Women selling on Facebook

Ethnography for the analysis of emerging fields

Abstract

Women in Mexico face multiple obstacles to entering paid formalwork activities, a fact that affects their high participation in jobs framed as informal. Likewise, in the search for activities that allow them to reconcile the spheres of their lives, women create different opportunities such as trading products on Internet platforms. The purpose of this research is to report on an emerging work activity developed by women who use the Facebook platform to sell different types of products,

This research develops its results from the information collected through ethnographic work that describes the sales work carried out, as the succession of  online – offline contexts, understanding the behaviors and meanings from the perspective of the woman who sell in Facebook bazaars, and the self-perception of being informal vendors. . To collect information, research techniques were used: online participant and non-participant observation, analysis of posts in Facebook bazaars, participant observation in the field, ethnographic interviews and 10 individual in-depth interviews with bazaar vendors.

The most relevant results we find the relevance of job insecurity, the worsening for women of the conditions that perpetuate gender roles, such as the responsibilities imposed on women mothers for the care of infants, which makes this role a limiting factor in the formal jobs. In addition to the use of Facebook to create activities that generate economic profits and the formation of women's groups in offline spaces.