Employment

The current economic structure privileges paid work and makes it difficult to combine it with other spheres of life such as domestic work, care and affection; that is, those tasks aimed at maintaining the home and caring for it and which often fall to women.

The lack of co-responsibility in domestic work between men and women means that many women have to opt for a part-time or reduced working day. On the other hand, in paid work there are also gender inequalities that affect working conditions: women are subject to more precarious forms of contracting, as well as a lack of participation in decision-making and a low presence in positions of responsibility. All of this ends up shaping the existence of the gender pay gap, another indicator of the inequality of men and women in the paid labour market.

Access to and permanence in the labor market

The sexual division of labor, that is, the distribution of paid work and domestic and care tasks between men and women, generates inequalities. In the world of work, this inequality is shown in different spheres, such as, for example, the fact that women are unemployed for the longest time. This contributes to the feminization of poverty and also affects the conditions in which women reach retirement.

Horizontal and vertical segregation

Gender inequalities in the world of work are also manifested through horizontal and vertical segregation of the labor market. Horizontal segregation concentrates men and women in certain occupations and jobs based on a cultural and social attribution that considers them “masculine” or “feminine” positions. This horizontal segregation is also complemented by vertical segregation in which positions of power or decision-making are mostly male.