Project Rewrite: A conversation on education, equality, and opportunity with Mercedes Mateo Díaz
Project Rewrite, a new initiative from the Wikimedia Foundation, is calling attention to gender gaps in the information landscape (the universe of resources we turn to for knowledge), and calling on everyone to help close them. Every organization and person can help to amplify women’s stories. As part of Project Rewrite, we are sharing conversations with inspiring women leaders we want you to know about. In turn, their organizations are profiling women in their fields to help elevate them in the wider information landscape.
Mercedes Mateo Díaz is lead education specialist at the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), where she heads a large education initiative focused on transforming education and equipping citizens with 21st century skills. Her work covers different areas of international development and social policy, with a strong emphasis on inequality. She holds a PhD in political science from the University of Louvain, and has previously been a postdoctoral fellow at the Belgian Scientific Research Foundation (FNRS) and Robert Schumann Center of the European University Institute.
In May 2020, the Wikimedia Foundation joined IDB’s coalition to promote the development and strengthening of 21st century skills in Latin America and the Caribbean. Learn more about the coalition here.
Read our interview with Mercedes below, and check out IDB’s profile of Mariana Costa Checa, a Peruvian entrepreneur who is the creator of Laboratoria, an organization promoting women in technology.
Q: What led you to become interested in development and social policy?
I come from a small city in Spain, a quite conservative environment. Growing up, I knew I wanted to travel the world, contribute, and give back to society by making it a better place for everyone. People say of me that when I see an injustice that’s stronger than me, I’m like an old knight who gets on my horse and fights. I always want to see an impact from what I do.
As a child, I had a strong intrinsic motivation to study, so there’s a strong connection to education and learning that runs throughout my own life. I knew [education] was my passport to the future I wanted, not the future I was predetermined to have, so to speak.
My own mother knew this very well. She wanted to be a doctor, that was her dream since she was born, and she couldn’t. She was a woman and her family privileged her brother’s education over hers, even though she was extremely gifted. I learned to be optimistic and never give up from her. My mom has reinvented herself several times in her life; she could never be a doctor but she had a strong passion for music and went to music school after retiring.
In my PhD studies, I learned a lot about equality. All my research was about social policy and how to generate and distribute opportunities, political preferences, and how nationalism and the sense of belonging to a community affects our perceptions of government’s performance in different issues.
“I knew education was my passport to the future I wanted, not the future I was predetermined to have.”
Q: How did you arrive at your current focus on education?
I came to education through my work on equality. Nobody can choose where one is born, but societies can make sure that everyone has similar chances to succeed in life by providing a good education.
When you look at LATAM and the Caribbean countries, you realize that the opportunities we are missing as a consequence of inequality are really dramatic. When a poor kid in Latin America sees her story, she probably sees her mom’s story repeating, because her opportunities to move up the social ladder are very small.
The crisis has been accelerated by COVID-19. We see overachievement of girls and women in education but at the same time an underachievement of those same women in the labor market. There is a 25 percentage points difference in terms of participation in the labor force between women and men [in Latin America]. Not to mention the differences in salaries and occupational segregation happening in the region. At least one out of two kids dropout of school and don’ t finish secondary education. This situation was accelerated by COVID-19, so we are seeing worse results in education, with an additional estimate of 1.2 million youth leaving school.
Inequality hinders prosperity and resilience; the higher the inequality, the less adaptive and resilient societies are. You cannot respond to shocks like a pandemic when you have a large proportion of the population that can fall into poverty. You cannot innovate, develop new industries and compete in the global economy when more than half of your population has not finished secondary education. For me, that’s why I decided to get into education. Providing real opportunities to the younger generation starts with the human capital investments that we make. When families cannot make those investments, society has to jump in. Education is the currency that we give individuals to exchange in society, and to have prosperous lives.
Q: What are some of the ways COVID-19 may change education?
We’ve been talking a lot about a need to transform education systems, and COVID-19 has turned everything upside down. Basically it showed us that what we had was not enough for the 21st Century. We are teaching students in the same ways, in the same class structures as we did in the 1900s, and with similar contents. The world has changed a lot, but school has not adapted to those changes. Today, no one doubts there is a profound need for transformation.
A modern education system needs to provide education for every child, no matter where she or he is. For that, we need technology and connectivity.
Teachers have also realized that they have to get trained in new pedagogies, devices, and digital skills. The fact that we will need to remediate and compensate for losses [in learning] accumulated during COVID-19 is leading us to explore new methods that haven’t been incorporated to the mass education production function before.
Q: What does a 21st Century education look like?
It’s about equity and flexibility. Being able to learn everywhere, at your pace, at different times, synchronously or asynchronously depending on your needs as a student and a learner. It also should be something that you do throughout your life. We used to think of education as something that you did during a certain period of your life: you were learning from 0 to 18 or 25, and then you would move to a productive phase in the labor market, and finally to retirement. Now the three stages are completely blown up.
Now we know that we have to learn throughout our lives. We need this because of the challenges and rapid changes brought by automation and the digital transformation; we will need to reinvent ourselves throughout our lives, and that means we need to keep on studying and learning, upskilling and reskilling, every day. The life expectancy of technical skills in the labor market is about 18 months to 2 years. That’s why it’s very important to keep on learning.
We need to make sure everybody understands that education should be providing everyone with those skills that are transferable. Those that you take with you for life, from one occupation to another, from the private sphere to the public sphere. Lifelong learning, digital skills, perseverance, grit, critical thinking, collaboration, teamwork, communication — those are the types of skills that everyone should have.
Education can transform how people live and contribute to society as active economic, social and political citizens, responsible and responsive to their environment and their communities. An important part of our education should be about our contribution to society as human beings. Today for example, online communities are quite central to our way of living. How you train individuals to be ethical and positive contributors to those communities, and how we all take responsibility in improving our collective intelligence in platforms like Wikimedia should be one of the keys to a good education. Avoiding toxic behaviors and fostering positive citizenship are more important than we might think for all of us and our future as a society.
You can learn more about Mercedes’ work at Enfoque Educación, the education-focused blog of the Interamerican Development Bank.
We invite you to learn more about Wikipedia’s gender gap and help us close the divide by joining Project Rewrite today.
*This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
