There are several inequalities in Brazilian society. One of the most evident refers to gender relations, less related to the economic issue and more to the cultural and social point of view. social representations about the participation of women within different spaces, whether in the family, at school, church, in social movements, in short, in life in society.
In the last decades of the 20th century, we witnessed one of the most striking facts in Brazilian society, which was the insertion, each growing, of women in the labor field, a fact explained by the combination of economic, cultural and social.
Due to the advance and growth of industrialization in Brazil, the transformation of the productive structure occurred, the continuous urbanization process and the reduction of fertility rates in families, providing the inclusion of women in the work.
According to the PNAD (National Household Sample Survey) carried out by the IBGE in 2007, the Brazilian population reaches almost 190 million Brazilians, with an estimated 51% of women. According to IBGE data from 2000, the Brazilian PEA (Economically Active Population) in 2001 had an average of 6.1 years of schooling, with the average schooling of women being 7.3 years and 6.3 years of men years old.
A recurrent finding is that, regardless of gender, the person with a higher level of education has more chances and opportunities for inclusion in the labor market. According to recent studies, it appears, even if timidly, that women have had a greater insertion in the labor market. There is also a significant improvement in wage differences when compared to males. However, the recurring difficulties encountered by female workers in accessing management positions and equal pay with men who occupy the same positions/occupations have not yet been overcome.
Even today, the concentration of occupations of women in the labor market is recurrent. that 80% of them are teachers, hairdressers, manicures, public servants or work in services of health. But the contingent of the most important women workers is concentrated in paid domestic service; in general, they are black women, with a low level of education and with the lowest incomes in Brazilian society.
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According to Seade – State Data Analysis System Foundation, of the government of the State of São Paulo – regarding the “behavior of female unemployment in the Region In the Metropolitan Region of São Paulo, in 1985, this rate was 15.5% for women and 10.1% for men, increasing in 2000 to 20.9% and 15.0%, respectively. This means that in the RMSP [Metropolitan Region of São Paulo], in 2000, one in five women who were part of the Economically Active Population was unemployed.”
The total number of women in precarious and informal work is 61%, 13% higher than the presence of men (54%). Black women have a rate 71% higher than white men and 23% of them are maids. Necessarily, the analysis of the situation of the female presence in the world of work goes through a review of the social functions of the woman, for the criticism of the conventional understanding of what work is and the ways of measuring it, which are carried out in the Marketplace.
Women's unpaid work, especially within the family, is not accounted for by our statistical system and it has no social value - not even by the women themselves - although they contribute significantly to the family income and come growing. What can be concluded from studies on the situation of women in the labor market is that there is a difficulty in separating family life from working life or public life of private life, even when it comes to participation in the labor market, in the economically active population.
Orson Camargo
Brazil School Collaborator
Graduated in Sociology and Politics from the School of Sociology and Politics of São Paulo – FESPSP
Master in Sociology from the State University of Campinas - UNICAMP
