"You can't have it all": patterns of gender and class segregation in paid domestic work in the city of Buenos Aires

Abstract

This chapter focuses on the labor trajectories of a group of women who enter the labor market mainly through paid domestic work. Studying these trajectories will enable us to see how the characteristics of the ways that they enter the market considerably limit their occupational mobility. For this reason, the form of labor mobility observed among domestic workers is strictly horizontal. In cases when workers do find a way out of domestic employment, it is into other occupations with similar characteristics. Based on a qualitative study that we have been carrying out in Buenos Aires since 2009, we will examine these forms of mobility so as to account for the dynamics of inequality that limit the horizon of opportunities for women from popular sectors in the world of work.