According to ILO Convention No. 111 (2003:99), employment discrimination is defined as any distinction, preference or exclusion in terms of selection, hiring and working conditions based on personal characteristics such as skin colour, ethnic origin, social class, age or sex of a person .
In the US, a country that bills itself as a champion of the law, the income gap between those considered “white” and Latinos, Afro-descendants and other ethnic minorities is striking.
But when these people are women and, moreover, of Latin American origin, this difference is multiplied. Wages are the lowest of any major racial, ethnic, or gender group.
Poverty wages, discrimination and unsafe working conditions are constant for Latino women, a situation that impacts families considering that 41% of working women in the United States are the sole breadwinners in their household and 16.4% of these women they are latinas.
In the wake of COVID-19, thousands of women stayed at home to care for their children, in part due to the difficulty of finding reliable and viable childcare, according to a report published by the AP news agency.
When the pandemic began in the spring of 2020, more than 20 million jobs were lost in the United States, and around 3.5 million women with teenage children remained unemployed, according to an analysis by the Office of Censuses.
Most of the women making up this group are of Latino and Afro descent, to which must be added the likely cause of workplace conditions and violence, including sexual harassment, factors that have increased during SARS-COV-2.
Debra Lancaster, executive director of the Center for Women and Labor at Rutgers University in the US, recalled the gender pay gap as a major factor in unemployment, which increases if you’re black or Hispanic, the lack of a family. a supportive paid family leave policy and affordable childcare infrastructure, according to France 24.
Violence against women is increasing by the day in the United States, the North American nation is among the ten countries where women are most at risk of sexual assault. One in five American women has been the victim of sexual abuse at least once in her life. Many of these incidents occur in the family or work environment, according to a report by the Colorado-based National Coalition Against Domestic Violence (NCADV).
The panorama in the country presented as “paradise” is very complex for women in general. We will not make any comparisons, it is not necessary. The American Dream, a skillfully crafted symbolic construction, cannot hide its terrible inequalities, its shadows and wounds.