<mark>education or to take on a job. Families ended up prioritizing men’s work.</mark><sup>33</sup> <mark>This arrangement is reinforced not only by men’s socially expected role as providers, but also with participants’ expectation that men will earn higher wages.</mark><sup>34</sup> <mark>It shows that, even when women value having a paid job, power dynamics within households and negotiating the organization of domestic work is still a major barrier to equal participation in the work force.</mark>

**<mark>Additionally, women with small children mentioned experiences of discrimination.</mark>** <mark>Women reported being asked about whether they have a partner and small children during job interviews and not being considered for the positions after their positive responses.</mark> While it remains a speculation, the level of detail to which the interviewee, in the following quotation, was inquired about her childcare responsibilities suggests that discrimination based on gender and care responsibilities may account for some of young women’s difficulties in accessing jobs.

_Q7: P: I was interviewed last week and... I think I lost the opportunity, the owner told me he had really liked me and all, but I lost the opportunity when he asked who had children. Out of all the girls there, one had one and I was the only one who had two, with one still a baby. When he asked their age, I said one of them was one year and three months old. The first thing he asked me was if I had a structure or someone to look after my baby. I told him I did. He asked me if my son still breastfeeds. I told him yes. So I think it fell through because of this. Small kids ask for their mothers when they are sick, so I think he didn ́t want someone missing work because of a kid that would be sick. It is not that he is constantly sick, but there is always the fear of hiring a person with kids. That would miss work to take to the doctor, to take a vaccine. I think it was because of this that he didn ́t give me the position._ _<mark>Woman, 25 years, from urban Caranguejo-Tabaiares</mark>_

- **4 How Poverty, Gender Norms and Lack of Support Systems Can Limit Youth’s Participation in the Educational Systems and Labor Market**

**<mark>In this section, we show how the combination of a social context of poverty and deprivation, a set of restrictive gender norms, and the lack of support systems may contribute to limit youths’ outcomes related to work and school.</mark>** <mark>However, it is important to point out that, although we are portraying major patterns, there were clearly deviations from those. The actual extent to which these patterns will determine individual outcomes can vary depending on the specific combination of contextual factors related to family, institutions and community as well as the individual’s capacity to exercise agency.</mark>

**Individuals’ capacity to form aspirations**<sup>**35**</sup> **in relation to work or education is adaptive to their social contexts and framed within a context of reference and sense**

> 33 Contrary to that, Chioda (2016) shows that highly educated women tend to see work more as a career than merely a source of income.

> 34 The World Values Survey 2014 shows that in Brazil 16.8 percent of interviewees agree that when jobs are scarce, men should have more right to a job than women.

> 35 See Appadurai’s (2004) work on the “capacity to aspire”.

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