Campeche, Sonora, and Yucatán have the highest percentages of women homeowners nationwide, with rates of 23%, 22%, and 21%, respectively. According to the 2025 States Under a Gender Lens report, published by the Mexican Institute for Competitiveness (IMCO), this proportion is above the national average of 16%; however, it still reflects the inequality in housing ownership among women.
The report considers economic autonomy, including working poverty, income dependency, formal entrepreneurship, and home ownership. IMCO used data from the National Household Income and Expenditure Survey, in which Mexican women reported their housing conditions to INEGI (the National Institute of Statistics and Geography).
Following these are three states from very different regions: Baja California Sur, Guerrero, and Tamaulipas. In these states, the percentage is 19% each. The states that contain the country’s major cities are not far from this range. Of the women living in Nuevo León and Jalisco, only 18% own or co-own their homes, and in Mexico City, that figure is 17%.
Paola Vázquez, Coordinator of Society at IMCO, explains that this stems from the economic inequalities women experience throughout their lives and the conditions they face in the labor market. “The fact that these states have some of the highest rates—we’re talking about 20%—is not something to celebrate. The figures reflect a fragmented trajectory in the labor market. Women’s career paths are nonlinear due to caregiving responsibilities, which affect their ability to remain in the workforce,” she explains in an interview with El Sol de México.
Vázquez argues that two main issues affect access to housing: informality and the gender pay gap. She noted that 54% of employed women work in the informal sector, as it is the only option that allows them to balance work and caregiving, but it comes with challenges such as ineligibility for housing loans, lack of social security, and lower incomes.
In Mexico, 54% of employed women work in the informal sector, a condition that limits their access to housing loans and social security. She believes this problem could be solved if the State guarantees a care system and caregiving responsibilities are delegated through state-level strategies. “We see progress in Nuevo León, we see progress in Mexico City, but there must certainly be these differences because each has distinct realities. It’s not just about childcare; it’s also about the surrounding policies so that women can have professional careers, so they don’t face this limitation and are less likely to experience inequalities or have these inequalities intertwined with others, such as the issue of housing prices,” she added.
At the other end of the spectrum, Vázquez argues that women in the formal sector face other challenges, such as the gender pay gap, which in Mexico is around 14%. “For every 100 pesos a man earns, a woman receives an average of 86. So we see that, clearly, these are lower incomes, and it may also be that, even within the formal sector, they have interrupted careers.”
Paula Soto Villagrán, a specialist in urban and feminist geographies, explains that care work has been excluded from the social production of housing. During the presentation of the book Habitar y comprender la vivienda y el habitar desde una perspectiva de género y cuidado (Inhabiting and Understanding Housing and Habitat from a Gender and Care Perspective), she emphasized that one obstacle to this is the notion of private property with a male bias.
In the book, she argues that the centrality of ownership and production in housing prevents us from recognizing the role of the relationships and daily practices carried out by the women who live in those homes. “It doesn’t consider the degree to which housing (whether individual homes or the broader housing system) is linked to caregiving, either facilitating or hindering households’ ability to provide care.”
The states with the lowest percentage of women homeowners are mostly located in the central part of the country: Hidalgo and Morelos report 14%, while Puebla has 13%. At the bottom of this national ranking, with 12% of women homeowners in these states, are Chiapas, Oaxaca, and the State of Mexico.
Source: oem
