Working and Studying as an Expectant Mother

For this post, I would like to take a break from the numbers and tell you about my personal experience with this project. When I traveled to Mexico, back in May, I was 7 months pregnant with my first child. My husband and I made the trip to Mexico hoping to get as much work done as possible before our little one finally arrived. It was a wonderful experience!

I was able to walk to the Ministry offices every morning, which was really healthy for baby. Once in the office, I shared a work space with three lovely women, two of them, Hilda and Lourdes, were experienced moms who had lots of advise to dispense every day. They would also bring treats to the office, like quesadillas or freshly baked bread, and then my other colleague, Yimel, and I would listen to some of their stories about being first time moms. 

Another lovely experience was conducting interviews with fellow FSOs. As soon as they noticed I was pregnant, our conversations flowed much more freely. They seemed excited for me, and offered supportive words. This made me feel a little more calm, even as I got closer to my due date and increasingly nervous. 

Expecting and Working: That is me on the far left.

I had to complete the second half of the internship remotely, since it would not be as safe to travel after I reached eight months of pregnancy. I had collected enough information to be able to use this period to analyze the data and begin putting some puzzle pieces together. I am still working on that. 

And then, on July 16th, baby finally arrived! 

Baby Adriano

It is such a joy! My husband and I are enjoying the learning process and we love taking care of this little angel. Even though I expect work-life balance to become very challenging in the coming months, I would not have it any other way. 

The Bottleneck

Minister. This is the highest rank that you can reach in the Foreign Service via the promotion exam. The only rank higher than that, Ambassador, can only be reached by Presidential decree. Currently, Ministers are the rarest breed in the Mexican Service. Only 10% of officers are Ministers, even less than Ambassadors, who are almost 12% of active FSOs. It is a long road towards becoming a Minister. On average, it takes 27 years to reach that rank. By that time, FSOs are between the ages of 56 and 57. It's essentially a whole life's work.The rank of Minister is where we find the largest gender gap: only 19% of Ministers are women! Why?

The gap at its widest

I think I may have found some clues. It seems that men tend to be promoted from Counselor to Minister faster than women. If you take a look at the following graph, you will see the percentage of men and women promoted to Minister after spending a number of months as Counselors. You can clearly see that the men's line stays above the women's line at all times. There is a certain percentage of men that got promoted even before spending a single month as a Counselor. No women were that lucky. Next, we can see that by month 40, 25% of women had been promoted, in comparison with 35% of men. The gap closes by month 50, where 40% of all officers had been promoted, but then widens again, until month 100 (a.k.a. year 8), where only 70% of women had been promoted in contrast with 85% of men. After 100 months, women begin to catch up, but do not fully get there until month 250 (year 20!). 

Men reach the rank quicker than women

The next step is to figure out why women Counselors are being held back. Since the only way to reach the rank of Minister is through the promotion exam, I plan to carefully look at the exam results of men and women Counselors since 2002 (when the promotion exam made its debut) and try to pinpoint the main differences. Because no FSOs that entered later than 1998 have reached this rank yet, I will be concentrating only on the cohorts that entered the Foreign Service before that year. The Foreign Service was quite different then. More on that later!