Youth is the stage of life when one’s life plan is defined, but for many young women in Santander, this transition to adulthood is conditioned by educational, employment, and wage barriers that limit their real opportunities for progress.
Although they continue to have greater access to higher education than men, they face greater obstacles to achieving solid economic autonomy, a disturbing paradox. This is warned in the report “Gaps that shape the future: educational and employment challenges for young women in Santander” produced by the Santander Observatory on Women and Gender Equality (OMEGS), in partnership with the Industrial University of Santander and the Departmental Government, which provides a detailed overview of the structural gaps that affect the present and future of this population.
Between 2019 and 2024, female participation in higher education rose from 51.6% to 54.4%. Women outnumber men at technical, technological, and professional levels and maintain a strong presence in postgraduate studies. However, behind this progress, silent segregation persists, according to the study, which is part of Santander’s Public Policy on Women and Gender Equality.
In Colombia, although slight progress has been made in youth employment indicators, gender gaps remain pronounced. According to figures from the National Administrative Department of Statistics (DANE), for the July-September quarter of 2024-2025, the youth participation rate was 54.7%, the employment rate was 46.7%, and the unemployment rate was 14.6%. In Santander, youth unemployment reached 11% in 2024, with reductions in participation and employment compared to 2023. These data show that the difficulties of entering the labor market are not uniform and that they affect young women to a greater extent, who face simultaneous barriers: less access to formal opportunities, a disproportionate burden of domestic and care work, and gender stereotypes that restrict their availability for work.
For its part, OMEGS points out that the areas with the highest female presence continue to be Education Sciences (76%), Health Sciences (74%), and programs related to economics and administration (71%). In contrast, in Engineering, Architecture, and STEM careers, female participation barely reaches 35%, while in Agronomy it reaches 43%. The disciplines with the lowest female presence coincide with the sectors with the highest growth, innovation, and remuneration in the regional economy.
In addition, women prefer virtual (19%) and distance learning (9.3%) modalities, an alternative that can be interpreted as academic flexibility to adapt to domestic burdens that continue to fall disproportionately on them.
More obstacles
In studies such as specializations and master’s degrees, women predominate, with a participation rate of between 55% and 58%, while men remain between 42% and 44% during 2024. However, the inequality becomes more evident in doctoral programs, where only 43% of women are enrolled compared to 57% of men.
“The gender gap in doctoral training is due to the existence of barriers related to an overload of care work, motherhood, employment gaps, or the impossibility of combining studies with paid work,” the report highlights.
According to Mariana Andrea Durán Fontecilla and Carla Estefanía Vargas Valdés, in their publication “They Are Expecting the Best of You”: The Complex Intersection of Being a Woman, Mother, and Doctoral Student,” in the Latin American Journal of Inclusive Education, “the disparity in access to and retention in doctoral studies has its origin in the intersection of being a woman-mother-student, where the social responsibility of caregiving clashes with academic demands and the lack of structural support, both economic and institutional.”
The transition to the labor market reproduces and amplifies these inequalities. In 2024, the overall participation rate for young men reached 61.6%, while that for women reached 49.6%. In other words, there is a gap of 12 percentage points that keeps almost half of the young female workforce out of the market.
Meanwhile, youth unemployment also hits women harder, with 20.1% unemployed compared to 16% of men. Added to this is a high level of informality, ranging between 52% and 54%, generally in sectors with low-quality jobs and no social protection.
In addition to the above statistics, the NENTR phenomenon (young people who are neither in education nor in paid employment) is a cause for concern. In Santander, five out of seven people in this situation are women. This is alarming because it combines a lack of work experience with care responsibilities that limit their productive integration.
A structural challenge
Santander shows that young women face structural disadvantages, which has led to lower labor force participation and employment rates, higher unemployment, and unstable integration into the labor market compared to men and the adult population.
Given this situation, experts recommend institutionalizing care systems, strengthening scholarships and integration strategies in technological areas, and establishing permanent mechanisms to monitor wage gaps, especially in the informal sector.
Santander thus faces a decisive challenge: to prevent a generation of young people from being trapped between education and exclusion. Ensuring real conditions of equity will not only expand individual opportunities, but also allow the department to advance with its full human potential.
