Differentials in Labor Market Outcomes in Brazil – 2000-2010

In past research (Guimarães, Barone, Alves de Brito, 2013) we argued that the transformations that the Brazilian labor market went through in the past 50 years (from 1960 on) meant the consolidation of a movement towards “marketization” of the labor force. This movement seemed closely related to increasing participation rates especially between women, at a different pace compared to what was observed in other countries, as opposed to race differentials in those chances, that didn’t seemed to change so much in the period .  

That meant a decrease in the differential between participation probabilities of men and women in the labor market through the period that we were analyzing. But that doesn’t say too much about the outcomes of participation, and the decrease in the differential on chances of entering the labor market does not necessarily mean decrease in the differential of outcomes between men and women once they decide to sell their labor force in the market. That’s the intend of this proposal. Drawing on the analyzes of Guimarães and Biderman (2004) which shows how, in a scenario of employment retraction, the sex and color attributes tend to have a very important role in determining wage differentials , we wanted to analyze how the effects of those attributes vary in a context of increasing formal employment, like we observed in Brazil between 2000 and 2010.  With our current research we had seen that the chances of labor market participation between women had dramatically changed and with this proposal we want to go further in that investigation in order to access what kind of effects this change in the chances of entering the labor market meant changes in labor market outcomes between men and women.