Since beginning my research here, one element of the cooperatives that has most caught my eye is the gender dynamics within the movement of catadores. Gender plays a huge role in the cooperatives and serves as a fascinating case study of the relationships between men and women in cooperative endeavors, particularly among the working class. This is not an issue I have studied in depth, but it is one that carries huge implications and certainly merits future attention.
The most obvious starting point to understand gender dynamics is the predominance of women in the cooperatives. A recent study by the Minas Gerais State Waste and Citizenship Forum showed that while women make up only 30.1% of street catadores and 28.2% of catadores in dumps, they make up 66.2% of catadores working in organizations. That is, even though women represent less than a third of total catadores, they form a significant majority among organized catadores. In fact, of the nine enterprises in the Cataunidos network, only ASMAC is majority-men, and even this is probably due only to the unique profile of ASMAC, which emphasizes individual collecting and sorting methods.
There are two key factors that enable gender to have such an important influence within the cooperatives. First, there is a clear division of labor in most enterprises, with women doing the sorting while men handle collection, transport, and press operation. (This fits within our traditional expectations of competitive advantage: men are better at activities that demand greater physical strength and women are better at activities that require careful attention to detail.) Of the production processes, sorting is certainly the most time-consuming, and thus the action that demands the greatest focus within the cooperative. As such, it makes sense to employ more women than men.
Second, women tend to have an easier time accepting the team mentality that is essential for working effectively in a cooperative. While this is not to say that men do not know how to work in teams, it is certainly true that female catadores are generally more willing to work together. The treasurer of Coopert mentioned in a recent conversation that they were having a difficult time recruiting more men to join their ranks, even though many women seemed quite interested in the idea. If you imagine the idea of the traditional male catador pulling his cart through the street, trading his materials for drinks and sleeping wherever he pleases, it becomes easier to understand why such individuals may prefer to keep their independence instead of becoming beholden to a group of peers. Women, on the other hand, often have families to support and may be attracted to the stability that cooperatives offer. This is not to say, of course, that women are better at avoiding conflicts than men. Indeed, constant gossiping and bickering are common among both sexes within the cooperatives, just as they are in other work environments. But it does mean that women are often more willing to tolerate and overcome such disagreements within the group.
Fabiana Goulart, a former student of Dr. Lima who wrote her master’s thesis on social relationships within three local cooperatives, found that gender can be a source of conflict. Due to the gender separation through division of labor, men and women often view their own tasks as more valuable and accuse the other of not carrying their weight within the group. Furthermore, women have tried to incorporate work schedules that allow them to leave early to prepare for their “second shift” of domestic duties such as cooking, cleaning and caring for the children. This progressive approach to ameliorating unfair societal household practices is often a source of tension among the men of the group, who insist that work and home are separate activities and that women should not be given special privileges within the group. Nevertheless, because women usually make up such a strong majority of members, they often get their way.
The implications of these dynamics are enormous for our understanding of the relationship between gender and socioeconomics in general, especially as women continue to enter the labor force in large numbers throughout the world, upending traditional social and economic structures. These questions loom large here in Brazil, where National Geographic’s recent “Girl Power” article profiled the interaction between economic development, demographic change and female empowerment. Will women’s growing clout in the workplace help force dramatic changes in our model of economic organization? Could women’s heightened appreciation for cooperative production and stability as well as their greater understanding of the interplay between work and family life help our society to reconsider our previous assumptions about individualism, hierarchy and the separation of the social and economic spheres in our daily lives? Will women simply be absorbed into our existing capitalist structure, or will they change it in ways we cannot yet predict?
A recent gathering of over 500 female leaders of the MNCR in Curitiba led to calls for greater understanding of how economic marginalization, environmental degradation, oppression of women and sexual minorities, and lack of adequate social support structures operate in tandem to reinforce existing societal inequalities and undermine our collective ability to form more prosperous communities for ourselves and our children. With every day that goes by, I recognize more and more that, through my work with the catadoras, I am witnessing the vanguard of the international feminist movement.
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