LIMA, Peru – The crisis caused by the COVID-19 pandemic in the labor markets of Latin America and the Caribbean has had a greater impact on women and has placed the region before the challenge of facing an unprecedented setback in gender equality at work, according to a Technical Note published Thursday by the ILO.
Women sew masks using machines provided by the Women’s Institute for Alternative Development in Trinidad and Tobago. (Photo by: WINAD)Of the 23.6 million jobs for women that were lost at the worst moment of the crisis in the second quarter of 2020, at the end of 2021 some 4.2 million were still to be recovered. In the case of men on the other hand, the 26 million jobs lost at that time had already been almost completely recovered.
“This March 8, International Women’s Day, we must bear in mind that we are facing a worrying setback in gender equality at work, and therefore the region needs to redouble its efforts to recover lost ground and generate more and better job opportunities for women”, said the ILO Director for Latin America and the Caribbean, Vinícius Pinheiro.
The ILO Technical Note “Latin America and the Caribbean: Gender equality and labor market policies during the pandemic”, which is part of the regional series entitled Labour Overview in times of COVID-19, presents a series of data on the situation of female employment and analyzes the strategies that have been put into practice in different countries of the region.
“Two years ago, when the crisis began in mid-March 2020, women were affected by a catastrophic loss of jobs and income. Female unemployment increased, but the most shocking thing was the massive departure from the labor force that brought labor participation rates to levels not seen two decades ago,” Pinheiro commented.
The new ILO Technical Note highlights that the regional participation rate for women, which hovered around 41 percent in the early 1990s, had risen steadily to 52.3 percent in 2019 (average for the first three quarters). In the same period in 2020, it fell to 47 percent, although that year there were moments when the regional average reached 43 percent.
In 2021, the participation rate registered an insufficient recovery, as it rose to 49.7 percent, 2.5 percentage points below pre-pandemic levels.
At the same time, as of the third quarter of 2021, the average unemployment rate for women is 12.4 percent, the same as in 2020, which is a sign that there has been no improvement, and that it needs to drop significantly to return to the 9.7 percent of 2019. It is above the general unemployment rate, 10 percent, and 8.3 percent of the rate for men.
The ILO analysis says that the measures adopted to address the health emergency, such as the closure of educational and care centers in general, had a negative impact on female labor participation.
Added to this, was that the sectors of activity where the social isolation measures had the most impact (commerce, restaurants and hotels, and leisure activities, among others) are intensive in female labor.
In turn, the impact was greater in informal employment and in micro, small and medium-sized enterprises where female employment is also predominant. Domestic work, where 91 percent of the employed is female and 72 percent is informal employment, was affected by considerable job losses.
“The pandemic exacerbated existing structural inequalities. Rural women, heads of households with young children, those with less training and education, indigenous and Afro-descendant women, have been more affected. Gender gaps, both in participation and in income, are persistent in women with lower incomes and lower educational levels”, commented the ILO Regional Specialist in Labour Economics, Roxana Maurizio.
The ILO study carries out an analysis of labor market policies and measures that have sought to contribute to mitigating the pernicious effects of the pandemic and to recovery, with a specific focus on those that consider a gender perspective.
“Gender equality considerations must be an intrinsic component of the design, elaboration, application and analysis of the results of all programs and strategies, policies, laws and regulations implemented during the pandemic and in the recovery stage” says the ILO Technical Note.
