GRSJ224/genderandneoliberalism

Structural Adjustment and Gender in Latin America

Map of Latin America. Latin America is a region of the Americas where the predominant spoken languages are Spanish, French and Portuguese.

Structural adjustment in Latin America, a group of counties in the Americas where Spanish, French and Portuguese are the predominant spoken languages, comprised loans from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank to countries in the region undergoing economic crises, particularly debt crises. Structural Adjustment has no official start or end date, but in Latin America it was most prevalent from 1982 through the 1990s. The loans the IMF and World Bank provided were called conditionality loans, because they had requirements attached to them. In order to receive the loans, countries had to undertake a number of free-market economic reforms intended to help their economies grow. In many cases, the reforms tied to these conditionality loans affected the lives of men and women differently. Critics of structural adjustment point to the many adverse ways the reforms affected women. Such negative effects include an increased wage gap between men and women, worse nutrition and health outcomes for women, greater pressure on women to care for children and the sick after cuts in social services, and more challenges faced by women in providing basic family needs, such as food. On the other hand, Structural Adjustment may have had the empowering or positive effect of increasing women’s financial autonomy through increased employment and spurring feminist collective action and political mobilization.

Overview of Latin American Structural Adjustment

Structural adjustment in Latin America is typically seen to have begun in 1982 when Mexico nearly defaulted on its foreign debt. The IMF renegotiated Mexico’s debt and provided new conditionality loans, which were associated with requirements for economic reform.

The IMF distributed conditionality loans in a number of other Latin American countries through the 1980s and 1990s. The conditions for each loans depended on the specific country and year, but typically consisted of the following reforms and ideas:

• Reduction in government programs, subsidiaries and public spending in general
• Promotion of international trade and investment
• Promotion of exports-focused industries
• Privatization of companies previously owned by the government
• Deregulation of markets and business

Map of Global free trade areas. Neoliberalism strongly advocates for free trade. Structural Adjustment reforms aimed at increasing Latin America's involvement in global trade through propping up export industries.

These reforms were designed to open up Latin American economies to free-market forces. All reforms reduce the size and scope of government, and focus on supporting business and international trade. The reduction in government spending would also reduce sovereign debt, in part to avoid crises like Mexico’s in 1982.

The idea that the increased trade and business opportunities would create economic growth is based on neoliberalism, a predominant and popular economic theory and ideology in the late 20th century. Neoliberalism theorizes that the best way to accumulate wealth in a society is to decrease the size and scope of government and allow private sector businesses to engage in market activities, including international trade, without regulation or excess taxes. Neoliberalism became increasingly significant in global development policy in the 1970s and 1980s, and its core principles were at the heart of Structural Adjustment.

In actual fact, most Latin American countries did not enjoy increased economic growth in the 1980s and 1990s and the conditionality loans actually increased debt. As such, the 1980s is widely referred to as the “lost decade” in Latin America due to fact standards of living decreased for the majority of the population in most countries in that decade.

Gendered Consequences of Structural Adjustment

Many scholars argue that structural adjustment affected women in different ways than men, and in particular that it hurt poor women. Development scholar Diane Elson, for example, writes:

It is generally agreed that during the period in which structural adjustment programmes have been in operation, the burdens on poor women in the countries where they have been implemented have increased, and there is little evidence as yet of women benefiting from new opportunities and incentives which structural adjustment programmes are meant to provide.

Structural Adjustment did not affect women in all parts of Latin America in the same way, though a number of broad trends can be seen. First, Structural Adjustment placed greater pressure on women in the domestic or household sphere (also called the “reproductive” sphere). Women often played a larger role than men in performing work in the domestic sphere, where they would have been responsible for childcare, cooking and other housework. Structural adjustment often made life for women in their role as mothers and household managers more difficult. For example, Structural Adjustment reforms aimed to reduce government subsidies on good such as food, transportation and energy. Cuts in food stamps made food more expensive, which put pressure on women financially and often forced them to buy cheaper foods that took a lot longer to cook. Structural adjustment also reduced social services such as education and health care. For one, these cuts made maternal health services less available. In addition, the burden to make up for these services typically fell on women. For example, it was women who would usually take time off work to take care of a sick family member, and without quality public health facilities, this task more demanding.

Second, Structural Adjustment put greater pressure on women in the employment (or so-called “productive”) sphere. In most countries, Structural Adjustment increased extreme poverty and inequality. In these difficult financial times, women were often forced to take up additional jobs. Women’s wages during the period of Structural Adjustment, however, decreased and working conditions in the manufacturing sector in an informal employment were often poor. Hence, Structural Adjustment placed increased demands on many women, as the reforms forced many women to do more in the employment and domestic spheres simultaneously.  

The various countries and communities within Latin America are not, however, monolithic, and the above description of the gendered consequences Structural Adjustment is general. The next section briefly explores case studies of Structural Adjustment in specific countries and regions.

Mexico

Map of Mexico.

The Mexican debt crisis of 1982 triggered the first set of IMF conditionality loans associated with Structural Adjustment in Latin America. In the 1980s and 1990s, the Mexican government largely embraced the free-market economic reforms of Structural Adjustment. The reforms supported the growth of companies focused on manufacturing for export, called maquiladoras. Particularly in Mexico’s northern regions near the US border, these companies increasingly hired women. Nonetheless, working conditions for women were often poor, and wage discrimination actually increased during this time period. While the average education level of women was rising, their wages decreased. This can be partially explained by a major focus within Structural Adjustment on cutting labour costs in order for companies to compete in international markets. Moreover, women working in medium- and high-skill jobs suffered from fewer employment opportunities and lower earnings compared to men. Critics see the aforementioned facts about women’s employment in the 1980s and 1990s as evidence that Structural adjustment failed to create economic conditions where skill, education, training or ability translated into good wages and employment.

Despite the low wages and difficult conditions, employment did come with positive aspects. For many women who only entered the labour force as a result of the Structural Adjustment reforms, employment provided them more financial autonomy and more power vis-a-vis husbands and other men in the household. But employment shifts was not the only major consequence of Structural Adjustment. The reforms also reduced the size of government, and this at times made women’s role as the manager of the household more demanding. Writing about Structural Adjustment in Mexico, Diana Alarcón-Gonzalez and Terry McKinley describe:

Substantial cuts in public services, such as education, health, and nutrition, tend to have a disproportionate effect on women, who have to shoulder more of the responsibility for such services. Women are called on to spend more time caring for the sick or the elderly, hunting for bargains, producing more food, or purchasing cheaper food items that require more preparation.

The Caribbean

Map of the Caribbean.

The Caribbean is a region in Latin America consisting of islands in the Caribbean Sea.  Structural adjustment in the Caribbean differentially affected women and men, and urban and rural communities.

In rural settings, women tended to perform subsistence farming, while men farmed crops for trade and export. Structural Adjustment placed a far greater emphasis on the latter, as a major goal of the reforms was for Latin American economies to compete in international markets with their exports. This shift in priority reduced the quality and quantity of land for subsistence farming, making it more difficult for women to provide food for their families. In addition, cuts in subsidies, including food stamps, make food at the market more expensive and scarce. In the Dominic Republic, for example, the cost of a food basket surpassed the minimum wage in 1987.

In Jamaica, both in urban and rural contexts,  poverty and income inequality grew during Structural Adjustment. As did the average wage gap between men and women. Previous to Structural Adjustment, women made up more than half of jobs in public sectors including education and the civil service. Hence Structural Adjustment cuts in public spending resulted in more job loss for women working in the public sector than men. Women often moved from good-paying, high-status jobs in the public sector to inferior jobs in the informal or export sectors. Such jobs involved longer hours and worse pay.

Yet another gendered consequence of Structural Adjustment was poorer health outcomes for women. The reforms included a reduction of government spending on health care, resulting in and fewer or lower quality health care facilities. The health care cuts particularly impacted women, especially mothers, who relied on the facilities more than men. Maternal mortality and anaemia both increased during the 1980s.

The response by women to the hardships brought on by Structural Adjustment was often collective and at the community level. Women found “new ways to pool resources, nurture souls and regenerate energies through communal living.” Indeed, women deployed various collective strategies to cope with hardships coming from harsh economic times and the simultaneous pressures on working and managing a household. Strategies included “communal laundries, kitchens, and child care facilities and more nearly systematized barter-type exchanges of goods and services.”

Nicaragua and Honduras

Nicaragua and Honduras are both countries in the region of Central America.

Nicaragua and Honduras represent special cases because in addition to advocating the typical free-market Structural Adjustment reforms, the IMF and World Bank also set-up Emergency Social Programs (ESPs) which were specifically designed to help Nicaragua and Honduras as their economies transitioned. The goals of the ESPs included to:

• Alleviate poverty
• Create job opportunities
• Improve infrastructure
• Involve and integrate the poor in the process of economic development

Critics of ESPs, however, argue the programs were male bias. The programs assumed implicitly that focusing on reducing poverty among men would translate to better outcomes for women. Women were not included in the design or operation of the programs. These critics of ESPs say the result of neglecting women in the program was to perpetuate and exacerbate gender inequality.

Argentina

Argentina is located in the southern part of the Southern American continent.

Structural Adjustment in Argentina had particularly negative effects of small- and medium-sized businesses, who struggled to keep up with international competition. The result was increased job instability for the bulk of the economy’s working men. Hence a greater burden to provide for the family financially fell on women. In Buenos Aires, specifically, women’s labour force participation rate, which is the percentage of women working or searching for work, increased substantially in the 1990s. Though the supply of female labour increased, employment opportunities for women, even educated women, stagnated or even got worse during Structural Adjustment. Like men, women struggled to find and maintain jobs during the 1990s, when Argentina was undergoing its major Structural Adjustment reforms. Women were usually hired by intermittent employers, and as such, did not receive employee benefits such as a pension plan and health insurance. In fact, among the Structural Adjustment reforms was a decrease in mandatory social security payments by employers. Without employment benefits, individuals had to rely further on government-provided social services. Yet during this period, Structural Adjustment reforms in Argentina provoked spending cuts in social services such as health care and education.