Approaches to Understanding the Position of Women Workers in the Informal Sector

Abstract

Although many studies of the informal economy tend to be gender-blind, being male or female affects one's movements, possibilities, and career trajectories in the informal sector. Partly because of societal, cultural, and familial patriarchal constraints, women often constitute an especially vulnerable, superexploitable labor force (Safa, 1995). Women in the informal sector may be married or single heads of household. As women married to male heads of household, they may take part in informal-sector activities either as part of the family labor force involved in the same informal-sector activity or as workers in their own right pursuing incomes complementary or supplementary to those of their spouses. Women heads of household, abandoned, separated, or widowed, more often depend on their informal-sector work for the majority of household income. (This of course depends on the stage in the domestic cycle and how many working-age children there are in the household.) The number of female-headed households is increasing throughout Latin America, and these women are disproportionately found in the informal sector (Berger, 1988: 16-17; Buvinc, Youssef, and Von Elm, 1978; Folbre, 1991; International Center for Research on Women, 1988; Lycette and White, 1988: 38-39). Women who work independently of their husbands are disadvantaged in setting up microenterprises such as sewing workshops or street vending stalls by their lesser access to capital and to the skills needed for buying and marketing (Rakowski, 1987; Lycette and White, 1988). Because of the limitations on their mobility associated with gender ideologies in Latin America, women have fewer opportunities to establish the contacts required for developing successful businesses (Cartaya, 1987; Lycette and White, 1988; Espinal and Grasmuck, n.d.; Ypeij, n.d.). Women working as unremunerated labor in their husbands' microenterprises may make the difference between success and failure of those enterprises.