Hasta las mujeres con estudio batallan

My name is Maria Elena Guardado, I am 37 years old, and I am living in San Antonio, Texas with my family.

When I used to live in Mexico, my family was moderately well off. We lived in San Luis Potosi, which is only a couple of hours north of Mexico DF. That is where I grew up. My great-grandfather was a politician working for the state of San Luis, and I am not too familiar with any accomplishments he may have made or not--but it is because of him that my family is a lot better off today than it could have been before.

I attended good secondary and preparatory schools in Mexico; in San Luis Potosi, and I was thankful to acquire an education without having to suffer as much as the vast majority of Mexicans have to suffer. 80% of Mexicans live in poverty and I think 40% live in extreme poverty in Mexico.

After I received my bachillerato from my preparatory college, I applied and was accepted at Tecnológico Monterrey. I have to say that Monterrey Tech is definitely one of the more expensive more well-renowned schools in Mexico. The exams to qualify for admission were very difficult and I spent a great deal of my time after I graduated from my preparatory to get ready for admissions process at Monterrey.

When i started school there, I was about twenty, maybe nineteen, I chose to study managerial psychology. This type of career is usually for human resources development, but it's something that interested me some. There were a lot of women in my class who were studying this same degree, and out of our class there were maybe four or five guys who were also in the same area of study. I felt pretty comfortable being surrounded in my classes with so many women, I really felt like i could breathe in there more comfortably than I ever could in the lectures that were more mathematically or scientifically oriented.

In our first year, our professors would tell us that we were the best in Mexico, they would say, "for all you graduating from here, you will receive so many job offers. This university carries a lot of weight and prestige and all of you will be the most qualified in your fields. Be prepared for at least four or five offers in your last year."

At the time it sounded like a wonderful dream, I thought to myself "just one good job offer would be enough!" I found out a hard version of reality as the time came close to graduation, and that is that no matter what level of education a woman has in Mexico, even at such a prestigious university as Monterrey, we are still considered less compatible for being hired than even mediocre men.

I mean, at that university we were all brains. The girls in my class were the sort who would cry if they saw a B on an exam. We all took our studies very seriously. I, for example, graduated summa cum laude, but even this type of preparation did not really and truthfully prepare me for the type of things we all saw.

Out of the five men who graduated with us, maybe one of them stood out. He was a real nerd and very intelligent. The rest were very mediocre. a couple were a little better than others but there was one that was real dud. I mean that guy shouldn't have been at this university at all, and with a class of such capable and engaging women, I really felt so good about all of us there together. This was an area where men couldn't tell us a thing about male privilege, we had them schooled in this area of psychology.

But you know what? If you look up any of those five men who graduated with us, they are all directors of human resources or development or something with whatever company they're in. The nerdy one is I think the director of human resources at Pepsi-Co Mexico. And all of the rest have 'director' their name, whether it be for a regional district or for a state or whatever the area, all of the men got really good jobs and easily moved up. One of them works for a top cement company in Mexico. Two work in Mexico City doing something with the federal government, but I can't remember exactly what. The point is, of the few men who studied the managerial psychology field, all of them became bigshots.

And you would think that if some losers with a degree from a good university could land such great jobs, that the rest of us could do something similar. But no. The educated woman in Mexico doesn't get much treatment better than even the factory woman worker.

My first job I had getting out of the university, I was fired within three months. Do you want to know why? because I was pregnant. I knew I was pregnant when I applied for the job, but i knew that if I let them know, I would never have a chance at the job. And if I waited to look for a job after I had Sarahi, all my possibilities would be gone with a snap of the fingers because then not only would I have a baby, I would have no experience, and so I would not meet the criteria that many companies had for women searching for jobs.

It's an awful working environment for women. And don't be fooled into thinking that it is only the sector that deals with entry-level manufacturing jobs or low-level service jobs. Every job I applied for was managerial or adminstrative, and it was so difficult to even qualify for the interview without lying about my pregnancy, and then afterwards about my daughter.

But there are a lot of things that happen in human resources at many companies in how they discriminate against women and even in how they discriminate against some men. I worked in human resources. I hired people to work for my company. I worked for Sam's Club--Mexico. There was criteria that we were obligated to follow, and it made it difficult for anyone to get a job.

END OF PART 1.