Gender dynamics in Brasilian households and labor market: evolving roles and persistent inequalities

• Autor(a) principal: Larissa Giardini Simoes
• Data de Publicação: 2023
• Tipo de documento: Tese
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Institucional da UFMG
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/1843/61990
• topic: Division of labor; Housework; Household structure; Gender equality; Earnings inequality; Gender wage gap; Segregation; Occupational gender composition; Occupational mobility; Brazil; Mercado de trabalho; Brasil; Salários; Mulheres; Condições sociais

In Brazil, there has been a process of increasing female participation in the labor market by women taking on new roles. The rise in female labor force participation leads to a prevalence of double shifts in women's daily routines. Although there has been a change towards more equal housework times among men and women, gender differences in time allocation remain. Another change is a trend toward more equal earnings among spouses worldwide. Female double burden influences women's unequal occupational placement, which tends to be in occupations that accommodate that kind of work journeys and their transition between occupations. This dissertation employs the family as a guiding thread for studying gender inequality in Brazilian households and labor market. Also, social stratification and demographic angles are applied to examine distortions and inequalities faced by women in the domestic and work realms. The first paper explores the effects of family structure and occupational characteristics on time spent on market and non-market work. There is still a traditionalistic pattern of time use since, e.g., having a male partner the household increases a woman's housework more than a son/daughter. Women's housework is significantly influenced by their socio-occupational status and the household composition, while male occupational status does not carry as much weight compared to the household structure. Gender ideologies in the delegation of domestic work to women speak louder than the social and demographic differences and inequalities that couples and families have. The second focuses on the earnings association of heterosexual couples across different income levels and how it has evolved. Between 1995 and 2019, the trend toward equality is more related to reducing the wage gap in favor of men and even increasing the cases of wage matches, than to the frequency rise of women outearning their partners. There is a trend towards greater income equality up to a certain point, where women still earn less than their husbands. This norm is more flexible among the poorest, possibly emerging from economic need rather than evolving gender attitudes. The third paper analyzes occupational mobility, emphasizing the occupational gender intensity of the occupations and the family structure of the movers. There is a gendered pattern in the occupational transitions, e.g., over time, there has been a stronger reduction in the transitions outside a worker`s gender-dominant occupation for women than to men, and the frequency of women`s changes to male occupations decreased more rapidly than their movements to female ones between 2012 and 2019. Overall, occupational transitions act to reduce gender occupational segregation, especially the ones performed by women. However, the pattern is not clear and does not appear to intensify over the years. This work contribution is drawing a picture of a set of changes in the gender system that are uneven; they happen more among women than men, more in the workplace than at home, and differently among socio-economic groups, and stalled.