Women and the informal economy with Sally Roever, WIEGO

Women and gender minorities have overcome many obstacles within the world of work in the last decades; however, gender inequality is still the norm around the globe. While concepts such as “glass ceilings” and “gender pay gaps” are more and more popular everyday, some of the most pressing issues affecting women are little-known outside academia and still understudied within academia, and more so in economic research. Around the world, and especially across the Global South women remain overrepresented in precarious and underpaid jobs, and in the informal economy. Moreover, frequently the “advancement” of women in middle and high income countries in the labor market, has a negative impact in women from low-income countries.

A distinguishing characteristic of labour markets of the Global South is the predominance of the informal sector or the informal economy, and women are overrepresented in these sectors. Workers in the informal economy face serious deficits in decent work: They are engaged in poor quality jobs, with low productivity and incomes, poor working conditions and occupational health and safety standards, and limited access to knowledge, technology, finance, and markets. Since they are normally outside the legislative regulatory framework and are not covered in official statistical enumeration, they are unrecognized, unregistered, unprotected, and socially excluded (ILO, 2018). This has lead to national and international efforts to promote “formalization processes” aiming to facilitate transitions to formality. Despite the gendered nature of the informal economy, little is know about the effect of formalization and informalization of economic sectors on gender relations and the role of women in the productive and reproductive sector.

In this scenario and building on the conversations we had at the YSI Latin America & Africa Convenings, the YSI Gender and Economics WG wants to coordinate a group of young scholars who are willing to do research on women and the informal economy in the Global South. The aim of this project will be to collect different short case studies from countries in these regions, in order to identify regional trends, similarities and differences.

With this goal in mind, we thought it could be helpful to have a kick-off webinar with an expert on informal work in order to create a homogenous baseline for all participants. In order to do this, we have invited Dr. Sally Roever from WIEGO (Women in Informal Employment: Globalizing and Organizing) to share a presentation with the goal of agreeing on a working definition of informality and discussing the gendered aspects of it.