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Latin America's poverty rate falls sharply, but gender pay gap is slow to narrow
By Anastasia Moloney
The poverty rate in Latin America is at its lowest in three decades – that’s the good news in a recent report from a U.N. body. But the report’s disheartening news is that far less progress has been made in reducing the wide pay gap between men and women in the region.
The number of poor people in the region has fallen to around 167 million – nearly 30 percent of the region’s total population today. A decade ago this figure was at 225 million – over 40 percent of the region’s population at the time, according to the report by the United Nations’ Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC).
But the gender wage gap is taking time to narrow. The issue of men being paid more than women also came to light in a 2012 study by the Inter-American Development Bank, which said the wage gap between men and women in the region is still quite high, despite dropping from 25 percent to 17 percent between 1992 and 2007.
“The poverty rate in Latin America fell sharply — by more than 14 percentage points — between 1999 and 2011. However, the pattern of poverty is, in a number of aspects, much the same as in the late 1990s,” the ECLAC report said.
One reason behind that unchanging “pattern of poverty” is because high numbers of women continue to be employed in low-paid jobs – such as nurses, teachers, maids and cleaners.
It’s a trend that threatens to slow down the pace of poverty reduction in the region, the report says.
So what can be done? As the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) points out, reproductive rights are key to improving women’s pay.
REPRODUCTIVE RIGHTS
Reproductive rights mean women having the right to decide if and when they want to have children, and how many. This involves ensuring all women have free and easy access to emergency contraception and family planning services.
That’s all still got a long way to go in Latin America – a region where in most countries abortion is only allowed in cases of rape, incest or if the life of the mother or foetus is in danger. Worse still, abortion is completely banned in five countries in Latin America – the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Chile, and Honduras.
When women can exercise their reproductive rights, it leads to more years of schooling, better health and higher incomes, the UNFPA says.
Ensuring more women have better-paid jobs is also about governments tackling the region’s high teenage-pregnancy rates.
In Colombia, for instance, nearly 20 percent of girls aged between 15 and 19 have been and/or are pregnant, according to government figures from 2012. Similar rates are found in Ecuador and Peru and across Central America.
The UNFPA says teenage mothers in Latin America and across the world are more likely to drop out of school and to earn less as an adult. They’re also much more likely to become parents of children who themselves become teenage parents, the UNFPA says.
It’s not all been bad news for women in recent years. On the upside, more and more women in Latin America are completing school and going to university than ever before, along with having greater political representation. In the region five heads of state are women – in Brazil, Argentina, Costa Rica, Trinidad and Tobago and Jamaica.
Nonetheless, as the report says, women continue to be the main providers of care in the family, looking after children, the sick and the elderly.
“The entrenched asymmetrical gender roles and the constraints that families face in paying for care services still mean that care is primarily provided by women, making it hard or impossible for them to participate in the labour market and thus undermining the family’s ability to increase its income level,” the ECLAC report, published last week, said.
If governments in Latin America want to see more women joining the workforce and earning more, they’ll have to do more to improve the region’s dire record on reproductive rights.
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