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“A little over 60 years ago, in the building of the Supreme Court of the Nation in Mexico, there was no toilet for women ministers because there were no women ministers either…” So my partner Beatriz and I (Almudena Barragán) began chronicling the appointment by Norma Piña, the first woman to serve as President of the Supreme Court in Mexico in nearly 200 years of history. Undoubtedly a step forward in a country that is still deeply unequal. “I feel accompanied, supported and agreed by everyone and by all of us. I feel very strong because I know that we are all showing what we can do here,” were Norma Piña’s first words after her appointment.
Her arrival at the top of the judiciary has become a hopeful boost for young lawyers and law students, but also for feminist, environmental, LGBT+ and human rights organisations. The celebration of the character of the Piña is not only because she is a woman, but also because she is a career lawyer whose actions she supports because of her clearly progressive cut in favor of women’s rights and other groups.
“We are all here today, despite the fact that in the past we have faced situations of systematic and structural exclusion in relation to men and have faced additional challenges such as an imbalance in work-life balance. As the poet would say, “walk the road,” he said in November while welcoming the 87 new federal judges.
Piña finally broke through a seemingly inaccessible glass ceiling and will not only preside over the SCJN until December 2026. The office also includes chairing the Federal Judicial Council, the supreme body of the entire federal judiciary. Behind her come others, but the balance is still unbalanced. In the last four years, 227 district judges have been appointed – 50% of those appointed since 1995 – but they still only make up 40% of the heads of courts. And the gap gets bigger the higher you go up the steps. For example, of the 11 Plenary Ministers, only four are women: Margarita Ríos Farjat, Yasmín Esquivel and Loretta Ortiz, in addition to the current President. Norma Piña has four years ahead of her, during which she will address key issues on the feminist agenda such as abortion, the regulation of surrogacy or obstetric violence, as well as burning issues in the country such as militarization or informal preventive detention.
Cases like Piña’s are becoming more common, partly as a result of feminist struggles, but their reaching the pinnacle of justice is still exceptional on the continent, as Lorena Arroyo explains with these figures. According to the ECLAC Observatory on Gender Equality for Latin America and the Caribbean, the proportion of women ministers in the region’s highest courts or supreme courts was 30.4% by the end of 2021. Their data reflect a notorious disparity between countries, with cases such as Guatemala, Panama and some Caribbean islands where women’s participation in the highest court exceeds 50% and others where their presence is almost non-existent.
It took 30 years for Colombia’s Constitutional Court to be led by women. In 2022, the country’s highest court made history by electing Justices Cristina Pardo and Diana Fajardo as President and Vice-President of the Supreme Court. Last year, for the first time in the history of the judiciary, women were in the majority. Sally Palomino explains that there were five judges versus four men before lawyer Gloria Stella Ortiz left office due to the end of her term. The five o’clock photo marked a milestone. A decade ago, only one woman held a seat on this court. The last to manage to sit there was Natalia Ángel Cabo, who said on the day of her appointment that she tried three times. Women’s representation in the country’s highest courts is only 23% and parity seems a long way off.
Colombian judges.
The Excellence in Justice Corporation examined the presence of women in Colombia’s highest courts from 1996 to 2021 and found that, for example, the Supreme Court had 119 judges, of whom only 18 (15.1%) were women. In the Trial Chamber, where they elected 41 judges, they managed only four appointments. The oldest courts, the Supreme Court and the Council of State (CE), are where the worst results are achieved. The EC, founded in 1817, appointed a female judge for the first time in 1978 and only until 1991 was a woman elected chairman. Since then, 128 judges have been appointed, but only 31 have been women.
A 2022 report on the participation of women in judicial bodies in the region, prepared by the Autonomous University of Chile, includes the progress of female presence in judicial bodies, prosecutors and public defenders, with a regional average of 51%. However, a qualitative analysis in ten countries, with the experiences and opinions of more than a hundred judges, academics and experts, shows that this increase “does not mean that these spaces guarantee equal opportunities for men and women and respect women’s human rights or are gender-sensitive in terms of access to justice.” The analysis confirms that they remain disadvantaged, particularly in terms of accessing and remaining in court. More worrying is the data for Supreme Court presidencies: between 1900 and 2021, only 43 had women judges a total of 4,057 positions were filled.
Despite the barriers, there have been notorious examples of women at the top of the highest courts and judicial bodies in the region. In Peru, for example, the Supreme Court and the judiciary are headed by a woman, Elvia Barrios, the first to hold the position. The Ecuadorian Attorney General’s office has Diana Salazar as its number one, a human rights specialist who is also the first Afro woman to achieve the position. In addition, several Central American jurists have stood out on the front lines in the fight against corruption and for human rights, even if it meant ending up in exile, such as former Guatemalan Attorney General Claudia Paz y Paz, who persecuted dictator Efraín Rios Montt. While others, like Costa Rican Elizabeth Odio, have ended up in international courts. Odio was President of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights and judge of the International Criminal Court and the Ad Hoc International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia.
As we can see, breaking the glass ceiling is not enough. The presence of women in the Supreme Court should increasingly be the norm and not the exception. Something Mexican sociologist Amneris Chaparro mentioned in an interview after Norma Piña’s victory: “It has taken us centuries to get there, but there is no going back. Hopefully, more women will have access to more spaces of power. The door must be opened so that it never closes again.”
📸 The photo of the week
Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez greets her colleague Jimmy Gomez’s son in the US House of Representatives January 3.EVELYN HOCKSTEIN (Portal)
By Lorraine Arroyo
This week’s US Congress appeared like a schoolyard where a small group of bullying students hijacked the ball so no one could play. Late Friday night and after 15 votes and a dramatic session finally defined with a call from former President Donald Trump to his supporting congressmen, Republican Kevin McCarthy was elected Speaker of the House after yielding to demands from the most radical wing his party. But alongside a dramatic spectacle that, as my colleague Miguel Jiménez writes, points to a dysfunctional and conflict-ridden legislature, the voting days have left us with a very delicate picture that prompts reflection on the division of labor between parents.
Congressman Jimmy Gomez went to the vote with his 4-month-old son Hodge and could be seen bottle-feeding him and changing his diapers. It is common in Washington for lawmakers to take their children and grandchildren to the opening day of the legislative year. In fact, Gómez’s baby wasn’t the only child in the house, but the California representative wanted to use the image to bring important issues to the table, like family reconciliation and the need to expand public support for raising children in a country where maternity leave is not guaranteed. In fact, as my colleague Antonia Laborde mentioned in this article, the United States is the only developed nation in the world that does not have a national law guaranteeing paid maternity (or paternity) leave.
In one of several votes, Gomez endorsed fellow Democrat Hakeem Jeffries as Speaker of the House while carrying her baby “on behalf of her son Hodge and all working families who need the child credit extension.” It was also important to him, he said in interviews with the US media, to show the need for a better division of tasks between parents. “We have to normalize that parents are with their children, be it at home or at work (…) Men have to do our bit. We don’t put our lives on the line by giving birth like women do,” she said.
His wife, Mary, who is Deputy Mayor of Los Angeles, also traveled to Washington, but the legislature’s inability to agree on the speaker’s choice meant she couldn’t stay until Friday to see her husband’s oath, because she had to return to your city to work. The baby stayed with the congressman. “We believe in the idea that my wife or any other woman shouldn’t be the caregiver by default,” lawmakers said. “My job is a bit more flexible because I am the head of my office (…). So it was easier for me to stay with him,” Gomez said.
The Gómez probably have more options than most Americans when it comes to the task of raising babies, but the picture of him holding his son was a beautiful symbol amid the chaos to remember the tasks at hand in the United States the search for family compatibility of employees.
🚀 An Instagram account to follow
By Monika Monsalve
Venezuelan aerospace engineer Nathalie Quintero is not just one of the more than 30,000 people behind Artemis, the NASA mission that aims to send the first woman to the moon. She is also passionate about communicating science and space, a subject few talk about, let alone in Spanish. That’s why she started this awesome Instagram account, stemforaerospace, where she explains NASA missions, honors female scientists and shows “behind the scenes” of the Artemis mission. It’s an account to remind us that science is for girls! I spoke to Quintero a few weeks ago. You can read the interview here.
Venezuelan aerospace engineer Nathalie Quintero poses next to NASA.stemforaerospace (RR.SS.) Space Launch System
🗞️ Some news of the week
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