The right of autonomy: Gender and social justice in democratic societies

The emergence of demands from different social movements in recent decades, elicited a reflection within the social sciences about how such claims could be set out. The universalistic content of republican principles is faced with the plurality of values ​​which emanate from the claims of such movements. This is the ground where specific policies are formulated to promote women's autonomy; one of them is the entry into the labor market. If the relation between employment and female autonomy is far from been clear, we mobilize in this article the Rawlsian argument for social justice as a fertile analytical resource to thinking about how such claims may be deal with in democratic societies.