Motherhood and Female Labor Market Outcomes in Latin America

Abstract

In Latin America, as in other developing regions, gender gaps in the labor market are still large. In this chapter we assess the role of motherhood in these gaps, bringing together new and existing evidence in an attempt to provide the most actual and comprehensive panorama for the region. New descriptive evidence comes from a novel database (GenLAC) that provides comparable data for 18 countries in Latin America regarding gender differences across many domains while also enabling intra-household comparisons. We document significant gender gaps in labor force participation (LFP), hours worked and wages, which remain about the same when considering women and men with similar characteristics. We also show that the presence of children in the household seems to explain a substantial portion of these gender gaps. This descriptive evidence is consistent with the results found by the very incipient literature addressing the causal effect of motherhood on labor market outcomes in the region. We provide a summary of this evidence which relies on event-study designs to obtain causal impacts of the birth of the first child on the labor market trajectories of parents. Results show that in Latin American countries effects are similar to those found for developed regions, although sizes differ. We next piece together the evidence regarding the main drivers behind motherhood effects in the region, namely: gender norms, childcare availability and family policies. Finally, we reunite the most recent evidence analyzing the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on female labor market performance and conclude that this shock contributed to deepen the labor gender gaps through channels closely related to the disproportionate share of child care activities performed by women in Latin American households.