Gender Disparities in Education, Empowerment, and the Job Market in Brazil

• In Event: Roundtable Session (Tuesday VII)
  In Refereed Round-Table Session: This one’s for the girls: designing educational opportunities that promote gender equality

Proposal

This study delves into the relationship between gender equity in education, labor market discrimination, and women’s empowerment in Brazil. Specifically, we explore the following research questions: What is the relationship between years of schooling and wage disparities between males and females in Brazil? How has women’s empowerment shifted in Brazil since the achievement of gender parity in education? How does the wage gap relate to women’s self-perceived empowerment in Brazil? How do rates of educational achievement, wages, and empowerment differ amongst women of different socioeconomic and ethnic backgrounds? We explore these variables, controlling for Brazilian regions (South, Southeast, North, Northeast and Center) and using sample data from the National Household Sample Survey (PNAD) carried out by the Brazilian institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE) and from the Brazilian Census at subnational levels, to measure the gender gap in education and the labor market. We also use PNAD to examine factors which indicate women’s empowerment and determine if and how these levels have changed overtime, as women have increasingly been able to access education despite not yet realizing gender parity in the workforce. We study both sets of data with OLS regression analysis. Additionally, we plan to conduct interviews with women from various socioeconomic levels, education-levels, and career fields to understand their own self-perceptions of empowerment.

Authors

• Joanna French, Stanford Graduate School of Education

• Isabela Pinto, Stanford University