Breathe
By Sofía Ramírez
We are only seven months away from the beginning of the 2023-2024 federal electoral process, the one in which we will elect a president, 500 deputies and 128 senators, on the basis of political affiliations and animosities, but also on the basis of an electoral campaign that should have more than one dimension (the political one), to unfold in very concrete proposals that improve people's quality of life.
Let's take advantage of the fact that, in addition to the federal elections, in the summer of 2023 there will be gubernatorial elections in Mexico City and Coahuila (where they will also renew their state congress), and local elections in 2024 in 30 of the 32 states, including 8 governorships and one head of government.
Here are some ideas of where I would start with a feminist economics agenda for substantive equality, useful for anyone seeking to win public office by popular vote this year or next, in a country where 52% of the population are women:
1.Quality employment, with benefits, including daycare and childcare, for more people, but in particular for more women; not just direct transfers, which do not allow those who can and want to go out to work to do so with peace of mind about who cares for their children. There are many other people at home to take care of, from school-age children, people living with disabilities, the sick and the elderly.
In Mexico we have a much lower rate of female labor participation than in many Latin American countries. This does not mean that Mexican women do not work. We do work in unpaid jobs: on average, 2.5 times more than men. We work in child-rearing, caring for family members who require accompaniment and attention, such as the sick or the elderly, in addition to other domestic chores that no one pays for.
It is a problem of time use, with a cultural component in some cases, no doubt, but fueled and perpetuated because no budget, legislative time or generalized attention is allocated. Formal employment, which has a recognized labor relationship between the parties, leads to up to 6 times higher productivity and higher wages, better benefits, and savings for retirement. And for those who believe that women choose to stay at home, I remind you that Mexican women in the U.S. also have a higher participation in paid employment than Mexican women in Mexico.
2.Promotion of savings for retirement, with a view to recognizing that women have a longer life expectancy than men when there is a minimum investment in public health.
Women, in round numbers, do not seem to save as much as men, because in general women earn less than men, either because we have less access to managerial positions, or because we need jobs with greater flexibility to attend to domestic and care work. However, when comparing women and men in the labor market, women save slightly more than men. In other words, saving is associated with income, but also with employment status.
Considering that in Mexico -and the world- women's life expectancy is longer than men's, let us imagine a world where saving for retirement should become part of everyone's work culture, but also promoting salary equity, as well as promoting more women to decision-making positions. And while this difficult transition takes place, let us think of schemes so that the universal pension or the spouse's pension incorporates the incontrovertible biological fact that women tend to live longer than men.
3.Funding for public health, but specifically for women's cancer screening and care.
Although the life expectancy of women is higher than that of men, INEGI's data on excess mortality in 2022 highlights an increase in female mortality above that of men, a phenomenon unprecedented in the pandemic and in the most recent history of the country.
Source.
This fact, rather than being due to a mutation in the genetic resilience of women, is most likely due to less attention paid by the public health sector to people who lack social security. In other words, women work more frequently in informal jobs, without social security, with lower pay, without access to retirement savings or health protection.
Moreover, given the above, women are more likely to live in poverty than men. For example, in 2022, for every 10 men in working poverty, there were 11 women living in the same situation in Mexico.
Adding poverty and lower income, the propensity to need universal health services is higher for women, and that universal health coverage has been deteriorating. Only between 2018 and 2020 did the percentage of people without access to health services increase by 75%.
If we add to this the lack of medicines and screening for curable cancers that can be detected and treated in time, which has increased for children and adult women in this administration, we have a fatal combination for thousands of people.
4.Guarantee of representation in the spaces where decisions are made, both public -which is where we are - and private, which is where there is still the greatest lag, and which ends up translating into glass ceilings and rules designed to ensure that only men reach positions of power.
At the national level, the parity of men and women in local congresses is very commendable, and in educational enrollment up to secondary school it is very similar between girls and boys.
But there is the same parity in decision-making spaces: today there are 9 female governors out of 32 states. There is a lot of narrative parity in the presidential cabinet, but there is no budget for the national care system, which is already halfway through the constitutional updating process but has no resources, legal framework, secondary laws or an implementation plan at the federal level. In the states, local efforts are many but disjointed, and they call direct transfers "care system" as well as paternity and maternity leaves without a strategy to ensure that care is not only for children but for the entire population that needs it.
In the private sector the lag is even greater, and the presence of women on boards of directors, general management and other positions of real power are still testimonial. In the speeches there are many "first women" within these spaces, many "for the first time in history a woman heads" and many "if she could, all women can" instead of stopping to analyze that we do not want an exceptional path but one of opportunities for all people.
Taking into account this minimum agenda, we can achieve substantive equality between men and women in less time, promoting greater economic freedom for women and, thus, closing the gaps sooner than the 67 years predicted by the World Economic Forum.
The opinions expressed are the responsibility of the authors and are absolutely independent of the position and editorial line of Opinion 51.
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