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

Join us for our sixth session with Lygia Sabbag Fares, Economics Professor at John Jay College (City University of New York – CUNY), on Monday, April 29, from 5pm to 6pm in the Levy Conference Room, or on Zoom. Dr. Fares’s 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 event is cosponsored by The Global and International Studies Program (GISP). ​

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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).

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