The pandemic care crisis far exceeds Argentina: the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) points out that due to the pandemic there was a “forceful” departure of women from the labor force in the region related to the need to attend to care demands in their homes. Female labor force participation fell “more than a decade”.
It is not, of course, only a Latin American problem, but it deserves special attention in a region marked by deep inequalities and by a violent machismo that continues to take a bloody price.
For a brief moment in 2020, we all find ourselves locked in, bearing the full weight of care tasks and without the possibility of resorting to outside help. In Argentina, several short-term pandemic emergency measures were adoptedSuch as licenses for formal workers with children due to school closings or emergency subsidy payments, helped make the situation less burdensome.
However, this equalization was a passing moment. Deep inequalities quickly reappeared between families who could hire private solutions and those who do not have those possibilities; differences that promise to deepen in the southern hemisphere school year that begins now, with limited and chaotic schedules. It is time for Latin American women and societies to fight against this inertia.
Feminist battles always have a double task: denaturing discrimination and then fighting for the right to be effective. From suffrage to legal abortion, the expansions of women’s rights were not evident beforehand. The legalization of abortion in Argentina, for example, was the result of strong activism that lasted decades and opened unprecedented conversations and was only achieved when the issue was widely debated in Argentine society. The same should happen with care work.
An agenda of these tasks should consider the redistribution of responsibilities indoors, with men who don’t “help” Rather, they comply with women and promote social changes that are accompanied by public policies, such as extended paternity leave, to establish joint responsibility in family and domestic tasks from the outset. I know requires state investment so that lower-income families can also access support that alleviates the burden of care. And also better care services for the elderly to reduce the burden of responsibility on those who care for them, usually women. Ultimately, all of this should be publicly discussed as widely as possible.
The pandemic could be the moment of truth for care work, a sector that is invisible to so many who naturalize the allocation of these free or poorly paid jobs to women.
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