Women Between a Rock and a Latin and Caribbean Hard Spot - Building Gender Balanced Business

• The unprecedented entry of 100 million women into Latin American and Caribbean workplaces has significantly changed the traditional balance of work and family life, a United Nations report says, at great costs for the women.

• The women aren’t the only ones suffering from the tension — so are the countries’ economic development as labour markets and corporate productivity are held back by the difficulty the women have in meeting traditional family expectations and the demands of work.

• Add to that the fact that women earn 70% on average of what men make in Latin America.

• The June 2009 International Labour Organisation and the UN Development Programme report “Work and Family: A new call for public policies of reconciliation with social co-responsibility” said that more than half of Latin American and Caribbean now have a job, up from less than a third in 1990. 7 in 10 women ages 20 to 40 work.

• But the report says the region has seen no “redistribution of domestic workload. Nor have public services that support such duties been improved significantly –and there has been little change towards reorganisation of social life.”

• Rebecca Grynspan of the Development Programme noted best practices of some countries in the region, such as Costa Rica’s day care plans for almost all workers; Brazil’s pension plan for workers in the women-dominated informal economy; and Chile’s paternity leave as well as maternity leave.

The UN news release