Female Labor Force Participation in Brazil: 1977–2001

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This paper has three objectives: the first is to track the changes in labor force participation behavior of women and show its evolution according to time and also according to cohorts; the second is to decompose these changes according to a group of elementary variables, such as position in the household and educational level; the last is to analyze with special care the relationship between educational levels of married women, education of their spouses, and their labor force participation behavior. This last objective is motivated by findings in the second one. We have five main results. The first is not surprising - we find both cohort and time effects at work on changes in participation behavior. The second is perhaps more surprising: position in the household has low statistical explanatory power for labor force participation - in other words, the strong increase in the percentage of female headed household holds little relation with the increase in female labor force participation. The real explanation is a massive increase in the participation rates of married women - this increase alone explains close to 70% of the increase in female labor force participation. Another surprising conclusion is that by far the most important explanatory variable is women's educational level, which alone explains about 50% of the variation in the global female participation rate. This suggests a strong price effect in the propensity to work among women. Finally, we van see that for married women of any educational level, increases in the spouse's educational level (and thus potential income) are associated with a lower labor force participation rate. This suggests an income effect to female participation behavior, although other interpretations are possible.