77% of people of working age, worldwide, without paid employment and without education are women. Latin American girls spend between 15 and 30 hours more than men on care tasks. Every year there are 4,000 girls under the age of 15 pregnant in Colombia, 8,000 in Mexico. Women in the region report twice the level of anxiety as men (27% vs. 15%), caused largely by their economic situation. They will suffer the effects of climate change in a more aggravated way, but without land ownership. Of the indigenous population that finishes high school in Mexico, only 25% are women. In Bolivia there is only one worker for every 10 employees in the areas of mathematics and technology; in the region they are three out of 10, and in those sectors, they charge 40% less. Their employment situation is more unstable and precarious: young Latin American women have a higher proportion of incomes below the minimum wage. The data collected in the report Dance in the mists. Gender and youth in unequal environments in Latin America and the Caribbean, they speak They, the young women of the region, live in a profound disadvantage.
The main objective of the document, in which 30 researchers from twenty countries participate, organized around UNESCO, the Latin American Council of Social Sciences (Clacso) and the College of Mexico, is to make these inequalities visible. “There is the idea that in reality women have the same rights as men in all contexts and even the green wave or feminist demonstrations can be perceived as exaggerated”, explains political scientist Laura Flamand, “and we want to communicate that women Young women are at very severe disadvantages, as was seen very clearly with the pandemic: they are much more vulnerable than men in many circumstances.
In a report of more than 200 pages, the three organizations paint a picture of lack of equity for women under 30 years of age in Latin America. Inequalities accumulate, are intertwined, are woven until reaching a profile of young people who always come out worse off. “There is very strong evidence in the report that shows that women continue to suffer profound intersecting disadvantages, not just that they are indigenous or low-income or that they became pregnant at a very young age, but it is all of these together that make them vulnerable to them and their families”, Flamand, a researcher at the Colegio de México and a participant in the report, explains to EL PAÍS.
The differences between the countries of the region and even within them are palpable; A young woman from Santiago de Chile does not suffer the same lack of protection as one from the Sierra de Guerrero, in Mexico, but there are traits that are maintained on the continent. Sociologist Landy Sánchez highlights how gender inequalities in the region are “deeply resistant to transformations”. For example, in recent years much progress has been made in women’s access to university education, but they continue to enter the labor market less. This is the case of Mexico, explains Sánchez, with one of the lowest labor participation rates in the region —and for its level of development, one of the lowest in the world—, despite the fact that educational gains have been among the lowest. fast in recent decades. “This is because certain gender norms, expectations and roles are so present that they make it very difficult to deconstruct the mechanisms of inequality, in labor participation, the distribution of care, the type of career that is chosen, the type of skills that we foster. or the type of work that is done in rural communities.”
The researcher at the Colegio de México Luis Olmeda emphasizes the same idea: even in countries where inequalities are not so visible at first glance, these gender roles continue to set the pace. “Chile is one of the most successful countries in terms of women’s access to university, but men continue to choose engineering and women more careers related to teaching.” Something similar occurs with Internet access, although young people use it equally, the report concludes that they acquire more programming skills and they acquire the Office package, intended for administrative tasks.
Thus, these inequalities persist despite progress, despite the international conventions signed, the commitments agreed upon. Another example is in the legal access to the interruption of pregnancy. Abortion has recently been decriminalized in Mexico or Colombia, but hospitals and medical centers in the regions still do not have protocols or resources to make it a reality. It exists on paper but not in the day-to-day life of women.
The report does not intend to remain mere evidence, but rather proposes recommendations to the governments of the region to channel some solutions. In the case of Mexico, the three participating researchers insist on the creation of a national care system, which facilitates the stable and continuous access of women to the work environment; develop educational policies that recover the students who were left behind in the pandemic —five million students dropped out of classes in the health crisis due to lack of resources to access them— and ensure that they continue towards higher school levels, and, in In general, they propose to the Government of Andrés Manuel López Obrador to bet on initiatives that empower young women: to access property, social protection, greater training and income, and real political representation.
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