Gender equity in the Brazilian job market and the importance of role models

Erika Seddon
Mattos Filho Advogados, São Paulo
erika.seddon@mattosfilho.com.br

Domingos Fortunato
Mattos Filho Advogados, São Paulo
dfortunato@mattosfilho.com.br

Cleber Venditti
Mattos Filho Advogados, São Paulo
cleber.venditti@mattosfilho.com.br

Introduction

Imagine yourself as an employee in a large company that has achieved excellent results over the past year. Due to your outstanding contribution to the company’s success, the chief executive officer (CEO) wants to arrange a meeting to congratulate you for your efforts and has an assistant call you to schedule a time.

In picturing this scene, did you assume the CEO is a man and the CEO’s assistant a woman? It is likely most readers will visualise the CEO as a white, middle-aged man. This is an example of unconscious gender bias, a phenomenon that represents a significant barrier to the progression of women’s careers across the globe.

Unconscious gender bias can even be detected in the world of artificial intelligence (AI). As part of International Women’s Day, a Brazilian retail company recently ran an advertising campaign featuring a simulated AI platform that was asked to generate images of CEOs, startup founders and attorneys, sure enough, they were all white men in their thirties or older.

Numerous studies have reported how invisible barriers, such as unconscious bias, are responsible for perpetuating the workplace gender gap. A McKinsey & Company survey from 2022[1] showed that for every female corporate officer promoted to the next level, two others decided to leave their company. The survey suggested that this stems from the burden of household activities and taking care of children and dependents being placed predominately on women, and that this burden only increased during the Covid-19 pandemic. As a result, only a select few women continue on the path towards high-level management positions, while the opposite is true for men.

The situation in Brazil

According to a 2019 survey by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística, IBGE)[2], women in Brazil have higher rates of attendance in secondary and tertiary education than men, with attendance at high schools and undergraduate/graduate schools around nine per cent higher for women.

The fact that less than 30 per cent of men and women attend tertiary education in Brazil reflects a longstanding educational deficit in the country. Yet, even when considering highly qualified professionals, the difficulties women encounter in climbing the career ladder are alarming, irrespective of whether they are more technically qualified than men.

Brazil’s stock exchange, B3, conducted research in 2022[3] revealing that among its 423 listed companies, 61 per cent do not have any female statutory officers, 26 per cent have only one and only six per cent have three women or more. Moreover, 37 per cent of these companies do not have any women on their boards, 38 per cent have only one woman and only eight per cent have three or more.

From a legislative standpoint, a bill has been proposed to increase those rates that would mandate a quota of at least 30 per cent of the company boards of publicly held, state-owned and government-controlled companies to be made up of women. However, this bill is currently in the early stages of congressional review.

The challenges women in Brazil face in reaching high-level positions may also be explained by the number of hours dedicated to taking care of children, dependents and household activities. Women spend over 23 hours per week attending to these tasks, while men spend a mere 11 hours on the same tasks. Women on lower incomes bear this burden in particular, spending around 24 hours per week on taking care of children, dependents and household activities, in comparison to the 21 hours spent by women on higher incomes.

Another alarming statistic the IBGE discovered concerns the impact of motherhood on women’s careers. Only 54.6 per cent of Brazilian women with children three years of age or younger are formally or informally employed, a significant drop when compared to the 67.2 per cent of women outside this demographic. Meanwhile, the opposite occurs in the case of men, whose employment levels increase from 83.4 per cent to 89.2 per cent when they have children three years of age or younger.

Certain aspects of this data were cited as grounds for enacting a federal law in 2022 that launched Brazil’s Hiring + Women (Emprega + Mulheres) programme. This law provides for certain tools that employers can adopt to help women stay in the job market, including:

• flexible working regimes and refunds for day care expenses for both men and women to incentivise the balanced sharing of parental responsibilities;
• time off work for women to focus on professional qualifications in strategic areas or areas with lower rates of participation among women (such as technology and computing);
• time off work for men to support their wives or partners after their maternity leave ends; and
• the possibility of women sharing extended maternity leave periods with the father, provided both of their employers have signed up to a government incentive programme to extend parental leave (an extra 60 days for the primary caregiver and 15 days for the secondary caregiver).

The value of role models

Aside from legislative incentives to support the progression of women’s careers and responsible parenting, incentivising women to opt for male-dominated career paths and a more balanced share of caregiving and household activities is dependent on the existence of role models, who have the ability to reshape the existing culture.

While companies have little say in their female employees’ tertiary education choices, guaranteeing a woman the same opportunities to ascend to leadership positions in areas with low female presence should serve as an incentive for her colleagues or community to aim for a similar career path. Moreover, guaranteeing the same opportunities also means it is necessary to offer women mechanisms to make up for the increased workload they encounter at home, for example, offering flexible work schemes and granting sufficient subsidies for day care services. Having diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) professionals review periodic professional evaluations in line with gender equity optics may also have important effects on how women’s careers progress.

Top-down examples are simply vital for any company or firm that seeks to enhance its gender equality metrics. Regardless of parental or gender equity policies, as long as the male professionals at the top of the pyramid fail to properly take paternity leave or leave the office at a reasonable hour to tend to their parental responsibilities, other male employees will often follow suit, even if it was not their intention to do so. As with women, well-intending male professionals could view these policies as potentially harmful to their careers and ongoing employment.

In Brazil, we recently lost a famous female journalist who served as a role model to many. Gloria Maria Matta da Silva was widely known as the first black woman in Brazil to become a television journalist in Brazil. Throughout her career, she had to face and overcome a wide array of challenges, such as former president João Batista Figueiredo’s regular refusals for interviews during the era of Brazil’s military regime, not only because she was a woman, but also because she was black. This situation gains further importance in the Brazilian context, given that the career prospects for black women are still even worse than those of other women.

Women need more role models like Gloria Maria to inspire and motivate them to strive for leadership positions in industries where men are over represented. Only in this way can we rid ourselves of the unconscious bias that leadership and executive positions are the exclusive domain of men once and for all, ensuring that everyone remembers to ask for the person’s name before jumping to the conclusion that the CEO is a man.

Conclusion

This is a call to companies everywhere. A call for companies to spur the empowerment of new female role models by reviewing their DEI policies and implementing concrete actions for improved gender equity, especially in senior and executive positions, while considering the specific characteristics and contexts of the countries where they operate.