Since last year Chilean women are a majority in higher education
and increasing Last year was the first time that a majority –
51% - of all higher education students in Chile were women, the
Education Ministry reported last week. “This is a global trend,”
said Jaime Bellolio, an economist at the Jaime Guzmán
Foundation. “In developed countries this has happened, and Chile
is a little behind.” Bellolio credited two factors for the
phenomenon: that women working outside of the home are becoming
more accepted by society, and that the gap of salaries between
men and women is becoming smaller, although it still exists.
This is an incentive for women to get a degree to find higher
paying jobs, he said. Andrés Bernasconi, academic vice rector of
the Universidad Andrés Bello, said he believed that another key
to understanding this trend was the incorporation of lower-
income students into higher education. When access to financial
aid was harder, families discriminated in favor of their sons,
so there were more men in