by Bianca Oliveira
SAO PAULO – The pandemic aggravated the inequality between men and women in the Brazilian labor market. According to the latest available data from the Institute for Applied Economic Research (Ipea), the percentage of women working stood at 45.8% in the third quarter of 2020, the lowest level since 1990.
In an interview to Dire news agency, the coordinator of Insper’s Women and Territory nucleus, Regina Madalozzo, says that the social and economic transformations caused by Covid-19 have made visible the overload of women’s work beyond the professional side.
“The most important feature of the coronavirus crisis was to open up the vulnerability that we have in the issue of care, of what we call domestic production. The participation of women in the labor market does not come together with a discussion of social roles that would allow the same conditions between men and women, and the pandemic wide-open this”, says Regina.
The lack of a support network during isolation, such as schools and nannies, made it impossible for many women to keep their jobs normally or to seek relocation to the market. Therefore, emergency aid played an important role in maintaining family care.
“Economic aid made it possible for the loss of income not to be so great and for the situation not to worsen further, so we discussed the continuity of emergency aid in Brazil. Because if you have a very large share of families headed by women and they can’t work or go out to look for a job, what are you going to do?” explains the coordinator.
Currently in Brazil, 49.5% of families are led by women, as pointed out by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE – Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatísticas). Their return to the job market, however, tends to be even slower than that of men, according to Regina Madallozo.
“The return of employment for women depends on a social organization that we are not yet prepared for.