A long decade of gendering social policy in Latin America: Transformative steps and inequality traps

ARZA, CAMILA; MARTÍNEZ FRANZONI, JULIANA

Handbook of gender and social policy

Edward Elgar

Año: 2018; p. 408 - 429

During the last fifteen years, Latin American countries -particularly but not only those with left-wing governments- put the fiscal space created by the commodity boom to the service of expanding social programs. Social policy efforts partly moved away from the emergency or minimum safety net approach that had prevailed during the 1980s and 1990s and granted state policy a more prominent role for people?s well-being. To address whether policy change benefitted women and how these developments reshaped gender equality, this chapter discusses three policies that are emblematic of this period: old-age pensions, conditional cash transfer programs (CCTs), and care policy. Firstly, old-age pensions are a good example of existing programs that were reformed and expanded. Two developments were important for women: reforms that sought to make pension systems more responsive to women´s labor trajectories and their role as caregivers; and the launching or expansion of social pensions aimed at those who, like most women, were not eligible to access contributory programs. Secondly, Conditional Cash Transfers (CCTs) were the flagship new social program of the last fifteen years, initially launched under very different political contexts in Brazil and Mexico, and systematically expanded to the rest of the region during the 2000s. And finally, care and the reorganization of care, erupted as a new realm of state intervention. Early Child Education and Care (ECEC) programs began to expand, rapidly yet still insufficiently and unevenly, across the region. Each of these three policy sectors offers an example of a different type of policy change: the reform of a long-standing policy (pensions), the rapid creation and expansion of a new program to tackle poverty (CCT), and the emergence of a new social issue in the policy agendas and, in some cases, also in practice. We conclude by summarizing transformative steps but also pointing at inequality traps that policy development must circumvent if social policy is to further its contribution to gender equality.