Women Business Leaders in Latin America

In November 2002, CGO held a 1 1/2 day workshop bringing together Center for Gender in Organizations faculty and Simmons School of Management faculty together with seven researchers from Latin America to discuss papers reporting results of interview-based research on women business leaders in Latin America. The papers covered seven countries including Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, El Salvador and Venezuela.

Each investigator surveyed existing work on women’s experiences in corporate careers and reported on roughly 25 interviews each covering topics related to the successes and challenges senior corporate women perceive in their careers. The papers will be compiled in an edited volume.

Some of the findings of the country studies include:

  • Preliminary quantitative indicators suggest women constitute a higher percentage of senior managers in the Andean region, particularly in Colombia, than in the Southern Cone, Brazilian or Central American regions.
  • Women constitute a higher percentage of senior managers in large nationally-owned or multinational firms than in smaller and medium-sized firms.
  • Women throughout the region face a glass ceiling. They see board room jobs as reserved for men and do not expect this to change.
  • Women also face “glass walls” in Latin America. In senior management women tend to concentrated in firms in the services and commerce sectors and in functions such as human resources and marketing.
  • Latin American women see the stereotypical ‘machista’ culture giving way, in the words on one interviewed, to “an understandable paternalism” or fading entirely.
  • As many as half of the Latin American corporate women interviewed did report gender-based discrimination.
  • By far the biggest obstacle to advancement for these women is work-family balance. In general women in Latin American corporations are more likely to be married and have more than one children than their US counterparts.

This project addressed the scarcity of data on women in business in Latin America and the dearth of women business leaders in the region. It was undertaken in collaboration with the Inter-American Dialogue in Washington, DC and the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard University.

 

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