Women at Work: Challenges for Latin America by IDB

Women at Work: Challenges for Latin America

the education and potential experience of workers, they find that the wage differential fell 7 percentage points over the decade, that is, the gap between women’s and men’s wages decreased from 25 percent to 17 percent.3 Tenjo, Ribero, and Bernat revisit the study of gender wage gaps in six countries of the region from the early 1980s to the late 1990s in Chapter 5. By looking at the differences in expected earnings between men and women, the authors present a perspective rarely seen in the literature on wage gaps. Expected earnings can be interpreted as the product of employment opportunities, hourly income, and work hours. Through this novel approach we learn that there is a tendency toward the equalization of monthly incomes between men and women, but while differences in hourly incomes are decreasing, the differential in hours worked per week has been widening. Furthermore, the authors show that gaps in employment opportunities vary by country. In the economic field, discrimination is traditionally measured by a technique known as “Oaxaca decomposition.” The difference in earnings between women and men is decomposed into the shares that can be attributed to differences in characteristics and shares related to differences in returns to those characteristics. Tenjo’s chapter uses this method to assess the levels, trends, and possible explanations for salary differences between men and women in Latin America. The authors find a clear tendency toward a decreased differential in hourly earnings in all countries, except Costa Rica. What may seem surprising to many is that in two of the countries studied—Argentina and Colombia—by the end of the 1990s women were earning higher hourly wages than men. Most of the empirical literature on gender discrimination finds that a significant share of the gender gap in earnings is explained by genderrelated differences in educational attainment. Contrary to the circumstances of most of the developing world, wage-earning women in Latin America and the Caribbean are increasingly achieving higher levels of education than wage-earning men. Since women in the region have been increasing their human capital very rapidly over the last two decades—surpassing men in many countries—differences in educational attainment between men and women should produce a reverse gender

Although some positive trends emerge for the region as a whole, we have to pay attention to the particular situation of any given sub-region or country. Duryea, Jaramillo, and Pagés (2003) find that the gender gap in wages is steadily declining in the Andean and Southern Cone countries, but no evidence of this trend is found in Mexico and Central America.

WOMEN AT WORK: CHALLENGES FOR LATIN AMERICA