Mexico Joins #HeForShe Campaign To Fight For Gender Equality

Mexico is joining the fight for gender equality with the #HeForShe campaign. 

The Mexican Interior Ministry announced their commitment to NosotrosPorEllas campaign at a launch event with UN Women Mexico on February 22. 

The international initiative encourages men and boys to participate in creating a gender equal world. 

“Women’s cause should always be our cause -- the cause of men,” said the Interior Minister, Miguel Angel Osorio Chong, at the event, according to a HuffPost translation. “This initiative calls us to deepen our reflection on our roles, attitudes and beliefs, and take down those practices that, without realizing it, distance us from our ideal of equality.”

The best part of the campaign launch was a video from the Mexican government, posted to its Facebook account, shattering traditional gender roles:  

The video shows men and women in their daily lives reversing conventional gender performances. A woman on a bus gives her seat to a man carrying a baby and says: “If he can take care of his baby, I can offer him my seat.” A man walks through a soccer field full of young soccer players and says: “If my grand-daughters can learn to play soccer, I can learn how to cook.”

Mexico still has a long way to go when it comes to gender equality and women’s rights. Mexico was ranked as one of the worst countries among industrialized nations to be a woman, according to a Thompson Reuters Foundation survey.

Two-thirds of women in Mexico are victims of domestic violence according to a 2010 national survey, Reuters reports. What’s more, women do so much unpaid household work that collectively their work was estimated to be equivalent to about 23 percent of the country’s GDP in 2011, according to the UN -- more than the manufacturing, agriculture or oil-extraction sectors.

The goal of the campaign is to accelerate change toward gender equality, and shed light on limiting stereotypes, explained Osorio Chong in his speech at the event.

“It’s time for Mexican men to break the stereotypes that limit the advancement of women,” Osorio Chong said.  

Emma Watson, who has been the face of the #HeForShe campaign since 2014, launched the IMPACT 10x10x10 initiative at the World Economic Forum in January, specifically aiming to get corporations, universities and governments -- like Mexico's -- to join the campaign and make transparent, realistic commitments to women's empowerment.

While Mexico's President, Enrique Peña Nieto, had already joined the #HeForShe campaign himself last year, now the Mexican government has joined and set clear benchmarks for its work alongside UN Women.

The government plans to open a Women’s Justice Center in every state in Mexico. There are currently 26 centers across the country, but Osorio Chong wants to ensure there is not a single state left without a Women’s Justice Center. The government has also committed to creating campaigns against gender violence, and to strengthening the country’s data collection on cases of violence against women, so as to better understand the causes and identify possible solutions.

Other government leaders are already champions of the initiative, according to the #HeForShe website. The President of Uruguay, for instance, has committed to reduce domestic violence mortality in his country by 10 percent by 2020. Mexico is one of the leading countries in terms of commitments made, alongside the U.S, Canada and Ecuador, according to UN Women. 

The UN Women Representative for Mexico, Ana Güezmes, wants more men to join the fight.

“Gender equality is not just a women’s issue, it requires the participation and commitment of men,” said Güezmes, speaking at Mexico's #HeForShe launch. “Despite the progress achieved in the last century, the hopes for real equality, substantive equality, in fact, are far from being realized.”

The idea of this campaign, she says, is for consciousness to be transformed into concrete actions, and for individual actions to collectively achieve sustainable, systemic social change.

So far, 18 million Mexican men have signed the campaign, according to Güezmes, out of 200 million men worldwide. She wants to hit 55 million men in Mexico.

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