Poor and working women, especially from the countryside, are in the fight against the murderous government of Dina Boluarte and the Congress, suffering the repression unleashed by it.
By PST-Peru
However, additionally, they carry on their shoulders the weight of the economic, social and political crisis that the country is dragging, subjected to precarious jobs, worse paid, less access to education and health, in addition to carrying out a much greater amount of unpaid work. at home, compared to their male partners or relatives. This, not to mention the violence that is perpetrated directly against them at home or by their partners and ex-partners, which often ends in their murder.
According to the report “Gender gaps 2022”, from the National Institute of Statistics and Informatics (INEI), by 2022, in Peru there were 16 million 641 thousand women and 16 million 394 thousand men at the end of 2021. This indicates that women constitute the 50.4% of the national population.
And of the total poor population, which after 2020 rose to 30% of the population[1]51.4% are women.
Of these, 32% of women over the age of 14 do not have their own income, compared to 14% of men of the same age. In Apurímac, one of the epicenters of the mobilizations in the south, this situation affects 40% of women.
900 thousand young women do not study or work. This figure is aggravated by knowing that 67% of them do not have trained skills to access quality jobs. The wage gap is around 25%.
There are 17% more men in paid work, receiving, on average, 25% more salary than their female partners for doing the same work. Most of the workers are in micro-enterprises, with a maximum of 5 workers. And they are concentrated in services (36.4%), commerce (27.5%) and agriculture (25.7%). Labor informality reaches 80% of women in Peru, according to the most recent reports.
But the inequalities do not stop there. For example, Peruvian women dedicate 39 hours and 28 minutes of the week to housework (unpaid) compared to 15 hours and 54 minutes for men. That is, 23 hours and 34 more minutes. According to Oxfam, by 2021, the unpaid work of Peruvian women was equivalent to 20% of GDP.
This situation is manifested in women’s health. As of 2021, 44.3% of women reported suffering from some ailment permanently, being 9.7 percentage points more than men (34.6%).
Breast cancer and cervical-uterine cancer are among the leading causes of female mortality and could be treatable with an early diagnosis of the disease. Of the total female deaths registered in 2019, 22.0% were caused by this disease.
The second cause of death for women is influenza and pneumonia, which caused 12.2% of deaths in women and in men represented 10.7%.
Illiteracy in women is almost triple that in men, reaching 7.6% of the female population compared to 2.7% of men. This rate, however, rises above 10% for women in the Andean regions, reaching 19.5% in the Apurímac region.
Adolescent maternity registers 8.9% nationwide. In Amazon regions such as Ucayali or Loreto, this rises to 25% and 18%, respectively. At the national level, 28% of these adolescents come from poor popular sectors.
And as if this were not much, the national police, which today savagely represses the population that comes out to protest, only managed to locate 48% of the 11,524 women registered as missing last year. That is, 5,558 women returned home. Nor has it done much to solve the 137 femicides reported during 2022. 73% of the women murdered were under 40 years of age.
This is the situation in which women find themselves, roughly speaking, in Peru. Therefore, it is not surprising that they are side by side in the struggle that is shaking the country. And that it is extremely urgent that the working class and the poor people take the flags of the poor woman as part of her demands, on the way to conquering the solution to her problems.
[1] The projected population for 2023 in Peru is 33.72 million inhabitants.