Costa Rica elects its first female president - Building Gender Balanced Business

Who is Laura Chinchilla?

• Mrs Chinchilla is a graduate of the University of Costa Rica and of Georgetown University.

• She has been married twice and has a 14 year-old son.

• Mrs. Chinchilla is a part of the centre-left Nation Liberation Party (PLN).

• As a social conservative, she is against gay marriage, abortion and any change to the position of Roman Catholicism as the state’s religion.

• In June 2009, she won the PLN’s primary election with a 15 point lead over her runner-up.

• In February, Laura Chinchilla was elected President of Costa Rica with 47% of the vote.

What is she going to do?

• She replaced the nobel laureate, Oscar Arias, after having been his vice-president from 2006 to 2008.

• As his protege, she vowed to continue Arias’s liberal economic policies and expand Costa Rica’s free trade agreements.

• She also stated that she would increase education spending by 8% of Costa Rica’s GDP and boost funding for law enforcement to contain the problem with drug smugglers that the country is facing.

The BBC article