Among the documents Blanca Treviño signed when she took her first job out of university in the early 1980s in Mexico was a resignation letter. The letter would be held in her file until the day she tied the knot. "If you got married, the management would decide ... whether or not you would be forced to resign," Treviño says. "It wasn't just me or this company. It was normal for a company to make all women submit the letter when they were hired."
Treviño left the company a few months before getting married. But 30 years later, she recalls the bygone practice as a powerful example of the barriers professional women have faced in Latin America. "A lot has changed and I personally have been very fortunate," notes Treviño, now CEO of Softtek, a Monterrey, Mexico-based privately held IT firm with 6,000 employees in offices across Latin America, the U.S. and Europe. "There are more opportunities now than there were then."
She has a point -- roughly 100 million women make up more than half of the region's workforce, and female politicians have risen to the highest offices from Central America to the Southern Cone. But little of that opportunity has bubbled up to corporate boardrooms and the corner executive offices. As reams of research and statistics suggest, Latin America lags other regions in corporate gender equality. With few exceptions -- such as Treviño -- Latin businesswomen are beset with barriers that keep them out of top executive management.
No comments:
Post a Comment