Currently Xiomara Castro de Zelaya, winner of the presidential elections of November 2021 in Honduras, is the only woman in Latin America who holds the first executive position. However, in 2014, the region had four presidents: Laura Chinchilla in Costa Rica, Cristina Fernández in Argentina, Dilma Rousseff in Brazil and Michel Bachelet in Chile. In total, Latin America has had twelve women presidents throughout its history. (1) Although this number does not seem very high, it must be taken into account that, according to data from UN Women, in 2021 there were only 22 countries in the world governed by women and 119 had never been presided over by them. Therefore, the region does not fare badly in comparative terms, although the horizon of gender balance in political decision-making is still far away.
If we focus on government cabinets, continuing at the executive level, in 2021 only 21% of the ministries were headed by a woman, but only three countries in the region: Brazil, Guatemala and the Dominican Republic were below below that average, highlighting El Salvador, Peru, Colombia, Costa Rica and Nicaragua for having cabinets or made up of more women than men, parity or close to parity.
In relation to the legislative level, female legislators held 25% of the seats in national parliaments worldwide. This percentage for Latin America and the Caribbean rises to 33.6% and, once again, several Latin American countries –Cuba, Nicaragua and Mexico– are at the forefront and, in others, such as Costa Rica, Bolivia, Argentina, Peru or Ecuador, the percentage of women representatives is more than 40%. However, important countries such as Brazil, Paraguay, Colombia or Guatemala were below the global average for the presence of women. The advancement of women in the legislative body in recent decades is, without a doubt, enormous if one takes into account that in 1995 the regional average of female legislators was 10.6%.
Despite the fact that the presence of women in political positions has normalized, as shown by the above data, it has not been the same in all countries and not at all levels of government, since in local legislatures the percentage of female presence is 24.9% and only 15.5% of mayors were held by women in 2021. In the same way, many of the positions they occupy, when they come to power, are not even the most visible nor the most politically relevant. Data from the Inter-Parliamentary Union show that it is more common for them to occupy ministries closer to social issues such as family, childhood, the elderly or disability, while in the Ministries of the Interior, Economy or Justice it is more likely that the holders are men. Likewise, it is less frequent for them to occupy spokespersons or high positions in party directives and, as empirical studies show, they face greater problems than their party colleagues in obtaining resources for their electoral campaigns, they suffer sexist treatment and, even violence, as will be seen later.
As has been said, the arrival of women in politics –as in other areas traditionally occupied by men– is not and has not been easy, it has required the push of women's movements that have fought, over many years , and who continue to fight for the recognition of equality. Sometimes in harsh contexts such as Latin America, where traditional gender roles structure spaces, segregating and limiting transformations.
Along this path, the adaptation of states to the demands for equality and non-discrimination established in different international agreements has been crucial. Examples of these agreements to which many of the Latin American countries have been ascribing are the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) (2) of the UN, the Regional Conference on Women in Latin America and the Caribbean with a history of more than four decades, the World Conference on Human Rights in 1993 or the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing and its Platform for Action (1995).
The fact that the states have assumed responsibility for generating equality has led to the inclusion of different public policies on the agenda. Initially, these were expressed through the approval of regulations and laws aimed at guaranteeing equal opportunities or the elimination of discriminatory legislation. However, these measures were considered insufficient because formal equality does not manage to put an end to the structure of inequality, linked to a form of social organization where gender roles prevail. This led to a new public policy agenda based on positive action measures. Within this group of policies was the establishment of quotas that forced parties to present female candidates and that have been key to increasing women's access to public office. A third type of policies focused on the mainstreaming or application of the gender perspective in policies.(3)
For the purposes of this article, it is not possible to understand the advancement of women –especially in national or subnational legislative bodies– without the establishment of quotas. Argentina is the first country in the world to pass this type of legislation in 1991, and today – except for Guatemala – all countries in the region have this type of positive action mechanism. Not all quota laws are equally effective. This led to the introduction of improvements in the following decades, and more recently, states in the region would once again become the vanguard –Argentina, Bolivia, Ecuador, Costa Rica, Mexico and Nicaragua– by adopting parity and demanding that the parties There is balance in the candidacies as a step towards achieving parity democracy.
The increase of women in the political world has made it possible to question the existence of differences, both in the personal characteristics of the representatives and in their trajectories and ways of doing politics and understanding representation.
In relation to the first point, the research project Latin American Elites of the University of Salamanca (PELA-USAL) (4) collects, since 1994, information on the parliamentary elites of eighteen countries in the region and allows diachronically and longitudinally approach empirically the differences between legislators and legislators showing important differences. The first is related to ideological positions and values. Female legislators maintain an average ideological position further to the left than their male peers, confirming the so-called "modern gender gap" that associates women's preference to the left with the greater defense of leftist parties of favorable social policies. to equality and family reconciliation. This difference is also found among women who belong to right-wing parties, since their positions are more focused than those of their peers and is reflected in positions that are more favorable to rights such as abortion or marriage between people of the same gender.
Another important difference is marital status. Although 83% of Latin American legislators are married or live with their partners, the percentage of female legislators in the same situation is 30 points lower. This difference reflects how gender roles impact the trajectory, limiting the political career of women, since they are the ones who encounter more obstacles in reconciling family life as they have greater responsibility for care. In addition, female legislators have shorter and more ephemeral careers, which is an obstacle in their careers since it prevents them from accumulating the same political capital as men. Focusing on this issue, the data from the aforementioned project show that, in cases in which the political trajectories of both are similar, the possibility of continuing with their career is more limited for legislators, revealing that the leadership of the parties is shown more reluctant to promote women than men.
Regarding the way in which political representation is configured, works focused on gender have tried to shed light, following the distinction made by Pitkin in his book The concept of representation, to the relationship between descriptive representation and representation. noun The first refers to presence. So representation occurs when the representatives share the same characteristics of the population they represent. In this case, if half of the population is a woman, they cannot be excluded from power, hence the importance of their presence. But does the fact of being a woman automatically lead to defending the interests of women? To approach this issue, it is necessary to observe the political agenda promoted by women, which has generated some controversy. It has been argued that the defense of women's interests depends on other factors such as the degree of autonomy of female legislators vis-à-vis their party or the government, partisan discipline, the existence of strong women's movements that exert pressure on legislators in the proposal of gender issues. There have also been debates about what are and are not women's interests, as well as positions contrary to looking at the issue from essentialism or calls for attention around the different identities that make up people, including gender but which can also be ethnic origin, religion, sexual orientation, class, ideology, etc...
However, empirical studies show that gender can predict legislative behavior. Thus, in Latin America, female legislators promote, to a greater extent than men, policies that recognize women's rights. In the same way, they show that, in the political game and in the face of equality policies, they seek alliances with other women beyond the party to which they belong.
The challenges that women who choose to dedicate themselves to politics in Latin America go through are diverse. Some of them are shared by their colleagues from other parts of the world because the division between public and private is still marked by traditional gender roles. Family responsibilities fall to a greater extent on women and the difficulty of conciliation affects both taking the step towards politics and the career of those who have already taken it. Similarly, in the region's political parties, the analyzes corroborate the persistence of asymmetrical relationships and informal practices that make it difficult for women to reach management positions, opt for equal funding for their campaigns, which exposes them to discriminatory situations due to attempts of eluding the normative advances (5) of the electoral quotas and, in its maximum degree, makes them vulnerable to political violence.
Some extreme examples of this violence have been the murder in 2012 of the Bolivian councilor Juana Quispe or the Brazilian Marielle Franco in 2018, but there are also cases of torture and threats against women when they decide to take the step towards politics as the one suffered in 2014 by the Mexican Elisa Zepeda or by the Honduran congresswoman Fátima Mena Baide. In fact, and given the seriousness of the events, ten countries in the region have specific regulations6 that delimit and punish violence against women in political life.
Although the presence of women in Latin American politics has made unquestionable progress, perceptions in the political world have not changed at the same rate. Thus, there are abundant and unfortunate examples such as Jair Bolsonaro's words towards a fellow legislator indicating that she was "too ugly to be raped" or Rafael Correa's statements towards the former presidential candidate of a rival party, Cynthia Viteri, of whom he said " This lady, don't talk about the economy. It looks bad Let him talk about anything. Let him talk, for example, about makeup.
Obviously, the perception of women in politics is linked to the perception of the role that they should occupy in society, and positions such as those recently defended by the candidate for the presidency of Colombia, Rodolfo Hernández, who stated that "The ideal would be for women to dedicate themselves to raising children." The transformations and the decades of struggle for equality by women seem to be in danger in the face of the growth of ultra-conservative groups at a global level contrary to the supposed gender ideology. Added to them in the region is the weight of the Catholic religion and the growth of evangelical groups that, in Central America or countries like Brazil, exert enormous political influence, both due to the number of faithful, as well as their electoral mobilization and promotion of political alliances against advances in gender equality, reproductive rights and rights of the LGTBI community.
Mercedes García Montero, University of Salamanca.
