1. Introduction

In the 20th century, Portugal experienced a long period of cultural backwardness, political repression and economic underdevelopment under a dictatorship, which lasted from 1926 to 1974. Hence, the subsequent political process of consolidating democracy, and other social and economic transformations, aimed at changing the country from “a backward, socially underdeveloped country into a modern nation” ^[1]. Women’s civil rights were harshly limited and repressed under the dictatorial regime. 

One of the most devastating legacies of the dictatorial regime was education. In the 1960s, more than 40% of the population could neither read nor write and only 0.6% had attained higher education ^[2]. However, the improvements in education by the democratic regime did not close the gender gap in illiteracy given that thirty years later the rate of illiterate women (21%) was still twice as high as that of men (11%) ^[3]. As stated in that article, by prioritising the building of a universal system of formal education for the new generations, democratic governments left behind the eradication of illiteracy, thus maintaining the gender gap and creating a generational gap in educational skills among women. The rapid progress of women in formal education was reflected in the 1991 population census, which reported 48% of the population with higher education qualifications were women and they were also the majority of graduate students (53.9%) ^[3]. Furthermore, women continued to progress in education with sociological research showing how educational credentials represented a necessary condition for women’s intergenerational mobility while the same did not apply to men ^[4]. In recent European statistics on education and science ^[5], women formed the majority of PhD holders and Portugal surpassed the average of EU countries in this indicator.

2. Changes and Continuities in the Division of Household Work

In family life, a highly traditional division of household work persists, imposing a heavy burden on women, especially in dual-career couples ^[6], which coexists with non-traditional attitudes towards marriage, divorce and sexuality ^[7]. Concerning the division of household work, the 2002 Family and Changing Gender Roles survey of the International Social Survey Programme (ISSP) returned significant differences between the time Portuguese women and men spent per week on household work with the former working more hours than the latter ^[8]. This pattern was common to the seven European countries included in this comparative study but the difference between the hours spent by Portuguese women (26) and men (7) was the highest. Comparing the data for dual-career couples, Portuguese women ‘only’ worked twice as many hours per week than men, contrary to more significant reductions in hours spent in household work by working women in other countries. Furthermore, in the measure for the perception of justice, Portuguese women reported the highest score for the item ‘I do my fair share of the work’. Two contradictions in the modernisation process account for the weak progress regarding equality in household work. One is the educational gap between different generations of women, which left older and unqualified women available for domestic paid labour and unpaid work in the case of family members such as grandmothers. Later on, the older generations were replaced by immigrant women thus assuring the continuity of this kind of paid work. As a result, dual-career couples have not felt any great pressure to negotiate the division of household work. However, research to substantiate the specific contributions of low paid (or non-paid), poorly qualified women to the household economy and its dynamics is still lacking. Another contradiction stems from the prevalence of the belief in women’s skills as wives and mothers within the scope of the feminine myth inherited from the past. This belief lies behind women’s perceived duty to protect their husband’s career and avoid instability in the family’s dynamics, according to research into dual-career earners in highly qualified professions ^[9]. More recently, we compared the data of the 2002 ISSP survey with data obtained in a 2014 survey ^[10] that applied the same questions. The results showed a slight reduction in the number of hours spent by women but no significant change in the division of household work in Portugal. This pattern remains highly disadvantageous to women’s working lives and careers while preserving the old gender order ^[11] in the family. The same traditional gender order is revealed in attitudes to gender roles in the family obtained in 2014 that express strong agreement with the statement that ‘the family is harmed when women work full time outside the home’ (43%) and agreement with the traditional male breadwinner-female housewife family model (25%). As stated by the authors: “These results show the latent conflict between a standard of equality in family life…and a certain nostalgia for a model of the conjugal division of paid and unpaid work, based on complementary roles and naturalizing gender specializations, which for decades was a hallmark of the ideology of the Estado Novo” ^[12]. The persistence of conflict between work and family, and in conciliating the difficulties arising are particularly experienced by women as detailed in a survey on the uses of time by men and women. In this survey, women reported lacking free time more often than men, whether for leisure or other activities, and expressed “feelings of guilt and anxiety for not being able to meet the expectations that are imposed on them by others or that they impose on themselves” ^[13]

3. Progress and Obstacles in Qualified Professions and Power Sharing

Although the percentage of female full professors rose to 17% ten years after the first survey, the numbers have stagnated near 25% in recent years in spite of women representing more than 45% of the scientific community, according to statistics from the Ministry of Science, Technology and Higher Education. In our perspective, scientific and higher education institutions do not consider gender equality a strategic priority for three main reasons. Firstly, this stems from the lack of formal involvement with gender equality policies until at least 2018. In this year, the Portuguese government adopted a national 2018–2030 strategy for equality and non-discrimination and with the plan for gender equality part of this strategy with objective 4 addressing the higher education and science sector. Ever since the adoption of the first action plan for equality by the Portuguese government in 1998, this was the first time specific actions addressed universities and research institutions. Secondly, social science research into career obstacles and the reasons for the persistence of discriminated elites in science and higher education institutions is still very scarce ^[14]^[14]. Additionally, thirdly, because the integration of gender in research ^[15] is not deemed sufficiently relevant ^[16].

Despite the increasing integration of women in traditionally male scientific domains of education, they remain under-represented in various training and professional areas. Data from the Association of Engineers indicate that women represent 21% of the members while the fields of Electronics and Automation, Metallurgy and Metalworking and Civil Engineering remain almost exclusively male ^[17]. The eight interviewees in this study recognize the existence of social barriers in the choice of their training field and often highlighted the role played by a male member of the family who helped them through school and encouraged them to choose engineering. Cultural factors, such as gender stereotypes are referred to as contributing to those barriers, as do social representations of what it means to be a woman or a man, the social roles they should play, the associated characteristics and the dominant ideals of femininity and masculinity that sustain gendered patterns of socialisation ^[18].

In the professional context, expectations differ according to gender with men tending to be perceived as more competent in certain professional areas, such as engineering ^[17][19], politics ^[20] and medicine ^[21], depending on the areas of specialisation, and women to be perceived as more suited to the arts, humanities and social sciences ^[22][23]. Studies based on interviews shed some light on the way young women anticipate their future in the profession and the strategies adopted by professional women to cope with the context.  Saavedra and Araújo (2015) ^[24] interviewed 102 women including secondary school (42) and university students (20), and 39 young and senior professionals ^[19]. 

Regarding horizontal segregation, data from the Portuguese Medical Association identify how, by the end of 2019, women were still over-represented in specialties related to the care of children and women, such as paediatrics (71.7%), childhood and adolescent psychiatry (78.3%), gynaecology and obstetrics (64.5%), and under-represented in specialties generally associated with higher salaries and prestige such as orthopaedics (11.7%), sports medicine (13.2%) and cardio-thoracic surgery (11.3%) or those dealing with male sexuality such as urology (6%) ^[25].

4. Final Remarks

Progressive public policies and legislation played a crucial role in improving equality between women and men in Portugal. However, this legislation opened opportunities, not minds. Recent institutional changes created the conditions to open minds and allow us to hope that the next generation of qualified women will experience better conditions of integration and career progression in their professions.