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International Women's Day 2006: More, but not always better jobs for women in Latin America

With 33 million women joining the labour market between 1990 and 2004, women now represent 40 per cent of the economically active population in urban areas in Latin America. A recent detailed ILO study of progress achieved in women's labour force participation shows mixed results in terms of access to quality jobs, unemployment, remuneration and social protection. ILO Online reports from Bolivia where women's rights activist Casimira Rodriguez Romero was recently appointed Minister of Justice and Human Rights.

Article | 28 February 2006

LA PAZ, Bolivia (ILO Online) - Casimira Rodríguez Romero was the only daughter of a poor family and began to work as a maid when she was 13. In 2001, the 39-year-old Quechuan woman, who has first hand knowledge about the situation of some 11 million domestic workers in Latin America, became secretary general of the Latin American and Caribbean Confederation of Domestic Workers (CONLACTRAHO).

In December 2005, Rodríguez Romero and other representatives of domestic workers and trade unions participated in an ILO seminar in Montevideo.

Today, Rodríguez Romero is the Minister of Justice and Human Rights in her country. She launched a legislative initiative to regulate domestic work. The law has been approved by the Bolivian Congress but has not been fully enacted. "The law is not enough", the Minister says. "Society must understand it and assimilate it as an act of justice."

According to the new ILO study, domestic service, which represents 15.5 per cent of total female employment on the subcontinent, is expanding. "The occupational segregation confining most women to the most underprivileged levels of the labour market continues to exist", says Maria Elena Valenzuela, co-author of the study.

But the study also notes more positive trends on the Latin American labour market. Women now make up around 40 per cent of the economically active population in Latin America's urban areas. The female participation rate rose from 39 per cent in 1990 to 44.7 per cent in 2002, while the male rate remained more or less stable, around 74 per cent.

"On the other hand, female participation rates in Latin America are still very low compared to OECD countries where, in 2001, they ranged between 62.1 per cent in France and 72.5 per cent in the United States", comments Valenzuela. "These rates vary enormously from country to country in Latin America, between 42 per cent in Chile and 58 per cent in Guatemala", she adds.

Furthermore, unemployment is higher among women than among men. In 2004, some 9.4 million women from urban areas were unemployed - 6.8 million more than in 1990. Although unemployment affected both sexes, the increase was far greater in the female labour force: between 1990 and 2004 the urban male employment rate rose from 5.3 to 9.1 per cent whereas the female rate jumped from 6.5 to 13 per cent.

The study attributes the boom in female labour market participation to better schooling, urban growth, declining fertility rates and new cultural patterns that favour the autonomy of women. A substantial increase in the number of female-headed households, which ranges from 19 to 31 per cent, depending on the country, also has played a role.

The privatization of public services and new patterns of consumption have created a need for more income and an increase in the number of "contributors" to each household. The repeated economic crises have accentuated the trend in order to offset the rise in male unemployment and the drop in real earnings.

Besides new work opportunities in export processing zones and the informal economy, most of the growth in female employment stems from the rapid increase in jobs in the areas most of them already work, mainly in the service sector.

"Women have the worst jobs in the informal sector"

As a result of the economic crisis in Latin America, poor women have joined the labour market in large numbers and the gap in labour market participation between poor women and the rest of the female population has become less marked. In 1990, the figure for poor women was no higher than 28.7 per cent, whereas that of high-income women was 50.7 per cent. The gap had closed considerably by 2000 when 39.3 per cent of the poor and 54.6 per cent of high-income women were in employment.

On the other hand, women from low-income households still have a long way to go before they can be considered fully integrated into the labour market. "One of the reasons why so many women are employed in domestic service is precisely because many women from medium- and high-income households have entered the labour market. In other words, many poor women can only find paid employment by working for the better-off", explainsValenzuela.

About half of the women employed in Latin America in 2003 were in the informal sector. Gender inequality in compounded by discrimination on ethnic grounds: large numbers of women from indigenous groups and of African origin face disadvantages and various forms of exclusion from the labour market.

In Brazil, for example, 71 per cent of black women work in the informal sector, a bigger proportion than black men (65 per cent), white women (61 per cent) and white men (48 per cent). In Guatemala, only 10.6 per cent of indigenous people with some form of employment worked in the formal economy compared to 31.8 per cent of non-indigenous workers.

"Women have the worst jobs in the informal sector. They are engaged in low-productivity businesses operating at the survival level", says Valenzuela.

Income differences between men and women are particularly evident in the informal sector where women only earn slightly more than half the income of men. But even in the formal economy the monthly income of women has reached only 75 per cent that of men, the study says. Income differences between the sexes in Latin America are higher than in any other region of the world.

The study also confirms that women are still at a disadvantage in terms of social protection. Most women on the subcontinent over the age of 65 have no retirement or other kind of pension at all because they have spent their entire adult life in unpaid domestic and household work.

"An entirely new approach is needed to meet the major challenge of generating quality jobs, one that identifies the kind of employment opportunities that can benefit women - mainly in the services sector where most of the female labour force is to be found", concludes Valenzuela.


Women's labour force participation rates in Latin America, by Laís Abramo and María Elena Valenzuela, in International Labour Review, special issue on "Women's Labour Force Participation", vol. 144, No. 4, International Labour Office, Geneva, 2005.