A comparison of gender equality between Latin America and Orthodox Europe (Part 3)
About domestic workers in Latin America
This is the third part of my series of posts on gender equality in Latin America, with a particular focus on the differences between Latin America and Orthodox Europe.
In the second part I noticed how some countries in Latin America and Europe have a suspiciously high percentage of women parliamentarians when compared to their percentage of women mayors, and how the former is used as a measure in order to rank countries by their gender equality while the latter is not, which begs the question of whether these countries’ governments and political parties are just trying to appear more gender equal than they really are. I also noticed that both Latin American countries and European countries in this group seem to be close to each other in a particular region of Europe and a particular region of Latin America. If one assumes that Europe is not completely culturally homogeneous and Latin America is not completely culturally homogeneous then this points towards the Western Balkans and Andean South America being somewhat different, and less gender equal, than neighboring countries.
I then commented on what I think is a not very well known effect of electing women mayors. It appears as if electing a woman mayor in a certain municipality has the effect of increasing the chances of electing a woman mayor in neighboring municipalities. At least for some countries (I don’t have enough data or time to check this for more countries).
I now want to go back to this last point before moving on.
Double checking the neighboring woman mayor effect
One very thoughtful critique I received about the supposed neighboring woman mayor effect is this: the effect can only be real if it happens during a long period of time, say months or years. Otherwise there is no time for neighboring voters to watch and be persuaded by the good work of the neighboring woman mayor.
I think this is just a partial critique. If party X decides to select a woman candidate for mayor of a certain municipality, party Y might just decide that it’s in their best interest to respond by selecting a woman candidate for mayor of the neighboring municipality. And so you might end up with two neighboring women mayors after that election.
Even if that might be the case for some elections, I still felt compelled to address that critique. So here is an animation showing women headed municipalities of Serbia from the 2015 local elections to the 2022 local elections.
The first transition from the 2015 local election to the 2019 local election doesn’t look great, but the second transition does look like it supports the neighboring woman mayor effect. 11 of the 17 newly elected women mayors from 2019 to 2022 were elected in a neighboring municipality.
Even if I still haven’t convinced you of the existence of this effect, I hope to have at least made a good enough argument to convince some serious researcher, the kind who has serious resources, that more research is needed.
Domestic work in Latin America
Before closing this series and moving on to other Latin America related subjects I wanted to talk a bit about the phenomenon of domestic work in Latin America, and how it relates to Female Labor Force Participation (FLFP).
There are between 11 and 18 million domestic workers in Latin America according to UN Women, and they represent between 10.5% and 14.3% of women’s employment in the region. ILO’s 2022 Labour Overview agrees with “about 10 per cent of regional female employment“. For now I’ll use that 10% figure without worrying about its breakdown into different Latin American countries.
I now want to compare the rate of domestic workers, particularly women, in Latin America with the rate in Europe, or at least some Western European countries. I decided to check the numbers for France, Spain and Portugal because they are the easiest for me to analyze.
The total labor force of Spain is 22,750,000, and apparently around 400,000 of those workers are domestic workers, and around 95% of them would be women. So that’s 1.7% of total employment. Assuming women represent around 46% of total employment (I used FLFP numbers to estimate this), those 400,000 women domestic workers represent around 3.8% of female employment.
Let’s do the same exercise for France. The total labor force of France is 30,680,000, and if I’m interpreting the Fepem (Fédération des particuliers employeurs de France) numbers correctly around 1,300,000 people work as domestic workers, around 90% of them are women, but only 364,940 of them work as maternal assistants (assistants maternels) or childcare workers (gardes d’enfants à domicile). So that’s around 1.1% of total employment. Assuming women represent around 47% of total employment (again FLFP numbers), women domestic workers should be around 2.3% of female employment.
For Portugal the total of women domestic workers appears to be 106,000, and assuming women represent 47% of total employment, women domestic workers should be 4.2% of female employment.
The difference between France on the one hand and Spain and Portugal on the other is mostly due to the numbers for Spain and Portugal including a lot of elderly care workers. But applying the same ratio of childcare workers to elderly care workers from France to the numbers for Spain and Portugal (39% of total), I arrive at a rate of 1.5% for Spain and 1.6% of female employment for Portugal, even lower than France (this might have something to do with the fact that French numbers include crèches workers).
In those three European countries the percentage of the female labor force in childcare is much lower than the average 10% for Latin America. That 10% is not all childcare workers of course, but even a little familiarity with Latin American society (sorry, no numbers for this) and a quick look at the numbers of elderly people as a percentage of the whole population will make it clear that the true number for Latin America is not 3.9% (the 39% of 10%). My guess would be 8% or 9% of the female workforce. So we are probably comparing rates in the range of 1.5% - 2.3% to rates in the range of 8% - 9% for most Latin American countries.
It seems fair to point out that domestic workers in Latin America also do a lot of housekeeping, not just childcare. But this influences women’s decision to work outside the home by weighing its trade-offs (domestic unpaid labor vs paid labor) in the same way as a higher availability of childcare. Higher availability of housekeeping services makes women more willing to work outside the home just like higher availability of childcare services makes them more willing.
So, just like I argued when discussing the rate on single mother households, my point again is that FLFP for Latin American countries is inflated. In this case by inflated I mean higher than it would be if the availability of childcare services and housekeeping services were as low as it is in developed countries (maybe with the exception of Singapore).
This I think supports my case for Latin American women having a lower compulsion or desire to work than women from higher FLFP countries.
There’s one last issue with this, and that is the issue of domestic workers themselves choosing to work as domestic workers. If there’s an increase in wages for a certain economy would that make domestic work less attractive? I think the answer is yes. Domestic work is a low-skill job, and domestic workers might choose to learn more skills in order to earn higher wages. Or they might make a decision not to work outside their own homes by weighing the trade-offs involved, assuming other wage earners in the household now earn more than before. This might be part of the answer for why the higher average income is for a Latin American country, the lower FLFP seems to be for that country.
Breakdown by country
The number for domestic workers as a percentage of female employment for all Latin American countries (except Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela) were also part of ILO’s 2022 Labour Overview. Here are the values for 2019, just before Covid-2019, together with values for GDP per capita PPP.
What can be gleaned from the table above is that generally countries with higher GDP per capita have a higher rate of female domestic workers. In fact the correlation between rate of female domestic workers and GDP per capita is 0.26.
How can that be possible when higher wages should discourage a low-skill job like domestic work? Part of the answer is regional migration. Paraguayan domestic workers migrate to work in Argentina, Peruvian domestic workers migrate to work in Chile, etc…
This is more evident when looking at the correlation for South America, considering it as a domestic work market on its own, which is 0.30. And without Uruguay, the most divergent South American country in terms of culture, that correlation for South America reaches 0.40
And I’ve finally reached the end of this series of posts on gender equality in Latin America.
I hope it’s unnecessary to explain that when I say Latin American women have a lower compulsion or desire to work than women from developed countries this is not a commentary on gender in Latin America - even if it has an effect on gender equality - but a commentary on people, men and women, in Latin America.
I look forward to post more on Latin America, and to hopefully contribute to make Latin America a much less magical place in the eyes of my readers.