The International Day for Afro-descendant Women has become a demand for equality and social justice for this population segment in the continent. | Photo: Brasil de Fato

Brasilia, July 26 (RHC)-- Black and Afro-descendant women marched this Monday in several Brazilian cities to commemorate their International Day, in the midst of a situation of profound prevailing discrimination.

Local Brazilian media detailed after a survey that only half of this female segment of 48.8 million women of working age got jobs in the labor market during the first quarter of 2022; and when they did, they were paid very low salaries and in very bad conditions.

The study conducted by the Getulio Vargas Foundation (FGV) further states that, among white and yellow men, 72.2 percent were in the labor market. 

Hence, in order to survive, about 43 percent of Black and mixed-race women hold informal jobs, in which they earn, on average, less than half of what white men earn, and the equivalent of 60 percentage points of the average income of other women.

In this regard, economist Janaína Feijó said that "Black women bring together two social problems: the problem of race and gender inequality.  I think we can say that, in general, they represent a more vulnerable group when we analyze the behavior of labor market indicators."

So much so that six out of ten households headed by black or brown people suffer from food insecurity, according to research developed by the Pensaan network.  That is why in Brazil, as in other Latin American and Caribbean nations where these phenomena are accentuated, women raise their voices to eradicate racial violence, as well as to make visible and combat ethnic, economic and social inequalities that expand over them.

Gisela Chala, researcher and second vice-mayor of the Ecuadorian district of Quito, said that it is a matter of prioritizing the freedom needs of this community of women in order to break the chains of oppression that have plagued them for hundreds of years.

At the same time, she added that it is a day of resistance, of struggle against everything that undermines their just right to life in equality.

July 25th is commemorated as the International Day of Afro-descendant Women, as a reference to the meeting held in the Dominican Republic on that day in 1992, in which Black women from 32 countries in Latin America and the Caribbean decided to make their struggles visible and define political strategies to confront racism from a gender perspective.