COVID-19 has been unique among recent crises in the swift attention directed to gender impacts and inequalities in relation both to the initial pandemic and to the economic and social crises that ...followed. Gender equality activists, advocates and researchers mobilized at extraordinary speed to raise concerns on issues from health, violence and care to employment and social protection. Thanks to these efforts, the gendered impacts of the interlinked health, economic and social crises have been well-documented and widely publicized.
With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, feminists in academia, international organizations and civil society were quick to predict that its impact on gender equality would be detrimental. Between ...March 2020 and March 2021, for example, UN Women conducted rapid gender assessments in over 50 countries, collecting gender data on the impact of COVID-19 on employment, unpaid care, mental and physical health, and access to government relief through specially designed surveys. These and other impact data left no doubt about the gendered fallout of the pandemic, but were governments heeding these insights to inform their response and recover efforts?
The COVID-19 pandemic revealed how globalized, market-based economies critically depend on a foundation of nonmarket goods, services, and productive activities that interact with capitalist ...institutions and impact market economies. These findings, long argued by feminist economists, have profound implications for how we think about our economic futures. This paper shows how lessons from the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic can inform how people think about the future of our economies and, specifically, how to address a trio of interlocking crises: care work, environmental degradation, and macroeconomic consequences. Drawing on these lessons, this paper argues for a necessary paradigm shift and discusses the implications of such a shift for social and economic policies.
HIGHLIGHTS
The pandemic highlights the interlocking crises of care, the environment, and macroeconomics.
COVID-19 underscores the centrality of care in our economies.
The intensifying environmental crisis illustrates the neglect of nonmarket processes in dominant policy approaches.
The biggest contradictions in our economic systems result from the interactions between capitalist institutions and the nonmarket sphere.
Through an analysis of recent reforms in three policy areas in Chile -- pensions, childcare services, and maternity/parental leave -- the paper seeks to explore how equity-oriented reforms deal with ...the triple legacy of maternalism, male-breadwinner bias, and market reform. Recent studies of "new" social policies in Latin America have underlined the persistent strength of maternalist assumptions. Feminist research on new cash transfer programs, in particular, has tended to see more continuity than change in the gendered underpinnings of social policy. This paper suggests that once we broaden our field of vision to include other social programs and reforms, the ways in which contemporary social policy (re)defines women's productive and reproductive roles, social rights, and obligations are more complex and contradictory. Indeed, while some policies take unpaid care by women for granted, others point to an increasing awareness of inequalities that shape women's and men's differential access to market income and public social benefits. Adapted from the source document.
This article examines the functions of the "dual discourse" about Peruvian migrant domestic workers in contemporary Santiago. A 2002 field study found that middle-class employers of Peruvian workers ...simultaneously praised them as superior workers and denigrated them as uneducated and uncivilized. While this response is not unique to Santiago, this study argues that it fulfilled particular ideological functions in this context. The praise served to discipline the Chilean working class, who middle-class employers claimed no longer knew their place. The epithets served as a foil for Chilean national identity. Stories about Peruvians serve as tools in ongoing ideological contestations over class, race, and nation in Chile and, at the same time, shape the working conditions and integration of the migrants themselves.
The negative impacts of the COVID‐19 pandemic on women's employment, care responsibilities, and access to services have motivated an unprecedented level of advocacy around strengthening national ...social protection systems from a gender perspective. Yet very little empirical evidence exists about what a gender‐responsive social protection system entails in practice. This paper addresses this gap through a comparative analysis of 52 national social protection strategies from primarily low‐and middle‐income countries. To analyse the gender responsiveness of these strategies, we developed an analytical framework based on international human rights standards and social policy, gender and development literature. Through presentation of the framework and our findings, this paper makes several contributions to scholarship and practice. First, our framework―the first of its kind―offers a novel conceptual and methodological contribution by enabling a systematic, comparative assessment of national approaches to social protection from a gender perspective. Second, the framework enables the systematisation of empirical evidence on the degree to which gender is integrated into social protection systems. By applying it to national social protection strategies, we identify which gendered risks and vulnerabilities are most commonly acknowledged and addressed in countries' efforts to create gender‐responsive social protection systems. We also highlight a concerning gap between rhetoric and response when it comes to gender equality in the strategic plans that governments lay out for these systems. To our knowledge, this is the first systematic cross‐country assessment of such documents. We conclude with future directions for research and practice, including the gap between recognition and action.
"This article defines paid care work and explains why it has become an important arena for research and policy. Drawing on cross-national and countrylevel analyses of selected occupations, it ...highlights three findings: first, the employment situation of care workers often mirrors broader, country-specific labour market conditions and problems; second, the State's role as an employer of care workers is changing as governments increasingly outsource such work; and third, social policy regimes also shape opportunities for and conditions of care employment. It concludes that both care workers and care recipients are likely to benefit from improved employment conditions of care work." Forschungsmethode: empirisch; Querschnitt. (author's abstract, IAB-Doku).
ABSTRACT
In recent years, several middle‐income countries, including Chile, Mexico and Uruguay, have increased the availability of early childhood education and care (ECEC) services. These ...developments have received little scholarly attention so far, resulting in the (surely unintended) impression that Latin American social policy is tied to a familialist track, when in reality national and regional trends are more varied and complex. This article looks at recent efforts to expand ECEC services in Chile and Mexico. In spite of similar concerns over low female labour force participation and child welfare, the approaches of the two countries to service expansion have differed significantly. While the Mexican programme aims to kick‐start and subsidize home‐ and community‐based care provision, with a training component for childminders, the Chilean programme emphasizes the expansion of professional ECEC services provided in public institutions. By comparing the two programmes, this article shows that differences in policy design have important implications in terms of the opportunities the programmes are able to create for women and children from low‐income families, and in terms of the programmes’ impacts on gender and class inequalities. It also ventures some hypotheses about why the two countries may have chosen such different routes.
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