Half of Mexicans, without social security

Of every 100 women, on average 49 do not have access to social security and 37 lack health services, according to the strategic assessment of the advancement of women in the exercise of their rights, carried out by the National Council for Policy Evaluation of Social Development (Coneval).

In addition, of 100 Mexican women, 19 are educationally backward, 18 lack access to nutritious and quality food, 17 do not have basic services in their home and eight do not have quality spaces in their home, the agency reveals.

Women in the country still face an unequal opportunity structure as a result of social processes that involve behavioral patterns, expectations and aspirations differentiated by gender that translate into processes of discrimination, exclusion and inequalities in various places, Coneval emphasizes in its analysis.

The incorporation of women into the labor market and public life highlights the barriers faced in achieving equal participation with men.exposes the document.

According to Coneval’s multidimensional poverty measurement, of the 67.1 million women in Mexico during 2022 (52.1 percent of the total population), 36.9 percent were in poverty, a proportion that was reduced compared to the 2018 levels, when 42.6 percent of them were in that condition.

Data from the National Occupation and Employment Survey and the National Occupation and Employment New Edition of the National Institute of Statistics and Geography (2023), refer to a growing incorporation of women into the labor market in Mexico. Between 2018 and 2022, the economic participation rate of Mexican women has ranged between 40.0 and 46.2 percent.

However, as of the fourth quarter of 2022, more than half of women of working age in Mexico were not doing so, and an economic participation gap between men and women of 30.3 percentage points persisted.

Mexico stands out for being the country with the largest gap between women and men in terms of economic participation in the Latin American and Caribbean region.mentions the Coneval document. In 2022, Mexico reported a gap of 32.1 percentage points above the average of the countries in the region.

The low participation of women in the workforce and their concentration in sectors with lower productivity is due to the fact that unpaid domestic and care work is burdened on them. This leads them to look for flexible or informal jobs, of lower quality, and even to interrupt their professional careers.

These factors limit their ability to generate their own income and consolidate economic autonomy. In this sense, income gaps between women and men point to differences in the types of work and the time they allocate to it.explained Coneval.