Ana Maria Hermeto Camilo de Oliveira és Professora Associada al Departament d’Economia i del Programa de Postgrau en Demografia, Center for Regional Development and Planning-CEDEPLAR, Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais; investigadora del Consejo Nacional de Desarrollo Científico y Tecnológico-CNPq i investigadora principal del Grup de Recerca en “Economia i Demografia de l’estratificació social a Brasil”.

Lines of investigation.- My broad agenda of research focus on the economic and demographic analysis of social stratification. The central issue is the role played by demographic events and trajectories to the production and reproduction of inequalities in Brazil and Latin America, particularly describing contemporary processes of gender inequality in the labour market and family, with its thematic interconnections. Demographic dimensions include effects of aging (changing age and educational structure), changes in patterns of participation in the workforce (particularly the increase in female labour force participation and family patterns) and changing family structures (including changes in assortative mating). My current lines of investigation are: (1) persistence and changes of female spaces, mainly at the labour market, which are determinants of a limit to the fall in gender inequality in Latin America; connected to this, and more specific, the analysis of occupations and technological skills: aging, educational mismatch and gender segregation; and (2) generational changes in family dynamics – marital selectivity patterns and living arrangements – and income inequality. I use longitudinal and cross-section large databases and quantitative methodologies in comparative studies of dynamics of individual wages and family income distributions

Summary.- Currently, the role of demographic changes on levels and patterns of inequality in Brazil has been partially analysed, despite the rapid demographic transition. While the family has been largely overlooked in the social stratification research, since the 1990s it has increasingly been recognised that changes in demographic behaviours and different patterns of relationships within and across families and households play an important role in the structuring of economic and social inequality, contributing to a further differentiation across households. Some studies highlight the importance of the effects of age structure on income inequality, suggesting that the younger age distribution of the poorer subgroups of the population was one of the factors responsible for maintaining inequality at high levels until the 1990s. During the 2000s, when levels of inequality began to fall systematically, some efforts were made to capture these demographic effects. However, the literature on income inequality still does not fully consider the demographic heterogeneity of the population, so this research aims to re-assess the persistence of inequalities in Brazil, from the perspective of the connection between demographic changes and social class stratification. Specifically, we address the Brazilian experience over the past 30 years in terms of how the marital selectivity patterns and living arrangements have differently changed and diverse family forms have emerged among social classes, interpreting these changes in terms of their implications to levels and patterns of income inequality. The increasing resemblance of working patterns and earnings of couples is stressed as well as the family work intensity. Variations in the pace and degree of changes are analysed using density estimations and decomposition techniques.