Sello Empresa Mujer — ChileCompra's Automatic Gender Certification for Public-Procurement Suppliers

Sello Empresa Mujer is a certification issued automatically inside Mercado Público, Chile's national e-procurement platform, to businesses meeting a simple ownership or leadership test: for individual suppliers, verification against Civil Registry sex records; for companies, more than 50% women ownership, or a woman general manager or legal representative. Public buyers can then use the seal as an evaluation criterion when awarding contracts.
ChileCompra (Dirección ChileCompra, part of the Ministry of Finance) launched the seal in March 2016, when women made up 36% of individual suppliers on the platform but captured only 25% of transacted value — the gap the seal was built to address. A 2022 directive automated the seal's assignment, removing the need for suppliers to apply manually.
By 2024, 33,673 suppliers held the seal (up 9.5% year-on-year), generating US$3.915 billion in state sales (34.8% growth on 2023) and equal to 22.2% of the US$17.6 billion public market. ChileCompra's own Gender Perspective Participation Index (IPPG), which tracks women-led firms' relative success rate against men-led firms, rose from 0.31 to 0.4 between 2022 and 2024. Measured against the 2016 baseline, however, women-led firms' overall share of transacted value (22.2% in 2024) has not clearly exceeded the 25% share recorded at launch — nearly a decade of automatic certification has grown absolute participation substantially without yet closing the underlying value-share gap.

Read the full analysis: https://www.chilecompra.cl/compras-publicas-con-perspectiva-de-genero/