Multiple Analytic Perspectives on Women's Labor in Latin America

Abstract

This paper analyzes five explanatory perspectives on women's economic participation in Latin American labor markets during the past three decades: (1) modernization, which selects macrostructural factors linked to the growing supply and demand for women's labor; (2) survival strategies, which focuses on household choices in the context of economic crises that lower both wages and labor demand; (3) globalization and economic restructuring, which centers on changes in the demand for labor; (4) multivariate models to quantify the relative importance of the multiple factors linked to the expansion or contraction of the demand for female labor; and (5) the gender perspective which redefines the study of women's work by introducing women's subjectivity and their role in the family. Women's participation in labor markets is seen as determined by a variety of factors. The paper argues that owing to its broader approach, the gender perspective is that which best incorporates such variety, treating it as selective influence which depends on class position, family and individual characteristics, and male vs female conceptions of women's work. As such, it is the most successful of the five in explaining the evolution of women's participation in the labor market during the past decades.