In this article, the authors explore the two faces of the intense movement of commodification of women’s work which took place in the last five decades in Brazil: its visible face, expressed in the official figures, and its invisible face, hidden in between the lines of the statistical categories’ definitions. In order to better understand such movement, the authors analyze the trends expressed in the data of the last five Brazilian censuses (1960 to 2010) in a dialogue with interpretations that came to be seminal in their time, produced both by the sociodemographic literature about the Brazilian labor market and the feminist literature, as well as the studies of gender.
Labor Market; Gender; Women’s Work; Brazil; Brazilian Censuses