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LATIN AMERICA: While
Women Pull Double Shift, State Looks the Other Way
By
Marcela Valente*
BUENOS AIRES (IPS) - Little does it matter if
they’re black or white, rich or poor, young or old.
Neither does it matter if they work or hold a
degree. In Latin America, women bear the brunt of
household chores, child-raising and care of the
elderly, while the state looks the other way.
To balance their multiple responsibilities, women
must usually rely on strategies that fall in the
private domain. If they can’t face the challenge of
juggling work and domestic responsibilities on their
own, they turn to another woman for help: their
mother or mother-in-law, a sister, their eldest
daughter, a neighbour, or - if they can afford it -
a paid housekeeper or hired caregiver.
They’re the first up in the morning and the last to
go to bed. Even if they work long hours outside the
home, they raise the children, do the cleaning and
cooking, and take care of any elderly or disabled
dependants, receiving no pay, little help from men,
and almost no government assistance.
With few exceptions - generally limited to
legislation that covers maternity leave and
breastfeeding periods - the state has no provisions
or policies aimed at lightening the extra load women
are forced to take on.
According to a report released this month in Chile
under the title "Work and Family: Towards New Forms
of Reconciliation with Social Co-Responsibility," it
is generally assumed "that caregiving is basically a
private, family concern."
The report presents the results of a study conducted
jointly by the International Labour Organisation’s (ILO)
Latin American and Caribbean office and the United
Nations Development Programme (UNDP), as part of an
effort to address what the report describes as one
of the greatest challenges of our time: the
reconciliation of work and family responsibilities,
as a key factor in promoting equality and combating
poverty.
The report indicates that the number of women active
in the labour market rose from 32 percent in 1990 to
53 percent in 2008, and that the proportion of women
in the 20 to 40 year age range working outside the
home now stands at 70 percent.
"There has been no significant shift, however, in
the dominant view of social reproduction as a
woman’s responsibility, rather than a societal
need," the study says, adding that this
misconception entails a high cost for women.
"Caregiving is not just a responsibility of the
family - who in turn place it entirely on women -
but a responsibility of the state and society as a
whole," said Natalia Gherardi, a lawyer with the
Equipo Latinoamericano de Justicia y Género - an
Argentine non-governmental organisation that works
for the promotion of gender justice – who was one of
the researchers who contributed to the study.
"The state has the legal obligation of providing the
means to make such benefits available," she told IPS.
But instead, she complained, its participation is
limited to marginal interventions through a handful
of piecemeal laws that are not always enforced.
This neglect suggests that the state is not
gender-neutral, but gender-biased, she argued. "The
state is male, and so are the laws and the power
structures based on the patriarchal organisation of
our societies," she said.
Women spend on average 1.5 to four times more hours
than men on household chores. "This overload in
terms of family responsibilities is at the root of
much of the discrimination and limitations they
experience in the labour market," the report says.
The study points to the need for a major cultural
transformation to accompany the many changes in
family structures and the labour market, with the
expansion of single-parent families and an
increasing number of women working outside the home,
which have left many households with no one
available to work fulltime on caregiving and other
family responsibilities.
But while men have so far failed to pick up their
share of the work, this "cultural problem is not
solely about men," the report says.
According to the study, there hasn’t been a
significant increase in public services aimed at
supporting household duties. "How society works in
general, with its unwritten rules, institutions and
schedules, continues to assume that someone is still
working fulltime on family care."
Few countries legally require companies to provide
day-care programmes for their workers, and then only
when their workforce is predominantly made up of
women. Paternity leave is far from widespread in the
region, and not many countries provide parental or
family leave for both male and female workers to
care for their children or elderly relatives when
they fall ill.
"Given the weakness or lack of public policies and
services to help people reconcile work and family
life, most families resort to essentially private,
family and women-centred strategies," the report
says. Experts suggest that solutions aimed at
distributing the load of family responsibilities
more evenly between men and women, to reconcile
family life and work, must be a "major component" of
social policies.
Maria Elena Valenzuela and Juliana Martínez, the
lead researchers on the study, believe that the
state must move towards universal work-family
reconciliation policies, so that family
responsibilities are not a millstone weighing women
down and hindering their personal realisation and
welfare.
"The State has a crucial role to play in the
development of services that are not restricted to
those who can pay for them or are formally
employed," said the researchers. A solution could be
to improve the capacity of social security systems
through the provision of care services or subsidies
to hire paid help, they added.
Women deal with it everyday
Morela Alcalá, from Venezuela, has never heard of
this study. Like millions of other women in the
region, she gets up at dawn to make breakfast for
the family, prepare the lunch her children will take
to school, leave dinner ready for the evening, and
set out the heart medicine for her ailing mother.
In Latin America, not only do nursing homes for the
elderly often provide inadequate care; they are also
very expensive and thus only available to
middle-class and wealthy families.
Alcalá is separated from her husband and works as a
manicurist Tuesday to Saturday in a hair salon in
Caracas. It takes her three hours to get to and from
work. But she tries to compensate the long haul by
"getting some shuteye" on the bus. "I’m beat," she
told IPS. When she gets up in the morning it’s still
dark out, and when she comes back home, her two kids
have already finished the dinner she prepared before
leaving for work.
She also has to care for her sick mother. On
Mondays, she takes her mother to the doctor. Mondays
are the most exhausting days, because she does the
cooking for the rest of the week, goes to the
market, and does the ironing. When she goes to work,
it worries her to have to leave her mother alone.
Fortunately, two neighbours drop in to check on her
every day.
The study reveals that the traditional family model
- where the husband is the breadwinner and the wife
a homemaker – has become the exception. A third of
all households are now headed by women, who more
often than not are employed in the informal sector,
earning low wages, working long hours, and having no
medical or social security coverage.
When Alcalá needs to take the day off from work
because her mother comes down with something or is
in the hospital, her employer is understanding, but
her pay is still affected because she misses out on
the percentage she receives for each customer she
sees and on the tips, both of which are a major part
of her income.
Nine percent of the population in Latin America are
elderly people, and their care places an
increasingly greater strain on families. In five
years, the percentage of seniors will have grown to
13 percent, and by 2050, it will be above 23
percent. Only the more affluent can hire paid
caregivers to cope with their elderly relatives.
With respect to this issue, the report identifies a
potential solution in matching the demand for care
services provided by the state and the market with
the need to create decent work for women.
"By transferring some domestic tasks and caregiving
to the market and public services, countries can
increase and formalise already existing employment
niches and create new jobs. This not only offers a
new source of jobs and progress toward equality, but
also offers the potential for creating decent work,
all of which help combat poverty in the region," the
report says.
It also addresses another major issue: migration.
According to the study, a "significant percentage of
the people of Latin American and the Caribbean live
outside their native countries" and women constitute
"over half of those who migrate for work-related
reasons."
"Migrant workers fill the unmet need for care
services in their destination countries," the report
says. In Argentina, women from Bolivia, Paraguay and
Peru are training to provide services for sick,
disabled and elderly people in middle and
upper-class families, and are increasingly in demand
as highly-valued caregivers.
Otilia (who preferred not to give her last name)
moved to Buenos Aires from Paraguay with her husband
and three children. Shortly after she arrived she
reported her husband for domestic violence. She then
moved into a state shelter with her children, where
she received training as a caregiver. "I have a
restraining order against my ex to keep him from
coming near the house," she told IPS.
She is now employed as a paid caregiver for the
sick, but dealing with her work and family
responsibilities is hard when there aren’t any other
women she can turn to. "I wake the kids up in the
morning, get them dressed, and leave them at
school," she said. Then it’s off to work for the
next nine hours.
"If I need to leave at lunchtime to meet with a
teacher or see the judge, they give me permission,
and I make up for it later," she said, adding that
she’s lucky to have her 15-year-old daughter, who
does the shopping, takes care of the cooking and
looks after her brothers.
In Brazil, such cases are frequent. "It’s a huge
sacrifice," said Rosilene Ribeiro, a 36-year-old
black Brazilian married mother of two. "You have to
split yourself in two," she told IPS. She relies
heavily on her mother-in-law, who takes care of the
children in exchange for her meals.
Her husband, a bricklayer, "helps out when he has no
work." When he’s out on a job, she pulls a double
shift, working as a domestic outside the home, and
doing all the chores in her own house. When she gets
in from work, she still has to prepare dinner and
lunch for the next day.
* With additional reporting by Fabiana Frayssinet in
Brazil, Natalia Ruiz Díaz in Paraguay, Helda
Martínez in Colombia and Estrella Gutiérrez in
Venezuela.
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