They program robots and study electromechanics: "This still looks like a man's job"

Paula Higuera, 22, has three industrial engineering courses at the university behind her, but “it didn't convince me and I ended up leaving it.

Thomas Osborne
Thomas Osborne
24 December 2022 Saturday 23:37
12 Reads
They program robots and study electromechanics: "This still looks like a man's job"

Paula Higuera, 22, has three industrial engineering courses at the university behind her, but “it didn't convince me and I ended up leaving it. I've been here since February and I like this a lot, ”she explains while reviewing a PLC (a programmable logic controller, for those less skilled in automation) with her classmates, the task that the tutor has given them in these final days of the term.

Paula studies at the San José de València Schools, a center founded at the beginning of the 20th century to respond to the needs of the Valencian industry with young labor. Since the 1960s, the center has been located in this building on the current Avenida de las Cortes Valencianas (it was first on Gran Vía), where more than 2,000 students study, many of them in Vocational Training courses. And in these, women are an exception, especially in technical training.

We see him walking through its corridors and its spacious workshop, which emulates the interior of a large factory where young people learn, for example, to assemble and disassemble the electrical installation that a home needs, from scratch. Practicing we find Lucía Sajeras, 22, who combines her work as an operator in a production line for car airbags with classes at this center.

"I wanted to improve and I applied for a position as a manager, but I was 19 years old and they told me that I better study something else and try again, that's why I'm here," she says. She had previously worked in a bar and her vocation that electromechanics awakens her, she never found before in classes, where she always dragged bad grades. "I was never a good student, but I like this, otherwise I would have left it already." She is the only woman in the class, and she says that she has never felt discriminated against, but she knows that the rest, from the outside, see this profession as "a man's job." In fact, the vacancy she wants to apply for in her company, in the maintenance department, has only been filled once by a woman.

Why is there little presence of women?, we launched them. Paula Higuera believes that because "until recently FP was not well regarded and they are still very focused on men". Next to her, her male colleagues point out that perhaps it influences the fact that robotics "is seen as a profession for nerds and geeks and that has always been more masculinized."

Referents in some cases help to change that perspective, as in the case of Naira Vintila, 16 years old, and Jezabel Gómez, 25 years old. Both are studying mechanics and have friends and relatives with degrees in similar industries. They have never felt discriminated against, but they admit that when they entered "I thought I would be alone," says Jezebel. She works on a packaging line and hopes that her vocational training studies will allow her to change jobs; Naira at the moment does not know which path she will choose herself.

Knowing them dismantles prejudices, because both Paula Higuera and Amanda Huguet, 22, plan to continue studying at the University when they leave these workshops. The first contemplates taking a new degree from the Polytechnic, the second studying electrical engineering once this course is finished. She did not have the initial support of her family-"my parents wanted me to do high school, but I didn't want to"-and now she is happy with the classes because "I like what I do. Among my friends it is quite normalized because there are many who study FP”, says Amanda.

The portrait of these schools serves in part to explain the reality of Vocational Training, where there is much more female students in administrative or healthcare courses than in industrial areas, "and it's something I don't know how we can change", assumes Antonio Alhambra, the FP director of the San José Schools. Alhambra considers that the educational orientation still has work to publicize all the options that are in the market, because he finds many companies that come to look for students at his center and leave without success. “I think there is no offer adjusted to current demands and also the stigma of vocational training is still dragging on, which was where bad students used to end up”, he points out.

The evolution of the qualification of women in FP shows a growth in the last years. According to the 2022 report from Caixabank Dualiza, in the 2019-20 academic year the proportion of women graduates has grown by one percentage point in Basic Vocational Training in the last five years, although it warns that in Higher Education they are already more than half. In general, the proportion of women graduates is higher than those enrolled in the previous academic year (2018-19) and these data, the same report acknowledges, could point to a higher performance of women in FP.

However, even though they come closer to these studies, there is still an imbalance in the modalities they study. An example: in the Valencian Community, in the vocational training programs for employment offered by the Labora employment service, they still have little presence in electricity and electronics courses (11%), energy and water (13%), manufacturing mechanics (14%) or transport and maintenance of vehicles (14%). Instead, they represent 90% of those enrolled in arts and crafts, 81% in health modules or 75% in administration and management.

Current trends suggest that in Spain only 12 out of 100 students from industrial families or STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) in FP are women, although their presence is growing in both branches: 7.3% and 10. 3%, respectively. They open the way and normalize, without realizing it, that it is not surprising to see a woman working in a mechanical workshop, for example. "She didn't know what she wanted to study, but she did know that she preferred to touch cables rather than not," explains Paula Higuera. Perhaps to overcome the barriers that still torpedo VT and even more to the presence of women in its most industrial branches, experts say, the key is not so much knowing what you want to study but being clear about what you want to be when you grow up .