Before and after reform: The effects of structural adjustment on women's employment in Latin America.

摘要

This study investigates the effects of structural adjustment on women's employment in Latin America. Specifically, the changes that occurred in the structure of demand for female labor in the decade of economic crises and adjustment (approximately 1980 to 1990) in Chile, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Mexico, and Venezuela are analyzed. For each country, the changes that occurred in women's employment are explored by projecting the patterns of industrial and occupational distributions by sex from the period before adjustment into the 1990s and comparing these counterfactual against actual data. The links of these changes to structural adjustment policies in the extreme cases of Costa Rica, where the largest increase in the female percentage of total employment occurred, and Mexico, where the female percentage of total employment decreased, are also explored. Possible extensions from these findings are then made to Chile, Ecuador, and Venezuela, and the similarities and differences in the countries' policies and their connections to changes in women's employment are discussed. Finally, it is concluded that among these five countries, those in which structural adjustment policies were less traditionally neoliberal experienced the greatest increases in women's relative employment over the decade. This study adds to the cumulative knowledge on the subject of structural adjustment and its effects on women's employment in Latin America by offering a broad analysis of five economies at two points in time. In this way it provides an extensive view of the changes in the structure of employment in these countries, and how women's employment was affected by them. Also, by concentrating on women's share of total employment rather than their participation rates, changes in women's position in the workforce relative to men's are emphasized. Finally, although all of the countries in this sample engaged in some type of reform in the 1980s, the degree to which their policies were neoliberal vary, and this allows the relationship of reform orthodoxy to changes in women's relative employment to be explored.