Resumo

In this paper I propose a reflection on the intersection between gender, race and diversity through the career trajectories of Brazilian black businesswomen. The empirical research was carried out between 2006 and 2011 in São Paulo, Brazil. I have opted to investigate the so-called corporate world, understood as the one composed of transnational corporations and the largest private national companies.

The research problem is structured from the following questions: What changes happened in the career trajectories of Brazilian black businesswomen from the end of the 1970s to the beginning of the 21st century? How do these changes reflect the socioeconomic transformations that occured in Brazilian society during that period? What consequences do these transformations have on Brazilian black businesswomen’s racial and gender identities?

The article is based on a discussion about the issues of race and gender. Concerning the gender issue, I understand gender as a kind of social identity that is constantly experienced and negotiated by social individuals. With regard to the racial issue, my starting point is that despite the fact that race does not exist as biologists have demonstrated, the idea of race remains an important one to comprehend the dynamics of social relations, as many social scientists argued.

The research methodological approach was socio-anthropological, so a qualitative one. It consisted of a double investigation strategy. Concerning the first generation of Brazilian black businesswomen, I have gathered the life histories of 5 such individuals. As for the second generation of Brazilian black businesswomen, I took hold of the so-called multi-sited ethnography.

Comparing the end of the 1970s to the early 21st century it’s possible to note a change in the construction of career trajectories of Brazilian black businesswomen, which shows the path from individual strategies to collective action. This change reflects the greatest politicization of debates on race and on gender in the Brazilian public sphere in the late 20th century. So that the second generation of Brazilian black businesswomen could build more positively affirmed black identities.

As within wider Brazilian society, the corporate world in Brazil is far from being free of racial tensions. The representatives of the second generation of Brazilian black businesswomen are just starting to build their careers and it is too early to have a final conclusion about the role of gender and race in it. Anyway, the discussion that I made in the article shows that there is still a long way to go in Brazil until you may eliminate racial and gender inequalities in the corporate world.

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