The provider role in urban Mexico. Breadwinner trajectories of two men cohorts.

MARTÍNEZ SALGADO, MARIO; FERRARIS, SABRINA

DF México

Taller; Avanced topic on sequence and network analysis applied to the life course perspective; 2015

Instituto de Investigaciones Sociales- Universidad Autónoma de México

An important part of the transition to adulthood occurs when an individual assumes many family and social responsibilities. Some of these tasks include providing goods for production and reproduction of the family unit. Other obligations at home are domestic work and childcare. Traditionally, activities related with household chores are associated with the female identity, while provider tasks are part of the male identity.For masculinity studies, the provider role is an important element of a value system to rank the importance of men by the economic benefits of their work. Some characteristics of contemporary Latin American labor markets are: unemployment, underemployment, unstable jobs and low salaries, elements that contribute to question the male identity based on the provider role.Our goal in this paper is to describe the breadwinner trajectories for men in urban Mexico. We use data of the Demographic Retrospective Survey of 2011 to build the trajectories considering the type of employment: formal or informal, and one-year periods in which they were the main breadwinner (shorter periods of employment or breadwinner status are unknown). We focus on the trajectories between ages 15 and 41. Our sample is composed of 851 men: 426 born between 1951-1953 and 425 born between 1966-1968.About employment, since it is not possible to determine if jobs have social security, we use work position and company size instead to build the categories about the kind of economy where they are carried out: formal or informal.With the kind of labor economics and one-year periods in which men were the main breadwinner, we construct the economic provider trajectory, varying between six reversible states: unemployed; employed in the informal economy; employed in the formal economy; main breadwinner, but unemployed; main breadwinner employed in the informal economy; and main breadwinner employed in the formal economyUsing these data, our aim is to look for patterns of breadwinner trajectories. We achieve these using the optimal matching analysis (OMA). The main idea behind OMA consists in measuring the dissimilarity between two sequences by calculating the cost of the transformation of one sequence into the other. We consider a constant cost matrix for the elementary operations (insertion, deletion and substitution) to calculate the distance between every pair of sequences. The distance matrix produced by OMA was submitted to a Hierarchical Clustering Analysis using Ward's criteria. All these processes were carried out using R (R Core Team, 2014) and the TraMineR package (Gabadinho et al., 2011).