Women in Latin America and the Caribbean - Cepal

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occupied in providing these services; and (iii) there is no protection for the right to health of female
caregivers. As has been well documented, caregiving is a task that involves major physical and mental
health risks, and women who provide care are not covered by health provision commensurate with their
needs and the limited time they have to look after themselves.
Approaching gender equality from the perspective of unpaid care work allows the world of work
to be analysed from a standpoint that is usually ignored in economic and social analysis. This analytical
perspective transcends the dichotomy between the public and private spheres, which leads to a focus on
unpaid activities and assigns caregiving a subsidiary, complementary and natural role based on the
prevailing gender order. This document has shown all the dimensions that affect gender equality, such as
employment, unpaid work, social security and, most importantly, the essential and unrecorded
contribution of work in the private sphere, which is a vital pillar of development. Although the dichotomy
between the public sphere and the private one (the non-business family realm) has a very long history, it
is only in the last few decades that the situation has begun to become critical because women have been
entering the labour market in large numbers, have little choice but to remain there, and wish to develop
their autonomy on the basis of financial independence, something that has also been driven by
demographic changes, particularly their control over their fertility and reproductive life, their educational
attainments and the growing demand for participation in democratic life, as discussed in the first part of
this document.
This change in analytical perspective makes it possible to focus on women’s contributions rather
than on what is lacking to them, and reveals the non-monetary subsidy they provide over time in the form
of unpaid care for children, the sick, older people and other family members. Not only that, but the
excessive burden of work to which most women are subject yields earnings from employment that are
essential for overcoming poverty and achieving well-being, but that result in situations which are
extremely distressing for poor women who have to relinquish the care of their own loved ones to work in
other households or leave their own countries. This represents a sort of informal social insurance that
makes up for the lack of universal, solidarity-based public policies.
The introduction to this document argued that the women of the twenty-first century were facing
up to the challenge of equality by winning their freedoms. The analysis presented in this second chapter
reveals the public policy challenges that need to be addressed if the conquest of civil and political rights is
to be accompanied by the conquest of economic and social rights in the private and public spheres.