Changes to legal frameworks have been insufficient to facilitate women’s economic empowerment, both globally and in Latin America (Htun et al, 2019). A socially unequal care regime that sits at the cross-section of high-income inequality and a lack of universal care services blocks women from attaining secure jobs and career trajectories in the region. While the removal of legal barriers is necessary to achieve economic equality between women and men, without a transformation of these underlying structures, women’s work will, by and large, remain precarious and vulnerable to shocks.

We offer a policy-based explanation for why women’s labour force participation has slowed in Latin America since the mid-2000s, stabilising well below the participation level of working men, and with significant differences across class lines. Specifically, the prominence of paid domestic labour (which provides a job for about a quarter of all working women, and is also a source of care work for middle- and high-income groups) fuels large class differences between women. It also maintains the status quo, in which women are the main, or sole, care providers, and creates an upper ceiling to the number of women who can enter the workforce. To further women’s economic empowerment, this care regime needs to be ‘imploded’, that is, changed from within.

Laws and policies can, and do, make a difference in removing some of the obstacles to a more egalitarian care regime. The comparative literature in this field addresses both rising tensions between paid and unpaid work, and the role played by governments and state policies in reallocating care responsibilities by expanding transfers and services not just to women, but also to men, that is, what Daly and Lewis (2000) labelled ‘social care’. Divorce laws, alimony and property distribution, leaves allowing a better balance between work and care, public employment of women, and state-financed care systems all help to further transitions from patriarchal regimes to more egalitarian gender regimes. The literature on comparative welfare regimes with a gender perspective highlights cross-national policy variations that help explain outcomes in female rates of labour participation and employment (Orloff, 2002). For Latin America, the issue has recently been addressed as one of reconciling work and family (Blofield and Martínez Franzoni, 2014; 2015).

A care regime is the pattern by which care is produced and distributed across markets, states, families and communities, all of them embedded in, and struggling with, the sexual division of labour (Bettio and Plantenga, 2004). Here, we address the specific set of adaptive strategies or adaptive responses that together give way to a care regime. For our purposes, adaptive strategies are practices linking individual lives with collective dynamics (Tilly, 1979; Tilly and Scott, 1987). The concept addresses patterns of behaviour displayed as a response to structural barriers and stressful events (Moen and Wethington, 1992). We address adaptive responses to reduce and/or reallocate time devoted to unpaid work across the life cycle. These adaptive responses become necessary once women break away from full-time dedication to unpaid domestic and care chores without men increasing their contributions to these unpaid activities.

We provide an overview of the care regime in Latin America and its associated adaptive (market- and family-based) strategies available to women at the bottom and the top of the income distribution. In an effort to convey the high inequality that currently cuts across adaptive and/coping mechanisms in work and care in Latin America, we regularly make comparisons with adaptive strategies to reconcile work and family in European countries. The relatively equal income distribution and relatively homogeneous care regimes within these countries stand in contrast to the highly unequal income distribution and class divide found in Latin America. Yet, legal and policy changes can indeed deliver changes in Latin American care regimes, as long as they simultaneously tackle several adaptive mechanisms at once. The example we draw upon here is the case of Uruguay.

In highly unequal environments such as exist in Latin America, adaptive responses can be very different, along class lines, between women. In other words, where income inequality is low (as in the Nordic countries where the Gini coefficient is 0.26), one can expect to have a single set of prevailing adaptive strategies; however, where income inequality is high (as in Latin America), one can expect to need more than one set of clearly defined adaptive responses. One can also expect that higher-income women will rely more on markets while lower-income women will rely more on families. In this context, the role of law and of state policies will be decisive in making adaptive strategies less unequal. When comparing Latin America with European countries, we are aware of differences in their aggregate wealth, as well as in their fiscal capacity to fund public policies. Among wealthy countries, the US specifically, and Anglo-Saxon countries generally, lack the state-centric care regime of Nordic countries. Similarly, countries in the Global South, even those with middle-income level of gross domestic product (GDP), have remarkably different care regimes.

Evidence for Latin America, as well as for relevant European countries, shows that:

• Income inequality means women have different abilities to access time-saving domestic appliances (for example, vacuum cleaners, dishwashers, washing machines and so on);

• income inequality and an absence of universal care services push women working outside the home to hire cheap domestic help;

• reliance on paid care services increases the differences between class groups (the cost of these services must be kept down), creates a ceiling for how many women can work (poor women cannot afford help) and implies that men are not forced to take on care work, maintaining the status quo in gender roles;

• the pattern can only be broken by making care work more expensive, providing collective care solutions and getting men involved in care work; and

• although still in its early days, the Uruguayan case suggests that such a transformation can be achieved with legislation and policy simultaneously addressing several adaptive mechanisms to cope with work and family, including implicating men in domestic and care work.

The stratification that we see in women’s labour incorporation fosters a highly unequal care regime that both allows and limits labour force participation in Latin America. As women enter the labour force, highly divergent patterns of adaptation to productive and reproductive demands are seen. Families are the site where these adaptive mechanisms become intertwined. Men remain mostly absent from unpaid domestic and care work, regardless of income, education or life cycle, while it is women who demonstrate high levels of inequality and who allocate radically different amounts of time to unpaid work along their life cycle. The stratification in their labour participation follows.

Uruguay is Latin America’s showcase attempt to implode and transform an unequal care regime in Latin America. Uruguay has indeed introduced comprehensive policy changes to eliminate a highly unequal set of adaptive strategies. From 2006 to 2016, a number of transformations regarding both domestic workers’ rights and expansion of the public care system have been under way. It is too soon, and the data available are too limited, to draw strong causal links. However, early evidence suggests that there may be an association between increased rights and better working conditions for domestic workers (including higher wages), with a decrease in the weight of domestic work in the entirety of women’s employment. There also seems to be a marked increase in access to, and use of, publicly funded collective care solutions. Finally, while Uruguay does not escape from the moderation in female labour force incorporation, at the prime reproductive age – between 25 and 44 years old – where combined demands on care and paid work are at their highest, female labour force participation continues to, slowly, creep upwards.

In short, if economic empowerment is to reach all women, further legal and policy changes must dismantle very unequal adaptive strategies, whereby the rich can outsource care work largely by relying upon poor women. Likewise, the poor cannot rely on unpaid family, mostly female, care work to supplement their domestic paid labour needs. The task for the state is not only to expand any care policy, but also to specifically develop universal public service policies capable of counteracting the existing socio-economic gap. The challenge for Latin America is to implement such policies in the context of very high income inequality and a more limited fiscal space.