The lingering face of gender inequality in Latin America

Abstract

The labour market experienced in the last fourth decades a great change in its composition through the increasing of female labour force. In most of the Latin America countries during this period a huge increase of women participation in the urban labor market takes place (Camou 2012) . The female labour force participation begins to increase in the 70s, continuing into the 80s and in the 90s the region sees a significant improvement. From the 60’ Argentine, Brazil, Uruguay, Mexic o and Chile passed of a female particip ation rate of around 20% to 40 - 50% in 2000. This change can be explained among other things by a process of technological advance and increase of human capital that allow to replace domestic or informal work by paid work. This change impacts on the labor market by increasing the supply of labor and increasing inequality between workers given that a gender gap persists. In Latina America the more recent studies of income distribution show heterogeneity between the countries (Bourguignon, Ferreira et al. 2004). We think that this topic highlighted the necessity of decomposition of inequality to understand the driving forces behind inequality over time