Chile Forum

My wife, who also currently runs our legal department for our consulting firm, use to run a government crime prevention office for a Senator in Santiago. It was all women, accept for one junior attorney and one office boy.

Sexism in Chile is more about the Chilean male ego, then directed against degrading women. If a women can keep the male ego happy, then there are no problems. This is lesson for men dealing with Chilean Males also. Nothing kills a deal here like embarrassing a Chilean Male. Keep that ego happy, and you can get a lot done.

I have a friend, a guy, who has a nack for going in to places like restaurants and treating everyone like crap, then offering them a way to save face. He ends up leaving their best friend. A strange sort of stick and carrot diplomacy.

I would say about half the business we deal with here in the Tourism industry are run by women. By the way, they also seem to run some of more successful tourism business. Where Chilean male managers tend to stay in the back office and ignore their clients, the women will get out and talk to their guest, take care of their problems, and are just better at anticipating what a tourist needs.

Now that I have minute, I have to tell this story. It Really has not all that much to do with Chile, but is funny anyway.

I was partner about 6 years ago, before I met my wife, in an IT company in Central America.

We employed three secretaries. Nice girls, not terribly attractive or well educated, but good at their jobs and we all respected them and depended on them.

Besides the secretaries, our staff was mostly composed of young male computer geeks from the US and Europe. We had all worked in US and European based companies and were well trained to be professional with our female counter parts, in-spite of the local culture of sexual harassment in the work place being considered part of the job description.

All was good. However, one day we come to work after about a year of working with the girls and they refused to do anything. They would not talk to us, just simply started progressively doing less and less work. Finally, we had a meeting among the partners about what was up with the secretarial pool.

Our oldest partner, that had originally hired the girls and spoke the most Spanish, talked to them. It turns out that they felt that we did not appreciate them as women. Until we showed some respect, they were not going to show us any respect either.

The solution was that valentines day was coming up. We took them all out to dinner, and made a concerted effort to each hit on one. Another cultural trait of Latin American women is they tend to be very territorial. So, problem solved. It never went anywhere. They just wanted some fringe benefit flirting. I think it mostly had to do with them being bored at the office, than they had any real designs on grabbing one of the gringos in the office.