A mãe de 30 anos: Maternidades e divisão sexual do trabalho

Abstract

In this study, the second shift and the hourly salary of mothers and non-mothers are compared to identify possible correlations between maternity and sexual division of labour. Considering the perspective of consubstantiality, results were analysed by age, parental status, moment of first maternity, schooling, and colour or race, for the time periods of 2006-2009 and 2016-2019 – both by simple average charts and by linear regressions, based on Heckman (1979). Schooling served as a proxy for income. The study is based on empirical studies that adopt human capital theory, but also on caveats made by feminist sociology and economics. Results showed that maternity at 30 years old and over is associated with, on the one hand, increased salary bonus, and on the other, increased work overload for white women with college degrees, along the periods under analysis. Thus, as instruments to measure results in the work market are overvalued, maternity – considered more reflexive – may be sustained on increasingly intensive workdays. The study notes that delayed maternity approximates more and less socioeconomically privileged mothers in terms of hours spent in domestic labour, but, reversely, makes these two groups even more unequal in terms of salary – which brings new challenges to understanding how structural oppressions communicate with each other in terms of sexual division of labour. It is understood therefore that salaried and domestic work are related and a change in one requires the other to transform if the goal is a more fair sexual division of labour. This study intends to contribute to value domestic work and, therefore, defends maternity as a social asset that benefits society as a whole. Finally, it is urgent to reflect on what is understood in the study as reflexive maternity, when mothers who had their children at 30 years old accumulate growing workloads despite salary increases. Economic rationality and liberal feminism, centred on liberation through the market, seem to not understand that gender values remain guiding social relations of sex and, consequently, the sexual division of labour for all the groups of mothers analysed in this study.