Resistance strategy in dialogue with the Sexual Division of Labor: the female differential with a view to breaking down gender barriers

Abstract

The 1988 Brazilian Constitution represented important advances for women regarding legal guarantees and opened paths for other legal apparatuses to be created to gender equality in Brazil. When it comes to work, however, the theories of the Sexual Division of Labor postulate, with their organizing principles, that there are men's work and women's work, and that performed by men’s has a higher value than what women’s do. Faced with the gender injustices announced in the scientific literature, confirmed in statistical data and in the speeches of several investigated workers, women do not passively accept the reality that puts them in a position of discredit, thus mobilizing various strategies of struggle and resistance. In this article, the speeches of different women, subjects of stricto sensu graduate research, show that women develop a differential to obtain opportunities that are minimally closer to those granted to men in the world of work. Thus, as a movement of inestimable importance for the reduction of inequalities, it is urgent that society move forward in the sense that the professional demands that fall on women are the same that affect men, as well as the fair division of domestic tasks and the equal valuation of the workforce of both.