Men Doing “Women's Work”: Masculinity and Gender Relations among Street Vendors in Maputo,Mozambique

Abstract

Gender inequality in sub-Saharan urban settings is perpetuated through the differences in men's and women's positions in the labor market. However, rising unemployment and increasing informalization of the economy that result from both the demographic structure and the structural adjustment reforms undermine men's economic advantage by pushing them into low-income and low-prestige “women's” occupations, such as street commerce. Men's entry into such niches of the labor market leads to both de-gendering and re-gendering of the workplace, which in turn questions the broader gender hierarchy and stereotypes and transforms gender relations. I analyze these occupational dynamics and their profound implications for gender identity and relations drawing primarily on in-depth interviews conducted with men street vendors in Greater Maputo, Mozambique, in 1999. The analysis of the qualitative data is complemented with insights from surveys carried out in Mozambique in the second half of the 1990s.

Keywords

street commerce gender relation masculinity division of labor Mozambique sub-Saharan Africa urban informal economy

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