Experiences and Challenges of Women Belonging to the Mexican National Researchers System
Abstract
The urge of granting women access to education has been present ever science remote times. Nevertheless, the first publications about women researchers in Mexico can only be tracked back 80 years. The most recent interest has focused on the vicissitudes a woman faces in her career as a researcher, more specifically as a member of the National Researchers System (SNI). Thus, in the present study, it was intended to comprehend the experiences and identify the challenges these researchers face in order to become members of the system, keep their permanence and get promoted. This is a qualitative research based upon the interpretative paradigm. Semi-structured interviews were used to collect the information and it was analyzed through the comparison method. It was found out that the participants perceived challenges at a personal and at an institutional level. Both levels served as metacategories. The personal challenges one was divided into two categories. The first one being “becoming a researcher”, which refers to the hardships they faced in order to achieve the status and the significance it has for them. The second one centers in the role family has in their life, the difficulties they´ve encountered to balance it with their work, and the support they had to overcome these. In the metacategory of the institutional, meanwhile, the researchers had to face cultural and political differences of two different institutions: their university and the National Researchers System. The main findings were that women face challenges in balancing personal life and work and the importance the family has in balancing it out in both public and private institutions. With regards of the professional development, there are two common challenges: difficulty to produce new researches and the education of new researchers. In public universities, the reason is the lack of time due to maternity leaves and attention to their family in general, whilst at the private institutions there is a lack of time to revise and publish new papers and the fact that there are no postgraduate programs that are oriented towards research.
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