The Lingering Face of Gender Inequality in Latin America

Abstract

The labour market experienced in the last four decades a great change in its composition through the increasing of female labour force. In most of the Latin American countries during this period a huge increase of women participation in the urban labour market took place ( Historical patterns of gender inequality in Latin America: New evidence , 16th World Economic History Congress, 2012). The female labour force participation began to increase in the 1970s, and continued into the 1980s, and in the 1990s the region saw a significant improvement. From the 1960s Argentine, Brazil, Uruguay, Mexico and Chile passed of a female participation rate of around 20 % to 40–50 % in 2000. This change can be explained among other things by a process of technological advance and increase of human capital that allow to replace domestic or informal work by paid work. This change impacts on the labour market by increasing the supply of labour and increasing inequality between workers given that a gender gap persists. In Latina America the more recent studies of income distribution show heterogeneity between the countries ( The microeconomics of income distribution dynamics in East Asia and Latin America , World Bank, Washington, DC, 2004). We think that this topic highlighted the necessity of decomposition of inequality to understand the driving forces behind inequality over time. The main goal of the research is to test the hypothesis that the evolution of the gender wage gap is an important component in global inequality and it has non-linear effects. Although this gap has narrowed in recent decades it is still wide, especially in the Latin American countries where inequality is high and where the incorporation of women into the labour force has lagged behind the developed countries.

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