Women in Latin America and the Caribbean - Cepal

83
It is interesting to characterize the workplaces of women employed in domestic service, so as to
identify the components making up the demand for this type of work and the conditions leading people to
employ a woman from outside the household to do tasks that, under the current sexual division of labour,
are considered the responsibility of the adult woman spouse. Household surveys can be used to obtain a
picture of households where there are live-in domestic servants, so that female workers are interviewed as
permanent residents.
The analysis shows first of all that there are evident care needs which are not met by households
themselves or by external services (whether provided by the State or the market), since in-house domestic
help is most often recruited in single-person households headed by a woman (usually an older adult),
those headed by a man, single-parent households (a man with no partner but with children) (see table 23
in the statistical annex), those containing larger numbers of adults over 75 (see table 32 statistical annex)
and those in urban areas containing larger numbers of minors aged 0 to 6 (see table 34 in the statistical
annex).
In the case of two-parent households, live-in domestic staff are most likely to be recruited when
the wife is in one of the following four situations: (i) she works outside the home (see table 25 in the
statistical annex); (ii) her working day is long (see figure II.12); (iii) she is in the occupational category of
employer or paid employee (see table 29 in the annex); and (iv) she has 13 years or more of education
(see table 28 in the statistical annex).
Figure II.12
LATIN AMERICA (14 COUNTRIES): TWO-PARENT HOUSEHOLDS WITH LIVE-IN DOMESTIC
STAFF, BY WORKING WEEK OF THE FEMALE EMPLOYER
(Percentages)
2.5
2.0
1.8
1.7
2.0
1.5
1.4
1.3
1.2
1.0
0.9
0.5
0.3
0.4
0.0
Total Urban Rural
Less than 24 hours 24 to 48 Over 48
Source: Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), on the basis of special tabulations of household
surveys from the countries concerned.