**2. The specificity of gender discrimination**

Official recognition of women's political, social, cultural, collective and territorial rights has gained pace along with the institutions and policies created to defend them. Political participation quotas, equal pay for equal work, and incorporation of women into the police and armed forces have been legislated and complied with, and universities have been opened to women. Nevertheless, women face unabated inequality. Even the first initial analyses that apply the concept and methodologies of HI have prioritized other elements such as ethnic, linguistic or religious distinctions over gender. This paper does not intend to fully explain the causes of women's inequality. It aims to only suggest some areas that contribute to it such as religion and elements of classical and neoclassical economic theory, which require a more profound analysis that exceeds the scope of the present research.

One of the causes of pay inequality is differences in labor productivity, although it does not explain the 30% of the wage gap between women and men that is attributed to gender discrimination. Yet theoretical frameworks, concepts and neoclassical economic methods do not enable identification of the mechanisms that explain discrimination in economic policy decision-making. A good part of the gap in pay and other economic variables is due to the formal and informal institutions that, like religion, exist and regulate socio-economic life. This is a complex issue in societies where Catholicism is the predominant religion in ethnic groups. Religion helps support hierarchical androcentric attitudes and practices.

Another driver of gender inequality is the prevailing classical and neoclassical economic theory that idolizes the selfish *economic man* as the core of the economy hides the contribution of women to the advantages of men. Maximizing his profit, he is the Robinson Crusoe, the model hero of individual entrepreneurship. Any subject other than this prototype is merely an accessory that serves the economic man's self-directed interests. The *economic woman*, therefore, is altruistic, selfless, self-sacrificing, free of vice, and born to serve. Since all her decisions and their consequences arise from this natural rationality, her lower social status, income and education can be attributed to the free acceptance of this rationality, not to the rules of the market, a formal institution arising from the capitalist social organization model [2, 3]. This ideology is to be found in the discussion about employment and occupations in Sections 2 and 3.

Neoclassical theory hides processes that perpetuate gender inequalities through the axiomatization of human behavior. Assuming exogenous preferences hides the fact that preferences are induced rather than natural. If society, from childhood to insertion into the labor market, relegates women to certain activities, their preferences are adjusted to the possibilities, it is a prior and subsequent discrimination that results in less labor and political recognition [4]. One of the main contributions of feminist economic theory is its rejection of positivism for which there is no evidence of reality, only proof of the action of natural laws; absolute truths, obtained from supposedly rigorous and objective analyses. One of those absolute truths is the naturally different rationality of women.

For example, neoclassical economics and its facets and ramifications conceive as a historical fact that the economy is divided into the public and private spheres. It is irrefutable that the economic man has always managed the public sphere, which claims that his natural function is to set the agenda that determines power, wealth

and the distribution of income. The function of the home and women is repressed for the sake of this agenda, generating an unequal society [2, 3]. Newer concepts of macroeconomics and growth theory depart from this narrow model, conceiving society and the economy as developing in contexts of environmental and sociocultural activity, which cannot be ignored if social sustainability is sought. Moreover, this development takes place in three spheres that are symbiotically linked: (i) the nuclear sphere—the productive unit—families, homes, and communities that supply and demand goods, services and care; (ii) the business sphere, the sphere of enterprises, including those whose objective goes beyond maximizing profit; and (iii) the public sphere, governments and non-profit welfare organizations such as the UN, the Red Cross, and others. The predominant ideas expressed in these contexts and spheres do not permit discrimination against women to be overcome, since that discrimination " … is deeply wedded to the prevailing power structure and that structure is patriarchal; that is, the orthodox economy expresses patriarchal power" ([5], p. 3).
