In Mexico the late nineteenth century creation of teacher training colleges was
accompanied by new opportunities for women. By 1907 nearly 80 per cent of normal
school students were female, though partly because of this there were very few women
in the universities. Nearly a century later, the majority of Mexican teachers are women,
though positions of authority and power still tend to reside with men. This is because
gender differences have been institutionalised in teacher education and employment.
Within Mexican public education, women are concentrated in the lower tier of the
system. Even though over 30 per cent of university students are female, they tend to be
found in traditionally 'female' fields such as liberal arts, teaching, nursing and social
work. There is a firmly rooted prejudice that "women who study are a bad investment
for the state", and the kinds of socio-cultural premises created lead to the dropout of a
significant number of female workers even in these welfare-oriented areas.
Within all this, the one sure avenue for women is teaching. Even a proportion of the
Mexican female elite hold a normal school degree, but normal school has never enjoyed
the status of the high schools - the route to universities - and dominated by men. This
was institutionalised subordination.
The article moves on to address the relationship between gender inequality and
educational employment. Even the high percentage of school principals who are female
does not mean that a critical mass of women in the educational system has real power.
Over the last 50 years, the author claims that: "the expansion of jobs for middle class
women in teaching in Mexico has been closely linked to the implementation of access
to education for more and more children". Even the teacher training sector has been
feminised but few women hold managerial positions in it, a phenomenon that: "cannot
be explained without understanding how the private and public worlds of women
interact in their lives as teachers".
In order to probe into this issue the author interviewed 22 successful female teachers
and 21 successful male teachers -all but 2 of the 43 were trained in the public sector. It
was found that barriers to female advancement were partly due to institutionalised
prejudices in the educational system and indeed the profession, and partly due to the
demands of family responsibility. Nonetheless Cortina concludes that women in
education in Mexico form a privileged group among Mexican women in general, there
being strong Union support and genuinely equal pay. Further decentralization might
devolve more power to women in the profession, but those private family
responsibilities, still unequally shared between men and women, will continue to be a
constraint on many potential leaders.
CORTINA, REGINA (1992) Gender and Power in the Teachers' Union in Mexico, in:
STROMQUIST, Nelly (ed) (1992) Women and Education in Latin America.