Three essays on gender inequality in Latin America: understanding labor market segregation, job quality, and environmental issues from a feminist perspective
Date
2024
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Abstract
For the past three decades, Latin America experienced remarkable progress in educational attainment and health care access for women, combined with decreasing household income inequality and higher wages across the board since 2002, especially at the bottom of the wage distribution for most countries. Yet, gender job segregation in the labor market has increased since the early 1990s. Urban women persistently occupy jobs in the informal sector, where jobs are generally characterized by low wages, lack of benefits, poor working conditions, and no promotion possibilities. Concerning both urban and rural women is Latin America's unique vulnerability to the impacts of climate change and the lack of progress in preventing deforestation, which disproportionally impacts impoverished communities, especially women and children. Despite some progress on reproductive rights in several countries, persistent economic challenges and constraints present serious barriers to the advancement of gender equality and reproductive justice—understood as the right to prevent and terminate undesired pregnancies, carry desired pregnancies, and raise a healthy and happy child to the best of one's ability. Based on the premise that such a complex scenario can only be understood through feminist research methodologies, this dissertation proposes three independent yet connected essays. Each essay focuses on a different research question that helps us better understand the gendered impacts of economic policies in Latin America, how women with different intersectional identities are impacted by them, and how to build useful scholarship for policy makers and activists to advance gender equality and reproductive justice in the region. The first essay focuses on the connections between gender job segregation, income distribution, and real exchange rates in Latin America. For the second essay, we propose a theoretical discussion, focusing on building reproductive justice as a research program within economics. Finally, the third essay focuses on rural women, exploring the relationship between deforestation and hours unpaid care work in the Amazonia rainforest.
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environmental economics
macroeconomics
Amazonia
reproductive justice
feminist economics