WUNRN
CUBA - WORK CHALLENGES FOR WOMEN -
MANAGEMENT, PRIVATE SECTOR +
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CUBA - MANAGEMENT JOBS ELUSIVE FOR
CUBAN WOMEN
The
burden of domestic chores and the lack of flexible work schedules limit women’s
access to management-level positions in state enterprises in Cuba. Credit:
Jorge Luis Baños/IPS
“We still face many barriers in access to management-level and executive jobs,” Mirtha Reina Reyes, head of the legal department for the state Construction Enterprise Group in Havana, told IPS.
The 44-year-old lawyer took her current job in 2008 as a way of working closer to home so that she could devote more time to her youngest son, who has Down’s syndrome. “I never imagined that I would be in industry,” said Reyes, who previously worked in a courtroom.
“What is hardest for women is the high cost that comes with being in management jobs,” she said.
She added that women “are too tied down to domestic work, even if they don’t have children or elderly family members to take care of.”
She is one of the few researchers who use a gender-based approach in the unexplored world of the Cuban state-run business enterprise, currently comprising 2,250 companies, according to 2012 figures from the National Office of Statistics and Information (ONEI).
“There are major inequalities between men and women in the business world, at the executive level and at all other levels,” Virgilí told IPS.
“Women pay higher costs; they face conflicts because they are women, and they are forced to find strategies for keeping their jobs,” she said.
“This is a level to which everyone wants access,” she said. After women gained ground in the world of academia and research, they began to move up in the country’s public enterprises.
These companies, especially in productive areas and tourism, represent the best employment opportunities in Cuba’s depressed economy. In these sectors, workers who have gone through the “sistema de perfeccionamiento empresarial” or “business improvement system” receive performance-based pay and better bonuses.
The system, implemented since last decade with the aim of increasing productivity, autonomy and efficiency, was revised as part of the current economic reforms, which include a focus on giving a boost to state enterprises, according to excerpts published from the latest session of parliament.
Despite the limits they still face, five state companies that are implementing the system in the municipality of Isla de la Juventud – the second largest island in the Cuban archipelago – achieved productivity levels in 2011 that enabled them to pay monthly salaries of more than 550 Cuban pesos (about 22 dollars).
That year, the average monthly salary nationwide was 455 Cuban pesos, an indicator that rose slightly – to 466 pesos – at the end of 2012, according to ONEI. The highest salaries are paid in the construction sector.
While men and women are supposed to receive equal pay, activists and experts warn that in practice women tend to receive lower wages, because they tend to miss work more often to take care of their children and older relatives. They also have less access to high-income jobs.
The International Labour Organisation reported a reduction of the gender-based salary gap between 2008 and 2011 in countries where statistics were available, which did not include Cuba. However, this reduction was not always caused by better conditions for women; sometimes it was due to fewer men obtaining jobs due to the global crisis, the ILO reported.
“When Cuban women obtain business management positions, they and their families are economically empowered,” Virgilí said. “The potential of women in that sector is not being fully exploited, even though they graduate from their higher education studies with better grades than their male counterparts.”
Cuba’s public enterprises need to make changes to fully incorporate women, she said. “We find women in an identity crisis because they feel like they need to become men when they become managers and executives, and they encounter serious difficulties in reconciling their work and home lives,” she added.
The changes that she proposed include: less masculinised management styles, a ban on the extended workday, advocating women for management jobs, gender training, and recreational activities for personnel that include families.
In addition, more changes are needed for working toward gender equality within families, changing sexist mentalities, and ensuring better services for the care of children and the elderly, Virgilí said.
But not all women managers have the same story.
Consuelo Díaz, an oil industry manager, told IPS that she experienced “certain moments” of discrimination when she started her business career. “But following my own firm ideas, without losing sensitivity or respect, day after day gave me key elements for success.
“I’m very demanding when it comes to quality work performance, but I never allow mistreatment or rudeness. I have never used profanity in addressing my workers,” said Díaz, an economist who has worked for almost 30 years in different management jobs in a liquefied gas plant, where most of the employees are men.
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From: WUNRN
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To: WUNRN ListServe
Sent: Wednesday, September 12, 2012 2:15 AM
Subject: Cuba - Women Face Challenges of Private Sector &
Self-Employment
WUNRN
CUBA - WOMEN FACE CHALLENGES OF
PRIVATE SECTOR & SELF- EMPLOYMENT
-
- Beatriz Lemes took her time
deciding, and finally agreed “apprehensively” to take the job of heading a
state-run company that is making the transition to financial autonomy, a system
that is spreading throughout
The
economic reforms in
“Self-financing
can work, but there is a need to change people’s mentality. They need to feel
like their work belongs to them,” said Lemes, who is deputy economic director
of the Territorial Station of Agricultural Engineering in the provinces of
Mayabeque and Artemisa, both of which adjoin
Now, with “more
responsibilities, demands and stress,” this accountant with 30 years’
experience expects new challenges for her staff when their company stops
receiving state funds in early 2013. “My workers are highly trained, but for
those of us who are women, it is harder because of the domestic burden,” she
told IPS.
The sweeping economic reforms
that began to be introduced in
For more than 50 years, the
bulk of
The National Office of
Statistics and Information (ONEI) reported 2,514 workplaces as state-financed
in 2010, out of a total of 11,857 economic entities in the country. The
state-financed figure dropped the following year, when only 2,455 of 10,963
entities received public funds. Also, several state companies are involved in
experiments in increased autonomy.
Lemes, who is 49 and divorced
with two adult daughters, said that one of her conditions for accepting the job
of deputy director was “not to have anyone in charge of me.” She noted that
“sometimes I have to stay after hours and I have to demand more of my staff.
Now I am the one responsible if we have losses.”
Working overtime and making
oneself available at all hours are behaviours that are “costly for women, given
that the roles of caregiver and administrator at home and in the family
continue to fall on them,” says an article about the impact of reforms on women
written by Echevarría and Lara.
However, Cuban women with paid
work have higher educational levels than men, the researchers noted. In late
March of 2011, women accounted for 63 percent of technical personnel and
professionals. Their high skill levels could pave the way to greater economic
independence.
Although she had envisioned
long days sitting in a laboratory, biochemist Lissy Rosabal, 26, pulls on her
tall rubber boots several days a week to go into the countryside. “My work involves
being there to evaluate and monitor experiments in
“Farmers, men and women, learn
from me and get better yields. At the same time, I learn from them and obtain
scientific results,” said Rosabal, who works in research at the state-run
National Institute of Agricultural Sciences in Mayabeque.
Her profession has a future
because agriculture is a key sector in the economic reforms. Part of her income
depends on her own efforts to come up with ideas for research projects and
obtain financing, she said.
“I’ve had to learn about
economic management. We do everything from the scientific conception of a
project to the preparation of invoices for buying the supplies requested,” she
said.
Specialists at the institute,
which is state-financed, submit their research proposals to apply for funds and
national and international scholarships, which provide income in addition to
their wages. “I have not felt at risk of being unemployed. However, this year
it has been difficult to get projects, because the number of calls for
proposals was reduced,” she commented.
In addition, authorities are
opening up more spaces to private enterprise. For instance, in 2009,
barbershops and hairdressing salons began to be leased to workers.
The list of authorised self-employment activities grew to 178 in 2010, and
self-employed individuals may now rent small establishments for food and
beverage services.
The goal is to increase the
number of private sector workers this year by 240,000.
But women continue to be a
minority in this sector, which enjoys broad financial autonomy. As of September
2011, women represented just 12.5 percent of 229,205 people involved in private
enterprise, according to the most recent statistics broken down by gender.
In their article, Echevarría
and Lara said that “there is differentiated access for productive assets, such
as land, housing and capital,” with women at a disadvantage. “Considering the educational
levels achieved by women, it may be that these activities are not very
attractive to them,” the article said.
Authorised private work
comprises basic and traditional activities such as food preparation and sale,
the production of artisan goods, passenger and freight transport, repair and
maintenance of equipment and others involving a predominance of what experts
describe as traditionally masculine activities.
After more than a decade of
making purses, leatherworker Hilda Zulueta took advantage of the expansion of
private work and joined the list of 371,000 people who were officially self-employed
as of February 2012. Her brand of handmade leather purses, Zulu, could take off
when her idea for a workshop-boutique comes to fruition.
With the economic crisis that
began in the early 1990s and is still affecting Cuba, Zulueta, a math teacher,
and her family began gathering scraps of leather that were discarded by the
shoe factory in her Havana neighbourhood, Alamar.
She began in 1992 “with what I
had at home and a lot of imagination,” she told IPS. Little by little, she
gained experience and acquired “all of the necessary tools,” and she met a
tanner who “does wonderful work.”
“I did not need start-up
capital, something that is now essential, and I did not leave my job as a
teacher,” said Zulueta, who is now 61 and retired, and who says her daughters
and granddaughters will take over her business.