Teaching segregation at the University of León

Abstract

From the Sociology of Labor, Anthropology, Gender Sociology, and Sociology of Education, the processes of labor segregation to which women are subjected (horizontal and vertical) are being denounced. Since the eighties of the 20th century, Spanish university classrooms have been feminized. Proportionally, female students are the majority of the graduates, but they still have more difficulties than their peers to find a job, get out of job insecurity, receive the same salary for the same job, have the same opportunities for promotion, etc. In addition, we ask ourselves if an institution such as the university, formally egalitarian, seat of science, objectivity, rationality, maintains mechanisms of closure and social exclusion that hinder women’s access to university teaching, and female professors to promotion, especially the promotion to the body of university full professors, producing and reproducing what we know as glass ceilings. In the light of the data, it is verified that female university professors concentrate on certain branches of knowledge (horizontal segregation) and on certain categories of professors (vertical segregation).Access and promotion in the University are based on meritocracy, hence its image of objectivity, neutrality, equal opportunities. It is difficult to understand and make understand that the university culture itself has biases, gender codes, which apply mechanisms of discrimination towards female professors. It is important to know the concrete situations that are lived within the universities. Moreover, this is what we have proposed for the University of León (ULE).By adopting a gender perspective and analyzing secondary data, we verify the horizontal and vertical segregation to which the female professors are subjected. Likewise, we discovered the existence of the glass ceiling: the proportion of female professors in the ULE is lower than the national average.