Racial, Gender, and Regional Inequalities in Brazil’s Care Provision and the Evolving Role of the State

Join us for our first session of the 2024 Fall Semester, with Luiza Nassif Pires, Assistant Professor at the Institute of Economics at Unicamp and the Director of the Research Center on Macroeconomics of Inequalities (MADE) at FEA/USP, on Monday, September 9th, from 5pm to 6pm in the Levy Conference Room at Blithewood, or on Zoom. Dr. Nassif Pires’ presentation will be followed by an open Q&A session with audience members—both those in person and on Zoom are welcome to ask questions.

Light refreshments will be served.

This presentation explores the multifaceted challenges and implications of care work in Brazil, drawing from several comprehensive studies conducted as part of the Made Research Center on Macroeconomics of Inequalities. I will introduce the Social Infrastructure Care Indicator (IISC), developed to assess the availability and inequality of paid care services across Brazil using data from the Continuous National Household Sample Survey (PNADc) for the 4th quarter of 2023. The findings reveal significant regional disparities, and a contrast between the dominance of the private sector in care provision and the public’s reliance on state services. Additionally, I will examine results and insights from a study on the “cost of motherhood,” and other studies on care in Brazil, which shed light on the complex interplay of gender, race, and socioeconomic status in shaping care dynamics. Collectively, these studies underscore the urgent need for policies that redistribute care responsibilities, enhance public care infrastructure, and support women’s economic participation. I aim to provide a comprehensive understanding of care work in Brazil and its broader social implications, advocating for systemic changes to address these entrenched inequalities.

Luiza Nassif Pires is Assistant Professor at the Institute of Economics at Unicamp and the Director of the Research Center on Macroeconomics of Inequalities (MADE) at FEA/USP. She holds a PhD in Economics from The New School for Social Research. She was a research scholar in the Gender Equality and the Economy program at the Levy Economics Institute at Bard College, where she lectured in the graduate programs in Economic Theory and Public Policy. Her main research topics are feminist economics, intersectional political economy, care economics, and social reproduction theory and the main research methods are microeconometrics, game theory, and input-output methods.

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