Temple University Press

Latin America needs public intervention to promote entrepreneurship in order to improve the quality of life and, in the long term, to make viable the possibilities of growth and economic and social development . This document compiles and analyses the main experiences and initiatives implemented to promote the participation of women and girls in the STEM sector. This study is an analytical and comparative document that includes the main experiences and initiatives implemented in the Latin American region to encourage the participation of women and girls in the STEM sector. The primary objectives of this study are to identify, contextualise, and analyse successful practices and initiatives at national and international levels for attracting, training, and promoting the participation of women and girls in STEM. The study systematises and compares policies and initiatives focused on gender equality in STEM. This list is by no means exhaustive, and further figures like Rosario Castellanos of Mexico and Celia Amorós of Spain should not be forgotten as they influenced the positions developed by these thinkers. All of these women dared to be thinkers at times when being a Latin American woman in philosophy was unheard of, and they have come to form the foundation of a canon of thinkers that paved the way for new and emerging voices.

  • With regard to my experience, I was mayor in Miguel Hidalgo and now I preside over a global organization.
  • We also campaign for the adoption of gender-sensitive whistleblowing protections and the adoption of measures that guarantee equal political participation.
  • Generating and disseminating knowledge with a multidisciplinary perspective, providing policy and technological development and building solutions in perinatal, women’s and sexual and reproductive health, working with the governments of the countries of the Americas and the Caribbean.
  • One is the emphasis on social issues (immigration, poverty, violence, inequality, etc.) and activism.

To save this article to your Dropbox account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you used this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your Dropbox account.Find out more about saving content to Dropbox. The municipalities and the national government agencies implement more projects to disseminate the entrepreneurial culture . In Latin America, on average, the sum of paid and unpaid work hours is higher for women than for men and unpaid work is mainly performed by women. Mexico has the highest rate, where the sum of paid work hours (847.4) plus unpaid work hours (847.5) totals 94.9 hours per week. Other countries with a high level of unpaid work are Uruguay (44.2, plus the time of paid work totals 82.7 hours per week), and Peru, where unpaid work consists of 39.4 hours per week. The countries where women perform less unpaid work are Brazil (25.2) and Costa Rica (31.6) .

Despite the fact that women-owned businesses favor economic development, job creation, family support, and poverty reduction, they still face environmental, legal, institutional, and cultural barriers . In relation to women entrepreneurship programs in several Latin American countries, there are public initiatives based on the policies in the region. The most used instruments are lines of financing, management and administration training, networks, access to credit, technical assistance to improve production, trade shows, seminars, meetings, and conferences, among others . Some of the programs to promote gender equity in women-owned businesses are shown in Table 5 . The legal and regulatory framework influences the start, formalization, and growth of women-owned businesses . There is clear progress in all Latin American countries; however, some countries emphasize more the maternity or gender-specific legal frameworks than the others do .

In 2016, the Americas Program was set up with the clear forward-looking mission to elevate discussion on the hemisphere to a strategic level. Today, throughout Latin America, much is being discussed and written about the role of women. We want to add our voice to these discussions by highlighting profiles of regional female leaders who are agents of change—those women who deliberately promote and enable gender equality within their own group and organization. While we have made significant progress in understanding drivers of breast cancer, most studies and clinical trials are in non-Hispanic white women. Increasing participation of underrepresented groups provides an opportunity to gain valuable insights into tumor biology and its variations among all people. This will ultimately enable the development of more personalized therapies and improve outcomes for Hispanic women and Latinas diagnosed with breast cancer. Social determinants also significantly influence overall health because they impact nearly every aspect of care, including access to insurance, preventive care, and treatment.

Political and economic transitions influenced the development of feminist ideas. Activism became institutionalized and the feminist movement grew in various directions. As the 90s came to a close, what started out as a spontaneous social movement with radical ideas about patriarchy, militarism, and democratization found its way into the halls of institutions and organizations that stifled feminist activism. The institutionalization of feminism was so profound that its political promise seemed lost. Institutionalization was not without critique, and the early 2000s marked the emergence of new voices that took liberal dominant feminisms to task by focusing on anti-neoliberal and decolonial critique which began to call out the hegemonic practices of Latin American feminisms. In relation to violence, no data have been found about the relationship between violence and women entrepreneurs.

Other studies specify that it is insufficient to review only individual aspects to explain entrepreneurship, and we need to understand the problems influenced by the environment rather than by individual aspects. Aldrich, Rosen, and Woodward state that social structures affect the entrance of women into the business sector. Business environment factors can be economic, financial, legal, political, and sociocultural, and these are beyond the company’s control . The extent to which these structural dimensions affect women entrepreneurs depends on cultural norms in a given society .

ECLAC Seeks to Bring More Women into STEM, Close the Digital Gap and Eradicate Gender Cyberviolence

TheRegional Conference on Women in Latin America and the Caribbeanis a subsidiary body of the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean and is the main regional intergovernmental forum on women’s rights and gender equality within the United Nations system. It is organised by ECLAC as Secretariat of the Conference and, since 2020, with the support of the United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women (UN-Women). In the states we examined, slightly more than a quarter (26.2%) of Latinas have a college degree, on average.

Abortion deserts: America’s new geography of access to care – mapped

Apollcommissioned by the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health found that the majority of Latinas agree that women have the right to make their own personal, private decisions about abortion, countering popular narratives of Latinas as being socially conservative and anti-abortion. Government authorities highlight women’s inclusion and economic empowerment as drivers of sustainable development. The indicators of the World Bank’sgender scorecards, which were used to study 29 Latin American and the Caribbean countries, indicate that progress has been made toward general equality but there are still major challenges. We face big challenges to help the world’s poorest people and ensure that everyone sees benefits from economic growth. Data and research help us understand these challenges and set priorities, share knowledge of what works, and measure progress. We provide a wide array of financial products and technical assistance, and we help countries share and apply innovative knowledge and solutions to the challenges they face. ; introduced shared parental leave and increased the length of paternity leave to encourage the sharing of responsibilities for unpaid care work.

However, there are alarming figures in some countries of the region and it might be assumed that violence also affects women entrepreneurs and their leadership. Further studies on gender-based violence are recommended to measure the impact that this could have on women entrepreneurs. In regard to associations, women entrepreneurs are at a disadvantage compared to their male counterparts, since they have less access to associations, information sources, and business formalization. While women do not have lesser entrepreneurial skills than men, they do have less chance of getting the necessary training to develop their companies. In addition, it should be noted that networks structure are different for men and women; women have small networks and these are mainly homogeneous social and family relationships .

Radical Women in Latin America

InBolivia, the recent case of an 11-year-old raped by her 61-year-old step-grandfather and forced to carry the pregnancy to term has reopened this debate. While access to safe abortion is threatened from theUnited StatestoChina, the “Marea Verde,” or Green Wave, women’s movement has helped deliver groundbreaking reforms and progress on reproductive health and rights in Latin America. The artists pioneer radical forms and explore a female sensibility with overt or, more often, covert links to feminist activism. Many works were realized under harsh political and social conditions, some due to U.S. interventions in Central and South America, that were complicated or compounded by the artists’ experiences as women. Finally, the green tide has became an internationalist impulse mapping out struggles and legislation, bringing together a feminist agenda that goes well beyond a demand for an individual right. Furthermore, abortion has become the banner for rekindled regressive forces that articulated a true conservative counter-offensive. An internationalist perspective allows us to both map the global dimension of those reactionary forces and take inspiration and learn from struggles that have successfully linked the right to abortion to other feminist demands and attacks on collective autonomy.

With the 2016 creation of thenational plan against gender-based violence, the Peruvian government publicly acknowledged the epidemic and placed it as a government priority for years to come. Several agencies with specialized task forces now work toward femicide reduction and prosecuting the abusers,includingemergency centers for women, a hotline for victims of violence against women, and the Specialized Police Squad for Prevention Against Domestic Violence.

It is organized by ECLAC as Secretariat of the Conference and, since 2020, with the support of the United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women (UN-Women). States, meanwhile, should track attainment by race and gender against their statewide attainment goals and establish interim metrics and targets for improvement. And investing in need-based scholarship programs that expand pathways to and through college for students of color would go a long way toward boosting access and degree completion. Lastly, since a high percentage of students of color start out at community colleges, states should improve transfer and articulation to smooth the transition between two- and four-year https://toplatinwomen.com/ colleges. Gender equality is not a women’s issue; it is an issue for men as much as it is for women. If equality is advanced, it will be better for business, for public policy, for men, for children, for the family, and of course for women as well. A study by McKinsey states that advancing women can add $12 trillion to global growth.