LABOUR-VENEZUELA: Women Earn 20 Percent Less than Men

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Andrés Cañizález

CARACAS, Mar 7 2001 (IPS) - Venezuelan women have joined the labour market in large numbers, but they continue to earn 20 percent less than men with a comparable level of schooling who perform the same jobs.

A study by María Beatriz Orlando and Jenny Zúñiga with the Andrés Bello Catholic University (UCAB) found a gender-related income gap in Venezuela which could not be explained away by differences in years of schooling, experience or branch of economic activity.

According to the report, to which IPS had access on the eve of International Women’s Day, which is commemorated on Mar 8, the income gap is linked to “women’s lack of ascent up the ladder in Venezuela’s business world.”

The researchers point out that women’s steadily growing participation in the workforce in the second half of the 20th century was linked to a rise in the average years of schooling among girls and young women beginning in the 1960s, and the deepening of the country’s economic crisis in the early 1990s.

The study found that the so-called “glass ceiling” is alive and well in Venezuela, where very few women hold managerial posts in large companies or own small companies or microenterprises.

“Only eight percent of bosses or employers are women,” states the study, which based its conclusions on the Central Office of Statistics and Information’s (OCEI) national censuses from 1960 to 1990, as well as its latest national surveys based on sample households.

Like in other countries in Latin America, “women’s participation in the Venezuelan labour market has become a structural tendency that will continue to grow,” say the authors.

The proportion of women in the workforce in this South American oil-producing country climbed from 17 percent in 1950 to 30 percent in 1990 and to 43 percent by 1998.

Fifty percent of women form part of the labour force in Brazil and Colombia, 41 percent in Mexico and 39 percent in Chile, according to the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), a regional United Nations agency.

Venezuela, a country of 23.5 million, has an economically active population of 10.2 million. Analysts agree that unemployment, which stands at 14 percent, and the fact that 51 percent of the labour force is active in the informal sector of the economy are the biggest problems affecting labour in Venezuela.

Orlando and Zúñiga also point to a tendency seen since the 1990s by which less and less women are “leaving the labour market after getting married or having children.” That trend is reflected by the rise in participation in the labour force of women between the ages of 35 and 44.

“Women’s participation in the workforce at older ages, when they have greater family responsibilities, is increasing,” says the study.

The authors also found higher levels of participation among divorced women, “reflecting the presence of women who are forced to assume sole responsibility for their families.”

The average wage earned by men was 25 percent higher than that of women in 1990, and 31 percent higher in 1997, the report points out.

In addition, the researchers studied specific cases, which led them to conclude that men earned 20 percent more than women with similar levels of education and experience, performing the same job in the same sector of the economy.

According to the study, Venezuelan women have a higher average level of formal education, while “a greater proportion of women have completed higher education.” However, they have less experience overall, and work less hours on a weekly basis.

“In the case of Venezuela, women are mainly found in professional, administrative and craft occupations that show significant wage gaps between men and women,” says the report.

Another factor that has widened the wage gap is the growth of the informal sector. “In the informal sector, the gap between the average income earned by men and women is three times the gap seen in the formal sector,” the authors conclude.