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Gender Equality and the Economy: Interdisciplinary Approaches

Levy Institute Research Program of Gender Equality and the Economy: A Speaker Series

The Gender Equality and the Economy Program of the Levy Economics Institute hosts a speaker series with practitioners and scholars across disciplines from around the globe to address the ever-relevant topic of “Gender Equality and the Economy.” Speakers will present their research and discuss differing approaches to economic analyses through a gender lens. The series highlights the importance of taking an interdisciplinary approach to understanding the implications of how gender and economic inequalities intersect in history, policy, and the everyday.

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Free to Choose? The Gendered Impacts of Flexible Working Hours in Brazil

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Sixth Session: April 29, from 5pm to 6pm

This article examines the effects of the flexibilization of working time in terms of gender segmentation in the labor market. It proposes and analyzes eight categories of women’s participation in the labor market and the effects of flexibilization on each of them. By using household survey data and case studies, the research shows that some forms of flexibilization reinforce the sexual division of labor, for example, low pay for precarious, part-time homebased work, and low social status that perpetuate caregiving roles for women in the private realm. Concurrently, forms of flexibilization associated with better pay do not consider the existing sexual division of labor, in that they demand women’s total availability for work, thus impacting their careers and lives negatively.

Lygia Sabbag Fares is an Economics Professor at John Jay College (City University of New York - CUNY). She is a member of the Core Faculty at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research specializing in Political Economy and Economics. She has her PhD in Development Economics: Social and Labor Economics, UNICAMP, and was previously a visiting scholar at York University, Toronto, Canada. Her research focuses on capitalism and its particularities in underdeveloped countries, and labor and gender. She held positions as Director of the Department of Alternative Income at the Municipal Secretary’s Office for Policies for Women for the City of São Paulo and Administrative Coordinator for the International Master’s Program of the Global Labour University at the University of Campinas, Brazil (UNICAMP).


PREVIOUS EVENTS IN THE SERIES:

• Remittances, Immunization, and Gender: Polio and Girl Children in the Punjab
• “Working the Program”: Employment and Poverty Governance in Criminal Justice Treatment for Women
• What is a Feminist Quantitative Method? Opportunities for Feminist Econometrics
• Queering Economics: Diversity and Inclusion in the Dismal Science
• Critiquing from the Margins: Examining the Power of Black Girls’ Critiques of Class-Based Disparities in Schools

[POSTPONED TO SPRING 2024] Well-Being Costs of Unpaid Care: Gendered Evidence from a Contextualized Time-Use Survey in India