The Miss Universe pageant is updating its 70-year-old eligibility rule.
Effective for the 72nd pageant — which can happen in 2023 — married women and moms might be allowed to compete within the pageant.
Preliminary pageants for this 12 months’s event — which happens in December — have already taken place.
Currently, the rule states that only single women aged 18 and 28, who’ve never been married or had children are allowed to use.
The age bracket will remain the identical, a source near the organization confirmed to Insider.
“All of us imagine that ladies must have agency over their lives and that a human’s personal decisions shouldn’t be a barrier to their success,” an internal memo seen by The National said.
The Post has contacted the Miss Universe organization for comment.
“The Miss Universe Organization is at all times the best and most progressive platform of its kind and now it’s going to be more inclusive and welcoming to moms and married women,” Josh Yugen, chief executive of Yugen Group and the national director of Miss Universe Bahrain, told The National. “For me, that is aligned with what I actually have been fighting for — breaking stereotypes and unlearning the stigma that the old society has forced on us from many many a long time ago.”
Andrea Meza, who was crowned Miss Universe 2020, told Insider that the rule change was long overdue.
“I truthfully love that this is going on,” Meza told the outlet. “Identical to society changes and girls are actually occupying leadership positions where up to now only men could, it was about time pageants modified and opened as much as women with families.
“There are plenty of women that got married young or had kids of their early 20s they usually at all times desired to take part in Miss Universe but couldn’t due to the foundations,” she added. “Now those women can start or boost their careers in entertainment due to these changes.”
Miss Universe 2020 Andrea Meza suggested the prior rules were “sexist” and “unrealistic.”Getty Images
The rule affected Meza personally after her victory when web sleuths found an Instagram post of her in a marriage gown, with a tuxedo-wearing man on top of a cliff, with the caption “3-09-19.”
Nevertheless, a spokesperson for Miss Universe told Insider on the time that the image was just from a photoshoot she had done while working because the official tourism brand ambassador for Chihuahua, where she lived in Mexico.
And Meza, who represented Mexico within the pageant, had a message for individuals who don’t just like the recent rule.
“Just a few individuals are against these changes because they at all times desired to see a single, beautiful woman who is obtainable for a relationship,” she said. “They at all times desired to see a girl that from the surface looks so perfect that she’s almost unreachable. The previous is sexist and the latter is unrealistic.
“Identical to in some other industry, women are capable of getting demanding leadership positions with or without a family, it isn’t any different on this case,” Meza reasoned.
