Women and working in healthcare during the Covid-19 pandemic in Brazil: bullying of colleagues

Background: Based on a feminist approach, we analyzed the experiences of workplace bullying suffered by women front-line healthcare professionals dealing with the Covid-19 pandemic. We start from studies that show that women make up 70% of the global health workforce, 85% in the area of nursing, and 90% in the case of social care workers. An unequivocal need thus exists to address gender issues regarding the composition of the labor force in the health area. The pandemic has aggravated recurring problems involving healthcare professionals at the various caregiving levels, such as mental harassment (bullying) and its effects on mental health. Methods: Data were gathered from an online survey of a convenience (non-probability) sample composed of 1,430 volunteer respondents, all women that work in the public health system in Brazil. The analyses and discussions involved the responses to a questionnaire containing 12 closed-ended questions and one open-ended question. Results: The results revealed a context of workplace bullying aggravated by precarious material, institutional and organizational conditions in the area of health services against the backdrop of the Covid-19 pandemic in Brazil. This context has variously led to aggression, isolation, heavy workloads, and invasion of privacy, humiliation, persecution and fear as it was possible to see, mainly, in the answers to the study’s open-ended question. This situation degrades both work relations and the integrity of the healthcare professionals who work on the front line to treat Covid-19 cases. Conclusion: We conclude that bullying is a psychosocial phenomenon that heightens the oppression and subordination still experienced by women in the contemporary context, but with new hues in a scenario of frontline response to Covid-19

So Thin It's Almost Invisible: Populist Attitudes and Voting Behavior in Brazil

Description: Replication flies for Castanho Silva, Bruno, Mario Fuks, and Eduardo R. Tamaki. forthcoming. "So Thin It's Almost Invisible: Populist Attitudes and Voting Behavior in Brazil", Electoral Studies. Contemporary research classifies populism as a thin-centered ideology, which can be attached to different "host" ideologies. Populist attitudes have been found to predict electoral support for populist candidates in Europe and the Americas, albeit still subsidiary to "thick" ideological issue positions. With the concomitant rise of the radical right, the lingering question is how much do populist attitudes actually matter for voting. We test the effects of populist attitudes and ideology on vote choice in a likely case scenario, the 2018 Brazilian presidential elections, using data from the Brazilian Election Study. Support for the far right populist candidate, Jair Bolsonaro, is explained by right-wing ideology and illiberal attitudes, with populist attitudes playing a very small role, if any. These results reinforce the idea that populist attitudes may be no more than a flamboyant but ultimately irrelevant packaging to explain the global rise of the far right