Changes in Status and Autonomy of Women in the Brazilian Demographic Processes

Jose Eustáquio Diniz Alves, Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística (IBGE)

The demographic transition is a process that has spread out all over the world. In Brazil, the mortality transition started in the middle of the last century. The crude rate o mortality decreased from 25 per thousand in 1940 to 6 per thousand in the year 2000. In the same pace, the life expectancy increased from 43 to 68 years old in the same period. The birth crude rate shifted from 43 per thousand in 1960 to 21 per thousand in 2000, and the fertility rate felt down from 6.2 to 2.3 children per woman, in this period. Several factors have contributed for the demographic transition since Brazil has gone over an intense process of development – industrialization and urbanization – during the second half of the XX century. The process of modernization in the country had a differentiated impact according to categories of gender. In addition, changes in women’s status and autonomy have contributed for the decline of fertility in Brazil. Women’s status is understood here as higher levels of education, income, and better access to services and assets in general. Autonomy is realized as a higher family independence, greater power of choice and bargain, and free will. The purpose of our paper is to verify to what extent changes in women’s status and autonomy have influenced changes that occurred in reproductive behavior along with the decline in fertility. In order to carry out this task we are faced with two major difficulties. From one hand, in a country with the socio and cultural characteristics and gender relations as in Brazil, it is difficult to define variables or indicators of status and autonomy in the terms we are using here. The fact that makes it more difficult is that gender relations are not as clear-cut as in the Muslim countries, but are very uneven and sometimes hidden under unequal rights. From the other hand, although Brazil has extremely rich data sets available on quite a few issues, we are faced with the lack of data on gender relations. Hence, before pursuing our major objective, we have a specific objective of defining proxies to indicate women’s status and autonomy based on secondary data. Consequently, we intend to identify a set of variables and indicators on women’s status and autonomy by using data from the Brazilian demographic censuses. Some of these indicators on status are more straightforward, such as levels of education, income and participation in the labor force. Others, however, we intend to create from the information on occupation and social security. We suppose that autonomy can be measured from considering gender segregation in the labor market, where women used to have higher chances of being inserted in labor market, in an occupation that is typically considered a female occupation. Additionally, we suppose that social security gives different levels of autonomy if the woman has it herself or depends on husband’s social security. Due to some empirical and theoretical constraints, we considerer only married women in our study, and carry out a longitudinal and spatial analysis of fertility decline that takes into account changes in gender relations. Also, we utilize a theoretical approach at the macro level, since it evaluates the relations between the socio-geographical environment and reproductive choices. We utilize model of fixed-effects to evaluate how much of the changes in the indicators of women’s status and autonomy have influenced the level of fertility from 1980 to 2000 in Brazil. Since Brazil is a very heterogeneous country either in terms of social relationships as well economic characteristics, the results will permit a better understanding of the fertility transition in Brazil, with the persistence of high levels of fertility in some regions of the country, at the same time it reaches fertility rates below the replacement level in other places. Therefore, our study will show that greater women’s autonomy and status have contributed to fertility decline and that fertility differentials have a strong gender component.