miércoles, 4 de mayo de 2016

You say there is not sexism in our country? Let’s see.


Sexism continues being an important society problem in the whole world and Chile it’s not the exception. Just take a look at the pay gap between genders, the many cases of femicide or just comparing the number of women and men in an ordinary engineering class.  The Latin American countries are still chauvinistic and the most worrying is that the institutional and economic system supports these acts.

All days we should face this practices, the street sexual “stalking” it’s a thing that always has existed and only recently has become very important to the people and the media, but the chauvinistic actions happens at home, at school, even in Congress where it has always understood the feminine as lower, weak or just bad.

As a few examples, in Chile the participation of women in the working market it’s extremely low in comparison with the men’s participation:  41,9% vs 70,7% respectively. A great percentage of women plays unpaid works, the salary is low when they’re paid and fewer opportunities to get jobs because the fact of being a woman involves losses for the companies because of the pregnancy issues or women diseases, and even the health plans are governed by the same ordinances. In our university we could see these episodes too, when teachers make offensive comments to women, they harass them or by the simple fact that some careers are male-dominated.


In summary, and without forgetting the advances in the field, the struggle for equality rights emplaced us to take part of this to make real changes in a country where the chauvinistic behaviors seem to be so naturals that go unnoticed and have become a part of our culture, not only affecting women but also men, imposing to us all practices by sex regardless individual decisions and that undervaluing to a genre historically despised.