Gender Statistics: Social Indicators of Women in Brazil (2024)

What disappears when “women” are represented by a single national average? The third edition of IBGE’s Estatísticas de Gênero: Indicadores sociais das mulheres no Brasil, released in 2024, brings labor, education, health, public decision-making and rights into one statistical framework. Its feminist value is the possibility of following several inequalities together, rather than using one improved indicator as proof that equality has arrived.

Whose time makes everyday life possible?

The report’s 2022 figures show women spending an average of 21.3 hours a week on unpaid care and housework, compared with men’s 11.7. The denominator matters: this indicator covers people aged 14 or over who reported performing those activities in the reference week. It is not an average over every resident, and it should not be read as a time diary of every form of responsibility. Definitions appear in the technical notes.

Disaggregation changes the picture. Women in the lowest fifth of household income per person spent 7.3 hours more on these tasks than women in the highest fifth. Women classified as pretas ou pardas also spent more time than white women. These are IBGE’s Brazilian color/race categories—Black and parda—whose meanings cannot simply be transferred to every other country’s classifications.

Income can enable a household to delegate tasks without making their performance less gendered. The report notes that women accounted for 91.3% of workers in paid domestic services in 2022. Read together, these figures invite attention to the employment conditions of the women who make another household’s time available. A reduction in one woman’s unpaid workload may coexist with another woman’s poorly protected paid work.

Education does not settle the question of equality

Among people aged 25 or over, women were more likely than men to have completed higher education in 2022, yet their average earnings remained lower. The report also separates outcomes by color/race, showing that differences within women are substantial. This combination complicates the explanation that gender inequality will disappear once women acquire more qualifications.

The earnings comparison is descriptive: it does not hold jobs, working hours and other characteristics constant, so it cannot quantify unequal pay for identical work. Its usefulness is to identify questions about occupational placement, care constraints and unequal returns to education that require further research.

Read the categories as well as the figures

The 2024 publication brings together indicators from different reference years; the figures discussed here are dated 2022. The report also states that sexual orientation and gender identities beyond its women/men categories are outside its scope. A broad official framework consequently remains an incomplete account of gendered lives. This is a reason to examine its definitions and supplement its evidence, rather than treat the categories as natural or exhaustive.

For a reading path, Hirata’s paper explains how labor relations connect gender, class and race; the French time-use study asks what a narrowing time gap means; and AWID’s domestic-worker article connects care policy with workers’ rights. The French and Brazilian measures differ, so these sources support connected questions rather than a direct numerical comparison.