Women in Latin America and the Caribbean - Cepal

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those in rural areas (42.1%), where it is more difficult to delegate reproductive work and where support
systems are much thinner on the ground. 37
The sexual division of labour has persisted and combined with changes in the world of
employment such that the traditional form of work organization, whereby women take most responsibility
in the family even when they work outside the home, has become unsustainable. The resulting conflicts
generally have to be solved privately and are a source of major tensions in the absence of State action and
public policies. Upon examination, it transpires that in over half of all cases where women aged 20 to 24
do not seek outside employment, the main reason is that they are performing unpaid work
—housework— in their homes. In fact, more women from this age group are in this position than are in
the education system (30.1% as against 15.9%), whereas when men are economically inactive it is
because they are studying or for some other reason (ECLAC, 2007a).
Box II.5
GIRLS IN DOMESTIC SERVICE: OUT OF SIGHT AND OUT OF MIND
Child labour has been a fact of life in our societies at different periods in history, but a new awareness of its negative
effects on children’s welfare arose in the early 1990s. This recognition has been reflected in international
instruments designed to protect children from any type of work that might interfere with their development. As part
of this effort, the International Labour Organization (ILO) has laid down a set of objective criteria for quantifying
the scale of child labour and defined concepts such as: light work that does not affect children’s health or personal
development, child labour, and worst forms of child labour. The criteria used for this classification are the number of
hours spent on these activities and the extent to which children’s health or physical safety is imperilled.
These definitions treat only “economic” activities (paid or unpaid) as work, so that most studies of child labour
concentrate exclusively on analysing the causes and consequences of activities carried out for the market or for
private consumption. There is no consideration of domestic work as something negative or harmful for children’s
development and health, irrespective of the number of hours spent on it, the amount of energy it demands or how
much time it leaves children for educational or recreational activities appropriate to their age. The result is that no
information is available on unpaid child domestic labour.
The low profile of this work means that public policies to address child labour leave out a large percentage
of girls, upon whom most of these tasks devolve. According to information compiled by the Chilean Child Labour
Survey in 2003, 67% of economically active children were boys, while 85% of minors spending over 20 hours a
week on housework were girls (Silva, 2006). Information from the Brazilian Household Survey for 2001, 2002 and
2003 shows that when housework is considered, more girls than boys are working and studying at the same time,
irrespective of socio-economic level. In Bolivia, data for 2001 likewise indicate that when housework is included in
the definition of child labour, girls in a given age group who work are systematically less educated than those who
do not (Zapata, Contreras and Kruger, 2007). The information available in Bolivia also shows that girls under 14
spend over 20 hours a week carrying wood or water and the same number of hours washing and ironing clothes,
activities that are liable to have an adverse effect on health in the short or medium term.
Source: D. Zapata, “Trabajo, educación y salud de las niñas en América Latina y el Caribe: indicadores elaborados en el marco
de la plataforma de Beijing”, Mujer y desarrollo series, No. 82 (LC/L.2708-P), Santiago, Chile, Economic Commission
for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), April 2007; D. Zapata, “Counting invisible workers: girls in domestic
activities within their homes” (EGM/DVGC/2006/EP.9), document presented at the Expert Group Meeting on the
Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination and Violence against the Girl Child, Florence, Italy, September 2006.
37
Covers women aged 15 and over devoted exclusively to unpaid domestic work.