Latin America has made significant strides over the past four decades to equalize opportunities for women in education, healthcare, and employment. Yet according to Augusto de la Torre, chief economist for Latin America and the Caribbean at the World Bank, these “first generation” gender gains are leading to second generation challenges that must be addressed to ensure equitable outcomes in the future.
“The first generation gender agenda…had to be an equality of access agenda to help societies snap out of an inefficient and unfair equilibrium. But in the second generation agenda, one probably has to target welfare as the main agenda.”
The remarks came during a presentation on a new World Bank report entitled “Work & Family: Latin American and Caribbean Women in Search of a New Balance,” held at the Inter-American Dialogue on May 1. Authored by Laura Chioda, senior economist for Latin America and the Caribbean at the World Bank, the report shows that on average, the education gender gap in Latin America has closed, life expectancy of women has risen, and female labor force participation in recent decades has increased.
Women now make up 40 percent of the total Latin American workforce, with 52 percent of working-age women employed. And due in part to new legal requirements in eleven countries that ballots contain a minimum percentage of female candidates, Latin America now has the highest proportion of female members of parliament of any region in the world.
Yet while these gains have improved female standards of living in many ways, women in Latin America face a new set of challenges. “What you have is women trying to deal with a balance of work defined as a career and family. And their aspirations about family and about work enter into tensions and conflict,” stated de la Torre. “There is a lot of evidence…that women are more stressed out about the work-life balance than guys.”
De la Torre argued that these tensions demand greater flexibility than the formal sector provides, leading many women to turn to the informal sector for employment and childcare. To address these problems, the report recommends that policymakers transition from gender blindness – which leads to equality of opportunity – to gender consciousness – which leads to equity of outcomes like wages and job satisfaction. Such policies could include, for example, provisions for childcare services, flexibility of work schedules, and the removal of disincentives for part-time employment.
While recognizing the importance of these recommendations, Mayra Buvinic, senior fellow at the United Nations’ Foundation and Vital Voices, who provided comments on the presentation, pointed out that a lack of data restricted the report’s discussion of diversity within gender.
“Social exclusion by race and ethnicity and gender and the interaction of them is very, very big in the region, and I think that that needs to be filtered more in the report.”
