The Miss Universe beauty pageant will be allowing mothers and married women to enter the competition next year for the first time ever.
The new rules will upend the previous policy of allowing only single, unmarried women to win the title of Miss Universe and remain that way for the title’s duration until a new winner takes the crown. Preliminary pageants are already being held ahead of the next competition.
“Before the rule change, only women between the ages of 18 and 28 who had never been married and had no children were allowed to compete for Miss Universe. The age bracket will remain the same,” Insider noted.
In a memo shared with The National, Miss Universe said the pageant believes “that women should have agency over their lives and that a human’s personal decisions should not be a barrier to their success.”
Andrea Meza of Mexico, who took home the crown in 2020, welcomed the rule change.
“I honestly love that this is happening,” she told Insider. “Just like society changes and women are now occupying leadership positions where in the past only men could, it was about time pageants changed and opened up to women with families.”
“There are a lot of women that got married young or had kids in their early 20s and they always wanted to participate in Miss Universe but couldn’t because of the rules,” she added. “Now those women can start or boost their careers in entertainment because of these changes.”
Meza said that the new rules will shatter the fantasy viewers had of a beautiful, single, unattainable woman.
Harnaaz Sandhu (Miss India, far right) competes in the 70th “Miss Universe” beauty pageant in Israel’s southern Red Sea coastal city of Eilat. (Ilia Yefimovich/picture alliance via Getty Images)
File/Sophida Kanchanarin of Thailand competes in swimsuit during the 2018 Miss Universe Pageant in Bangkok on December 17, 2018. ( LILLIAN SUWANRUMPHA/AFP via Getty Images)
“A few people are against these changes because they always wanted to see a single beautiful woman who is available for a relationship,” she said. “They always wanted to see a woman that from the outside looks so perfect that she’s almost unreachable. The former is sexist and the latter is unrealistic.”
Though the job of Miss Universe can be stressful and taxing, Meza said married women and mothers should be allowed to participate.
“Just like in any other industry, women are capable of having demanding leadership positions without or with a family, it is no different in this case,” she added.
Miss Universe changed its rules to allow transgenders into the competition back in 2013. The Miss USA pageant featured its first transgender contestant in 2021.
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