Multiplying Themselves: Women Cosmetics Sellers in Ecuador

Abstract

With the “feminization of labor,” more women in developing countries are working for pay, but that work is precarious and often exists in the informal economy. This paper examines the situation of Ecuadorian women selling cosmetics through a multilevel direct sales organization in which earnings are dependent on the amount of product sold and the number of sellers recruited. This relatively new type of gendered, paid employment promises to help women achieve balance between paid work and family responsibilities. Using ethnographic methods to explore direct-selling mothers' identities, strategies, and struggles, this study finds that such a balance remains elusive for these women sellers, despite the purported flexibility of direct sales work. It discusses the finding that women think about their paid work and family roles as connected and examines the myth prevalent among direct sellers that successfully balancing paid work and family comes from “organizing yourself.”

Keywords:

• Women and work
• family responsibilities
• informal economy

Acknowledgments

Many thanks to the participants in the panel on gender and work that I organized at the Latin American Studies Association's 2009 Congress in Rio de Janeiro: Greta Friedemann-Sánchez, Marina Prieto-Carrón, Ana Josefina Cuevas Hernández, and Florence Babb. Thanks also to the scholars in the audience at that panel for their questions and comments. As always, I am indebted to Tamara Mose Brown and Henry I. Casanova for their insights and support. Above all, I am grateful to the women who participated in my study and shared their stories.

Notes

¹ Figures are for 2009.

² I use the words “sellers” and “distributors” interchangeably; within the DSO studied, the sales force is divided into “directors” and those referred to by the company as “beauty consultants” or simply “consultants,” whom the directors recruit and mentor in their “groups.” Both directors and consultants are officially considered self-employed, “independent distributors” rather than employees of the DSO.

³ Throughout this article, “work–family” refers to the relationship between paid work and family.

⁴ Although Benería and Floro (2006) use the term “degrees of informality” to classify women's jobs in Ecuador and Bolivia as low, medium, or highly informal, direct sales does not fit neatly into any of these categories. I am referring here instead to the closeness or distance of the seller to the transnational corporation or DSO, which has some connection – though not a perfect correspondence – to the degrees of informality that Benería and Floro define.

⁵ Here I am referring to patriarchal families centered on heterosexual couples and their offspring. Throughout the paper, when I speak of families and households, I am referring to those family forms most common among my respondents. Most women were partnered with men (either in legal or common-law marriages) and had children living at home. All but one of the single women were also mothers.

⁶ Married, urban Mexican women in Martha Roldán's (1988) study also claimed to need their husbands' permission to engage in paid work.

⁷ See Paula England (2005) for an overview of the new scholarly work on “care” as a gendered form of paid and unpaid labor.

⁸ Ecuadorian scholar Felipe Burbano de Lara has argued that structural adjustment was “incomplete” in Ecuador due to the political fragmentation that he characterizes as “lack of consensus and constant bickering” (2008: 274–5). Moser counted eight “distinct stabilization/adjustment packages” of policies implemented between 1982 and 1988 (1993: 178).

⁹ Consolidated areas are parts of the city where nearly all inhabitants' basic survival needs are fulfilled, with reliable infrastructure such as running water, trash collection, and electricity. Unconsolidated areas do not have such reliable resources.

¹⁰ The revenues for 2006 were US$260 million with approximately 200,000 sellers. This represented a 37 percent increase in revenue and a 54 percent increase in the sales force over the previous year, 2005, when US$190 million was generated by 130,000 sellers.

¹¹ This figure has been given in the context of North America (US and Mexico), and I have not found statistics for turnover in Ecuador. A turnover rate of 100 percent means that as many new sellers enter the sales force as the number that leave in any given year.

¹² Beyond “allowing” their wives to sell or buying Yanbal products from them, active supporters also helped their wives in ways such as loaning the money to cover orders, taking catalogs to their places of employment or to friends' houses, or assisting in the recruitment of new consultants.

¹³ The term “grandmother director,” which demonstrates the way that social and economic relations within the DSO are likened to family relations, means that Ligia recruited the woman who subsequently recruited Betty into the organization.

¹⁴ See Karyn A. Loscocco (1997) for accounts of how self-employed men and women in the US attempt to keep paid work and family separate.

¹⁵ Keep in mind that she is not paid by the hour to attend meetings or events.