Abstract

SANTOS PEREZ, María Lourdes  and  VALENCIA OLIVERO, Nelcy Yoly. The absence of capabilities: a common denominator of the career paths of women in the services to persons markets. Rev. colomb. soc. [online]. 2017, vol.40, n.2, pp.147-171. ISSN 0120-159X.  https://doi.org/10.15446/rcs.v40n2.66390.

The article presents the most relevant findings of a research project which carried out a critical study of the career paths of some Colombian women engaged in the globalized labor markets of "services to persons", specifically in the Spanish labor market, between 2000 and 2007. The term "services to persons" is used to designate a series of activities related to domestic and care work; however, upon closer examination, those activities seem to be found at the interstices or in a grey area with respect to the meaning of the concept of work, given that the everyday behavior of those who engage in such activities reveals multiple tensions between the formal and the informal, the visible and the invisible, the regular and the irregular, and the private and the public. While the research was carried out using a mixed quantitative and qualitative methodology, the work centered specifically on analyzing the results of the quantitative part. To our empirical inquiry reflected in a logistic regression exercise, we added a series of theoretical considerations in the form of notes, in order to explore the heuristic potential of Sen’s notion of capabilities, as reviewed from the gender perspective by feminist authors like Martha Nussbaum. The main conclusions drawn from our work are the following: 1) each one of the cases of the women under study made evident the structural inequalities of their place of origin, the lack of opportunities, and the representation of gender inequalities, at the moment when they offered their services in the labor market; 2) those elements contribute to creating a profile for the job; and 3) their insertion in the services to persons market entails both continuity and rupture in terms of capabilities. In this sense, their career paths are shaped by taking into account their original circumstances, as well as all sorts of discourses and imaginaries that help them give meaning to their decision regarding what to work in, how, and where.

Keywords : capabilities; care; gender; globalization; labor markets.

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