Breathe
By Sonia Garza González, National President of the Mexican Association of Women Heads of Business (AMMJE), National Board Member of COPARMEX, COPARMEX NL and CAINTRA NL. Selected for the second consecutive year as one of the 100 Powerful Women in Business by Expansión magazine.
A topic that has resonated with me for several days now is the economic autonomy of women in the world and in our country, because it is fundamental, insofar as it allows us to expand our possibilities for productive, personal and family development.
Beyond having the ability to generate one's own income through paid work, economic autonomy also implies -for me- the ability to freely use those resources to cover food, housing, health and general welfare needs, including the freedom of social mobility and to change environment whenever we wish or require it.
In this context, the opposite situation of economic autonomy is economic dependence, most of the time with hard family or existential battles, due to the limitation of generating their own or sufficient income. Let us not forget that with the Covid-19 pandemic, during the first periods of confinement, there were several crises at a global level that had repercussions so that many women could not advance towards such autonomy, due to salary cuts, layoffs or job abandonment, to take care of children or sick family members.
Another unfortunate crisis that we should not ignore, because of its present and future effects, has to do with school dropouts at different educational levels, due to the lack of family solidity or because teenagers or young people also had to help in caregiving. What does the future hold for these children and teenagers ? Both their economic "autonomy" and their rights are likely to be limited, and this outlook is already very regrettable.
These two examples highlight a deficit in the economic autonomy of thousands of women who cannot freely decide how to use their time, generate income and dispose of it on equal terms with men. The situation is even more complex for women with other conditions of vulnerability, those who are faced with the enormous task of managing the double or triple workday: paid work (often precarious and with low pay) and unpaid work, which must be performed and managed with insufficient resources.
Although I work in the business world and every day I interact with women leaders and generators of the economy, I really cannot understand why it is so difficult for decision makers to analyze and become aware of the enormous losses due to the lack of equal opportunities (access to the productive sphere, no wage gap, opportunity for promotion, etc., etc.).
It is urgent that all branches of government (Executive, Legislative and Judicial), the private sector, academic and health institutions, the media, and families assume a leading role in guaranteeing the right of all people to care for and be cared for. It is urgent that caregiving responsibilities cease to be invisibilized and feminized.
According to data from the National Institute of Statistics and Geography, in 2021, each woman performed unpaid care work in households equivalent to 71 thousand 524 pesos per year. On the other hand, each man performed this type of work for an equivalent of 28,831 pesos, with women contributing 2.6 times more economic value than men in terms of domestic care work and dedicating 3,417 million hours per week to domestic work without receiving any remuneration.
How to turn these alarming figures around, what are the proposals of the brand new politicians who are "working" to compete in the upcoming elections, what panic button should be invented to help women in terms of economic autonomy?
The opinions expressed are the responsibility of the authors and are absolutely independent of the position and editorial line of Opinion 51.
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