Caribbean women ‘still struggle to balance work, family life’

Although women in the Caribbean and Latin America have made unprecedented strides in joining the workforce and gaining access to education and health, they still struggle to balance work and family life, a new World Bank study has found.

The study, “Work and Family: Latin American & Caribbean Women in Search of a New Balance,” called for a new raft of policies to make childcare services more readily available and allow for more flexibility in the workplace.

But the report noted that the region’s women surpass men on many counts and rank well above many other regions of the world. Since 1980, more than 70 million additional women have entered the labour force in Latin America, marking an unprecedented growth in female participation in the labour market.

The report said that three decades ago, only 36 per cent of working-age women were in the workforce. Since then, female participation in Latin America and the Caribbean has risen faster than in any other region in the world, the study said.

“These results are closely linked to females scoring huge successes in education where they have been outperforming men on a number of indicators,” the report said, stating that girls are today more likely than boys to enroll in secondary and tertiary schooling and also more likely to complete both. But, as the gender parity gap closes, new challenges arise, the report warned.

While a first generation of gender policies has addressed disparities and ensured equal access to services ranging from education to health, the study said “a new set of policies is needed now to help women balance the demands of their careers and family lives.

“Ironically these advances in the gender agenda are bringing new challenges for the policy makers, in particular the unmet demand for flexibility by women who are trying to balance their lives at work and at home,” said World Bank economist Laura Chioda, the report’s author.

“Whether it is the provision of childcare services or the formalisation of part-time arrangements in the labour market, policies allowing more flexibility at work have been proven to improve the quality of women’s participation in the workforce,” she added.

Chioda said evidence provided in the study shows that women in the region increasingly face the complex challenge of balancing different roles, identities, and aspirations.

She said many see joining the labour market as a move towards a career rather than just a source of income – “a move that doesn’t translate into giving up on their desire for marriage, motherhood and family.” It is these complexities that the report argued will have to be brought to the fore in designing public policy design.

“Legislation that acknowledges the pressures of motherhood and of the day-to-day demands on households’ time, can generate important results by enabling women to fulfill their identities as mothers and workers, raising the quality of their economic participation, thereby increasing their well-being, as well as that of the entire household,” Chioda said.

She said that more women going into professional careers have led to their higher participation in formal politics, including many positions of high office. The study said women hold a 24 per cent share of the region’s parliamentary seats – the highest in the world – edging past the highly developed member Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries at a 23 per cent share.

The World Bank study also said that increasing women’s representation in regional parliaments in increasing but remains unevenly distributed across countries. One in ten lawmakers is a woman in Belize, Haiti, Suriname, Panama and Brazil.

The report warns against “simplistic conclusions and views” on gender issues in the region, calling for a deeper understanding of women’s decision making processes in order to improve the design and efficacy of policy.

“In light of the region’s remarkable achievements over the past four decades, it may be tempting to conclude that the gains in access mechanically translate into gains in labour market outcomes and that welfare can unequivocally be inferred from these trends,” the study concluded.