The destructuring of gender in Latin America, we want there to be a common thread throughout the year on gender issues and it is the starting point to launch these conversations from many points of view with the hope that it will be something very collaborative.
To understand what are the barriers and possible facilitators of a more intensive incorporation of women in science, to go a little further and what can we do from our position; what can be done to generate the space for women to realize their ambitions to participate in science; support for women who approach geology, if there is a career that is complicated to find a balance between your personal and professional life is geology because of all the field work that must be done, especially if you are passionate about field work. Women have to face the problem of gender stigmas in engineering areas, most of the degrees in geology are in engineering schools and how can you find a balance between personal and professional life and how can I face an environment in which unfortunately until today there are still situations of discrimination.
What are the barriers and what are the facilitators? Men very much into the stereotype, the facilitators for our generation were men who had totally the opposite visualization. Today there is still machismo in some schools, where women and men are still classified differently, fortunately and thanks to all the movements that have been made and that have strengthened the issue in universities, the issue of respect for gender, many of them would like to make these attacks, but now they are silent and no longer do them. One of the main problems is also in the family or with whom you marry, since there is not always support. Men, even if there are only a few that you meet along the way who function as facilitators, are key to helping you stay afloat.
In our culture, men are expected to be the economic support, he must have achievements and then the couple's relationship can sometimes be difficult. It is necessary to make visible the structural impediments that make STEM areas, for example, masculinized, because it has to do with these tensions. So visibility is fundamental, although even if we had 50% women and 50% men in high hierarchical positions in these areas, the fundamental question now is not who does science, but how and with what values, and there we get into the symbolic and the symbolic is with what values we do science, it will be fed back with the production of scientific knowledge itself, that is, with studies for example, that continue to legitimize the two brains.
There is a short film called "The paradox of gender equality", which precisely states that in Norway, where women and men do not have any type of impediment related to care or economics to access universities, but it is said that the areas of nursing, for example, are feminized and the areas of engineering are masculinized, what this documentary states is that these differences must be natural because there is no cultural impediment for women to dedicate themselves to engineering and men to nursing. Women have to make a double effort, all the time demonstrating that we deserve to be in that place and we have to shine, when in reality men do the same work all day long and are legitimized for being men, then all these issues of double or triple demands have to do with the fact that we are incorporating an androcentric model to produce knowledge, it is important to have a dialogue to feedback the structural and symbolic barriers.