Women break through Latin American poultry farming

Three Latin American women share their experience working in the poultry industry and explain how times have changed and what to do in the future to have more women in the industry.

(hedgehog94 | iStock)
(hedgehog94 | iStock)

Sixty years ago, María Luisa de Zubizarreta traveled from Paraguay to Argentina to buy some puppies at the request of her husband, Manuel Zubizarreta. With the money she decided to buy — to everyone's surprise — a box of pullets and returned to Asunción with the idea of establishing her own commercial egg business. She would later call her business El Cortijo Zeta (which means Zee Country House), marking each egg with the letter Z, in reference to the family name. 

“When my dad came looking for his puppies, he found the chirp,” said Pilar Zubizarreta, daughter of María Luisa and member of the Board of Directors of Pollpar, the second largest chicken producing company in Paraguay, in an interview with WATT Poultry. “My father accompanied her, assisted her to be able to get the land, the loans and everything. My mother did that meticulous little job to get into production and we were really the first commercial egg production farm in an industrial way, because at that time there was no such thing (in Paraguay).”

In the 1990s, the company turned into the chicken broiler production under the name Pollos Paraguayos, Pollpar, and its brand Kzero. Eventually, they stopped egg production, but María Luisa, now 90, is still on the Pollpar Board of Directors. 

However, not all the women are as lucky as María Luisa in poultry business.  

Sexism in the poultry industry 

“When I did my career in Colombia 30 years ago, we were two women and 33 men (in the Faculty of Veterinary Medicine) ... We had very sexist professors who told us that we should go home because we were women,” said Marta Pulido, professor at the Mississippi State University College of Veterinary Medicine, in an interview with WATTPoultry. Other professors “wanted to protect us so much that sometimes they would not allow us to do the same things that men did.” 

Despite this, Pulido graduated and became a professor at the National University of Colombia, where she worked for 24 years. Initially, in the 1990s, she coordinated internships for her students in private companies and encountered other obstacles. “There were companies to which you said: ‘I have three female students and three male students.’ And the person deciding who would get the internship said: ‘Doctor, it can be dangerous to send women to a farm. ... I don’t want a woman on the farm.” At that time, some companies only chose men. 

Yet she witnessed evolution. “It was a total transformation because more and more women began to enter (to study at the university), first two, then five, then 10 (women per classroom),” Pulido said. Around 2009, Pulido recalls that women were already practically 50% of her students and the female presence also began to change views. “I was coordinating internships at the time (in 2009). I spoke with the same business owner (as in the 1990s) and told him: ‘I have three resumes from women and three from men.’ And he told me: ‘I'm going to see them all, but I want women because they are more responsible.’"

The change was also experienced when she did her work for her PhD in Brazil and when she went to work in the United States: there were more women in colleges and poultry businesses. 

Women in colleges in Latin America

In Colombia, it was not until the 1930s that women had access to a college education. In 2005, 27.7% of women between 18 and 24 had access to higher education, a figure that increased to 36.5% in 2018, according to data from the National Administrative Department of Statistics (DANE, in Spanish). In both cases, these are higher figures than their male counterparts.

In Argentina, the 2010 census showed that, for the first time, more women (54.4%) had a college degree. At the University of Buenos Aires (UBA), women were more than 60% of the students, and more than 70% in faculties such as veterinary sciences. 

The trend is repeated in other countries, but women sometimes encounter other obstacles: lack of job opportunities because they are women and little support in the family nucleus for them to function effectively.

More women, but with less formal work 

In the 1960s in Latin America, only 20% of adult women were working or actively looking for a job. Today, that figure reaches 65%, according to the report on Female Labor Participation by the Inter-American Development Bank (IADB). Although the number of women is similar to that of men in the region, male labor participation reaches 94%, 29 percentage points more than women, which shows the existing gap and the “great challenge” of “explaining the factors that influence in female labor participation,” according to the IADB.

In countries such as Mexico and Peru, the “protagonists” of this gap are “women with a low educational level, non-indigenous, married, with small children and with low-income spouses.” Another factor that affects women is that many of them work in low-paid jobs with high levels of informality. 

In the study “Gender and Food Security: Role and Importance of Women in Backyard Poultry Farming in Tetela de Ocampo, Puebla, Mexico,” the authors explain that, although the women interviewed mostly knew how to read and write (80% said having school studies), the problems in rural areas have to do with “the infrastructure and geographical location of the schools, the economic benefits that are granted mainly to men and the little medical attention they receive.” Marriage at an early age also affects more women than men.

This study showed that women who engaged in backyard poultry farming did so primarily to support “the education of children and maintenance of the home.” Nevertheless, when women studied more, they engaged less in backyard poultry farming in rural areas. 

Maternity and labor laws 

The fact that women become pregnant has been a factor in keeping them out of the labor field or in discriminating against them when looking for jobs. Until a few years ago, in countries such as Colombia some companies would request a pregnancy test within the examinations that they required when hiring someone. This limited the access of pregnant women to jobs for which they were qualified, Lina María Peñuela, professor of Monogastric Nutrition at University of Colima (Colombia), told WATTPoultry. 

Although asking for a pregnancy test at work is now illegal in Colombia, the fact that there are different times of parental leaves between women and men influences the social view that women are more responsible for their children than men, Peñuela and Pulido agreed. 

“We (women) have a much longer maternity leave than men, which can be unfair for men because they also have to exercise a paternity role,” said Peñuela. 

She considered that motherhood complicates the work situation for many women, as they sometimes have to carry the chores at home and at work. “Many decisions in my professional life had a lot to do with my family life because I have a daughter. Working (in poultry businesses) and dealing with a family life can be a little more difficult because you have to travel a lot. I preferred the option of becoming a college professor to be able to stay more still in a city.” 

If María Luisa had not had her husband’s support since she started her business at home in Paraguay, she might not have been able to develop it as she did. 

What to do in the future? 

To get more women to make their way into the poultry industry — not only in backyard poultry farming but also in executive positions, government and poultry unions — there’s a need to include a gender equality perspective in education, to develop effective gender equality legislation and to increase the presence of women in key positions, agreed the interviewees. 

“We as women (working in the poultry industry) have to do something to show our Latin American women that working in the poultry industry is important. It is a thriving industry, that trains, that gives many opportunities. ... Reaching balance is very difficult, but hopefully one day it would be possible,” said Pulido. 

“The future of women is more and more assured because women have come out to occupy spaces, they have gone out to study. It is true that sometimes they have to put in twice the effort than a man, but when a woman wants something, I assure you that she can get it,” said Zubizarreta. 

How to improve the participation of women in poultry farming? 

In the Female Labor Participation report, the Bank for Economic Development (IDB) and the Center for Distributive, Labor and Social Studies (Cedlas, in Spanish) agreed that greater participation of women in the labor force is “essential” for “growth and productivity of a country.” For this reason, they recommend the following actions, based on international evidence, to promote female employment and gender equality: 

  • Expand childcare and preschool centers and promote schools with extended hours and service for the elderly. 
  • Expand maternity, paternity and care leaves to promote balance between fathers and mothers and to avoid falling into traditional gender roles. 
  • Extend education to disadvantaged groups of the population, including women.
  • Guarantee information and means for family planning, offering universal access to sexual education and contraceptive methods. 
  • Promote co-responsibility at home to overcome gender stereotypes, which would help empower women and, in turn, facilitate their employment. 
  • Improve the design of social programs such as conditional transfers to avoid deepening traditional gender roles. 
  • Encourage labor flexibility that makes it possible to reconcile the care of children and elderly with the development of a professional career.
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