World Politics Review | In Mexico, the Push for a National Care System Is Gaining Momentum

At the heart of unpaid care work in Mexico lies a paradox: The labor sustains the economy, even as it creates barriers to women joining the workforce. All told, the value of uncompensated domestic labor in Mexico amounts to more than 26 percent of GDP, outpacing both the manufacturing sector and trade, according to the country’s statistics agency. Yet roughly 20 million Mexican women are not employed because they are busy providing that unpaid labor.

Now, a push to build a national care system seeks to recognize and rebalance that work by creating a network of services covering care for children, people with disabilities, the elderly—and the caretakers themselves. President Claudia Sheinbaum, Mexico’s first woman head of state, created a Women’s Secretariat that, among other tasks, is charged with building the system. And earlier this month, one of the country’s main opposition parties said it would introduce an initiative enshrining the right to care in the Constitution.

But the devil is in the details, and building a national care system will take time and resources. Can Mexico get there?

The effort to recognize “the right to care, to be cared for, and care for oneself” is not new in Latin America. From the 2007 Quito Consensus on through multiple regional women’s summits since then, it has been a focus of attention, and several Latin American countries have taken steps to develop care systems. In 2015, Uruguay became the first country in the region to make such a system law, while others—from Costa Rica to Colombia to Chile—are developing national systems with services ranging from early education programs and job training for people with disabilities, to day centers where the aging can get care and socialize. Beyond care delivery, another goal is to close gender gaps: Across the region, women spend almost triple the amount of time that men do on unpaid domestic and care work.

Nowhere in Latin America is that gap between men and women bigger than in Mexico, where women devote, on average, 43 hours a week to unpaid labor—the highest in the region. “If we really want to work at guaranteeing substantive equality, we have to make progress in removing the care burdens that still fall on women,” says Martha Tagle, a former federal deputy with the Citizen’s Movement, or MC, party, in an interview. 

Those burdens come with an economic cost, creating a stubborn obstacle to getting women into Mexico’s workforce. Over the past decade, Mexican women’s labor participation grew by just 3 percent to 46 percent, lagging men’s participation by 30 points. At that rate, it will take 56 years for the country to catch up to the OECD average of 67 percent when it comes to women in the workforce, according to the Mexican Institute for Competitiveness, or IMCO, think tank. But closing the gap faster would come with a bonus: IMCO estimates that Mexico’s GDP would be 3.7 percent higher if it hit the OECD average by 2035.

As Mexico faces the headwinds of U.S. tariff threats and stagnant growth, closing the workforce gap represents an economic opportunity. For that reason alone, a care system is “fundamental,” says Odracir Barquera, CEO of the Mexican Automotive Industry Association and previously an adviser to a Mexican senator on women’s economic inclusion. “The problem is that the proposal has to be accompanied by resources … because one part can be supplied by the employer, but the other part needs to involve state infrastructure.”

Some steps toward laying the foundation for that infrastructure have been taken. When Sheinbaum was sworn in as president in October 2024, her inauguration speech included a pledge to implement a national care system through existing health and social service agencies, starting with a dozen childcare centers for day workers and factory employees in the border city of Ciudad Juarez starting later this year. The plan is to subsequently expand these centers to other cities.

But financing and access remain open questions, given that 55 percent of working women are informally employed in Mexico, limiting their use of social services. Then there’s the question of the price tag. The Inter-American Development Bank, which announced its backing of the country’s care system in December, estimates that building one will cost between 1 percent and 3 percent of GDP. But despite the long-term payoffs, Sheinbaum’s government has entered a phase of post-election belt-tightening. “There isn’t the budget, infrastructure, or public policy to complete [a care system] during this six-year presidential term,” Secretary of Women Citlalli Hernandez told reporters earlier this month. “But we believe six years is enough to lay a path.”

Thus far, that path has not involved a legal route at the national level. Days within taking office, Sheinbaum unveiled a series of reforms aimed at guaranteeing substantive equality for women. The measures, since approved, included closing the pay gap and reducing violence, but not a care system. Mexico’s lower house of Congress approved a reform to build one in 2020, but the measure stalled in the Senate. The MC party is now pushing to revive the reform in the upper house, as well as urging Mexico’s 32 states to recognize the right to care.

A number of states have already taken steps in that direction. In 2017, Mexico City established the right to care in its constitution. Some of the country’s most populous states, such as Jalisco and Estado de Mexico, have adopted reforms to build state care systems in the past couple years, while several cities are taking up the task on a municipal level, responding to local needs.

Melissa Ayala, a lawyer focused on constitutional law and feminist legal theory, argues that a subnational approach could be the best way to build Mexico’s care system from the ground up. “Of course, we all want a national care system,” says Ayala. “But when it comes time to put pencil to paper and figure out how you’re going to create it—where the money will come from, who will be in charge, how you’re going to operate it—it gets very complicated.” Instead, she suggests, implementing small programs at a local level and building toward a national system over a decade or so offers a more promising pathway.

Regardless of the route, the incentive to build a care system in Mexico will continue to grow, given that nine out of 10 people who leave the workforce to meet caretaking demands are women in the country. With numbers like that, expect the demand to persist.

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