WASHINGTON – Although women in the Caribbean and Latin America have made unprecedented strides in joining the workforce and gaining access to education and health, they still struggle to balance work and family life, a new World Bank study has found.
The study, Work and Family: Latin American & Caribbean Women in Search of a New Balance, called for a new raft to policies to make childcare services more readily available and allow for more flexibility in the workplace.
But the report noted that the region’s women surpass men on many counts and rank well above many other regions of the world.
Since 1980, more than 70 million additional women have entered the labour force in Latin America, marking an unprecedented growth in female participation in the labour market.
The report said that three decades ago, only 36 per cent of working-age women were in the workforce.
Since then, female participation in Latin America and the Caribbean has risen faster than in any other region in the world, the study said.
“These results are closely linked to females scoring huge successes in education where they have been outperforming men on a number of indicators,” the report said, stating that girls are today more likely than boys to enrol in secondary and tertiary schooling and also more likely to complete both.
But, as the gender parity gap closes, new challenges arise, the report warned.
