The Battle for Female Talent in Brazil - Center for Work-Life Policy

IntRoduCtIon
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In 1941, Austrian novelist and playwright Stefan Zweig traveled to Brazil and fell
in love. His infatuation found expression in a book, Brazil: Land of the Future,
in which he predicted that the country “was destined to become one of the
most important factors in the development of our world.” 3 Zweig may have been
Brazil’s most eloquent advocate but he was neither the first of a long line of foreign
adventurers, entrepreneurs, investors and seasoned businessmen to promote the
country’s potential nor the last to watch their dreams of wealth implode in a series
of booms and inevitable busts: lumber, sugar, cotton, gold, coffee, rubber… so
many that Zweig’s book became the basis for a joke: “Brazil is the land of the future
and always will be.”
Today, though, the consensus is that the future is finally here. The Brazilian
economy has been on a steady upswing over the last decade. Under the marketwise
policies of Fernando Henrique Cardoso in the 1990s and his successors,
Brazil has managed to conquer triple-digit inflation, pay off foreign debt and
expand at an average rate of 4 percent per year over the last decade. These days,
Brazil is among the largest and fastest-growing markets in the world, one of the
vital quartet of “BRIC” (Brazil, Russia, India and China) nations.
As such, Brazil is pivotal to the ongoing shift in global economic power from
mature to developing markets. Notwithstanding vast class inequities, epitomized
by the entrenched desperation of the infamous favelas, or slums, unemployment is
at record lows and the growth of the middle class continues to surge. 4 The seventh
largest economy in the world in 2011, Brazil’s economic miracle is projected to
continue full force, further fueled by such high-profile events as the 2014 Football
World Cup and the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro. 5 According to Goldman
Sachs, Brazil presents the best conditions among the BRICs for sustained growth
over the next few years, and by the end of the next decade, is expected to leapfrog
Germany, Great Britain and France to become the fifth largest consumer market in
the world. 6
One key ingredient of the Brazilian economic phenomenon, however, is
seldom discussed and little analyzed: the invaluable contribution of Brazilian
women to their country’s metamorphosis. Much of the existing literature on gender
in Brazil derives from the field of development economics and focuses exclusively
on empowering women in the lower half of the socio-economic scale. Although
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