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WOMEN-CHILE: Steps in the Right Direction

Daniela Estrada

SANTIAGO, Feb 9 2006 (IPS) - The election of Chile’s first woman president, and her choice of a cabinet with equal numbers of male and female ministers, are a positive sign for the political aspirations of women in this country, but more concrete action is still needed, both activists and authorities agree.

“Chile is experiencing a real cultural revolution. Three years ago, no one could have imagined that such a male chauvinist society as ours would elect a female president,” Paulina Weber, one of the leaders of the Movement for the Emancipation of Chilean Women (MEMCH), told IPS.

In the Jan. 15 runoff election, Michelle Bachelet of the centre-left Coalition for Democracy which has governed this country of 15.6 million people since 1990, captured 53 percent of the vote, defeating multimillionaire businessman Sebastián Piñera, the candidate of the rightwing opposition.

On Jan. 30, before going on summer vacation in southern Chile, the 54-year-old pediatrician and president-elect designated her cabinet of ministers, which for the first time in history will be made up of equal numbers of men and women, thus fulfilling one of her main campaign pledges.

Several of Bachelet’s 10 women ministers have been appointed to key portfolios, including the General Secretariat of the Presidency, in charge of relations with Congress, to be headed by socialist lawyer Paulina Veloso, and the Defence Ministry, under economist Vivianne Blanlot of the Party for Democracy (PPD).

The socialist president-elect, who will take office on Mar. 11, also appointed actress Paulina Urrutia, an independent, as minister of Culture; Ingrid Antonijevic of the PPD to Economy; Clarisa Hardy, a member of Bachelet’s Socialist Party, to Planning; and socialist Dr. María Soledad Barría to Health.

The other women ministers are Patricia Poblete and Laura Albornoz of the Christian Democratic Party, in Housing and Urban Planning and National Service for Women, respectively. Karen Poniachik, an independent, will be at Mining, and Romy Schmidt of the PPD will be minister of National Assets.

But experts say that these important changes are not enough to ensure women a greater share of elected posts, such as mayors, deputies and senators, because there are still many obstacles to women occupying positions of power.

Although the portion of elected posts held by women has increased from 10 percent to 20 percent in the last 15 years, many women have difficulty in reconciling their private life with the world of work, due mainly to unequal gender roles within families.

Indeed, the new minister of Culture, Paulina Urrutia, 37, who is a well-known theatre, film and television actress and a former president of the Actors’ Union, acknowledged in a local radio interview that she plans to postpone motherhood – she has no children -in order to concentrate on her ministerial work as of March.

In the Dec. 11 parliamentary elections, 37 women and 204 men stood for the 120 seats in the Chamber of Deputies, while nine women and 57 men stood for the 20 Senate seats. Eighteen women deputies were elected, 15 percent of the total, and two female senators, or 9.5 percent of the total.

The election of Bachelet and the considerable number of women in her cabinet could have “a domino effect” on other processes favouring gender equality, according to the deputy director of the DOMOS Centre for Women’s Development, Virginia Guzmán.

Women can exercise power differently from men, “with more teamwork, less hierarchy, more openness to participation by ordinary people,” thereby attracting more capable women into public service, she asserted.

Guzmán said she is confident about the leadership that Bachelet’s team of women will provide, because she believes that professional women like Veloso, Hardy and Barría have a history of commitment to the struggle for gender equality.

But Weber said it is possible that the new women ministers may opt for a masculine style of management, which according to her would be a betrayal of Bachelet’s campaign promise to work in a closer, more welcoming, supportive, and participative way, paying more attention to social problems.

In her view, Bachelet and her female ministers will not have an easy time, “because people will be watching out for any mistakes they make, since women are held to much higher standards than men.”

According to the activist, this is a clear demonstration of male chauvinism, which she said was also demonstrated before the elections, when one of the topics debated was whether Bachelet could really measure up as a president, something that was never questioned about male candidates.

The outgoing minister of the National Service for Women, Cecilia Pérez, told IPS that the future in Chile for equal opportunities for women and men looked promising, although more concrete affirmative action, such as a quota law, was needed to achieve a better distribution of positions of power.

Pérez noted that different kinds of laws and quota systems have been put in place in a number of countries, and that they are usually temporary measures, in effect “until balance is achieved.”

In Latin America, Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, Panama and Venezuela already have such laws.

Many predict that the debate on quota laws will drag on for a long time in Chile. In 2002 and 2004, deputies from both the governing coalition and the opposition alliance presented two draft laws to regulate the question, but both were eventually shelved.

“Last year we held debates in every part of the country, involving legislators and civil society organisations, to see if there is a national consensus about the need for a quota law, so that we can go on to discuss what the best mechanism might be,” Pérez remarked.

During the debates, Pérez was surprised that some women legislators criticised the idea, arguing that people should be elected on merit alone.

Meanwhile, on Feb. 3, Pérez’s future successor, Laura Albornoz, told the newspaper El Mercurio that she would send Congress “a draft quota law for parties to reserve 40 percent of the candidacies for women.”

The initiative would likely be packaged together with a draft law aimed at modifying the so-called “binominal electoral system” used in legislative elections, which makes it hard for small parties to win seats unless they form part of large coalitions. That bill will be debated in Congress in March.

Bachelet has also proposed other measures, including a draft law to be sent to Congress that would provide free child care to poor working mothers, and a draft code on “good employment practice and non-discrimination in the public sector”.

Weber told IPS that on Mar. 8, International Women’s Day, around 100 organisations will take to the streets to celebrate the appointment of Chilean women to such high political office, a long-awaited aspiration of the national and worldwide women’s movement.