Many of the universities in the world have years of history. In our region of O’Higgins, our state university opened its doors in 2016, so it is just writing the passages of its life. And it will remain in its pages the fact that the first rector of the University of O’Higgins (UOH) has been in office for about six months.
She is Fernanda Kri Amar, a computer professional always linked to the educational area. For more than 15 years she has worked on issues related to the quality of education through management positions and leading national projects. Since her time at MINEDUC, she brought with her a romantic idea of what it is to create a university from scratch, adding her experience in university management. She remembers that she came to the UOH invited by Rafael Correa, former rector, to assume leadership in the pro-rector’s office (November 2020), being especially in charge of the entity’s accreditation process.
LEADERSHIP WITH A WOMAN’S NAME
“Advancing gender equality is everyone’s task to build a more just society. Therefore, it is vital to generate networks between us. We can do all the fights we have to fight with better results when we all do it together and that gives us more strength to continue,” the rector tells us when we sit down to talk about female leadership on this International Women’s Day.
In her opinion, assuming leadership roles is important and a challenge for women. “We live in a patriarchal world and universities are generally like that. For many years, higher education was reserved for men and especially when studying. We see what we have advanced and in the number of female leaders worldwide who come to take on leadership that has always been masculine, more authoritarian, focused more on results and profits. However, female leadership is more collaborative and more focused on the common good,” the doctor said. And she focuses this challenge on her own leadership style, one that is more collaborative and participatory. “When this is the case I feel that it is easier to manage the work teams. Each one contributes from themselves to building a university. This way you have more support and they become part of this work. I have been very lucky because I have had trustworthy teams that are very committed to the project.”
This Computer Civil Engineering from the University of Santiago de Chile has always been linked to a sexist training area. She believes that there are still many gender stereotypes and customs that have been normalized, “from talking about your clothes, weight or hair, to more complicated problems such as not letting you present your projects or your opinion. I have not experienced this so much at this university because it is a very young entity in its staff and management and teaching bodies, which in general are very young, a generation that already comes with a very different perspective,” Kri indicated. “When you are the first woman in a role, which had always been occupied by men, prejudices arise, everyone is watching to make sure you don’t make a mistake, there is more pressure. But it is a challenge to be a reference for these new generations in different areas of development, pursuing their vocation and skills,” she added.
GENDER LOOK IN EDUCATION
Races have no gender and this rector knows that very well. “While it is a social justice issue, it is more than that. If you have men and women debating an issue in a gender-diverse classroom, you will have diverse points of view. Therefore, your solutions are going to be better, different and more innovative. Having more women in science and engineering, for example, will not only allow us to have more female engineers, but also to make engineers better,” explained the representative.
He recalled that in some universities gender quotas have existed for many years. In this regard, the UOH emerges with a strong focus on a gender approach, “not only because the ministry requests it or because it is reactive, but because long before the universities of the Council of Rectors started many before with the issue of violence against women. In our case, it started first with an office in Gender Equality and then to an address to be part of this work,” she highlighted. “Within all its policies, the first of this university was gender equality, paying great attention to parity, in teams, to promoting a model of sanction and also prevention. If we do not do prevention training we will not advance.”
Added to these advances today is a project funded by the Ministry of Sciences, which is based on developing research with a gender and gender perspective. “For example, when I take a group to test a technique, it is representative of the population. And I say this because we must mainstream the gender approach in everything we do and in every decision we make, whether in management, teaching, and also in research,” our interviewee stressed.
WOMEN IN SCIENCE
The sciences are an environment mostly marked by the presence of men. That is why for some years the UOH has had gender equality quotas for enrollment in careers linked to the STEM industry (science, technology, engineering and mathematics, for its acronym in English), which are open to women who are on a career waiting list. This year, Rector Kri emphasizes to us, the Undersecretary of Higher Education installed it for the entire single admission system (Entry through PAES). “Although we had this option before, this 2024 we promoted it and thus managed to enter, in the emblematic case of Engineering, a total of 35 women.”
It is worth mentioning that when this initiative was implemented, the number of women who entered regularly also increased, according to the rector, “which shows how cultural it is. Culturally, there is a lot of disincentive for young women to apply to this area and this situation arose that allowed many more women to enter directly and not only through gender quotas.”
Finally, she reflects in her capacity as an expert and as an engineer, that at the national level “we still have engineering very reserved for men, as well as pedagogies, very reserved for women. If you look at the academic bodies, something similar happens. At the UOH, for example, we generally have a lot of equivalence in gender, but not when we see them separated by major, where in engineering there is still a deficit.”
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