Latin America?s Progress on Gender Equality: Poor Women Workers Are Still Left Behind

Eduardo Zepeda

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Research Papers in Economics

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      February, 2008      Number  49
Latin America’s Progress on Gender Equality:
Poor Women Workers Are Still Left Behind
Share of poor women in urban paid employment and in urban paid
domestic work, selected countries in Latin America
 Source: Author’s calculations based on data from EQxIS.
The Millennium Development Goals seek to
achieve gender equality by the year 2015 (see MDG #3). The
set of indicators proposed to track progress towards this goal
encompasses the social, political and economic spheres. We focus
on an important economic indicator, i.e., the share of women in
wage employment in the non-agricultural sector.
The Latin American and Caribbean region has shown notable
progress on all indicators of gender equality. Official data from the
United Nations show that, within the developing world, this region
has had the best performance on women’s economic progress.
For instance, women hold 42 per cent of wage jobs in the
non-agricultural sector.
However, an assessment of the region’s progress on gender
equality cannot rely only on national averages. In the region in
the world with the highest inequality, one should expect progress
in gender equality to be inequitably distributed, and likely to be
most limited for poor women.
We restrict our attention to urban areas, where this indicator is
more relevant and data are more reliable. We then examine—by
quintiles—the share of women in wage employment in the urban
non-agricultural sector for 20 countries in Latin America (circa 2004).
Data in EQxIS (www.iadb.org/xindicators) allow us to see that this
share is 48 per cent for the richest fifth and 40 per cent for the
poorest. Hence, the participation of poor women in such
employment is eight percentage points lower, on average, across all
countries. In countries such as Bolivia, Chile, Honduras and Panama,
the difference can be as large as 15 percentage points.
But let us disaggregate our data in order to get closer to the real
story. Often, the main wage work that poor women in urban areas
can find is performing domestic chores for rich or middle-class
households, e.g., cleaning, cooking and baby sitting. What if we
exclude these jobs from our analysis since they are usually low
paid, lack benefits and offer few opportunities—hardly a basis
on which to demonstrate gender equality? If we do, the disparities
between rich women and poor women become striking.
Excluding domestic work does not alter the share of rich women in
urban wage work. But the share of poor women drops dramatically,
by 12 percentage points, from 40 to 28 per cent! This suggests that
more than one in four poor women workers (12/40) who are in
urban wage employment are domestic workers. Moreover, the
domestic chores that they perform for rich and middle-income
households are likely to enable the women in these households
to secure higher wage employment outside the household.
The importance of paid domestic work for poor women workers
differs across countries in Latin America. For selected countries in this
region, the Graph highlights: 1) the share of all poor women workers
who are in urban paid employment and 2) the percentage of all poor
women workers who are paid domestic workers.
The Graph allows us to gauge the share of poor women in urban paid
employment who are domestic workers. This percentage is almost one
half of all poor women in urban paid employment in Brazil, one third in
Chile, a bit more than one fifth in Costa Rica and a little less than one
fifth in Venezuela. Paraguay is an extreme case: more than half of poor
women engaged in urban paid employment are domestic workers.
Thus, MDG-related policies aiming to reduce gender equality need to
take into account the complexity of women’s participation in labour
markets, particularly in countries with high inequality such as those
in Latin America. Access to non-agricultural wage employment,
though important, does not necessarily expand significantly the
economic opportunities of poor women.2
So indicators that focus solely on national averages might provide
a misleading picture of progress in reducing gender equality.
Disaggregating data, such as we have done for paid domestic
work, should be an initial step in uncovering the real conditions
of gender inequality.
Notes:
1. Former senior researcher at the International Poverty Centre and current staff member of the
UNDP Poverty Group.
2. For a recent discussion of gender equality, see issue number #13 of IPC’s Poverty In Focus magazine,
published in January 2008.  @
by Eduardo Zepeda, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace1

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Latin America?s Progress on Gender Equality: Poor Women Workers Are Still Left Behind

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