Chile Forum

Believe It or Not!!
Seems like an appropriate place for this tidbit...

Since last year Chilean women are a majority in higher education and increasing

Last year was the first time that a majority – 51% - of all higher education students in Chile were women, the Education Ministry reported last week.

Female participation in the work force is also growing rapidly Female participation in the work force is also growing rapidly

“This is a global trend,” said Jaime Bellolio, an economist at the Jaime Guzmán Foundation. “In developed countries this has happened, and Chile is a little behind.”

Bellolio credited two factors for the phenomenon: that women working outside of the home are becoming more accepted by society, and that the gap of salaries between men and women is becoming smaller, although it still exists. This is an incentive for women to get a degree to find higher paying jobs, he said.

Andrés Bernasconi, academic vice rector of the Universidad Andrés Bello, said he believed that another key to understanding this trend was the incorporation of lower-income students into higher education. When access to financial aid was harder, families discriminated in favor of their sons, so there were more men in higher education.

“Today that discrimination has been reduced,” Bernasconi said, and so female students have a better chance of entering college.

The education of more women is expected to have both social and economic effects. Juan Pablo Swett, an economist at trabajando.com, estimated that female participation in the work force would rise from its current rate of 44% to closer to 70%.

“What remains to be figured out it how we can eliminate the discrimination against women that exists in the mentality of many employers,” he said.

Yea, we for the most part only hire women for professional positions. The men we have hired have tended not to be able to do the job. Basically we are in the taking care of people biz, and Chilean men tend not to be very good at that. Besides we have had a whole girls club thing in our office for years that works really well, and every time we try to inject a Chilean male in to that the productivity gets disrupted badly. Men for the most part work as contractors, drivers, and so on, and mostly out of the office.

No worries about the increase in women in the work force. They just fixed that by extending the maternity leave for women, and thus reducing the ability of women to find jobs. There are bunch of Women's groups in Chile on the news that were really vocal and ticked about the way maternity leave benefits work, not to mention employers. Woman gets hired, works a few weeks, gets pregnant, and the employer is on the hook for the full maternity leave. Definitely it is in the back of minds of the bosses doing the hiring, even if officially they can not say it. You can not just pass a law for something like that to not discriminate. The other complaint was that most of the maternity leave benefits where going to something like less than 10% of women earning the highest wages in Chile. Most women in the lower end of the work force were not getting that benefit because they were being hired say as contractors or as part-time employees so that the employers could get off the hook for the cost of any potential maternity leave. Not so sure about that, but there is definitely a major gap in coverage. The biggest social impact for giving something like that is likly in the lowest wage earning houses where money is the tightest, and that extra time with the kids at that critical age will reduce future social problems.

I am all for giving women maternity leave (Men too, but different issue), just it should not penalize the women and the biz while doing it. If the government wants to add a social befit for a particular group, pony up the cash to compensate for it. For very small biz in Chile, having another person on the payroll might be the whole profit margin that makes or breaks if they can stay in biz.

CHILE

It's almost automatic for me now. 80% of the time IME, it is the woman owned and operated operations that I don't have to be paranoid about getting overcharged or getting the gringo surcharge.

I am in a relation with a chilena that I know will most likely lie to the authorities to protect me if push comes to shove.

If I ever operate a business directly, you can bet that 90%+ of the employees would be chilena females vetted previously by their female peers for honesty and reliability.

¡¡VIVA LAS CHILENAS!!

80% of the time IME, it is the woman owned and operated operations that I don't have to be paranoid about getting overcharged or getting the gringo surcharge

Ditto your experience.