Segregation by gender and highest academic level in the career of research support staff of CONICET-Argentina, for the year 2021.

This work analyzes data obtained through a public request in 2021 of the highest academic level and gender in the career of CONICET support staff, which are scientific personnel in charge of a wide variety of highly qualified tasks such as: responsible of: equipment, techniques and laboratories, as well as administrative. There are other types of hiring this role in science, which are not contemplated in this analysis, such as: Article 9, contracted, outsourced personnel, dependent on universities with functions in CONICET, among other possible still unidentified.It was determined that there is a balanced composition of personnel from the undergraduate, graduate and postgraduate studies levels. By incorporating the gender variable, it can be seen that at the undergraduate and graduate training levels (non-university tertiary, intermediate and basic) are masculinized, while at the postgraduate training levels are feminized. In the analysis of the distribution of CPA personnel by career, we can see that there are more personnel in the Professional category: 1864 people vs 951, and that it is balanced in gender but this is not the same for the Technical career. Analyzing the Technical and Professional careers separately, it was found that there are people with a high level of training retained in the Technical category, a situation that affects women more than men. It can also be seen that in the Professional category, an analogous process occurs, in which the people who access this category with a level of training less than a bachelor's degree are mostly men, which confirms that there is greater pressure of training for women. In this work, this is not considered to be a strict demonstration of “overqualification” or “underqualification,” since for this it is necessary to investigate more about the nature of the tasks they perform, how the bureaucratic incorporation and promotion mechanisms influence them, as well as the subjectivities put into play in the interpretation of which tasks are Technical and which are Professional. It is necessary to continue researching the reasons that produce these inequalities in order to propose reparatory solutions.