and length.
Carmen Rios: Let’s start with the piece “Parity in Everything.” In that piece, you talk about the years of work that went into that 2019 constitutional reform in Mexico mandating gender equality across so many different areas of government. We’ve been stalled, obviously, in the U.S., on significant progress for parity.
Mexico has a feminist woman president, Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo. We have… not. What can and should feminists in the U.S. learn from this movement in Mexico?
Jen Piscopo: The reform installed what they call gender parity in everything, which is 50/50 gender balance representation—in the federal executive, federal legislature, federal judiciary, in all levels of the federal government. It applies to the states and municipalities in all three of those branches as well. And it did not come out of nowhere.
That wasn’t a push that began two years before the constitutional reform process, but that was actually a process that started in the 1980s. Mexican women in the political parties were very, very frustrated with how few opportunities the political parties were giving them to run as candidates, and they started insisting that the parties had to do more to nominate women and put women in electable positions.
Some of the women within the political parties, especially parties of the left, managed in party conventions to secure commitments from their parties to nominate certain numbers of women in upcoming elections. Then the women started working together across the party lines, to try to turn those internal party mandates into legislative mandates, passing laws that would require all of the parties to run certain percentages of women.
Mexico eventually passes what we call a 30 percent gender quota law, then it passes a 40 percent gender quota law, and these just apply, initially, to candidates for the federal congress. But gradually, this idea of quotas becomes parity. It becomes gender balance. It spreads beyond the congress to implicate other government institutions, and eventually becomes the Parity in Everything reform that’s talked about in that article.
The first takeaway is that feminist activism plays a long game, especially in these particular moments where the fruits of activism can feel hard to obtain or even vulnerable and even directly being repealed. It’s important to remember that all of these gains are sown not just over years but over decades.
You have to stay in the fight, even when it seems hard.
Jennifer Piscopo
Thinking about my own work in Mexico, when I went in the early 2000s, I talked to women about what was still, then, a 30 and then a 40 percent gender quota. They weren’t talking about parity in everything. It wasn’t even on their radar because they were fighting these earlier battles. It’s a long game. Policies can build on each other. You have to stay in the fight, even when it seems hard.
What’s important is that the women in Mexico found a way to work across political party lines. That’s not to say they agree on every issue. There are plenty of gender equality issues in which the parties might divide—but when it came to having more opportunities for women to be in political office, eventually the right parties and the women from the right parties realized the importance of mandates, because their own party was not getting there on its own. This ability to find cross-party alliances can be really important and can identify the key issues that are movable in a political moment.
Rios: We’re very polarized even around the idea of representation here—there’s that irony of women running for office and then saying gender doesn’t matter, identity doesn’t matter, and we see that happening a lot on the right. There’s this willingness for women to run for office and then be like, but DEI is not important, equality is not important. Were there any specific strategies about fostering cross-party dialogue about representation that you saw or came across in your reporting?
Piscopo: It is important to realize that initially, in Mexico, and in the other countries in Latin America, where there have been these gender quota laws, women on the right were not supportive. They made these meritocratic arguments. They said, ‘No, we are in our spots on our merits, we don’t want there to be a mandate for parties to choose women.’
Initially, the push was from leftist women—and what started to change rightist women was seeing more and more of them enter the party and being stalled in ways that they didn’t think actually reflected their merit. As more and more women entered right parties, they were blocked, and it became harder and harder for them to think that their own merit would get them through.
I would interview right-wing women who would say, ‘I was able to get through because of my merit, but I saw these other talented women, who are my friends, who weren’t getting through.’ You could still see them grappling with a little bit of this cognitive dissonance of admitting that they, themselves, had experienced gender discrimination. But when they could at least see it happening to other women in their party, it made them more empathetic to what many women on the left had been saying all along.
At the end of the day, the reason measures like gender quotas or gender parity are easier to construct agreement about among politically active women is that this is actually about their careers. As right-wing women started to see that these measures would benefit their careers, it became easier for them to get onboard.
Some of the other gender equality issues don’t have such direct personal benefit for women in right-wing parties, and then it can be harder to construct these alliances, but another area where we have seen lots of collaboration across party lines, in Mexico—but also globally—is on violence against women. At a certain level, right-wing women and left-wing women might not exactly agree on how to solve violence against women. Right-wing women might prefer policies more aimed at family conciliation. Left-wing women are skeptical about promoting family conciliation, but when they are able to dialogue about their shared experiences of things like violence, things like harassment.
There is a way to build bridges and say: ‘Okay, we might disagree on some of the details, but we actually agree on the principle of strengthening our country’s anti-violence laws.’
The past 50 years have shown that democracy is bound up with gender equality. … Feminist claims have always been about making democracy work for those usually excluded.
Jennifer Piscopo
Rios: I know you also have written about how the quota system might not be as directly applicable in the United States—our government is structured differently, we don’t have parties nominating candidates. What are some reforms here in the U.S. that could bring us closer to parity in everything?
Piscopo: People like me talk a lot about gender quota laws or gender parity laws, and we give the big picture, which is they require political parties to nominate specified percentages of women. But these laws often also contain a lot of other gender equality measures for women in politics that are part of the quota. They’re part of the quota legislation, but they’re not part of the quota mechanism itself, because as women work to reform the gender quota, they know that their only barrier is not just getting the nomination.
They also face other barriers: Would they get nominated in a winnable seat? Would they actually receive the campaign resources they needed to run effective campaigns? Would they actually receive media time? Would they receive equality in media time? The quota legislation would contain the mechanism of the quota, but then, often, the legislation contained a lot of additional mechanisms.
We see mechanisms like these that are encouraging political parties to transform more resources to women candidates versus men candidates. Sometimes, the state will pay a bonus to parties that actually give women certain amounts of money or place women in winnable districts. We can see mechanisms around campaign financing. Sometimes they also allocate money within the parties for leadership training programs for women candidates.
They also think about a lot of other ways the playing field isn’t equal between women and men, and we can look at that in the United States. We know, still, that women don’t, on average, have access to the same kinds of campaign donations. We know that women also, often are less likely to donate to campaigns than men. There’s lots of measures that we can think about around fundraising, around the use of campaign expenses. Can women use their campaign expenses for things like childcare, for their staff to travel with them, to provide childcare while they’re on the campaign trail?
There are lots of other ways that we can use policy in the U.S. as a lever.
After you’ve had 30 years of 30, and then 40, and now 50 percent women … it’s really hard to make the argument that women aren’t interested, and women aren’t competent, and women aren’t capable, and that there are no women available who could take on these posts.
Jennifer Piscopo
Rios: Mexico has elected its first feminist woman president since this article came out. I’m curious what Mexico’s journey toward parity in everything has shown you about the power of parity in the lives of women. How has equity and representation translated into policy and political victories for women in Mexico?
Piscopo: There are some things that I take heart in. If we go back to the 1990s, and this is the first moment in Mexico and in other countries where these gender quota laws are being talked about, we see some very predictable arguments from the political parties: ‘Oh, women aren’t interested in being in politics,’ or, ‘Even if women are interested in being in politics, we just don’t know where they are. How are we going to find women to run?’ ‘Women aren’t prepared in the same way men are. There’s not as many women lawyers. There’s not as many women in business.’
Thirty years later, I really can say, sincerely, not wearing rose-colored lenses, that a lot of these arguments are just not present anymore, or they’re being whispered quietly and not in public.
After you’ve had 30 years of 30, and then 40, and now 50 percent women, not just in congress but also now in the governor’s seats, in the state legislatures, as mayors, it’s really hard to make the argument that women aren’t interested, and women aren’t competent, and women aren’t capable, and that there are no women available who could take on these posts.
That has been enormously important, and it changes the perceptions of what women can do. In the presidential race in 2024, two women competed from the two main coalitions, and they were both highly qualified, and there was really no discussion about whether or not they were up for the job. That’s actually a really significant advance.
Thinking about where women, from across political parties, can find common ground to walk together, we have seen improvements in gender-based violence legislation, we have seen other areas of improvement. There are processes, now, for gender-budgeting and gender-responsive policymaking. This is the idea that when federal budgets are made or when policies are made in certain areas, like climate, that there has to be a gendered lens taken by the policymakers to think about how the budget items or the policies will affect men and women in society. You also have a lot of policy changes that follow.
Rios: This podcast looks back on 50 years of feminist writing and organizing. I’m curious: What do you hope has changed, 50 years from now?
Piscopo: It’s a challenging moment to answer this question. There has always been resistance to expanding women’s rights—in Mexico, in the U.S., everywhere—whether in politics or different spheres, but we are at this moment where that resistance seems to be having its own moment, and has been able to walk back a lot of gains.
Parity in Mexico is still in place, but we know that there have been other women’s rights legislation that has fallen in the U.S. and in other countries in recent years. It’s hard to think that through, but women, in the U.S. and across the globe, in general, have more formal rights and freedoms now than they did 50 years ago. That is thanks to feminist organizing, both nationally and globally.
My students are always shocked when I tell them that when I was growing up, a married woman could not have her own bank account. Things like that are different, and they have mattered, and I know we might feel like even something as simple as women having their own bank accounts is perhaps under siege in many places, it is important to remember that we’ve made a lot of changes.
I was just at a U.N. Women meeting, where we were talking about the 1979 Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination Against Women, which is the global women’s rights treaty. The U.S. hasn’t signed it, but most other countries have, and it was the same question of ‘Oh, there’s disillusionment with the state of women’s rights.’ One of my colleagues in the room said: ‘Look, we’ve had 2,000 years of patriarchy and only 40 years of CEDAW.’
Feminist activism plays a long game. … It’s important to remember that all of these gains are sown not just over years, but over decades.
Jennifer Piscopo
It takes time. When I think about what could realistically change in the next 50 years, I want to see us hold the line on the rights we’ve won. I didn’t think I’d have to say that a few years ago. We have to hold the line, we have to conquer more, but I also think whether we’re talking about politics or other spheres, the real final frontier of change is about the home, because what we know is that women are entering politics, they are entering the workforce, they are going to university, and the distribution of household tasks in the home is not changing. There’s more women in politics, there’s more women in business, there’s more women in all these aspects of public life, but all of our time use surveys—whether it’s the global north or the global south—show very little movement on how much time women are performing on unpaid care tasks, domestic care tasks and reproductive labor in the home.
One of the questions I’ve thought about is, what is the relationship between democracy, gender equality and feminism? The past 50 years have shown that democracy is bound up with gender equality. If we take democracy seriously, it is the promise of political equality and social equality for all members of the polity, and that, for a long time, in democracies, in emerging democracies globally, that’s what feminists base their claims to rights on.
It was about the kind of political and legal equality that democracy promises but doesn’t always encode in its constitutions and in its legislation. That’s why in 2025, as countries start to walk back democracy, they’re walking back some of these equal rights guarantees—because not democracy is not political and social and legal equality for everyone who lives in the polity.
They really are bound up together, but feminists have an advantage here because feminist claims have always been about making democracy work for those usually excluded, which are women and which are other marginalized groups. I have a paper I’ve been working on about feminists leading what we call democratic defense or democratic resistance, and I say these are old strategies in new times. The entire feminist project has been understanding that democracy doesn’t live up to its theoretical promises of equality and trying to push democracy to do that.
Feminists have been essentially fighting a democratic battle for a long time. Everyone still benefits when women are equal. One longstanding feminist demand has been for the equal division of household tasks. If that happens, think about where we are right now. Families are stressed out. Families are under pressure. Families feel like they can’t make ends meet. Men and women are struggling to feel like they’re caring for their families.
A key feminist demand is for more state provisioning to help with care: more care services, more childcare, more elder care. That’s not just going to benefit women. That’s going to benefit men. That’s going to benefit families. These are not policies that are niche for women. They are policies that actually raise everyone’s quality of life.
That’s the final frontier, and that is going to require policy change. The state can assume some of these care tasks. We can have more universal, federally funded, state-funded childcare, elder care, but I also think we have to see these changes in households, and I hope that in the next 50 years, we can continue with our insistence that domestic chores and tasks need to be shared equally.
Great Job Carmen Rios & the Team @ Ms. Magazine Source link for sharing this story.
