 RAMSÉS VARGAS 2017/09/06 14:39

Our debt to women. By Ramses

Vargas
The debt of our society with women is an ethical and moral imperative, before
which we can not resign ourselves to isolated quotas or affirmative actions.

Our country has had balances in red, since it is called Colombia, with many sectors of what we call
society: with the regions, with ethnic minorities, with science, with lower income strata, with health and
education but with everything, for everything and especially, with women.

Wherever you look, there is no figure that serves to make up the imbalance against women. Nor is there
public policy that has substantially served to help match the accounts.

Advances have been, of course, but the balance persists and is more noticeable when looking at the cold
statistics of the labor market where the wage gap is 25 percent, something that counts when looking at
income in a country that has gone filling women with head of household: according to the Dane, of 22
million women, 56 percent carry the burden of the home.

The general figures summarize everything. The Employment Service of the Ministry of Labor, which
must be believed, say that in the overall rate of participation of the labor market (64.7 percent), women
are at a disadvantage: 54.9 percent against 75 percent. percent of men -measure between May 2015
and April 2016-.

On the same path are the comparative rates of unemployment: that of them, in the order of 11.8
percent, far from that of men (6.7 percent). And the gap is deepened in young women who can exceed
20 percent, a fact that can not be taken lightly by the vulnerability to which is exposed a population that
just enters the world of work, including men of less than 25 years. In those figures, some analysts have
found that there is a background that skews the participation of women. They cover the provision of
personnel, this is recruitment and selection; promotion, training and development and performance
evaluation.

But the biases in labor have, in addition, other facets that reflect the division of labor according to
gender: for them the work of health, education, trade, financial sector, care of people and beauty
rooms, where seven out of ten workers they are women. For them activities associated with muscle:
construction and mining and transportation, for example. They are also at a disadvantage when looking
for a job: it takes an average of three weeks more (19.3) than men. And in much more disadvantage are
our rural women who must wait up to five months to get hooked.

Perhaps where the weight of the legislator in favor of women has been more noticeable has been in the
law of quotas (Law 581 of 2000) that mandates that at least 30 percent of positions at different levels be
for women, a mandate that It is fulfilled by fortune. But does a society that claims to be inclusive have to
distribute access to public service by gender and not by skills and knowledge?
And if the labor field biases female employment, politics is still primarily a matter for men and designed
for them, which from their seats pontificate on weeks of maternity, female fees and even taxes for
sanitary towels. Of 32 governors, only four are women and more than 360 congressmen, only 55 are
mothers of the motherland.

A student of the subject as Greys Jiménez Barrios highlights the feminine influence in the labor, political,
sports, cultural or artistic or literary, but also raises the need to "break the mold with which we have
configured, question many of the codes of behavior that have been internalized as natural, to improve
coexistence and promote better relationships, more human, more just and more empathetic ". To which
it should be added that it is not that there has not been progress. The problem is that the backwardness
has been so great that the conquests are not noticed yet.

The debt of our society with women is an ethical and moral imperative, before which we can not resign
ourselves to isolated quotas or affirmative actions. This is a topic that urges us to become citizens from
early childhood, and to start accepting what we all know but do not say: women are discriminated
against in Colombia for the mere fact of being that, woman. For all this, as long as the stereotypes of
'male' and 'female', blue and pink, which have made such a dent in our imaginations, subsist, the
problem will not be solved.

By Ramsés Vargas Lamadrid, MPA, MSc