Mujeres en la élite del poder. La presencia de las mujeres en los gabinetes ministeriales latinoamericanos (1978–2021)

Résumé

There is an academic consensus, based on empirical evidence, that Latin American ministerial cabinets are gendered. Thus, despite the increase in the number of women in the region’s governments, there is still an underrepresentation in relation to the number of men. However, this genericization is not only manifested in quantitative terms, but is also expressed in terms of the distribution of portfolios. While men tend to hold ministries oriented to the public sphere such as Economy or Defense, women tend to occupy others such as Health, Family or Education. In order to verify the presence and roles of women in Latin American cabinets, this paper uses descriptive statistics to explore an original database made up of the analyzes of the 6,305 ministers appointed to lead the ministerial portfolios (5,337 men and 968 women) from the 18 countries of the region from 1978 to 2021. From the analysis it can be extracted that in the cabinets there is not only an overrepresentation of men, but that women tend to concentrate in portfolios linked to the social sphere.