The political discourse on the professional qualification of disadvantaged women: emancipation or hegemony?

Abstract

The aim of this article is to analyze the logic, assumptions and beliefs present in the context of the Thousand Women Program created in 2006. The article verifies the program’s contribution to the social construction of the professional roles attributed to disadvantaged women. The qualitative research was based on the transdisciplinary approach, which refers to the epistemological principles of critical discourse studies of Fairclough, Chouliaraki and Fairclough, together with the theory of social construction of target populations and with references to feminist studies. The results showed that the political discourse and policy design elements of the Thousand Women Program, based on social constructs and institutional cultures, promote skills in traditionally female areas with limited emancipation of women. The conclusion shows that there is a contradiction between the program’s discourse and its actual practice, because it reiterates the logic that maintains hegemony and gender polarization.