Women in Latin America and the Caribbean - Cepal

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employment flexibility. The measures adopted in most countries redefined the relationship between these
three elements and, although at the social level the stage was set for the creation of governmental
mechanisms for the advancement of women, these were not given a central place on public agendas but
developed mainly thanks to pressure from women’s movements and the contributions of multilateral and
bilateral cooperation agencies.
The lack of debate during the 1990s on the issues identified in Beijing may have been attributable
to the difficulty of finding common ground between dialogues based on apparently irreconcilable
paradigms. It was not only the difficulties inherent in the interdisciplinary approach that complicated
analysis of the linkages between the social and political realms; another contributory factor was the
abandonment of the rights-based approach in the face of the urgent need to meet macroeconomic targets.
In this context, concerns about relations between men and women seemed irrelevant. Financial
sustainability was the main rationale for the reforms, and a comprehensive, socially-oriented perspective
seemed incompatible with this.
ECLAC studies of pension reforms (Marco, 2004b) all concluded that unfunded systems failed to
meet their objectives because of a combination of administrative, demographic and employment factors
that not only put them beyond recovery but also, from a gender equity perspective, tended to reproduce
the inequities of the labour market and failed to provide coverage for most women who had either not
entered the workforce or had worked in mainly low-productivity, insecure and poorly paid jobs. These
studies recognized the difficulty of comparing the old pension systems with those that emerged from the
reforms, since the design of the latter had abandoned basic social security principles such as universality
and solidarity, ultimately turning them into a system of individual saving governed by the laws of the
market (Uthoff, 2002).
Furthermore, the reforms did not treat citizenship as the basis for entitlement to State protection.
Indeed, employment-based pension systems limit access to social security for women who do not have
continuous paid employment or who work in the informal sector. As this variable was not considered when
most countries’ pension reforms were being analysed, women were left out of policy design or were treated
as secondary recipients, with lower retirement pensions and reduced coverage. In recent years, a start has
been made on implementing initiatives to correct the distortions of the 1990s reforms and the advantages of
the model resulting from these reforms have been increasingly questioned (ECLAC, 2006b).
In this context, various initiatives have been launched to comply with international agreements
relating to labour issues (see statistical annex). In some countries, specific legislation has recently been
enacted for this purpose, such as Law No. 28983 of March 2007 in Peru, which deals with equal
opportunities for women and men and whose article 6 requires the executive to adopt policies, plans and
programmes to harmonize family and employment responsibilities. 49 In most of the countries, however,
the idea of “reconciling” family and work still refers to arrangements or mechanisms that rely on women
to respond simultaneously to the demands of employment and those of the family in such a way as to
achieve the best quality of life possible given the working conditions that obtain. In other words,
reference is made to a “need” that appears to be peculiar to women and not to concern men or society at
large. Thus, there has yet to be a serious debate about promoting cultural change so that responsibility for
49
Report presented by the Government of Peru 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.