Millennium Development Goals and the Gender Gap: Women in Higher Education in Mexico

Abstract

The Millennium Development Goals (MDG) and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) have helped to outline the specific guidelines to reverse the gender gap in order to promote women’s access to Higher Education (HE) in Mexico. This paper questions whether the different governments of the country are actually creating public policies to reverse this asymmetry. The aim is to find out whether the MDGs and the SDGs have promoted gender equality and the empowerment of women through the development of sectoral plans for access to HE by the federal government in the last 40 years. Following a qualitative-descriptive paradigm, we conducted a systematic review to collect data, and then a hermeneutic analysis of the content of the texts and statistics to describe the phenomenon. The results show that before the year 2000 there were no sectoral policies to help women in their attempt to enroll in HE. After that date there have been proposals to develop sectoral policies in the national political agenda, but without actions focused on women. Our findings indicate that the feminization and rapid growth of female enrollment in HE responds to socio-historical junctures of political movements for inclusion and gender parity in HE.