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“Progress in the world is slow, but Brazil is making even slower progress in the fight against gender inequality,” the economist sums up
Statistically, being a woman means having fewer opportunities for professional development and earning less than male colleagues for the same function.
It’s gender inequality, a structural problem that no country has fully balanced and it goes beyond the labor market.
In some regions girls have less access to education than boys, women have less access to health care than men and face many more barriers to entering politics.
The World Economic Forum, a nonprofit organization that holds annual meetings in Davos, Switzerland, that brings together business people and leaders from around the world, has been preparing an indicator since 2006 that attempts to summarize these different dimensions of gender inequality.
The Global Gender Gap Report has four pillars Health and Survival, Education, Economic Participation and Opportunity, Political Empowerment each with a set of indicators.
The score ranges from zero to 1 the closer to 1, the closer the country is to achieving gender equality.
Brazil is poorly positioned in the ranking. In the 2022 edition, it was ranked 94th out of 146 nations and has deteriorated its ranking since 2020 when it was 92nd.
In those three years, the country slightly improved its score from 0.691 to 0.696. However, other countries saw more significant growth and ended up gaining positions.
“In the last 15 years, countries have started to worry more about this, but progress is still very slow,” says economist Regina Madalozzo.
“But even with such slow progress, Brazil is making less progress,” concludes she, who is a member of the Family and Gender Economics (GeFam) Study Group, which brings together researchers from different institutions.
The country closest to eliminating gender inequality is Iceland, which tops the Global Gender Gap Report’s list with a score of 0.908, followed by Finland (0.860) and Norway (0.845). Also in the top 10 are Rwanda (6th, .811) and Nicaragua (7th, .810).
In terms of regional performance, Brazil has one of the worst indices in Latin America and the Caribbean. Out of 22 countries, it is only ahead of Belize and Guatemala.
Looking at the four pillars that make up the index, the country performs well on health and education (which means men and women have more equal access to these rights) and performs better on the economic empowerment pillar than the aggregate index. rank 85
In the last pillar, political empowerment, the country is at the very bottom with a score of 0.136 in 104th place.
The Brazilian case
Insper professor Ana Diniz claims that many of the countries that do well on the list like the Nordic countries “have more structured equality policies, particularly those focused on work and the multiple dimensions that women’s participation in the marketplace affect”.
In the case of Brazil, she adds, historically the focus of gender politics has been on violence against women because of the seriousness of the problem.
But these actions, too, have been dehydrated in the last four years, says the economist, as budget implementation data from the Ministry of Women, Family and Human Rights show.
The Federal Ministry of Public Relations has even launched an investigation to find out why the portfolio only spent 44% of the budget approved in the budget in 2020.
According to Regina Madalozzo, part of Brazil’s slower progress in this area is also related to the setback in the discussion about gender roles in recent years.
“People felt entitled to reproduce biased statements and confused this with freedom of expression. So you end up losing some of the progress you made, because progress goes into educating people and teaching them that you can’t can treat differently”, scores.
This is the cultural dimension of gender inequality, which also has a direct impact on problem solving and is manifested, for example, in gender stereotypes: the idea that women are more responsible than men for doing housework and childcare and for the elderly; or that some areas of knowledge, such as exact sciences and technology, are more masculine.
Ana Diniz defined this last case for the report as “gender knowledge division”: “How do we prepare women for some areas that are more related to care and men for other areas that are more related to decisionmaking and technology and the are not coincidentally the most valued areas in terms of compensation”.
Both economists point out that the pandemic has also helped deepen gender inequalities, as women have faced an increase in household chores and demands for family care, particularly when the children are at home when the schools were closed.
The 2022 Global Gender Gap Report draws attention to the impact of Covid19, noting that “job losses due to the pandemic have been significantly worse for women than men, in contrast to other recessions in recent history that have affected more male workers “.
The statistics in Brazil point in this direction. According to IBGE’s Pnad Contínua, the female unemployment rate peaked at 18.5% in the first quarter of 2021, a period when male unemployment was 12.2%. The 6.3 percentage point difference between the two indices is the highest in the series beginning in 2012.
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The inequality between men and women in the labor market is multidimensional
The labor market hurdle race
Not only have women become unemployed more often, they have also withdrawn more from the labor market. In 2020, the first year of the pandemic, the female labor force participation rate (i.e. the proportion of workingage women actually in the market, either jobseekers or employed), fell below 50% for the first time in the Continuous Pnad series.
The proportion of men also fell, but at 67% remained at a higher level than for women.
Although the pandemic has affected women’s persistence in the marketplace, the significant difference in participation rates of each gender is structural and also linked to gender inequality. A number of factors contribute to keeping more women out of the workforce.
Teenage pregnancy, lack of day care, early marriage… these are all factors contributing to women’s more erratic relationship with the labor market. For this reason, according to the experts, all these dimensions should fall within the realm of the state’s public policy when proposing to reduce gender inequality.
“I conducted a survey around 2012 among lowincome residents of the city of São Paulo, families with children under the age of six. And half of them said they didn’t work because they couldn’t find a place in a day care center for their child,” Madalozzo explains.
“There was a part that didn’t work because her husband didn’t want her to work and there was a small part that didn’t work because she really didn’t want to, but most were like, ‘I can’t’ because I can’t find a place in daycare.”
Expanding the supply of daycare places, expanding paternity leave, tackling early pregnancies, and incorporating traditionally female roles into boy education are some of the actions the economist lists to create everyday opportunities and challenges for greater equality between men and women .
For Ana Diniz, whose research area includes public and private initiatives to combat inequalities and promote inclusion in the labor market, the private sector as well as public power also play an important role in this construction.
“We talk a lot about reviewing management practices, especially those applied to human resources management, so that they are not permeated by these stereotypes, do not reproduce boundaries and barriers for women, and so that they are sensitive to the specifics of each group.”
The economist adds that the issue of women’s economic autonomy that is, creating conditions for entering, developing and remaining in the labor market is directly related to the endemic problem of violence against women.
“It’s not that a woman who has economic autonomy necessarily has to leave the situation of violence, but more often than not she needs economic autonomy to be able to leave. T.”
Government promises package of measures
President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (PT) said last week that his government is preparing a bill to be announced on March 8 to guarantee that women and men holding the same positions are paid the same wages.
The president even commented on the wage compensation instrument approved in the labor reform (Law 13.467/2017), saying at the time that the law had “so many nuances” that it was difficult to apply in practice. However, he did not give any details about the content of the new draft law.
On March 1, the First Lady, Janja Lula, and Minister for Women, Cida Gonçalves, brought together the 11 ministers who make up the government (out of 30 ministries) and the Presidents of Caixa and Banco do Brasil to “examine the position of the federal government on the expansion of female power spaces”.
According to the government’s official announcement following the event, the announcement, scheduled for March 8, is set to go beyond the Pay Equity Bill and include action in several ministries.