From the “Young Lady” to “Good Appearance”: Grammar of Employability, Gender Scripts, and Secondary Education in Classified Advertisements of El Mercurio (Santiago, Chile, 1960-2005)

Abstract

This article analyzes 1,040 classified advertisements from El Mercurio (1960-2005) to map the occupational composition associated with the secondary education credential and to reconstruct, from a gender perspective, a grammar of employability that organized labor admissibility. Issues from March, June, and December were reviewed in five-year cycles, including only items that explicitly mentioned secondary education. A total of 953 advertisements were harmonized to ISCO-08, and the female subcorpus (n= 385) was examined through seven families of textual markers, an indexical reading, and the contrast between “seeking” and “offering” employment advertisements. Results show that in the 1960s and 1970s secondary education was linked to office and commerce jobs, whereas from the 1980s onward it shifted toward lower-skilled service occupations, a trend consolidated in the 1990s and 2000s. Within the female subcorpus, administrative support and services/sales predominated, with an almost total absence of machine operators. Diachronically, femininity shifted from explicit labels to more implicit filters. These findings support a discussion of the social function of secondary education as a promise of integration and mobility in relation to the labor market. Finally, the article proposes an agenda to test whether secondary education operated as an implicit gender marker in the legibility of the “ideal” female candidate.