Can public policies catch up with the “silent revolution”? Responses from Latin America's “best case” scenarios

Latin America has undergone a “quiet revolution” (Goldin 2006) over the past two decades, at the intersection of work and family, resulting from women´s massive participation in labor markets along with a dramatic change in family composition. While scholarly and policy attention has begun to catch up with this transition, to date we have little systematic analysis on how governments have responded, and the determinants of their responses, except that, over-all, they have been very slow in recognizing the changed social realities. Our project seeks to fill this gap by addressing the following questions: Why have policies on work-family reconciliation specifically taken so long to catch up with social structures? Under what circumstances and with what results is policy catching up with deeply transformed families and labour markets? When do these issues make it onto the political agenda, and how do policies, policy reforms, and lack thereof, vary across these countries, both in terms of policy adoption and policy implementation? What are the effects of different policies on both gender equity and social equity? How salient are social factors (structural changes, public opinion) versus political factors (interest groups, government ideology, women’s policy machineries, etc) in driving policy responses? And finally, what factors explain the similarities across countries as well as policy variation?

To address these questions, our project focuses on the more advanced Latin American countries, Brazil, Costa Rica, Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay. We focus on the period between 2000 and 2010, distinguishing between policies that were already adopted and implemented by then, and policies that were introduced during the last ten years.