Women in Latin America and the Caribbean - Cepal

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who have paid into the system only sporadically and have not accumulated enough contributions to fund a
basic pension. This measure is especially beneficial for those carrying out temporary work, such as
women working in the agricultural export sector, since the solidarity contribution will allow them to retire
on much the same terms as other workers, on a pension that covers their basic needs. 30
In the case of Mexico, in early 2006 the Mechanism of Saving for Retirement Opportunities
(MAROP) was established to help members of the poorest families save for their retirement. The federal
government will match people’s deposits peso for peso, allowing women who work in the home to build
up individual savings without the need to participate in the formal labour market. 31
Similarly, the available literature and country reports show a much more promising situation
when it comes to attempts “to develop a more comprehensive knowledge of work and employment
through, inter alia, efforts to measure and better understand the type, extent and distribution of
unremunerated work, particularly work in caring for dependants and unremunerated work done for family
farms or businesses” (Strategic Objective F.1), although this information is not updated on a regular basis
and is not among the resources drawn upon by policymakers. Academics and NGOs have a very
important contribution to make in this area, given how slow governments have been in making use of the
information available.
Comparing the current economic situation with the progress made in ratifying the conventions,
what is striking is that despite the mechanisms and provisions that now exist to guarantee gender equality,
working conditions have actually become less secure in the past few years. This has been clearly
detrimental to both men and women, as the rights won by workers have often been flouted. Moves to
increase the flexibility of employment laws, mainly through deregulation (Todaro and Yáñez, 2004), have
resulted in the introduction of part-time or reduced hours contracts, temporary working or the use of
supply workers, and outsourcing, for example, which have been presented as ways of boosting job
creation, especially for women of all ages and young people of both sexes. These methods have not had
the promised results and female unemployment has remained consistently higher than male
unemployment, topping 10% between 2002 and 2005 (ECLAC, 2006d). One reason for having a flexible
working day was so that women could continue to take charge of all caregiving and domestic tasks,
without any redistribution of these within households or support from the State or businesses, all this on
top of low wages and the lack of social protection.
The fact is that these characteristics of economic policy in recent years have meant that the most
urgent problem for many women is not to protect themselves when they have children but to be able to
reconcile motherhood with the need to work. With working conditions increasingly insecure, many
companies are using the “maternity problem” as a reason to press for more flexible working conditions,
thus making reproduction a problem for women rather than a necessity for society. Later marriage and the
drop in fertility rates among women with higher levels of education is not only part of women’s move
towards physical independence. It also has other causes, among them the need to reconcile working life
with family responsibilities, since the higher labour costs supposedly represented by women are a
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Information provided by the Government of Chile at the subregional preparatory meeting for South America for
the tenth session of the Regional Conference on Women in Latin America and the Caribbean, Santiago, Chile,
May 2007.
Information provided by the Government of Mexico at the subregional preparatory meeting for Mexico and
Central America for the tenth session of the Regional Conference on Women in Latin America and the
Caribbean, May 2007.