Mexico. In the third quarter of 2017, the number of people employed in the telecommunications sector was equivalent to 207,652, of which 22.8% were women and the rest were men. This translates into a gap equivalent to 54.4% of total employees.
Although this differential alone is high, when put into perspective, it is much larger than that of the labor market as a whole, since when looking at the gender composition of the Economically Active Population (EAP) employed, of the 52.4 million people in this area, 37.90% are women and, consequently, 37.9%, men, that is, a differential of 24.2% with respect to the total.
On the other hand, the gender gap has registered an all-time high since in the third quarter of 2017 it became the highest since the first quarter of 2011, when 34.4% of employees in the telecommunications sector were women.
In this sense, there is a linear trend increasing in the number of men who manage to insert themselves into the labor market of the telecommunications sector, while there is a decreasing trend for the case of women. It is striking that in the first half of 2016 the gap amounted to 38% of total employees, implying that in one year it increased 16.4 percentage points.
One of the explanations for the persistent gap in the sector is the low participation of women in undergraduate and postgraduate degrees related to new technologies.
Therefore, it is essential to promote among women the development of skills around information and communication technologies (ICT) that attract them to this type of careers and specializations. An increase in the number of women in ICT studies would not only increase the pool of specialized human capital, but would also narrow the gender gap in the sector.
Text written by Laura Castillo of The Social Intelligence Unit.
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