Class Strategies Are Gendered: Female Social Scientists’ Access to Higher Education in Chile

Introduction

This article presents a qualitative study on how female social scientists in Chile accessed their undergraduate education. It aims to understand what motivated them to choose this academic field and how this decision was linked to the class strategies and gender mandates of their families. Drawing on Bourdieu, ¹ we analyze how the gendered dimension of inequalities in higher education is articulated with family class expectations. We also contemplate the role of intersectional markers that relegate certain groups to the periphery of the educational system. ² Specifically, we focus on how this intersectionality affects women from their childhood (connecting, for example, with the conceptions of their family environment about their gender roles).

The number of women in universities has progressively increased since the 1970s in the Global North and the 1990s in the Global South. Today, women globally account for 53% of undergraduate enrollments, 55% of master's, and 44% of doctorates. ³ This female majority is concentrated in the social sciences, arts and humanities, journalism and information, and health and welfare, fields with lower remuneration, prestige, and salaries. ⁴ Between 2000 and 2019, women aged from 18 to 24 went from representing 25% to 59.7% of university matriculations in Latin America and the Caribbean. ⁵ In 2022, they accounted for 61.7% of those entering higher education. ⁶ In the region, the highest female presence is found in social sciences, information and journalism (58.2%), education (73.3%), and health and welfare (72.4%). ⁷

Chile has followed this global and regional trend in a prominent way. By the mid-1980s, women accounted for 39.5% of university enrollments (this rate was 25.1% in 1940). ⁸ In the 1990s, Chilean women showed sustained growth in their entry into formal schooling, surpassing their male peers in educational achievements. ⁹ At that time, female enrollments predominated in university degrees whose professional practice often led to lower salaries (humanities, social sciences, and social and health care). ¹⁰ Therefore, the greater participation of Chilean women in higher education did not result in direct improvement of their position in the labor market. ¹¹ Currently, women represent 54% of all undergraduate, 51% of master's, and 43% of doctorate matriculations in all fields of study in Chile.^12,13 The masculinization of technology sciences and the feminization of social, educational, and health sciences have been confirmed.^14,15 In social sciences, women represent about 65% of undergraduate, 55% of master's, and 51% of doctoral enrollments in the country. ¹⁶

However, our perspective in this study seeks to challenge the dominant views in international public policies and previous studies regarding female participation in higher education and scientific activities, which are predominantly grounded in quantitative diagnoses. This heavy reliance on statistical indicators often renders invisible the diverse symbolic, relational, affective, and emotional mechanisms through which gender inequalities are reproduced in academic spaces. Furthermore, it obscures the fact that these inequalities are deeply rooted in women's life trajectories, influenced by multiple factors that extend beyond the academic environments. Our research aims to broaden these perspectives by using a qualitative approach. Specifically, we demonstrate how the educational and professional trajectories of female social scientists in Chile must be understood through broader-scale processes, which focus on and involve their families’ histories and experiences. This entails, on the one hand, observing the configuration and changes in their families’ gender relations with a transgenerational approach. On the other hand, it requires considering the heterogeneities that mark women's lives by investigating the experiences of female academics with varied profiles of age, ethnicity, ideological stances, career and disciplinary paths, and embedded in universities of diverse types (public and private; secular and religious; small, medium, and large size).

With these orientations in mind, in 2023, we conducted semi-structured qualitative interviews with 50 female social scientists working in universities in northern, central, and southern Chile. From our dialogues with them, we reconstructed their trajectories accessing undergraduate studies, emphasizing how they were influenced by family relationships. For many, studying at a higher level meant revolutionizing family class patterns. For others, it meant challenging gender mandates and engaging in work that was unthinkable for previous generations of women. We also observed the crucial role that women play in inspiring other women in contexts that otherwise distance them from seeking a future at university. Therefore, this study investigates how the feminization of social science degrees in Chile is produced from a qualitative perspective. We seek elements to interpret the quantitative data from the relational nuances that sustain them in the concrete experiences of our interviewees. To frame these debates, in the second section, we will discuss the genderization of access to higher education based on Bourdieu's concepts of class strategies and cultural capital. We will expand these ideas with an intersectional perspective. The third section will present the methodology of the study and the sample profile. The fourth will go into the empirical results, analyzing how the women came to their decision to pursue higher education. The fifth will address how this decision impacted gender mandates and family expectations. The sixth section will draw on the female figures who supported or inspired our interviewees, while the seventh will focus on the conflicts linked to this whole process. The final section synthesizes the concluding axes of the study.

Theoretical Debates

This study draws on Pierre Bourdieu's debates on class strategies and the Latin American feminist critiques of the intersectional character of educational inequalities.

Bourdieu's ¹⁷ reflection is triggered by how relations, actions, and strategies (of individuals, groups, or institutions) allow the social order to endure. The author distrusted both the arguments that asserted the unchanging character of this order and the assumptions about the full capacity of subjects to alter their realities according to their desires. ¹⁸

From this prism, he constructed an articulation between the Marxist notion of “position” and the Weberian notion of class “situation.” ¹⁹ In doing so, he proposed an interpretation of the processes of social inequality that articulates “objectifiable,” symbolic,” and “relational” aspects. ²⁰ In this theorization, he redefined the set of relations and materialities of social groups, conceiving them as derived from the possession of a set of forms of capital (social, cultural, symbolic, and economic) that, distributed asymmetrically, constitute the social field. ²¹

For the author, individuals and groups develop class strategies aimed at appropriating different capitals according to the possibilities or limitations that their origins condition. ²² In these processes, they establish their location in the social field (the class in itself) and their distance in relation to others (the class for itself). These elements endure over time, being transmitted between people who share the same social location through two or more generations. When this occurs, they come to constitute class conditioning, ²³ which is centrally linked to the way subjects assume their cultural capital in the dispute for power and positioning. This last concept is fundamental in studies on education because it alludes to the knowledge and resources embodied by people and disseminated through their social relations. ²⁴ According to Bourdieu, ²⁵ three states of cultural capital can be distinguished.

Embodied refers to how bodies are configured by their environments, gaining specific forms from practices, knowledge, and relational contexts. ²⁶ It also alludes to how historical notions of otherness impact corporeality with respect to the phenotype, aesthetics, and presentation of people, their way of moving, behaving, and relating to others in public and private spheres. ²⁷ Objectified refers to the belongings that give people social prestige and that can, in certain circumstances, be exchanged for economic goods (enabling transit of permanence in certain places). ²⁸ Institutionalized refers to the knowledge acquired through social institutions that are enabled for this purpose. ²⁹ For example, accessing formal education and being recognized for this experience (receiving a diploma) allow people to navigate through specific social spaces and relationships. ³⁰ Hence, when they wish and project upward social change for their children, parents invest resources in their formal education, seeking institutions that guarantee good subsequent social recognition. ³¹

Bourdieu’ feminist criticism has expanded these reflections on cultural capital (especially the embodied one, habitus). Several authors have contributed to this debate since the 1990s. Considering the topics investigated in this study, it is worth returning specifically to Skeggs’ ³² inferences. First, she highlighted that Bourdieu addressed several central issues relevant to feminist theorists of his time (such as the sex–gender division of labor, masculine domination, and the impact of both on how people perceive, represent, and live in the world). ³³ Nevertheless, the author made minimal reference to these previous theorists, making it difficult for contemporary and subsequent feminists to fully engage with his debates. ³⁴ Despite this, and secondly, Bourdieu's theorization fostered a feminist re-dimensioning of social class, emphasizing that paternal and maternal family trajectories are key to understanding why people tend to make educational, employment, and consumption choices that align with gender-specific imaginings and mandates. ³⁵ Key to this analysis is the socially undervalued role of mothers’ domestic and care work. ³⁶

This perspective was fruitfully conceived within feminism from an intersectional perspective, therefore assuming the articulations between ethnicity, racialization, age, and people's migratory status (among other elements). The debate on intersectionality was introduced into the social sciences from the field of law in the early 1990s by Black feminists, starting with Crenshaw. ³⁷ Her reflections brought together an important critique of White middle- and upper-class liberal feminisms, which often assumed the role of authoritative voices on women's oppression. These mainstream feminisms did not always recognize (or make visible) the differences in perspective, obstacles, and levels of oppression experienced by the most vulnerable due to other axes of social hierarchization. ³⁸ This distortion has had a violent effect on the forms of representation of the struggle against androcentric violence.

Over the last three decades, authors writing from the Global South—a perspective to which we adhere in this study—have added a decolonizing dimension to these feminist reflections. For example, Spivak ³⁹ noted the historical continuities in the postcolonial production of subaltern subjects. Native women from formerly colonized territories continue to be marginalized primarily through the construction of hegemonic discourses, both inside their own countries and on an international scale. This persistent marginalization of women is based on a process of epistemic violence. However, it is shaped in a tacitly contradictory way, as these women occupy key functions in the reproduction of the societies in which they participate. Therefore, their recurrent symbolic marginalization forces them into a dialectical condition of being a silent center. ⁴⁰

In Latin America, the critical reflections derived from this were especially compelling in education studies, a field where it is much more difficult to understand personal trajectories without viewing them from these intersectional perspectives. ⁴¹ In this debate, the feminist intersectional perspective has also expanded Bourdieu's class analysis on the production of subjectivities. ⁴² Several authors have empirically and theoretically demonstrated how embodied cultural capital becomes incomprehensible if its impact on the production of subjectivities is ignored. Bourdieu's concept of habitus

[…] rel[ies] on ideas about self-interest, investment and/or “playing the game”. As people are increasingly expected to publicly legitimate themselves as good and worthy subjects and as capital increasingly enters the spaces of intimacy and bio-politics, we need to consider the limits of our theoretical imaginaries for understanding the value production necessary to the performance of personhood. Specifically, most of the theories we have for understanding the connections between personhood and value reproduce and legitimate the normative, hinging our theoretical imaginary to the dominant symbolic, making proper personhood an exclusive resource predicated on constitution by exclusion; where limits define the norm, the margins the center and the improper the proper. How then can we understand how people who are excluded from the possibilities of accruing and attaching value to themselves, who are positioned outside of the dominant symbolic as the constitutional limit for the proper self or as the zero limit to culture, develop value/s? ⁴³

This study aims to address the interpretive distortions identified by Skeggs in this excerpt. We are interested in observing how the processes of creating internal and external gender boundaries within individuals, in the context of early family socialization experiences, generate limits and possibilities in the social fields. However, we also investigate how these processes affect the production of value that women can incorporate and sustain in their educational and professional performances, examining their impact on personality, affections, and emotional configurations.

Thus, this study considers that the family is one of the main articulators of social mobility and reproduction strategies through educational capital. ⁴⁴ Therefore, at least three embodied dimensions of this capital are implied in the trajectory of the subjects: (i) that which comes from the history of their subgroup or class, often given by the family unit to which they belong; (ii) the history of the social spaces through which they move; and (iii) their own itinerary and personal history through these environments. ⁴⁵ The type of cultural capital that people experience does not depend solely on their desire, awareness, or action; it presupposes a social history that is prior to them, that they live and transform with their experience, and that, likewise, surpasses them. ⁴⁶ In the decisions on children's access to education, the preservation and rupture of power asymmetries are disputed, gender asymmetries being fundamental among them.^47,48

Gilligan and Snider ⁴⁹ observed that many of the gender asymmetries are rooted in patriarchal symbolisms that “make us consider human capabilities ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine’ and privilege the masculine ones.” ⁵⁰ This fosters a conceptualization of men as self-made persons (“beings-for-themselves”) and of women as responsible for creating and sustaining relational ties (“beings-for-others”). ⁵¹ This drives men to locate and perform in the world by centralizing themselves, while women are driven to fulfill themselves from the imperative to abandon their centrality in a (self-)sacrificial way to care for others. ⁵² Personal decisions about educational and professional futures are articulated with these gender symbolisms and their role in allocating socially validated spaces for one another.

The feminist perspective on education has expanded these arguments by demonstrating that class strategies are influenced by other social classifications that cause marginalization (such as ethnicity, age, migratory status, and sexual orientation). ⁵³ These aspects shape the limits and possibilities of people when positioning themselves in the social field. ⁵⁴ Regarding access to higher education, it is accepted that class strategies operate from a set of symbolisms, moralities, and regulations that designate the locations and activities specific to each gender. ⁵⁵ However, it is also made explicit that racial hierarchies cross these constructions and magnify the vulnerability of populations considered non-White (Indigenous, Afro-descendants, mestizos).^56,57

Recent studies carried out in Chile have observed the intersectional persistence of gender gaps in access to university. ⁵⁸ They have also shown that the predominant patriarchal worldviews affect women's possibilities in this field, naturalizing their exercise in relational and care degrees. ⁵⁹ Furthermore, the predominance of women's education in the social sciences, health, and humanities triggers labor segregation that is difficult to reverse ⁶⁰ since these are the careers that enjoy the lowest monetary and symbolic recognition. ⁶¹

All these aspects appear in the accounts of the women interviewed. However, before we analyze them, let us take a look at the methodology and sample profile of the study.

Methodology

In this research, we conducted 50 semi-structured qualitative interviews with female social science academics working in Chile. ⁶² We adopted an intersubjective, reflective, and experiential methodological perspective, recognizing ourselves as part of the community we were investigating. ⁶³ We constructed the interview script between January and March 2023 in meetings with our entire research team (then composed of four anthropologists and two sociologists). In these instances, and in coherence with the methodology adopted, we decided to include ourselves in the sample: the first six interviews of the study were conducted within the team itself. This material was transcribed, anonymized, and included in the analysis.

Between July and August 2023, we conducted the remaining interviews with female academics in public and private universities (secular and religious) in nine Chilean cities. We began by surveying the country's 55 universities, looking for those that had departments, institutes, or research centers in one of the social sciences disciplines: sociology, anthropology, political science, social communication and/or journalism, social work, and education. ⁶⁴

We compiled a list of female academics in these units. Next, we selected the interviewees, aiming to have diverse profiles in terms of age, origin and/or ethnic affiliation, social class, type of work relationship, and field of knowledge in which they operate. In addition, we sought to gather geographically diverse accounts from the country's northern, central, and southern macro-zones. We interviewed fifteen female academics in the northern macro-zone (30% of the sample), in the cities of Arica (six) and Iquique (nine). Another twenty-one were interviewed in the central macro-zone (42%), all in Santiago. We interviewed fourteen female academics in the southern macro-zone (28%), in Valdivia (five), Concepción (four), Temuco (two), Osorno (one), Puerto Montt (one), and Coyhaique (1).

The interviews varied in length and took place over one or two meetings. Twenty-nine were face-to-face, and twenty-one were virtual (using Zoom). Each interview was anonymized, with each person choosing a pseudonym or initials to protect their identities. In addition, each participant signed an informed consent document. The recordings were transcribed in parallel to the interviews. Each transcript then underwent a process of anonymization of personal names, institutions cited, disciplines, work themes, cities, and countries. We then sent the transcripts to our interlocuters, who reviewed the material. This latter procedure lasted until November 2023.

The discourse analysis of the interviews was carried out until March 2024 with the support of the MAXQDA software. We developed an interpretative matrix composed of eight macro-categories, subdivided into 101 codes. This article analyzes the results of the “undergraduate experiences” macro-category.

Reaching University

Three factors pushed our interviewees to study for a university degree. The first alludes to family expectations. For the 13 women (26%) whose mothers and/or fathers’ have higher education, these expectations are related to upholding their class status. Going to university was an obligation: “There was no other option in my family. The prospect was always to go to university; this was never even questioned. It was the logic: ‘You have to go to university’” (CG, July 11, 2023). Some interviewees wanted to rebel, but they were met with resistance from their parents:

I expressed that I didn’t want to study at university. Then my parents said: “You must study! It was not an inspiration, but “You have to study!” They didn’t care much about what I studied. The experience of going to university was enough for them. (Helen, July 14, 2023)

However, investment in formal education also appears in the narratives as one of the class strategies that most mobilized resources in families with expectations of transgenerational social ascent. For twelve interviewees (24%) who came from impoverished sectors, attending university meant access to economic stability. They also felt that continuing their studies was a family mandate:

I always had the goal of going to university. It was not so much my own goal. I liked the idea, but it was expected of me and my brother in our generation. Our parents didn’t go to university, so we had to go further. As a girl, I had a bee in my bonnet [was obsessed] about going to university. Whenever I could, I would go to my cousins’ house, which had a computer, because I didn’t have one. I would search the curricula [of undergraduate courses] at their house. I wanted to study psychology, so I searched for study programs and reviewed the subjects. I was very young; I was 13 years old […]. I used to think: “I have to take the entrance test!” At that time, it was the Academic Aptitude Test. I was stressed at 13 years old, thinking about what I would do if I didn’t do well on this test. I was under pressure. (Andrea, July 13, 2023)

For Amanda, who grew up in a rural village in Argentina, this mandate was shared with the families of her primary school classmates. Local parents who actively demanded the opening of a public secondary school created a shared expectation about the educational future of her generation:

We never had any doubt that we had to go to university. Our parents had fought to get the [public] secondary school in our town. My mum was on the committee with the other parents of my classmates. Several years before we reached secondary school, they had started pushing for the school to be created […]. I don’t remember ever thinking I wouldn’t go to university; I was always sure that it was something I had to do […]. I don’t remember making the decision; the idea had already been planted since they had opened the secondary school. (Amanda, July 12, 2023)

Fresa also comes from a family with low socioeconomic stratification. Her mother encouraged her to continue her studies, but her primary motivation for going to university was a mandate from her teachers:

Fundamentally, it was my teachers who influenced me in these decisions […]. But where I did my secondary education, the school encouraged us a lot, and so did the teachers; they talked about university as a way to improve oneself. Going to university was the way to climb socially. There was no other way at school […]. The only way to get out of there was to hold the school's name high and study for a university degree. That is what influenced my decision to go to university. They [her teachers] provided the setting for that to happen. (Fresa, August 10, 2023)

Second, several interviewees studied out of a motivation to change living conditions naturalized in their family environments. Flaka explained the need to break free from stereotyped female roles:

I didn’t want to repeat my mom's story; I didn’t want to be like her. I studied in a traditional nuns’ school here in southern Chile, highly conservative […]. My dream was to leave school and go to university through the gates of medical school. That's what I imagined […]; I wasn’t going to marry. There was no dream of a white church wedding; that dream never existed. (Flaka, July 20, 2023)

Flor, Juno, and Josefa lacked the resources that guarantee university studies and/or came from families in which their parents did not have higher education. Nevertheless, from an early age, they had wanted to study at university:

What came after secondary school was a problem. Obviously, my mother didn’t have the money to pay for university, and I thought the only way to access university studies was by having money […]. I worked in a chemical laboratory to pay my university fees; there I saved my money. I’d always wanted to go to university. (Flor, July 21, 2023)

The different concepts of public services in different national contexts affect personal trajectories. Flor was born and raised in Chile, where public universities are fee-paying (and can be more expensive than private ones). For her, the only way to access higher education was through working and saving for it. Josefa was born and raised in Brazil, where public universities do not charge fees. Hence, she could envisage continuing her education without so much financial pressure.

Third, we have the cases of colleagues like Valentina and María. Both had at least one parent with a university degree, but their desire to study manifested at a very early age and was related to an early (vocational) interest in knowledge. However, the trajectory of our interviewees from low-income sectors is marked by the imperative to push oneself: a pressure to ensure the consolidation of the family's transformation project through study. This self-imposed effort to persevere in education appears in some accounts as a class strategy and an innovation experienced for the first time in their family environments. In those cases, in which mothers and/or fathers had university studies by applying this strategy, the experience of sacrifice is more consolidated. Consequently, it constitutes class conditioning: a crystallized way of projecting the displacements of each person in the family in the social field that lasts two (or more) generations.

Aitana, who is Spanish, is her family's first university-educated generation. She is also the first urban generation on both her mother's and father's sides of the family. Her experience is marked by her parents’ investment aimed at changing the educational trajectory of their daughters. They keenly wanted them to get through primary school (an opportunity the parents did not have in their childhood or youth) and secondary school and to reach university: “We cleaned the bathroom and made our bed. However, my mother did most of the chores; we were told that our job was to study. We had to study; that was our job, our responsibility” (Aitana, April 05, 2023). The family imperative for Aitana and her younger sister to study was so strong that it even suspended the roles they should fulfill according to the “traditional” (in Aitana's words) family gender division of labor. The mother took on the domestic overload that should be shared with the daughters in their traditional division of labor. She did this so her daughters could fulfill the dream of accessing education. The paternal voice also appears, indicating the need to reorient the daughters’ labor future:

His [her father] message was: “I don’t want you to go into the shoe business at all. You have to study because it's long hours of work, a lot of worries”. But what my father didn’t say, but we knew, was that his friends’ children of my generation were working there. Many of them hadn’t gone to university because they had stayed [behind to work] in the family business. This was associated with the parents buying them [these children] the best cars: it was something else. My father only bought a second car after the first one died. His message was that we should go to university. Always, always. (Aitana, April 05, 2023)

Aitana's parents joined forces to change the inertia of the social reproduction of their class and profession, pushing their daughters into an innovative project: studying. Aitana chose her graduate studies, guided by the appreciation that having her own university degree was enough distinction:

Whatever we wanted to study for our lives was an honor for them [her parents], unlike the parents of many friends who said, “Engineering! You have to study engineering!”. Also, there were no referents. The fact that we went to university was incredible for them. Thank goodness they didn’t impose anything on me in that sense. (Aitana, April 05, 2023)

Aitana felt the obligation to do her best as a debt to her parents and as a hallmark of her identity as the daughter of a lower-class family that had worked hard to rise to middle class: “I have it installed into me that I only deserve what I work hard for; I am suspicious of anything that comes easy to me” (Aitana, April 05, 2023). This moral framework configured in her an imperative to work while sacrificing rest:

My parents told me I didn’t need to work. But I always felt that I came from a working-class background. So, I started working during the summers at the summer school. Not because something in particular was lacking; there was always enough to be ok. But, in my house, making an effort and sacrificing carried weight. That's why I started teaching at the summer school. (Aitana, April 05, 2023)

Amanda and Rosalía had similar experiences. University appears in their narratives as a projection of their mothers and/or fathers, as a path of distinction and upward social mobility through educational credentials:

During secondary education, my parents always worked hard to guide my brother and me towards higher education. It was the traditional path that one supposedly had to take to achieve social mobility. There was no obligation, no specific degree, nothing like that, simply that we liked it and could work professionally at something that would allow us to earn a living. (Rosalía, July 26, 2023)

In the case of María, in Brazil, we note the same construction of effort as an imperative and a class strategy and conditioning linked to her father's lower-class origin. He was born in the countryside and migrated to the city, where he worked in different trades until he managed to graduate from university. Her mother was also the first urban generation in her family. Both parents were the first generation to go to university in their families; they studied at prestigious institutions and chose socially valued degrees (the father engineering and the mother medicine), which, at that time, guaranteed well-paid careers. Raising their three daughters (María was the middle one) was marked by investment in private schools, extracurricular courses, and complementary training to lead these young women to university. This project was also aimed at helping them opt for prestigious and well-paid careers. To uphold her decision to study social sciences, María had to confront her father, spend almost a year without talking to her mother, and finally leave the family home. Her parents saw her choice of degree as a betrayal of their class strategies. It took them many years to “forgive” her for studying the degree of her choice. While the moral of effort is present, as with Aitana, the freedom to choose a degree and the appreciation of professions not oriented to economic accumulation are absent in María's family's symbolic configurations.

In sum, several interviewees share the link between the lower-class origins of their families and the persistence of a family morality that drives women to self-impose effort. This operates in their narratives as a compensatory investment: it allows low-income people to affirm that their social value lies in their honesty and hard work ethic and not in their economic resources. Thus, the imperative of effort is not only an apprenticeship in the sacrificial exercise of the female gender but also a delimitation of a class origin.

(Re)Situating Gender

The example of Valentina in Mexico illustrates other aspects of this link between class and effort. In her family environment, the construction of an archetype of “good women” can be observed, which excludes them from performing productive functions as their primary occupation. From an early age, Valentina felt a strong vocation for her studies:

As long as I can remember, I’ve always wanted to study, to keep studying. I felt very comfortable and happy studying. Maybe it was a refuge. I don’t know, but it felt pleasant to me, and I wanted to explore that in more depth. I was left to my own devices; my mother was always fighting with my brother because he didn’t do his homework […]. He would go out drinking; he was extremely troublesome. I was very happy being independent and self-sufficient, and I saw the point of doing my homework and enjoyed doing it. Over the years, I’ve felt that that experience with my brother influenced me a lot in the sense of not following his example. As a young girl, from my first year in primary school, I felt I studied because I liked it because it was nice. However, my parents never recognized that because they were far too worried about the terrible things my brother was up to […]. From a very early age, I wanted to study for a degree in social sciences. But I also wanted to study other things: engineering and law. I saw myself doing that: I wanted to study many things. (Valentina, March 29, 2023)

Parents’ expectations regarding access to formal studies were predominantly focused on their sons (especially the first-born). No one seriously expected Valentina to get a university education; it was assumed that the most important thing for her would be to start a family and take on a home:

The women in my own family would say, “Well, you, being a woman, you have to be a good mother and do the housework well. You, for sure, as a woman, you have to…” […]. That is what they told me when I was 10: “Why do you study so hard if you are going to end up working here with us?”. And I: “No, I’m going to study for a doctorate”. At that time, I had no idea what, but it was a way to differentiate myself as a woman, doing things differently from what they told me. (Valentina, March 30, 2023)

She had to resist her mother's push to transform her into a “good housewife” and even her advice that the most important thing was cultivating those skills that are “always valued everywhere.” The image that there is only one possible path to female fulfillment felt like a straitjacket for Valentina. She felt that her enormous interest in studying was ignored, that nobody was excited about her excellent academic performance, worrying only about her brother's antagonistic behavior. This reproduced the idea that studying was desirable for a woman but indispensable for a man:

It was to be expected; it was obvious I would go to university. Nobody was surprised by the news; they took it for granted that I was going to do well. What really stands out for me is that I finished secondary school with the top mark in the year, and they said: “Ah, that's good!”. Like that, “That's good”. That's the reaction my family had: “Good”. Back in Mexico, getting into MX02 [secular, public university, Mexico] is very complex. A lot of people apply, and it is based on exams and your grade point average. It is much more complex than getting into university here in Chile. And my family just said, “Oh good, obviously”. My mum didn’t understand what a university degree course meant for a woman, what you would work on, or how you apply it. She always told me: “Regardless of that, you have to cook well and clear the dishes and cutlery away and wash up; be a good housewife”. To this day, I remember that, at that time in my life, this was the most important message from my mom. That's how it was and there was nothing more to it. (Valentina, March 29, 2023)

Russ ⁶⁵ noted that the absence of formal prohibitions on women's access to studies does not imply that implicit impediments do not exist and that they have the power to undermine women's educational trajectories. The history of “debarring women from higher education is too well-known to need repeating here. What may not be generally known is that the debarring, in modified form, sometimes continues.” ⁶⁶ Valentina's case shows a contemporary form of this denial. Her academic development and success at school were joys she celebrated alone; they had little importance to her family. Lack of appreciation and recognition is a difficult obstacle: it pushes women to repeatedly question whether what they are doing has value and meaning, whether they are on the right track, or whether, on the contrary, they are lost and aimless. This demoralization “is part of a general discouragement of female learning that is still prevalent […]. The education of women is of little importance compared to that of men.” ⁶⁷ Another mechanism that prevents women's access is overloading them with household chores and care work to the point that they do not have the strength to think about anything else and end up losing enthusiasm for their intellectual vocations. ⁶⁸ Valentina was able to resist this pressure by developing a strategy of refusal:

It's strange to value it like that, but I began to generate a … I don’t know a feeling of being fed up with the way my mother saw domestic work linked to women. It made me feel uneasy. Of course, I did it out of obligation; it's not that I enjoyed it. Since I migrated and live alone, I now realize that I love doing housework. I love cooking and cleaning. But because of the discourse that my mother associated with women, I hated doing any housework and did it out of obligation. (Valentina, April 29, 2023)

A more drastic mechanism is the “lethal form of discouragement.” ⁶⁹ It occurs when the mandate not to produce “is built so thoroughly into the woman's expectations of herself as to constitute a genuine split in identity.” ⁷⁰ This was what Valentina experienced on surpassing her mother's levels of study; she began to feel she did not know what kind of woman she had become:

The crisis was not really knowing how to direct those studies and assimilate them into my life. It was tough for me; now that I think about it, they were very important milestones in my life. For example, since secondary school, when my studies began to surpass my mother's, I used to say to myself: “What do you do with this? I already have more studies than my mother”. And I felt something similar when I finished my university studies: “What do I do with this? I don’t know what to do, how to be a professional woman” […]. It's a bit of psychoanalytic logic: if you do something different than your mother, your closest living referent, that is betraying her, and if you don’t, you also betray her. I was in a state of limbo, and I didn’t do anything […]. It was very difficult to see myself and understand what I really wanted to do because of the lack of a close referent. It was very hard not having a role model close to me. Deep down, I felt I was taking a path that neither my family nor my mother expected of me as a woman. (Valentina, April 30, 2023)

Like María, Valentina was “betraying” a class strategy because she assimilated for herself a transgenerational expectation (accessing a university degree) that was not intended for her but for her male siblings (who failed to fulfill this mandate). Thus, her split in identity occurs due to a lack of understanding of how to move forward or which paths to take outside the route designated for the women in her family. Valentina disrupted the specific place the family class strategy assigns to women. She embodies a gender reconfiguration that catapults her out of her environment. After migrating to Chile, far from family pressure, she was able to find herself again and pursue her postgraduate studies.

Inspiring Women

We saw that the absence of role models was an added difficulty for Valentina. Twenty-five interviewees (50%) mentioned the crucial role female referents played in allowing them to imagine a professional future. Fifteen mentioned figures from their family group: mothers, stepmothers, grandmothers, sisters, and aunts. Their stories reveal the importance of intimate coexistence among women when constructing emotional foundations and support for student and/or professional performance. Some grandmothers deserve special mention:

My grandmother was the woman. She was from a working-class background. The only one of her brothers who studied at university was lazy; he never finished. My grandmother was the youngest of her siblings, and she is an example to me: a woman who reads! That's why she got together with my grandfather. She loved to read and write. My grandfather, who is of Alsatian descent, had a huge library […]. That's why I spent a lot of time at my grandmother's […]. She always sent me off to read: “You’re not sure about that? Go and look it up [in the dictionary]” [laughs]. Yes, my grandmother was an example of a woman. She won many literature awards; she liked writing short stories. I got my passion for writing stories from her. She was an eclectic woman, combining artistic and intellectual tools […]. It marked me a lot to see her reading and writing all the time and, for her time, being a critical woman. So was my mother. (Itinerante, July 25, 2023)

The women of the family that inspired our interviewees went beyond the gender mandates of their times, carrying out activities conceived as “masculine”; they inverted the roles in their most patriarchal conception. They expressed political opinions, created artistically and intellectually; they worked and supported their families:

My maternal grandmother, the one who is a teacher, was my female inspiration. My grandmother worked all her life, and she was the breadwinner. She was married to my grandfather, who was a loose cannon [irresponsible]. My granny gave the family economic stability with a salary. My mother always worked, too. That planted something in me: I always knew I wanted to work, but I never knew if I wanted to have children. It seemed more important to me to work and read than to play with dolls. (Donna, July 14, 2023)

Mothers also appear both as inspirations and as the voice of a mandate for self-improvement through projecting educational, professional, and life expectations that they themselves did not manage to sustain. These female transgenerational expectations have a dialectical aspect; they push and encourage women to continue studying, finish university, and build a professional space for themselves. However, they also “hook” the younger women into unconscious patterns of self-demand (of self-imposed effort). Women who grew up in this type of relationship report having great difficulty in setting limits to personal/professional sacrifice. Amanda tells us how she experienced this self-improvement/sacrifice dialect, observing that it is reproduced in the relationship her sister has with her niece:

A large part of going to university, most of it actually, has to do with the interests my mom taught us. She was an architect of that. She would tell me, “All you have to do is study; your only job is to study”[…]. It is still an intense pressure because we get caught up in that kind of pressure. You feel you have to do it and do it very well because the other [her mother] is projecting. Obviously, it's not done consciously. My mother was also stern about that. If you came and said to her, “I got a 10”. She would reply: “Very good!”. But if you got an 8, “Why didn’t you get a 10?” […]. There was pressure, and now I see that in my sister; she projects onto my niece. Later, you realize that this causes suffering because you are always putting pressure on yourself. (Amanda, July 12, 2023)

Almeida, in turn, emphasized her middle sister's crucial role; she studied anthropology before her and introduced her to this disciplinary field (taking her to stay with her for a time abroad when she was pursuing a postgraduate degree). María spoke of the simultaneous influence of several female family figures:

All of them: my grandmother, my mother, my aunts, then my sister. My sister is the first woman in the family to dedicate herself to professional research. Even though my mother was a doctor, my sister dedicated herself to research; she expanded the female family trajectories. All of them are key for me. (María, April 6, 2023)

For Helen, the domestic worker who educated her was an inspiration and a motivation to dedicate herself to her subject field:

The woman who raised me, the domestic worker in the house motivated me to choose my degree. She is my inspiration. I’m not sure if [she motivated me] to study, but I’ve done a lot of research on domestic work and migration. And she was a migrant. I think she is a central figure. So, I went to the field to interview migrant women who were domestic workers in my country. Everybody asks me, “Why are you interested in this topic?” I always say that a woman, migrant, and domestic worker raised me; I am her daughter, right? (Helen, July 14, 2023)

With the democratic transition in Chile, new female voices disputing the space of political expression meant a referential horizon. Margarita mentioned a current female Chilean government minister who had been a leader of the student movement in the 1980s:

You’re going to laugh, but my referent was a person who is now a minister: Carolina Tohá. My school was very close to the law school she went to, in the city center. So, I used to see her there, and in the magazines my mother used to buy […]. I used to say to myself: “I want to be like her”. (Margarita, July 10, 2023)

Female primary and secondary teachers are mentioned by eleven female academics (22%). Both as intellectual referents, providing security and confidence in their skills and abilities, and as an example of expanding female horizons:

The truth is we had female teachers at school who were really cool [fun]. Swiss teachers who came on exchange programs. They spent some time at the school, and there I saw the possibility of studying or working in something that allowed you to live abroad. Seeing them as powerful women, some had families, others didn’t; they diversified the ways of being professional women. (Alicia, July 26, 2023)

Choosing a Degree

In several accounts, the paternal voice appears as the one driving the expectations of class transformation through education. Fathers’ influence (as figures with more authority to give guidance on “the productive world”) impacted women's perceptions of which degrees and institutions were ideal. In families with left-leaning political positions, parental conditioning does not necessarily allude to an imperative of economic accumulation through better-paid professions. They are oriented according to the logic of social differentiation linked to the prestige granted by education. Several of these families valued degrees in humanities or social sciences due to a vision of prestige, according to which professional practice is something vocational. This logic is often linked to a paternal discourse of social distinction.

Julieta's father, who came from the upper classes of Santiago, was opposed to her choosing a career as a preschool teacher. Her father had a degree in geology—an important qualification in a country with large mining investments like Chile—and was the second generation of university graduates in his family. Before him, Julieta's paternal grandmother had graduated in biochemistry. Both studied at one of Chile's most prestigious universities. Julieta's mother, coming from peripheral regions and the lower-middle class, studied pedagogy, as did her sister and brother-in-law (Julieta's maternal aunt and uncle). Her father pressured Julieta to choose a degree closer to the paternal family's class strategies than the maternal one. However, conditioning from the environment also played a part:

I studied in a private school where social sciences were always frowned upon. All the students wanted to go into engineering or at least law. The humanists went to law. At that time, at secondary school, we were divided into those who studied mathematics, science, and humanities. When I began to realize that I was a humanist, I went with the humanities group. That's when I started looking for a degree, but I wasn’t very sure. My family didn’t have much experience with degrees in the humanities. My dad's family was very much into mathematics. My mother was a teacher. In her family, her sister and brother-in-law were also teachers, but of mathematics. These were my closest family references. Everything led me to mathematics, either from the pedagogy side or through engineering degrees. But it was very clear to me that I didn’t want to study either of those two things. I started looking for a degree without knowing much. (Julieta, April 6, 2023)

There is a close relationship between the school being in an upper-class neighborhood, the fact it is private, and the students’ choosing a degree in engineering or law. These choices satisfied their parents’ expectations of social distinction (and class reproduction). Degrees in humanities constituted an “eccentric” choice. This confused Julieta, who had many doubts about this subject area. “My best friend was going to study early years pedagogy. So, I told my family that I wanted to study this too. My dad told me: ‘No, you’re not going to study to be a kindergarten teacher’” (Julieta, April 20, 2023). Her father's intervention clarifies the relationship between the chosen subject field and his class expectations. After this dialogue, Julieta's family began to “write her off.” But it was the national political context that empowered her decision to study sociology:

I left school in 1990, during the return to democracy […]. This degree had been closed down during the dictatorship; there were not as many social science degrees as there are now. One summer, I read a book by a sociologist, and I was struck by the analysis he made. It was an extremely basic analysis of some surveys, but it was entertaining. That's when I started to decide on sociology […]. But I didn’t know anything; I knew nothing except this book I’d read. I had no idea what sociology was or what sociologists did; I didn’t know any sociologists either, nothing. I liked it as a new, different degree, almost as a way of going against the family trend. (Julieta, April 20, 2023)

In this way, Julieta resisted parental pressure. By adhering to a historical change, she introduced a new professional possibility in the interpretative horizons of her family. She managed to enter the second most important university in Chile, where a significant part of the country's elite studied; therefore, her degree choice was protected in institutional terms. In addition, her father and mother shared left-leaning political tendencies and associated sociology with the well-received figure of the “critical intellectual” in this political sector. Thus, Julieta's trajectory contributes to expanding her family's class strategies.

Also, the socio-political context played a fundamental role for sixteen women (32%). Their own and family political affiliation against the military dictatorship influenced their choice of degree: “Choosing social science had to do with conversations, with the political affiliation of my parents. They were left-wing militants. They were very close to Unidad Popular. ⁷¹ Both were also teachers until they were let go” (Daniela, July, 19, 2023). However, there is one more contradiction to consider. The interviewees’ families were less concerned about “detours” from degree choice when their daughters made them. The notion of unspeakable things unspoken by Morrison ⁷² remains: women will marry, and the focus will ultimately be on their husbands’ jobs. This explains why Julieta's brother opted for a less innovative choice and graduated as an engineer. Contradictorily, the (sometimes unconscious) understanding that women's productive exercise is marginal, added to the idea that women will marry and have husbands with more important professions, gives young women some flexibility to innovate in their undergraduate choice, as opposed to their brothers (from whom economically profitable professions are expected).

Alejandra and CNL explained that the international migratory experience prompted their choice. For Alejandra, a life outside Chile was motivated by the exile of her parents during the dictatorship. This experience left deep marks on her way of denaturalizing everyday life in the countries of origin and destination:

The decision to study sociology had a lot to do with having lived in Germany; I internalized being reflective. After returning to Chile, I spent a lot of my childhood thinking about how it was possible for two societies to be so different [laughs] […]. But sociology allows you to reflect on why one is so different from the other. (Alejandra, August 01, 2023)

The dictatorial process and the democratic transition had a multidimensional impact on family networks and, with this, on women's trajectories. MF, for example, is part of a generation whose professional parents were removed from their public positions on the suspicion that they were opponents of the regime:

After 1973, with the military coup, my father went to work in a national ministry. He had previously worked in another public agency that the military shut down, but they let my dad continue working in a ministry. I don’t know what he did there; I have no idea. One day, he came home and said: “Now I know what you want to do. I met an anthropologist!” It was S., who had also been removed from his previous job at the university and sent to the same ministry. He worked in a small office; he was a gentleman; he did the accounts. I was still very young when my dad said: “I’m going to invite him to the house so you can meet him”. I had no idea what my dad and this man were talking about, but he was the first anthropologist I met. I was about 13 years old at the time. He also offered me my first job ever. After many years, I met him again at the university. I started to go to and sit in on anthropology classes when I was 16 years old. (MF, July 11, 2023)

The arbitrariness of the dictatorship brought unexpected results for MF's father: it led to exchanges with professionals he would never have met in other circumstances. The solidarity they generated to face the uncertain conditions configured a support network, encouraging dinners at family residences and establishing forms of reciprocity. This enabled MF to access a specific cultural capital that gave a disciplinary name to her vocation.

For Nina, her female secondary school teachers’ concern for the future of young women intensified during the transition to democracy. These teachers were actively involved in orientating the girls at a time when they were both highly stimulated and simultaneously at a loss:

It was the return to democracy. I had overly sensitive ears; I listened to everything. As a child, I read a lot despite my precarious situation. In my secondary school, where I studied accounting, a female teacher asked me: “What are you going to do next year? You have lousy grades in accounting, costs, and tax. But you have excellent grades in Spanish, history, and English. What will you do?”. I told her: “The only thing I know is that I don’t want to be an accountant”. She said, “You can be a teacher”. Then, she started naming careers I’d never heard of. I was in my last year at school, but they weren’t registered in my head; they were unfamiliar professions in a small town. She helped me. (Nina, July 19, 2023)

Seven respondents (14%) chose a degree to defy their parents. For CG, it was a real “battle”:

I had a pitched battle with my parents because they were extremely strict, and I was a very good student. My older sister was also a very good student. So, they had a lot of expectations. And I was super rebellious. I tried to imagine different degrees to study, but they were absolutely horrified with my options. When I was in my second year, I said: “I’m going to study English”. And they said: “Why on earth would you study English?”. Then I switched to history: “Why on earth would you study history?” Then I wanted to study journalism […]. Their aspiration, they expected that I would study a very prestigious degree. I knew I wasn’t going to study law. Being a rebel, I wasn’t going to study the same as my father. It was a lot of pressure, don’t you see? Because I was doing really well at school […]. Actually, to be honest, I could have studied anything. I did very well on the university entrance test. But my parents were horrified. Since I was so rebellious, I was deliberately going against their wishes, wasn’t I? Now, I always knew it was going to be in the social sciences, even though I was doing really well in mathematics. (CG, July 11, 2023)

Those women who grew up in environments with greater access to cultural capital were exposed to more resources, information, and guidance in choosing a degree:

I left secondary school at the expected time, took the [university entrance] test, and started studying sociology that same year. I had already defined that a long time ago. I was very well-oriented and guided. My parents separated when I was very young, when I was seven years old. But my stepfather, with whom I lived from the age of ten, is a sociologist. His ex-wife, the mother of my stepsiblings, was also a sociologist. I was influenced by and had significant access to the social sciences […]. (Gabriela, July 26, 2023)

Thirteen interviewees (26%) did not study the degree they really wanted to: five because of family pressure and seven because of lack of resources. Rosa, for example, gave in to maternal pressure and took the admission test for a degree she did not want to do. On failing to get in, it was her mother who registered her in social work, a course she had not chosen either but which she “grew to love”:

My mom always reinforced the idea that I should study law. I would answer her: “Ok, mom, law”. When I took the test, the only thing I wanted to do was leave […]. I was put on the waiting list; my mom told me, “I’m going to enroll you in social work”, which had been marked as a second choice. But she told me: I’m going to let you study, so that later you can move to law.” (Rosa, July 18, 2023)

Women who grew up in peripheral regions of Chile, like Juno (from the north of the country) faced several obstacles when choosing a vocation. In addition to passing the national selection exam with a score that would allow them to enter their chosen course (and apply for scholarships), they had to secure enough resources to live away from the family home and pay the fees (if scholarship applications were unsuccessful). Also, they faced the androcentric barrier of family mindsets, the impetus to control women to avoid sexually and/or morally prescribed behaviors:

The engineering degree was at a private university in Santiago. I applied and got in, and it wasn’t that much more expensive at that time. I was 17, and my parents had to go with me. My mom, full of fear, supported me. But my dad became restrictive. I had a very macho, heteronormative upbringing. He told my mom, “If she gets pregnant or something happens to her, it's your fault”. My mom got scared, changed her mind, and told me, “If you want to leave, leave”. I replied, “Mom, I’m 17 years old, they’re asking me to sign a promissory note [commitment to pay]. I can’t sign it”. And she said, “Well, I’m sorry”. And so, I asked, “What can I do?”. I didn’t want to study for a traditional degree, and they only offered traditional degrees here. But I looked to see what I could do. Law, no! Psychology, no! […]. And I said: “Social work, that's it!” (Juno, July 18, 2023)

Violeta and Flaka, who are also from impoverished socioeconomic backgrounds and without previous generations of university students in their families, reported having no guidance:

My mom always told me, for as long as I can remember, “You have to study!” The only person I knew who had gone to university was my cousin, who is six years older than me. She went to study engineering; she was my only referent […]. After, another cousin, who is also Mapuche, his parents are Mapuche, studied pedagogy. These two were my referents. But I chose anthropology. It's super funny; I wanted to study philosophy. I liked reading philosophy, and those were the few books I could access. I would go to the market, and I saw second-hand Nietzsche books. Those were the books I could access. I could never go to a library […]. It was like living in a grey capsule; I had no access to anything, no books, no education, no culture, nothing […]. They published a list of all the degrees offered by the universities in El Mercurio [a Chilean newspaper]. Then, I saw anthropology […]. In the profile description of an anthropology student, it said: “A critical person who questions everything”. When I read it, I said to myself, “That's me!” That's how I chose anthropology; that's how I made my decision. (Violeta, August 2, 2023)

Virginia explained how the lack of resources has a multidimensional character: it connects the absence of economic capital with the reproduction of mandates on how to raise children. This affects women's possibilities of moving to other regions (as we saw with Juno) and hinders women's upward social mobility:

Truth be told, I wanted to go somewhere else, but we didn’t have the resources. Not only that, but my family was also incapable of thinking about letting their daughter go. There was a lot of fear around that about going somewhere else. There was also no capacity to think or manage scholarships or things like that; I had to choose to study at the regional university […]. I was a bit resigned to studying here and I was also resigned to doing a degree that I didn’t like; I knew I had to choose the one that was closest to my taste. (Virginia, July 19, 2023)

Virginia “had to choose” the university in her city. We also see with Jana that the prolonged exposure to a lack of all kinds of capital deprives women of even knowing about possible professions. It is not only about the lack of family economic capital to finance more expensive degrees or ones that imply travel. It is also about the difficulty (as mentioned by Juno and Virginia) families have in imagining such displacements as compatible for women:

I don’t know if I ever really knew that I wanted to study social sciences. It was more like that was the only thing available to me. I thought about it a lot. When you come from such a precarious reality, you have very few options to choose from because you don’t know anything. The only thing you know are social workers and teachers; they are the only professional dimension you see. So, I started studying social work but dropped out because I didn’t like the degree. That was extremely expensive in economic terms, and I lost several years. But finally, I started history. I studied those two degrees because I had no other choice. I’ve always had a talent for the arts; they were easier for me than numbers. But if I had had more cultural capital, I doubt I would have dedicated myself to this. Probably, I would have studied something related to the [natural] sciences. (Jana, August 1, 2023)

Flor, who came from a family headed by a single working mother, made huge efforts to study. An early and unplanned pregnancy limited her preferences:

I started social work, but at that time what I really wanted to study was sociology. I didn’t get high enough grades. I liked sociology as a social science. I planned to study one year of social work and switch to sociology. But then I got pregnant and making that change meant losing a year. I said to myself: “I can’t lose a year; I need money; I need to graduate as soon as possible”. I continued with social work. (Flor, July 21, 2023)

The gender mandates that framed Flor's childhood and adolescence implied a discursive taboo on sex: they prohibited her mother from talking to her about sexuality and how to prevent pregnancy or sexually transmitted diseases. Her class status, in turn, limited her access to this knowledge from other sources (books, public talks, films, and conversations with professionals). Finally, having grown up during the context of the Chilean dictatorship, characterized by a strong moral conservatism in relation to sexuality and female roles, ⁷³ also deprived her of access to this knowledge at a public school (through sex education classes). Thus, the intersection between class and gender is configured in an extremely specific way in Flor's trajectory but is also influenced by the political characteristics of the context. Her unplanned pregnancy is a milestone in this intersectionality: it conditions her life and education itineraries, limiting her choice of degree, among other things.

Final Remarks

The analyzed testimonies exemplify how the intersectionality between class status and gender experience influences women's educational trajectories, inclining them (in heterogeneous and often conflicting ways) to the social sciences. Women's experiences in their families of origin constitute pivotal points on which our interviewees built their life trajectories, desires, expectations, and strategies for traversing adverse circumstances. In all this, parents’ social class, the type of access they had to education, and the arrangements they made regarding male and female roles explain much more than we had assumed at first glance. However, expanding these debates from an intersectional perspective, our findings suggest that the class strategies families put in place for sons and daughters could differ tacitly. This is a key aspect to explore in future studies, particularly focusing on how symbolisms associated with the work of each gender are understood in parenting processes.

Research shows that the expectation of transgenerational transformation of class through education is particularly important in the trajectory of women from impoverished or middle-class sectors. However, for the interviewees from families with more resources, the family expectation of reproducing or consolidating class status through the education of daughters is a key element in women's experiences. Beyond the specific class status, the accounts show that family social strategies—especially acquiring economic, social, and cultural capital—impact women's projects. But they do so based on concrete imaginaries about the social place and acceptable roles for women. Thus, the family class expectations pressed on our interviewees are unintelligible if analyzed without their intersectional articulation with gender mandates. This articulation is, contradictory as it may seem, a transversal phenomenon observed in the different social sectors of origin.

Despite this, in each interview, we see a different configuration of how family expectations about the female future shape access to education, establishing possibilities and restrictions. These class conditionings operate for women at very deep levels. They are anchored in their desires and feelings, in the perception of their obligation, and in how they experience their fulfillment. In several accounts, these expectations are also shaped by the political positioning of the family of origin and the national context.

The interviews with female academics from low-income families show that the concept of “choice” does not accurately describe their process of selecting a university degree. The trajectories and class conditions in which they are immersed act as limitations. While these women demonstrate a great deal of adaptive creativity in maximizing the available resources, this remarkable capacity for agency does not tacitly result in “freedom of choice.” Consequently, to answer qualitatively why there are more women in social sciences in Chile, we must also consider these intersectional mechanisms that configure the “right to choose a career” as something that is unequally distributed among social classes, with greater accessibility to women from higher-income social sectors.

The fracture in the freedom of choice appears, moreover, in the trajectory of women from impoverished social sectors. This is a result of the accumulating deficit of knowledge, practices, and resources that allow a better understanding of what is or is not available and ways to access it. Added to this, for several interviewees, is the fact that they have contact with only two types of professional women: social workers working in poor neighborhoods and teachers. Class condition intersects strongly with gender imaginaries about the professional place and female mobilities: “a grey capsule,” in the words of one of the interviewees. However, to suppose that they cannot resist, reconfigure, and reinvent these difficulties would be absurd. They did, and against all odds, they finished a degree and are now working as academics.

In summary, the testimonies show a tense relationship between continuity and social change. We see that the interviewees developed heterogeneous and asymmetrical strategies to situate themselves in their social environments. In the most extreme cases, this involved migrating to realize educational projects far from family restrictions. To do so, they used the knowledge, contacts, material goods, and symbolisms to which they were able to gain access to in their trajectory, precisely because of their family experience. Even so, the type and quality of these resources depend not only on this family experience but also on women's position in social spaces and how they moved in them.

Our interviewees are not free to determine in which spaces they are socialized and in which family they are educated: they begin their trajectories without being able to choose their starting resources. Many of them managed to rise up gradually against constraints or entered into “a full-pitched battle” (as one put it). Most of the women, however, sought to accumulate the necessary tools to change their position in a processual and slow manner. This conflicting arrangement between the resources to which they have access, their location in social spaces, and the desire to change impacts women's educational trajectories in various ways. It is a contextual, configurative, and situational arrangement that is incomprehensible from quantitative analytical strategies alone.

This study also highlights the urgent need to rethink public policies aimed at ensuring equal access to higher education and professional participation within scientific and university systems. It draws attention to the need for more nuanced interpretative frameworks on gender equity, based on an intersectional perspective. When the limitations and possibilities of women in university education and academic professional performance are examined, diagnoses should not only address the different inequalities associated with each field of study but also inquire into how they are related to power asymmetries entailing institutional prestige, class origin, and long-term labor trajectories. Furthermore, the study points to the need for targeted career guidance policies in primary and secondary education. These policies should enable women to become familiar with and learn about fields of academic knowledge that are associated with masculinity in broader social imaginaries. Such awareness would benefit women and men, as the latter are also often pushed into specific roles and have less access to professions traditionally viewed as “feminine.” Thus, our findings have the potential to inform gender-sensitive educational policies and guide curriculum development or academic career support.

Furthermore, this article resizes previous debates on higher education by showing that the quantitative rates of female participation (both as students and as scholars) coexist with significantly entrenched and enduring qualitative gender inequalities. It also addresses a gap in the literature by providing empirical qualitative data on how gender and class-based family strategies influence women's access to universities. By combining Bourdieu's theoretical tools with an intersectional re-reading within a Latin American context, the article offers critical insight into how family dynamics, class strategies, habitus, and gendered mandates shape women's educational access and choices. Last but not least, the findings contribute to a multi-dimensional understanding of generational narratives, family mandates, and the affective dimensions of educational aspirations among female academics (from different social classes, regions, and institutional contexts). In doing so, it resizes the homogenizing tendencies in educational research.