AN INTERNATIONAL COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN INCOME INEQUALITY AND DOMESTIC SERVICE

In the bibliography on paid domestic work, one question remains open: what explains variation in the proportion of the labor force employed in domestic service in each country? Among the five hypotheses presented by Sociology and Economics to answer this question, the explanation focused on income inequality has already been tested, only for the United States, by the American sociologists Milkman, Reese and Roth (1998). According to them, a crucial determinant of the extent of employment in paid domestic labor in a given location is the degree of economic inequality there. This article aims to verify the same hypothesis, but for a group of 95 countries from different parts of the world. Through a regression model, using the Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) method, the relationship between the Gini index of the countries and the proportion of women employed as domestic workers is evaluated.