Received: 2019-03-15  |  Accepted: 2019-04-25  |  Published: 2019-06-30

Title

Undoing gender inequalities: insights from the Portuguese perspective


Abstract

In Portugal and elsewhere in the world, the movement promoting gender equality has known advances and setbacks over the past century. While acknowledging and outlining the major favourable developments, this paper discusses mainly some tendencies in the opposite direction, in particular those that highlight and encourage, from an early age, differences between men and women, usually to the detriment of the latter. Examples in Portugal include the growing genderization of children's toys and books (which in one case has triggered a widely-mediatized polemic in September 2017) and the importance of the colours pink and blue. After childhood, differences persist regarding choice of study, professional activities, salary and domestic responsibilities. In this respect, sociological research in Portugal has observed a backlash in the position of women, in particular as an effect of the financial and economic crisis in the period 2010-2014.


Keywords

gender inequality, feminism, Portugal, education, domestic context


JEL classifications

J00


URI

http://jssidoi.org/ird/article/7


DOI


HAL


Pages

85-98


Funding

Parts of this text are spinoffs from research in the framework of the project Time allocation and Technology – A gender approach for the Portuguese context, funded by the FCT (PIHM/2008/37) and FEDER funds through the European Regional Development Fund COMPETE programme.

This is an open access issue and all published articles are licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License

Authors

Schouten, Maria Johanna Christina
University of Beira Interior, Covilhã, Portugal http://www.ubi.pt
University of Minho, Braga, Portugal https://www.uminho.pt
Articles by this author in: CrossRef |  Google Scholar

Journal title

Insights into Regional Development

Volume

1


Number

2


Issue date

June 2019


Issue DOI


ISSN

ISSN 2345-0282 (online)


Publisher

VšĮ Entrepreneurship and Sustainability Center, Vilnius, Lithuania

Cited

Google Scholar

Article views & downloads

HTML views: 3035  |  PDF downloads: 1339

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