ULS participates in a seminar on gender gaps and policies in Higher Education and other sectors of the country

gender seminar

The initiative that arose from the Gender Equality Commission AUR - CRUCH was attended by a three-state commission supported by the Rector's Office, made up of students, academics, civil servants and officials of the state institution.

With the objective of convening national and international experts to share diagnoses and analyzes and identify challenges in order to debate proposals to implement gender policies that, with due adaptations, can be extended to other sectors of the country, it was held in the reading room. of the Library of the National Congress the Seminar “Gender Gaps and Policies in Higher Education and other sectors of the country”, an important activity in which the University of La Serena participated, represented by a tri-state commission made up of authorities, teachers, students, officials of the state educational institution.

The ULS delegation was made up of Dr. Vilbett Briones, Mg. Mónica Rengifo, Dr. Luperfina Rojas and Dr. María Lourdes Campos (academics); Mg. Karina Núñez, Claudia Farías and Carlos Lagos (officials); and Gabriela Zapata, Dannery Barraza and Antonia Cortés (student class).

gender2 seminarThe initiative, arising from the Gender Equality Commission AUR - CRUCH, had the support of the Senate Education Commission and the Library of Congress.

Regarding the participation of this ULS delegation in the meeting, the president of the AFULS, Mg. Karina Núñez pointed out that as a director of the Association of Officials of the institution “we appreciate the invitation and the opportunity to have participated in the seminar, where we witnessed the great gender inequality that exists in all CRUCH universities, for example, Although there are more women officials, they are only - for the most part - in administrative positions and decision-making continues to be in the hands of men. We also analyze the low participation of women in science and that the unions are led by men. .

Karina Núñez also highlighted that ULS was one of the few universities that attended the seminar with a tri-state commission, “where, together, we worked to improve the work environment, organizational culture and good work and academic practices of our university.”

While the Dean of the Faculty of Social and Economic Sciences of the state campus, Dr. Luperfina Rojas, indicated that this meeting “was enriching since it clearly showed that gender inequality is a structural problem in our society. Furthermore, she evidenced, in a very worrying way, the low participation of women in higher education institutions, without there being a clear and objective foundation. The latter, she poses an unavoidable task to universities, to implement gender equity policies, of a comprehensive nature, that she considers human resources, career curricula, permanent training, new organizations, among others.

Dean Rojas added that “the new Law to Strengthen State Universities incorporates the issue of gender equality, which must be considered in an optimal and effective way. In the social change that our country requires, universities have a leading role in building a more just and egalitarian society, where everyone has the same opportunities and possibilities for development. It is time to make the required changes enforceable.”

gender3 seminarMeanwhile, the president of the ULS Student Federation, Dannery Barraza, expressed that the gender gap seminar “had a high turnout and the panels were quite interesting, seeing a study carried out at the CRUCH universities on gender inequalities. gender was impressive, seeing that there are more women in undergraduate degrees than in doctoral degrees, for example, as well as knowing that not all universities have gender equality policies, anti-harassment protocols, and the development of these is mostly not tri-state.”

Student Antonia Cortés stated that attending the seminar “was gratifying and a great experience for us as participants in the Assembly of Self-convened Women of our University of La Serena, and we appreciate the support given by the institution.” At the same time, he highlighted the topics discussed, such as the figures that demonstrate the differences of academics in positions by gender, the examples of requests and protocols from three universities and that the gaps were addressed from preschool, “encouraging us and making us responsible for changing these situations as a generation.”

Present at the seminar were Yasna Provoste, president of the Senate Education Commission; Aldo Valle, Rector of the University of Valparaíso and Executive Vice President of CRUCH; Patricio Sanhueza, president of the Group of Regional Universities, AUR; Blas Fernández, coordinator of the Gender, Society and Policies Area of ​​Flacso Argentina, and María Inés Salamanca, coordinator in Chile of UN Women, among other authorities.

Rector Aldo Valle said in his welcome speech that Chilean society and our cultural system have arrived late, there being a certain reasonable perplexity that causes universities to encounter student mobilizations with legitimate demands that cannot be postponed: “as a society we are today faced with the duty to "Initiate a substantive change that knows how to distinguish the accessory from the main thing, we need to look ourselves in the face and assume this social, academic, intellectual and moral responsibility and, certainly, we have to be able to get out of the perplexity."

gender4 seminarHe added that CRUCH must make an effort to implement institutional equality policies, making rectifications in careers, curricula and substantive and profound changes in content: “it is a great cause, non-sexist education is a necessity, it is a arduous task and is part of what some authorities have called the forgotten, incomplete enlightenment for women.”

For his part, Patricio Sanhueza, president of the AUR, highlighted that the Group of Regional Universities has been working on the issue of gender equality since 2016 and that there is a long-standing relationship with the National Congress on this matter through seminars, meetings and workshops, and there has also been debate regarding certain laws, such as the Law to Strengthen State Universities, where gender equality is incorporated and this law is fully in force.

The authority explained that this seminar is held with the purpose of having the 27 CRUCH universities illuminate their path regarding the transformations that must be made within the institutions themselves: “this is a long-standing historical problem, which has had advances and setbacks, but particularly it is a problem of a cultural nature. For this reason, universities are conducive instances for these issues to be dealt with in the greatest depth and safe and firm steps can be taken, where university communities support the progress we have to make and the objective we want to achieve: that the behaviors of people respect the dignity of the human being.”

The seminar considered the panel “Inequality gaps”, in which the margin of difference existing in the university space was presented, which would contribute a lot to this concept of sexist education. Participating in this panel were Dr. Antonia Santos, political scientist and academic at the Arturo Prat University, specialist in gender gaps and policies in Higher Education and coordinator of the CRUCH-AUR Gender Equality Commission; Vania Figueroa, academic from the University of O'Higgins and member of the Network of Researchers, who gave a presentation on “Women in Sciences”, and moderated by the academic Javiera Arce, from the University of Valparaíso.

The activity continued with panels where experiences from the universities of Valparaíso, Santiago, Chile and Austral were shared, and figures regarding gender inequality and the challenges to overcome it, with the corresponding participation of the attending public through questions and comments.