Gendered labor legacies of authoritarian neoliberalism: Chile's double crisis

Abstract

AbstractLegacies of Chile's democratic crisis pose challenges for workplace gender equity. This paper brings together scholarly debates on gender regimes and factory regimes to examine the gendered labor practices in a high‐tech, transnational agricultural sector. Specifically, I ask how gender regimes and regulatory practices entrenched in Chile's authoritarian past shape labor dynamics in this industry today. I argue that we must look to the past to understand how firms benefit from unequal social relations embedded in institutions and for identifying mechanisms of change. I document how the neoliberal and authoritarian policies of the democratic crisis in Chile (1973–90) became the baseline conditions in democracy, leaving stark gender and labor inequalities that persist today. The resulting neoliberal pact continues to privilege elites and marginalize the working poor, especially women, contributing to the slow‐brewing inequality crisis that came to a head in 2019. Based on ethnographic observation and semi‐structured interviews in Arica, Chile, a major hub for corn seed development, I show how these legacies enable firms to benefit from Chile's unequal gender relations to develop high‐value products without paying the price associated with the skill needed to produce them. I find that conservative gender norms together with labor relations inherent in Chile's neoliberal model, rooted in a 17‐year dictatorship, create obstacles to efforts to address gender inequality.