Opinion – Pablo Acosta: What advantage does Maria have?

Going to school, learning with quality, ensuring good health in childhood and adulthood are elements that manufacture an individual’s productive potential. The ICH (Human Capital Index) seeks to materialize this idea, through a single number that measures future productivity. But then what? Where is this productive potential realized? In the business market. This is where the capital accumulated by an individual is used. In other words, it is work that allows productive potential to become effective. In this leap from potential to actual, from accumulation to utilization, an essential group of the population is left behind: women.

The World Bank’s Human Capital Report for Brazil shows that women develop 60% of their productive potential, measured by the ICH. Men, on the other hand, only reach 53% of their human capital. Women have more years of schooling, have a lower dropout rate and lower school repetition rates. While 26% of female students reach high school with an age-grade distortion, this percentage for male students is 36%. Also, in 2017, the scores of the national assessment (Saeb) showed that boys perform better than girls in mathematics, but in Portuguese the advantage is female. This same analysis was not possible in 2019 —the latest edition of Saeb released— due to the unusual absence of disaggregation by sex in the results.

If the gender difference is ambiguous in terms of learning in basic disciplines, in health indicators it is quite clear.

The Human Capital Report for Brazil shows that while a 15-year-old Brazilian woman has, on average, a 91% chance of surviving to age 60, a male of the same age’s chance of surviving into adulthood is 82%. Deaths from external events, such as homicides and accidents —more prevalent among males— explain this result. The comparative advantage of women in health is added to the advantage in education, and together they produce a single result: a Human Capital Index 13% higher for women than for men.

However —to use a popular expression—, what advantage does Maria have in accumulating this human capital? Maria, here, represents all Brazilian women and has “a force that alerts us” —as Milton Nascimento would say. Data from Pnad for the last quarter of 2019 show that while 67% of men over 14 years old were employed in the labor market, only 47% of women were in the same condition. In the North, the difference is even greater: while 67% of men were also employed in formal or informal jobs, only 42% of women had paid jobs. The difference in the level of occupation is only the first of many inequalities in the labor market. Lower wages, double shifts, sexual harassment are some of the many other obstacles that women encounter in their tiring journey. The women’s trophy won during the accumulation of human capital disintegrates in the labor market.

The Human Capital Report looks at this phenomenon and asks: “How much of the accumulated human capital is actually used?”. At this moment, the ICH conquers one more letter and becomes the ICHU: Index of Used Human Capital. It is at this very moment that we see the gender paradox. While men, who were in the rear, accumulate and employ 40% of their human capital, women gather and use only 32%. This means that almost half of women’s human capital is lost at the door of the labor market. For men, this loss is approximately one-quarter. Afro-descendant women are even more penalized and end up accumulating and using only 29% of their potential productivity. They are doubly repressed by society: by race and by gender.

ICHU makes us reflect on two major obstacles that women face in entering the labor market. The first, and perhaps more abstract, are cultural factors. Data from the World Value Survey show that 22% of Brazilians believe that men are better business executives than women. In countries like the Netherlands or New Zealand, this percentage is around 6%. We are a thousand leagues away from a society that believes in the productive potential of women. The second, and more concrete, obstacle is housework and childcare. IBGE data show that women dedicate 10.4 hours a week more than men to household chores and caring for people, including children. This difference — which represents a fifth of a typical working day — has grown over the years.

Public policies are and must be able to leverage the use of female human capital. Academic literature demonstrates, for example, that adequate coverage of day care centers and preschools has a positive impact on women’s participation in the labor market. The ICHU, in addition to being a statistic, is, above all, an invitation for us to think about and debate policies that promote gender equity.

This column was written in collaboration with Giovanna Quintão, a junior associate professional.