Labor Market Gender Gaps In The Time Of Covid 19 In Latin America And The Caribbean

This study shows that the trend of declining gender gaps in labor market indicators in Latin America in previous decades did not change significantly in most countries during the COVID-19 pandemic. However, a closer look at the dynamics during the 2019-2021 period shows that (i) women were harder hit in terms of employment losses during the 2020 economic shock; (ii) despite the labor market recovery, women in 2021 often remained less likely to work than they did in 2019; nevertheless, (iii) in a subset of countries the gender gap in employment rates widened. However, relative to the value of their 2019 wages, the accumulated income losses were considerably greater for women than for men in most cases. This can create scarring effects for the future through greater vulnerability, lower incomes, and reduced probabilities of job insertion. The groups of women hit hardest by the shock were those with less than a tertiary education, those in the 14-24 year-old age group, those living in urban areas, and those working in the tertiary sector.

Despite its negative effects, the COVID-19 pandemic has also accelerated Latin America's digitalization. The rapid increase in connectivity and digital services was helpful in mitigating the pandemic's negative impact on the labor markets, especially for those with enough flexibility to continue working from home. The shock has particularly affected women due to their household responsibilities and labor market characteristics. This paper examines how digitalization may have affected gender gaps in employment and job loss related to the COVID-19 crisis. Using a sample of Latin American countries, our findings suggest that higher levels of digitalization are associated with increased female employment and reduced job loss for both men and women. These findings hold even after controlling for factors such as child care, household chores, and the COVID-19 shock. Our results are also robust to various econometric techniques.

We study the labor supply impact of the COVID-19 pandemic by gender in four Latin American and Caribbean (LAC) countries: Brazil, Chile, Dominican Republic, and Mexico. To identify the impact, we compare labor market stocks and labor market flows over four quarters for a set of balanced panel samples of comparable workers before and after the pandemic. We find that the pandemic has negatively affected the labor market status of both men and women, but that the effect is significantly stronger for women, magnifying the already large gender gaps that characterize LAC countries. The main channel through which this stronger impact is taking place is the increase in child care work affecting women with school-age children.

Over recent decades, women in Latin America and the Caribbean have increased their labor force participation faster than in any other region of the world. This evolution occurred in the context of more general progress in women’s status. Female enrollment rates have increased at all levels of education, fertility rates have declined, and social norms have shifted toward gender equality. This report sheds light on the complex relationship between stages of economic development and female economic participation. It documents a shift in women’s perceptions whereby work has become a fundamental part of their identity, highlighting the distinction between jobs and careers. These dynamics are made more complex by the acknowledgment that individuals are part of larger economic units—families. As development progresses and the options available to women expand, the need to balance career and family takes greater importance. New tensions emerge, paradoxically made possible by decades of steady gains. Understanding the new challenges women face as they balance work and family is thus crucial for policy.

Women across the world remain an underutilized resource in the labor force. Participation in the labor force averages around 80 percent for men but only 50 percent for women – nearly half of women’s productive potential remains untapped compared to one-fifth for men. Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC), as a region, saw the largest gains in female labor force participation (LFP) in the world during the last two decades. Women in LAC are becoming increasingly active in paid work, closing the gap with men and catching up to their counterparts in advanced economies at an impressive rate. In this paper, we document the recent trends in female LFP and female education in the LAC region, discuss the size of potential gains to GDP from increasing female LFP and policies which could be deployed towards this goal.

A region known for its volatility, Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) has suffered severe economic and social setbacks from crises—including the COVID-19 pandemic. These crises have taken their toll on careers, wage growth, and productivity. Employment in Crisis: The Path to Better Jobs in a Post-COVID-19 Latin America provides new evidence on the effects of crises on the region’s workers and firms and suggests several policy responses that can bolster long-term and inclusive economic growth. This report has three key findings. First, crises lead to persistent employment losses and accelerate structural changes away from the formal sector. This change occurs more through reductions in the creation of formal jobs than through job destruction. Second, some workers recover from crises, while others are permanently scarred by them. Low-skilled workers can suffer up to a decade of lower earnings caused by crises, while high-skilled workers rebound fast, exacerbating the LAC region’s high level of inequality. Formal workers suffer smaller employment and wage losses in localities with higher rates of informality. And the reduced job flows caused by crises decrease welfare, but workers in localities with more job opportunities, whether formal or informal, bounce back better. Third, crises’ cleansing effects can increase efficiency and productivity, but these effects are dampened by the LAC region’s less competitive market structure. Rather than becoming more agile and productive during economic downturns, protected sectors and firms gain market share and crowd out others, trapping valuable resources. This report proposes a three-pronged mix of policies to improve the LAC region’s responses to crises: •Create a more stable macroeconomic environment to smooth the impacts of crises, including automatic stabilizers such as unemployment insurance and short-term compensation programs; •Increase the capacity of social protection and labor programs to respond to crises and coalesce these programs into systems that complement income support with reemployment assistance and reskilling opportunities; and •Tackle structural issues, including the lack of product market competition and the spatial dimension behind poor labor market adjustment—a “good jobs and good firms†? agenda.

COVID-19 started as a health emergency, but it is rapidly evolving into an employment crisis. There is still uncertainty on how severe the economic impact of the pandemic will be. As things go, however, the drag on the region’s employment could last longer than the epidemic itself. Beyond the immediate impacts on the level of employment, the crisis is deepening and accelerating the transformation of jobs, bringing the future closer. Going Viral: COVID-19 and the Accelerated Transformation of Jobs in Latin America and the Caribbean focuses on recent trends in the economies of the region that have been significantly changing the labor market: premature deindustrialization, the servicification of the economy, and the changing skill requirements of jobs as automation advances. The findings of this report have important implications for economic policy. Some of these implications are related to the productivity challenges that Latin America and the Caribbean was already facing after the end of the “Golden Decade†? in 2013. Other policy implications see their relevance enhanced by the COVID-19 crisis. As sectors are impacted in different ways, as new technologies are developed and adopted, and as working remotely becomes more common, governments need to respond in ways that support a smooth transformation of jobs—one that is socially acceptable and that contributes to productivity growth, including investing in the human capital of the workforce. The accelerated transformation of jobs also calls for a rethinking of labor regulations and social protection policies. The institutional architecture geared to wage earners in the formal sector is quickly becoming outdated. The report calls for the flexible regulation of the emerging forms of work, in a way that encourages employment and supports formalization, thereby expanding the coverage of social protection. to larger segments

Relying on a variety of examples from Latin America and the Caribbean, this book counteracts the gender gap by focusing on what you need to know to analyze the modernization of business management and economic growth as well as design effective public policies that allow for greater participation of women in society.