Claudia Sheinbaumthe first president in the history of Mexico, announced this week several reforms to reinforce gender equality and women’s rights in the Constitution, in a country with high rates of femicides and inequality based on sexist stereotypes.
Claudia Sheinbaum, 62, took office on Tuesday with the promise of continuing the work of her predecessor and political mentor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, in the fight against poverty and corruption.
“The difference in salaries, even violence against women, comes from discrimination, from machismo,” said Sheinbaum when presenting the changes to the Magna Carta in a press conference in which she was accompanied by several officials who hold high-level positions in her administration.
The new president intends to eliminate the wage gap between men and women, under the logic of “equal work, equal pay”, and make it mandatory for there to be gender parity in the cabinets of the different levels of government of the public administration.
The plan involves modifying six articles of the Constitution and seven secondary laws, changes that are expected to be approved in the Senate and the Chamber of Deputies, where the government party Morena and its allies have almost assured the two-thirds majority of votes necessary to reform the Magna Carta.
He right to “a life free of violence” for women, adolescents and girls is another key point of the reforms, as well as the requirement for all prosecutors’ offices in the country to create “prosecutors to investigate gender-based crimes.”
Although the Government reported in August that femicides decreased by 37.6% between December 2018 and last July, these crimes continue to represent a constant in Mexican society and until August they totaled around half a thousand in the country, according to official data.
Sheinbaum’s strategy also includes a financial aid program for women aged 60 to 64 that in 2025 will represent an expense for the Government of 23,000 million pesos, the president detailed.
