Gender, income and schooling in a rural setting: making an analysis about the race/ethnicity spectrum in old age
The socio-demographic profile found for both groups presented significant differences in relation to the “gender” category, which enables us to reflect on the “gender” category as a prominent marker of social difference. Furthermore, the data attest our initial hypothesis that there would be distinctions concerning the variables “class” and “schooling” for men and women.
In spite of the differences related to gender, generally the elderly population in Brazil represents the poorest population cohort with the lowest rate of schooling (Camarano, 2003, IBGE, 2017). Authors such as Silva (1997) and Faleiros (2007) analysed that this reality, has disparities in terms of having access to fundamental resources, such as the lack of treated water, electricity and access to child and adult education.
From the data obtained, an even more problematic panorama for new research and the setting of ageing in the field can be observed from the differences between “race/ethnicity”. The mere territorial equation between elderly subjects living in urban areas versus those living in the countryside does not seem to account for heterogeneous realities, especially in Brazil, having a historical process of discrimination, stigma and enslavement of the black and often poorer population with low schooling (IBGE, 2000, 2017). Thus, the “race/ethnicity” variable corroborated significant differences concerning the composition of income and schooling, which is part of the gender problem, showing that women over 60 and those self-declared as black have a lower income and the worst indicators for education in the possible multiple comparison scenarios. This data, in line with what was briefly introduced in the introduction by the Continuous National Household Sample Survey (IBGE, 2016) and the Social Indicators Synthesis (IBGE, 2017), includes a portion of socially vulnerable subjects, mostly represented by black and pardo women over 60 years.
Although there is a prevalence of retired women (n = 79), men have a higher proportion of retirement pension (n = 111). Having said that, in this context, women do informal work (n = 63) when they are elderly much more than men (n = 42) do in order to compensate for the lack of social security and managing to survive. These data show that women self-declared as black (n = 37) rely more on informal work for income than women self-declared as white (n = 26; SD: 5.5) in the same age bracket.
In historical terms, rural workers were only entitled to retirement under the 1988 Constitution. Before that they were protected by Funrural[2], which guaranteed them a few benefits. This fact contributed to the precariousness of rural workers. Therefore, the social class dimension is in this case quite explicit in the sense of increasing the social inequality of these workers compared to the others (Silva, 1999).
Woortmann & Woortmann (1999) argue that income obtained from social security is fundamental for maintaining basic living conditions; i.e. buying medicine, food, clothing and household utensils, especially in circumstances of extreme drought, disaster or the reduction of rural production (especially in situations where families make a living from producing organic vegetables, animals and other soil-dependent food products).
Thus, if retirement is an indispensable resource in the event of a shortage of formal labour and natural resources, sickness and climate change whose effects directly affect small farmers and the informal economy from family agriculture, it can be observed that this non-minority share of underprivileged social security subjects are to a large extent in a situation of social vulnerability. Moreover, they are people who have had their trajectories marked by exploitation in the extensive agglomerations of sugarcane, orange picking, soybeans and coffee plantations, ageing, therefore, with numerous comorbidities, as a result of hard work and the precariousness of living conditions in the countryside in the last century (Silva, 1999; 2014; 2016).
As of the 1988 Constitution, the rural social security system is no longer a priority for welfare policies, refractory to Funrural, with reduced options and benefits, moving to a macro policy centered on social and universal protection, with the principles of citizenship and the same rights granted to workers in an urban context.
Laws 8.212 and 8.213, enacted in 1991, also modify the way the family unit (husband, wife and children aged 16 and over) obtains access to Social Security funds. This change started to integrate the whole family in the context of politics, thus no longer an exclusive resource for a minority of subjects. Before the two laws mentioned above, rural workers were only entitled to a retirement and death pension, starting to count (from the Social Security) on the same benefits paid to workers in urban areas, among which were: sickness, maternity pay and retirement pension due to disability. Finally, another crucial point was the equalisation of the social security, guaranteed by the Constitution, from a common minimum wage, levelling the minimum importance of the benefits granted to rural and urban workers[3].
The vulnerabilisation of the poorest and oldest population in generational terms, considered sociologically, encompasses a process that began in the mid-1950s in São Paulo state, from replacing coffee farms with large sugarcane mills (Silva, 1999; 2014; 2016). Concerning this process:
“Thousands of agricultural workers left their land to work in the sugar plantations of São Paulo state. Many left the family behind as a way of guaranteeing social reproduction. Those victimised by the expropriation of their land came with their families. This fact caused a change in the chromatic aspect of the rural working class of São Paulo. Descendants of European and white settlers were no longer on the scene, but rather ‘people of the northern countries’, ‘people from Bahia’, ‘people from Minas Gerais’ and the ‘blacks’. From its beginnings, work in sugarcane plantations was characterised by precariousness, insalubrity and vulnerability.” (Silva, 2016, p.149).
The outskirts of the sugarcane cities of São Paulo state are inhabited by significant population contingents from other regions of the country and, in many cases, this process characterizes a significant portion of black migrants. In the case of the city where the research was carried out, a neighbourhood on the outskirts was created in the mid-1980s by people from the Northeast, Minas Gerais, Paraná, etc. (Maciel, 2012). They are agricultural workers expropriated from their lands of origin, as a consequence of the conservative modernisation that affected the whole country (Silva, 1999; 2016).
Concerning this, according to Baeninger (1995), the great region that covers the territory of the research, had 75,871 migrants in the 1970s, which corresponded to 58,105 people from São Paulo state and 17,766 from other states. Baeninger (1995) and Maciel (2012) found that the migratory process intensified in 1980, 1990 and 2000, leading to the population of the cities that make up the Government Region of Araraquara to double in size from 238,327 to 569,404 inhabitants in 2010.
Since the 1950s, the rate of urbanisation has increased and, for the first time, the rural population of 47,958 inhabitants is lower than the urban population of 50,628 inhabitants (Maciel, 2012). Baeninger (1999) considers that the migratory balance to the region in question contributed with 67.7% of the absolute growth of the Government Region, i.e., an increase of 40 thousand inhabitants. The migration phenomenon related to looking for work and better living conditions in the 1960s and 1970s was cleaved by the gender component, while many men and women – usually wives – migrated to the former settlements and coffee, soy, corn, cotton and sugar cane production regions, performing equally heavy, unhealthy and dangerous task[4]. With the growth of agricultural modernisation, there was an abrupt change in the old coffee structure, also changing the structure of work and organisation of social life in the countryside.
Thus, the work force of the new migrants was added to the strength of those who already lived in rural areas of São Paulo state (Stolcke, 1986; Silva, 1998; Alves, 1991; Maciel, 2012).
Women, historically constrained from the universe of formal salaried work (Saffioti, 1976), used more strategies to earn a family income, either by informal work or federal benefits, such as the Continuous Cash Benefit. This benefit, established by the Unified Social Assistance System, was created in December 1993, based on the Organic Law of Social Assistance, as a way of guaranteeing a minimum wage to people 65 and over, as well as to people with disabilities, who have per capita family income below a quarter of a minimum wage (Alcântara, 2016).
Public policies focused on security in Brazil have created a distinct social situation for families and people who, in the past, were marginalised in income and access to services. The great change, initiated by the Federal Constitution of 1988, from the first writings on social security and old age, favoured and encouraged the emergence of complementary legislation, such as the National Policy on the Elderly in January 1994, the Statute on the Elderly in October, 2003 and the National Policy on the Health of the Elderly in October, 2006 (Debert, 1999; Camarano, 2003; Faleiros, 2007; Alcântara, 2016).
According to demographic census data from 1940 and 2000, the female contingent above 60 years old accounted for 4.7% of the total Brazilian population in 2000, compared to 2.2% in 1940; the male population, also above 60 years old, was at the lowest proportion in 2000 at 3.8%. Concerning the population considered “very old” – made up of subjects aged 80 and over – it was 166 thousand people in 1940 compared to approximately 1.8 million in the 2000s. The “very old” female population in the 2000s, accounted for 12% of this cohort in Brazil (Faleiros, 2007; Beltrão et al., 2003; Veras, 2009; Alcântara, 2016).
According to Camarano (2003), the portrayal of the female cohort considered “elderly” and “older” in the country is characterised by the lack of experience in the formal labour market and by the low level of schooling, constituting worse health conditions. From the educational perspective, the IBGE, through the Continuous National Household Sample Survey (IBGE, 2016), compiled new data on illiteracy and the differences between race/ethnicity in the population, starting a series of comparisons never seen in historical terms. According to the results obtained, people self-declared as white – in all age cohorts – have more access to education in the country than those who are self-declared as blacks or pardo, and the oldest population join together the largest contingent of illiterate people, making up 6.07 million people.
When the data of the Continuous National Household Sample Survey (IBGE, 2016) are stratified between subjects aged 60 and over by race/ethnicity, the differences widen between whites, blacks or pardos. In the cohort of white subjects, the illiteracy indicator corresponds to 11.7%, while the indicator between blacks and pardo in the same age group almost triples, approaching 30.7%.
This data engenders approximations with the results obtained from the research, with differences in schooling between individuals self-declared as white and black, but with an unprecedented data on gender, in which women self-declared as black have the worst indicators of both income and educational level compared to men self-declared as white and black, within the same age group. Nonetheless, women self-declared as black reported income from a retirement pension, informal work and Continuous Cash Benefit, while men were proportionately more retired, with more experience in the formal job market, in addition to having higher educational indicators. Thus:
“older women receive benefits in less privileged conditions than men: retirement by age versus length of service and benefits. The value of such benefits is lower. This situation reflects the greater precariousness of the female condition in the labour market. The ways in which, historically, additional protection for women in social security terms has been created (shorter working or contribution time, lower eligibility for benefits, widows' full pension entitlement) should not be seen as compensation only for the double shift but also because of the precariousness of women's working conditions relative to men.” (Camarano, 2003, p.44).
From the 1980s to the 2000s, the percentage of women without any income fell significantly from 42.2% to 18.4%, with the proportion of poor women also reducing by 21.3 percentage points, totalling a reduction of 56% (IBGE, 2000, Camarano, 2003). However, contrary to the 1998 National Household Sample Survey/IBGE data, women in the survey conducted here represented the poorest stratum compared to men with a significant reduction in income from the “race/ethnicity” marker, as women self-declared as black were at a disadvantage compared to the other groups (IBGE, 2000; Camarano, 2003).
Differently from Beltrão et al. (2003) and Camarano (2003), where the data on the racial/ethnic profile did not show significant differences in terms of income – even though there was a higher proportion of white women living without income – the present study showed significant differences for the variable “race/ethnicity”, putting forward a new empirical and theoretical proposition to demography. Camarano (2003) argues that although there have been no quantitatively significant differences concerning the racial/ethnic profile in the 2000 Census survey, the effect of the race/ethnicity category can be found in relation to the proportion of elderly women living in households considered poor; in the research, the author analyses that slightly more than 25% of black and pardo women resided in such housing.
The “work” category, in light of Silva's research (1999; 2014; 2016) is an important marker of social difference and reproduction as the gender division of labour creates new inequalities in relation to ageing in the field. According to Silva (2014; 2016), “gender”, “class” and “race/ethnicity” are analytical concepts that must be thought and mobilised in a relational and dynamic way as they configure asymmetrical paradoxes and relations, relative to the way the world of life is created and reproduced.
In this regard, it should be pointed out that while policies focused on social security have ensured progress in terms of income distribution, education and improved living conditions over the last 30 years, there are still challenges regarding gender differences and the racial/ethnic profile of the Brazilian population over 60 living in a rural context.
Regarding differences, we can see the discrepancy of the socio-demographic profile in terms of schooling and income, configuring a distinct social situation between the analysed groups, mainly from the racial and gender aspect; concerning the similarities, in turn, approximations can be observed with the official data produced by the 2000 Census, Continuous National Household Sample Survey (IBGE, 2016) and by the Social Indicators Synthesis (IBGE, 2017), as well as by the specialised literature as the total sample is still represented by the spectrum of illiteracy and low professionalization. This creates a social and economic gap between those whose childhood, youth and part of adult life were before the Federal Constitution (FC) and, therefore, without legal guarantees of rights, and those subjects who were born after the promulgation of the FC, having their generational experience marked by democratic governments and social policies centered on social security, expansion of education, economic growth, severe reduction of hunger and extreme poverty, increased social mobility and of labour rights.
[2] Rural Workers Assistance Fund.
[4] Silva's research (2016, p.156-157), undertaken in the same region in which we are concerned with in this article, recovers the gender division of labour in the countryside. The author discusses the unhealthy, heavy and invisible nature of the tasks performed by women; namely: administering herbicides, harvesting sugarcane crushed by machines, removing weeds from the sugarcane plantations, planting new sugarcane seedlings and picking up stones.