Implications of paid work for poor women: tensions and possibilities

Abstract

The participation of women in the productive area, carrying out work of extradomestic work (García, de Oliveira, 1994) has been increasing rapidly in the last decades, due to different factors, from changes in lifestyles, in The aspirations of women, to a greater demand of women workers in some economic sectors (Razavi, 2008). This access to the world of work has not been a harmonious or conciliatory process of traditional activities: motherhood, care and domestic work. On the other hand, tensions are often experienced as a result of the hierarchy of gender roles, resulting in a patriarchal differential (Moreno, 2008), reflected in a deficit of women compared to men who also participate in the labor market.

Assuming that every family model is based on different models of production under a certain conception of development, on which depends the distribution of labor in the labor market, the role played by the state and the obligations assigned to the unit (Esping-Andersen 2000), it is possible to see that safe, stable jobs coexist with precarious, flexible jobs.

Finally, we incorporate poverty into the analysis; Poor women have seen their opportunities for development reduced, as well as the employment options they encounter tend to be more rigid in terms of organization (Moreno, 2008), thus increasing the tension between domestic and extradition.
In the present work, we first present a sociodemographic view of a polygon of poverty in Leon, Guanajuato, and deepen the analysis with testimonies
of a group of women who work in the toilet in an institution of Private Higher Education, who live in that area analyzing the tensions between the Domestic and extradition areas, as well as the impact that the paid activity has had on them.