Graduate Training

Fifty female social scientists donated their testimonies to this book. This chapter’s analysis sheds light on their experiences of gender inequality and violence, personal or witnessed during their graduate training. The narratives collected reveal three major areas of vulnerability. First, the androcentric symbolic mechanisms (experienced in daily interactions inside and outside the classrooms) naturalize a masculine vision of scientific and academic prestige in universities. Second, class discrimination has specific effects on women and is exacerbated by the gender discrimination they suffer. Finally, the chapter identifies mechanisms of racial labeling based on women’s phenotypes and regional and/or national origin. Addressing these aspects will enrich the statistical diagnoses of the phenomenon developed in Chap. 3. It will also help us understand why, despite a greater number of women in social sciences postgraduate courses in Chile (and worldwide) compared to other fields of knowledge, female social scientists still do not experience minimum conditions of equity in their education.