Blessing in Disguise? How the Gendered Division of Labor in Political Science Helped Achieved Gender Parity in the Chilean Constitutional Assembly

Abstract

On October 18, 2019, a social uprising in Chile took many national and foreign analysts by surprise. Protests, demonstrations, arson, looting, and rioting occurred in the streets of major cities across the country, sparked by a modest rise in subway fares and a police crackdown on high school students hopping over turnstiles. Demonstrators’ violence and police abuse, intertwined with large-scale peaceful rallies, exposed structural conditions of social and economic inequality and a profound crisis of political representation. The demonstrators’ motto, “Until Dignity Becomes a Habit!,” brought together the demands of several groups of protesters (Suárez-Cao 2021). Their many demands exposed the limitations of dictator Augusto Pinochet’s constitution as an “institutional straitjacket” that had blocked many widely urged reforms (Piscopo and Siavelis 2021). The idea that a new constitution could set a path to rewriting the broken social pact, at the same time that it could advance the addressing of social grievances, gained strength amid disoriented elites. Late at night onNovember 15, 2019, party leaders from the left and the right signed an agreement to organize a referendum in which voters would decide on whether the constitution should be changed and, if so, what the replacement mechanism should be.