Gender and Social Policy in a Global Context: Uncovering the Gendered Structure of 'the Social' (Social Policy in a Development Context)

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Author: Shahra Razavi | Shireen Hassim

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Gender and Social Policy in a Global Context Uncovering the Gendered Structure of ‘the Social’

Edited by

Shahra Razavi and Shireen Hassim

Gender and Social Policy in a Global Context

Social Policy in a Development Context General Editors: Thandika Mkandawire and Huck-Ju Kwon, both of UNRISD Social Policy in a Development Context is a new series which places social policy at the centre of research while maintaining the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD)’s unified approach to social development. The series provides a new and exciting contribution to the literature in economic development and social policy. In economic development, social policy has been recognized as an integral part of development, but the literature often falls short of elaborating social policy for a unified approach to economic and social development. In social policy, analysis has concentrated mainly on European and North American countries, and studies on developing countries often lack comparative rigour. The bridge between economic development and social policy will not only contribute to the academic research but also inform the policy debate at the international and national levels. Titles include: Olli Kangas and Joakim Palme (editors) SOCIAL POLICY AND ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT IN THE NORDIC COUNTRIES Massoud Karshenas and Valentine M. Moghadam (editors) SOCIAL POLICY IN THE MIDDLE EAST Economic, Political and Gender Dynamics Huck-Ju Kwon (editor) TRANSFORMING THE DEVELOPMENTAL WELFARE STATE IN EAST ASIA Maureen Mackintosh and Meri Koivusalo (editors) COMMERCIALIZATION OF HEALTH CARE Global and Local Dynamics and Policy Responses Thandika Mikandawire (editor) SOCIAL POLICY IN A DEVELOPMENT CONTEXT Shahra Razavi and Shireen Hassim (editors) GENDER AND SOCIAL POLICY IN A GLOBAL CONTEXT Uncovering the Gendered Structure of ‘the Social’

Social Policy in a Development Context Series Standing Order ISBN 1–4039–4295–1 (hardback) 1–4039–4296–X (paperback) (outside North America only) You can receive future titles in this series as they are published by placing a standing order. Please contact your bookseller or, in case of difficulty, write to us at the address below with your name and address, the title of the series and the ISBN quoted above. Customer Services Department, Macmillan Distribution Ltd, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS, England

Gender and Social Policy in a Global Context Uncovering the Gendered Structure of ‘the Social’ Edited by

Shahra Razavi and Shireen Hassim

© UNRISD 2006 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published in 2006 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world. PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN-13: 978–1–4039–9630–5 ISBN-10: 1–4039–9630–X This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Gender and social policy in a global context : uncovering the gendered structure of ‘the social’ / edited by Shahra Razavi and Shireen Hassim. p. cm.––(Social policy in a development context) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1–4039–9630–X (cloth) 1. Women – Government policy – Cross-cultural studies. 2. Social policy – Cross-cultural studies. 3. Sex role – Government policy – Cross-cultural studies. 4. Women – Social conditions – Cross-cultural studies. I. Razavi, Shahrashoub. II. Hassim, Shireen. III. Series. HV1444.G45 2006 305.40973––dc22 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 06 Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham and Eastbourne

2005056620

Contents List of Tables

vii

List of Figures

ix

List of Acronyms and Abbreviations

x

Notes on Contributors

xi

Preface and Acknowledgements

xv

Foreword

xvii

1 Gender and Social Policy in a Global Context: Uncovering the Gendered Structure of ‘the Social’ Shireen Hassim and Shahra Razavi

1

Part I Historical and Regional Trajectories in Social Provisioning 2 Mothers at the Service of the New Poverty Agenda: The PROGRESA/Oportunidades Programme in Mexico Maxine Molyneux 3 Gender and Post-socialist Welfare States in Central Eastern Europe: Family Policy Reforms in Poland and the Czech Republic Compared Silke Steinhilber 4 Maternalist Policies versus Women’s Economic Citizenship? Gendered Social Policy in Iran Valentine M. Moghadam

43

68

87

5 Gender Equality and Developmental Social Welfare in South Africa Shireen Hassim

109

6 Social Policy Reforms and Gender in Japan and South Korea Ito Peng

130

7 The Evolution of the Women-friendly State: Opportunities and Constraints in the Swedish Welfare State Barbara Hobson

151

8 The Adult-worker-model Family and Gender Equality: Principles to Enable the Valuing and Sharing of Care Jane Lewis and Susanna Giullari

173

v

vi Contents

Part II Labour Market Informality and the Search for Social Security 9 Labour Market Informalization, Gender and Social Protection: Reflections on Poor Urban Households in Bolivia and Ecuador Lourdes Benería and Maria S. Floro 10 Working People and Access to Social Protection Francie Lund

Part III

193 217

Gender Dimensions of Social-sector Restructuring

11 Gender and Health Sector Reform: Analytical Perspectives on African Experience Maureen Mackintosh and Paula Tibandebage 12 Health Sector Reform in China: Gender Equality and Social Justice Jufen Wang 13 Secondary Education in the Indian State of Uttar Pradesh: Gender Dimensions of State Policy and Practice Jyotsna Jha and Ramya Subrahmanian

237 258

278

Part IV Financing Social Provisioning and Counting in Women 14 Gendered Implications of Tax Reform in Latin America: Argentina, Chile, Costa Rica and Jamaica Evelyne Huber

301

15 Expectations versus Realities in Gender-responsive Budget Initiatives Debbie Budlender

322

Index

340

Tables 1.1 Time spent in unpaid and paid work by men and women in two adult families with a child under 5 years old (average hours per day). 1.2 Women’s hourly earnings as a percentage of men’s hourly earnings 3.1 Entitlements and financing of family benefits, Poland, 2003 3.2 State social support benefits in the Czech Republic as of 1995/96 3.3 Three family benefits, total spending and spending as a percentage of GDP, the Czech Republic, 1996–2000 5.1 Government budget: size and distribution, South Africa 6.1 Ageing population (% population over 65) in Japan and Korea, 1980–2030 6.2 Total average fertility rate in Japan and Korea, 1970–2030 6.3 Family structures in Japan and Korea 1980–2000 6.4 Divorce rate (crude divorce rate per thousand population), 1980–2002 6.5 Percentage of single parents in Japan 6.6 Percentage of single parents in Korea 6.7 Changes in the population coverage of the four major social insurances in Korea 9.1 Employment pattern of husbands and wives in urban, poor households, 2002 Bolivia and Ecuador Sample Survey, by sex 9.2 Access to benefits by workers, 2002 Bolivia and Ecuador Household Sample Survey, by type of benefit and by sex 9.3 Monthly earnings and earnings variability of self-employed workers, 2002 Ecuador and Bolivia Household Sample, by sex 9.4 Patterns of household decision-making in couple households, 2002 Bolivia and Ecuador Household Sample, by sex 9.5 Mean debt service ratio of borrowers, 2002 Ecuador Household Sample, by sex and type of household headship 9.6 Loan characteristics by gender and credit source, 2002 Ecuador Household Sample 10.1 Gendered risks and vulnerabilities associated with different stages of the life cycle

vii

11 13 73 74 75 123 134 134 135 135 135 136 139

203 204

205

207 209 210 220

viii List of Tables

11.1 Selected African countries: percentage of the labour force that is female, and percentage of the male and female labour force receiving wages or salaries 12.1 Shanghai social healthcare scheme, contributions by percentage and age 12.2 Standard scale for the shared-responsibility stage of urban insurance, Shanghai 12.3 Main aspects of the 2004 supplementary policy on reducing medical care expenses, Shanghai 13.1 Gross Enrolment Ratios at secondary level (Grades IX to XII) 13.2 Crude drop-out rates and proportion of repeaters 13.3 Crude transition rates for different levels of school education (1998/99 to 1999/2000) 13.4 Gender-wise pass percentages for Grades X and XII, Uttar Pradesh, India 13.5 Gross Enrolment Ratio (GER) at different stages of school education 13.6 Expenditure on school education by levels in Uttar Pradesh, India 13.7 Percentage distribution between plan and non-plan expenditures on elementary and secondary education, Uttar Pradesh, India 13.8 Per student expenditure at elementary and secondary education levels, Uttar Pradesh, India 13.9 Percentage distribution of secondary schools by management in Uttar Pradesh, India 13.10 Number of examinees and pass percentages in different types of schools (Grade X and Grade XII examinations – 2002), Uttar Pradesh, India 13.11 Growth of schools in Uttar Pradesh, India 13.12 Annual growth rate for the number of institutions at different school levels in Uttar Pradesh, India 14.1 Tax categories 14.2 Taxes as a percentage of GDP 14.3 Taxes as a percentage of total revenue 14.4 Population employed in the urban informal sector

242 267 268 272 281 281 282 282 283 284

285 286 288

289 291 292 302 303 303 314

Figures 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6 1.7

Ratio of female to male gross primary school enrolment rates Ratio of female to male gross secondary school enrolment rates Ratio of female to male gross tertiary enrolment rates Ratio of female to male adult (15+) literacy rates Maternal mortality rates, 2000 Percentage of parliamentary seats held by women, 2004 Difference between male and female activity rates (economically active population as a percentage of total population, 15+) 1.8 Informal employment as a percentage of total employment (15+) 1.9 Women’s hourly employment earnings as a percentage of men’s, total employment (15+) 3.1 Family benefits as percentage of GDP, Poland, 1990–98 7.1 Women’s and men’s paid and unpaid work, weekly hours 1990–91, 2000–01 7.2 Poverty rates of solo mothers 9.1a Areas of economic activity and labour use during economic growth 9.1b Areas of economic activity and labour use during severe economic crisis

ix

3 3 4 4 5 5 6 12 13 75 165 166 196 196

Acronyms and Abbreviations BpfA CEDAW CGE DAWN FOWODE GAD GBI GEAR GRB IFI MTEF NCRFW NGO PER PRS SNA TAF TGNP UNIFEM WBI WNC ZWRCN

Beijing Platform for Action Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women Commission on Gender Equality (South Africa) Development Through Active Women Networking Foundation (the Philippines) Forum for Women in Democracy (Uganda) Gender and development Gender Budget Initiative Growth, employment and redistribution (South Africa) Gender-responsive budget International financial institution Medium-term expenditure framework National Commission on the Role of Filipino Women Non-governmental organisation Public expenditure review Poverty reduction strategy System of National Accounts The Asia Foundation Tanzania Gender Networking Programme United Nations Development Fund for Women Women’s Budget Initiative Women’s National Coalition (South Africa) Zimbabwe Women’s Resource Centre Network

x

Notes on the Contributors Lourdes Benería is Professor of City and Regional Planning and Women’s Studies, and Director of the International Studies in Planning Program at Cornell University. Her work has focused on gender and development issues, paid/ unpaid work, globalization, structural adjustment and Latin American development, among others. She is the author of many articles and books on these topics. Recent publications include Gender, Development and Globalization; Economics as if all People Mattered (2003), with its Spanish translation published in 2005, and Global Tensions; Opportunities and Challenges in the World Economy, edited with Savitri Bisnath (2003). Debbie Budlender is a specialist researcher with the Community Agency for Social Enquiry (CASE), a South African non-governmental organization working in the area of social policy research. Over the last eight years Debbie has served as consultant on gender-responsive budgeting to non-governmental organizations, governments, parliamentarians and donors in approximately 30 countries in Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean. Maria S. Floro is an Associate Professor in the Economics Department at American University, United States, where she teaches in the fields of gender, development finance, and development economics. In 1987, she received her doctorate from Stanford University. Her publications include books on Credit Markets and the New Institutional Economics (1991), as well as Women’s Work in the World Economy (1992), and several articles on topics including time allocation, informal sector, credit, savings and asset ownership along gender lines. Her recent research focuses on gender dimensions of financing strategies for development, and the intersection of gender, finance and home-based work among urban poor households in both Latin America and Asia. Susanna Giullari was a BA Fellow and a Research Officer employed on the European Union-funded project when she completed her work with Jane Lewis. She is now the Single Parent Action Network Policy/Research Officer. She is currently working on a participatory policy project, funded by the Big Lottery Fund, to raise the capacity of lone parents to influence policy development in the UK, and on a EU-funded comparative research project investigating the experiences of poverty and social exclusion of children living in single-parent families. Shireen Hassim is Associate Professor in Political Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa. She is author of Women’s Organizations and Democracy in South Africa: Contesting Authority (2005) and co-editor, with Anne Marie Goetz, of No Shortcuts to Power: Women in Politics and Policymaking in Africa (2003). xi

xii Notes on the Contributors

Barbara Hobson is a Professor of Sociology at Stockholm University and the founder and a current editor of Social Politics: International Studies of Gender, State, and Society. She has published numerous articles on gender and welfare regimes concerning the themes of citizenship, global restructuring and most recently birthstrikes and worklife balance. She has recently been awarded a European Science Foundation grant to study men and worklife balance. Her current research concerns issues of citizenship identity and diversity, within supra-contexts and venues. She has been project leader for three major book projects within the Comparative Gender Studies Program, of which she was Director for many years: Recognition and Social Movements: Contested Identities, Agency and Power (2003), Making Men Into Fathers: Men, Masculinities and the Social Politics of Fatherhood (2001); and Gender and Citizenship in Transition (2000). Evelyne Huber (formerly Evelyne Huber Stephens) is Morehead Alumni Distinguished Professor of Political Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is co-author of Capitalist Development and Democracy (1992) and Development and Crisis of the Welfare State (2001), and editor of Models of Capitalism: Lessons for Latin America (2002). She is investigating the impact of transitions to open economies and/or to democracy on systems of social protection in Latin America and the Caribbean. Jyotsna Jha was awarded a PhD in Economics of Education from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, in 1995. She has worked for both government and nongovernmental organizations, and for national and international agencies, for the past several years in India. She has conducted research and evaluation studies relating to various aspects of education policy, programming and financing. She has also worked closely with teachers and administrators on matters of equity in educational planning, research techniques, development of social learning curriculum and educational management issues. She is the co-author of the recently published book, Elementary Education for the Poorest and Other Deprived Groups (2005). Jane Lewis was Barnett Professor of Social Policy at the University of Oxford and is now Professor of Social Policy at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Her recent publications include: Should We Worry about Family Change? (The 2001 Joanne Goodman Lectures) (2003); The End of Marriage? Individualism and Intimate Relations (2001); with Paul Bridgen, Elderly People and the Boundary between Health and Social Care 1946–1991: Whose Responsibility? (2000); and with Kath Kiernan and Hilary Land, Lone Mothers in Twentieth Century Britain (1998). Francie Lund trained as a sociologist and community worker, and is Associate Professor in the School of Development Studies at the University of KwaZuluNatal, South Africa, where she teaches social policy. She is also the director of the Social Protection Programme in the international WIEGO network – Women in the Informal Economy: Globalizing and Organizing. Her main research interests are in the redistributive role of social security, and informal employment, and the relationship of both to the dynamics of poverty and well-being. She has published extensively, and most recently was a co-author of UNIFEM’s Progress of the World’s Women 2005: Women, Work and Poverty.

Notes on the Contributors xiii

Maureen Mackintosh is Professor of Economics at the Open University, UK. Her research interests are in the economics of markets in ‘social’ goods such as health care and social care, both in the UK and in African contexts. Publications include: The Market Shaping of Charges, Trust and Abuse: Health Care Transactions in Tanzania (with Paula Tibandebage) (2005) and Commercialization of Health Care: Global and Local Dynamics and Policy Responses, edited with Meri Koivusalo (2005). Valentine M. Moghadam is currently Chief of Section in the Social and Human Sciences Sector of UNESCO. Previously she was Director of Women’s Studies and Professor of Sociology at Illinois State University. Among her books are Modernizing Women: Gender and Social Change in the Middle East (2003, second edition) and Globalizing Women: Transnational Feminist Networks (2005). She is co-editor, with Massoud Karshenas, of Social Policy in the Middle East: Economic, Political, and Gender Dynamics (2005). Maxine Molyneux is Professor of Sociology at the Institute for the Study of the Americas, University of London. Among her recent books are Women’s Movements in International Perspective (2000), M. Molyneux and Razavi, S. (eds), Gender Justice, Development and Rights (2002), M. Molyneux and S. Lazar, Doing the Rights Thing (2003), M. Molyneux and N. Craske (eds), Gender and the Politics of Rights and Democracy in Latin America (2002), and E. Dore and M. Molyneux (eds), The Hidden Histories of Gender and the State in Latin America (2000). Ito Peng is Associate Professor of Political Sociology at the Department of Sociology, and the Director of Dr David Chu Chair Programme in Asia Pacific Studies at the University of Toronto. She has published extensively on comparative social policy in Japan, Korea, and Taiwan. Her current research projects include political economy of social policy reforms in Japan and Korea, comparison of familialistic welfare states in Japan, Korea, Italy and Spain, and varieties of capitalism in East Asia. Shahra Razavi is Research Coordinator at the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD) and has published widely on gender and livelihoods. Her most recent publications include Agrarian Change, Gender and Land Rights (2003), also published as a special double issue of the Journal of Agrarian Change, Vol. 3, Nos. 1&2, January & April 2003; and Gender Justice, Development and Rights, an edited volume with Maxine Molyneux (2002). Silke Steinhilber is a researcher and consultant on women’s economic and social rights in Central and Eastern Europe. She is a PhD candidate in the Political Science Department of the New School for Social Research in New York. Formerly, she worked for the International Labour Organisation in the Subregional Office for Central and Eastern Europe in Budapest, Hungary. Ramya Subrahmanian is a Research Fellow at the Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex working on issues of elementary education, child labour, social exclusion and gender equality. She is a co-editor of Needs versus Rights: Child Labour and the Right to Education in South Asia (2003) and Institutions,

xiv Notes on the Contributors

Relations and Outcomes: A Framework and Case Studies for Gender Aware-Planning (1999). Paula Tibandebage is Training Co-ordinator for Research on Poverty Alleviation (REPOA) in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. She is a political economist specialising in social policy issues. Her recent work includes two co-authored articles: ‘Inclusion by design: rethinking regulatory intervention in Tanzanian healthcare’, Journal of Development Studies (2002), and ‘The market shaping of charges, trust and abuse: Health care transactions in Tanzania’, Social Science and Medicine (2005). Jufen Wang is Professor at the School of Social Development and Public Policy, Fudan University, Shanghai, China, where she teaches courses on demography and gender studies. She has published over 30 papers in various journals. Her main publications include The Resolution of Pre-marital Pregnancy (2002) and Legal Protection of Women’s Rights (2004). Her research interests are reproductive health, women’s employment and social security issues.

Preface and Acknowledgements This book is part of a series coming out of UNRISD’s timely and innovative research programme on Social Policy in a Development Context. The programme has launched a wide-ranging inquiry into models of social policy that are inclusive, developmental and democratically grounded – especially for middle- and lowincome countries. Inclusive social policy, the programme maintains, is not a luxury that only affluent countries can afford, but a necessity of social and economic development. The programme has thus set itself the task of understanding the social, political and economic conditions for the edification of a state-society nexus that is developmental, inclusive and democratic. A gender perspective on social policies in middle- and low-income countries, as in the already institutionalized ‘welfare states’ until quite recently, has remained on the margins of mainstream research. This book attempts to move the gender analytical framework closer to the centre of social policy thinking by exposing how the social institutions through which social policy is filtered are all indelibly bearers of gender––be it families and communities, markets, informal arrangements for care, or health and education systems, and the public sector. Women’s unpaid care work continues to form the bedrock on which social protection is subsidized, with erosions in state provisioning impacting most strongly on women. Despite women’s increasing participation in paid work, labour markets continue to reproduce gender-based segmentations and inequalities in wages and income, as well as in work-related social benefits and social protection mechanisms. Attention to gender also reveals the extent to which inequalities (of class, gender and region) are being intensified as a consequence of shifts in the global economy, and processes of privatization and commercialization taking place within countries. As editors of this volume we would like to thank all the contributing authors for their patience and persistence in responding to our numerous requests for revisions. At UNRISD, Thandika Mkandawire was a major source of intellectual and moral support; we also benefited from many useful discussions with Huck-Ju Kwon. Our greatest debt goes to Alexandra Efthymiades for providing excellent research assistance and for seeing the book through, with great patience and good humour. We would also like to thank those who contributed to our work by agreeing to review manuscripts, act as discussants, and provide advice at different points in the life cycle of this project, especially Armando Barrientos, Ulla Björnberg, Claudia Bonan Janotti, Sarah Cook, Monica Erwer, Éva Fodor, Tekaligne Godana, Beth Goldblatt, James Heintz, Ping-Chun Hsiung, Elizabeth Jelin, Helen Schneider, Stephanie Seguino, Ylva Sörman Nath, Ida Susser, Dzodzi Tsikata and Ann Zammit. xv

xvi Preface and Acknowledgements

We would also like to express our appreciation to the Centre for Global Gender Studies at Göteborg University, especially Ann Schlyter, Monica Erwer and Monica Lindberg-Falk, for organizing a memorable conference on the beautiful Marstrand Island in Göteborg (Sweden) in May 2005. Shahra Razavi and Shireen Hassim

Foreword The UNRISD research programme on social policy consists of both regional and thematic components. This volume presents the comparative research carried out by a network of gender specialists, largely though not exclusively from developing countries, exploring the gender dimensions of social policy. Although it was always the intention of the social policy programme to address gender issues across all regional and thematic components, we were also convinced that this effort would have to be complemented by a focused analysis of social policy through a gender ‘lens’. Without the latter, we feared, ‘mainstreaming’ gender would risk diluting it. From their diverse regional perspectives the contributions to this volume show how social and economic rights are shaped by economic structures and reforms, institutional designs and capacities, and political processes which are all deeply gendered. It underlines the importance of thinking beyond states and markets in social provisioning, including in the analysis the interactions between these and other social institutions, especially the family and community that take on much of the burden, particularly in developing countries where formal social provisioning is thin. Although there have been changes in the balance of work and care in many societies, this book shows that in many contexts these changes have reinscribed rather than eroded gender inequalities. The volume illustrates why both academic research and policy thinking need to factor-in gender hierarchies and structures if they are to address some of the key challenges of contemporary societies: the widespread informality and insecurity of paid work, and the crisis of care. UNRISD would like to take this opportunity to thank the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida) and the United Kingdom Department for International Development (DFID) for their financial support of the project. for its financial support of the project. As is the case with all other UNRISD projects, work on this project would not have been possible without the core funding of the governments of Denmark, Finland, Mexico, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. Thandika Mkandawire Director, UNRISD

xvii

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1 Gender and Social Policy in a Global Context: Uncovering the Gendered Structure of ‘the Social’ Shireen Hassim and Shahra Razavi

The past decade has witnessed a renewed interest in social policies, and some governments have increased social spending to soften the impacts of economic reform. These changes have come in the wake of widespread realization of the failure of the neoliberal economic model to generate economic growth and dynamism, and to reduce poverty. At the same time, processes of political liberalization have opened spaces for social movements in many parts of the developing world to articulate demands for more effective social policies that mitigate the effects of market failures and reduce inequalities. These contestations have coincided with a rediscovery of ‘the social’ in the policy oriented literature, widely understood to embrace the cluster of social and political institutions, norms, and relationships that define the boundaries of market exchange, reduce transaction costs and enhance social and political stability. Polanyi’s (1957) seminal work that showed the market to be a political and social construct is widely cited today to explain the failure of the structural adjustment packages that narrowly focused on ‘getting the prices right’, and to redirect attention to the institutional underpinnings necessary for successful market capitalism (Ruggie 2003).1 However despite the movement away from the standard neoliberal approach of the 1980s, and the increasing recognition given to institutions and the state, there is little agreement on a number of critical issues. These include the scope of social policy and the appropriate interface between social policy and macroeconomic policy (Elson 2004; Mkandawire 2004; Tendler 2004); the role of the state, not just as ‘regulator’ but also as a provider of social welfare; and the values underpinning public policy, in particular core values of equality and redistribution which seem to have been displaced by the discourse on poverty (Phillips 2001). A gender perspective on social policies in the South, as in the North until quite recently, has remained on the margins of these debates. This volume is an attempt to move the gender analytical framework closer to the centre of social policy thinking. From their different regional perspectives, the chapters in the volume map out the complex ways in which social policies are filtered through social institutions – families and communities; markets; care arrangements; health and 1

2

Shireen Hassim and Shahra Razavi

education systems; the public sector – that are ‘bearers of gender’. Moreover attention to gender reveals the extent to which inequalities (of class, gender and region) are being intensified as a consequence of shifts in the global economy, and processes of privatization and commercialization taking place within countries. Women’s unpaid care work continues to form the bedrock on which social protection is subsidized, with erosions in state provisioning impacting most strongly on women. Despite women’s increasing participation in paid work, labour markets continue to reproduce gender-based segmentations and inequalities in wages/income, work-related social benefits, and social security. As this book demonstrates, social institutions are by no means homogeneous: economic, institutional and cultural variations across countries and regions shape the nature of both risks faced and forms of social protection available for women. In this chapter, we root a theorization of gender and social policy in three key, interrelated arenas: the nature of labour markets, the institutional basis for social policy formulation (families, communities, markets and states) and the nature of political contestation around social policy. In the first section, we lay out the gendered nature of economic transformations in the late twentieth century, drawing out the implications for gender equality of shifts in the nature of labour markets and the relationships between paid and unpaid work. In the following section, we link these changes in the structure of labour markets to a discussion of the impacts of social sector restructuring. Here we examine the gender implications of commercialization and privatization of social services and income supports as well as the policy turn to targeting and social insurance as a response to the exclusionary effects of markets. The third section explores the institutional basis for social policy formulation, examining more closely the assumptions about gender roles and entitlements, especially in the key institutions of family and community, and how these interface with the state. The relationship between political democratization and the development of gender equitable social policy is then examined. We are particularly concerned with exploring women’s agency in relation to advocating for social policy change in ways that meet their various needs. To facilitate our discussion of the chapters, Figures 1.1 to 1.7 (pages 3 to 6) capture some of the standard indicators of relative (or absolute) female status for the countries included in this volume, ranked by per capita GDP (USD PPP adjusted). These include indicators of educational status (gross enrolment rates at the primary, secondary and tertiary levels, and adult literacy rates), health status (maternal mortality rates), political status (percentage of parliamentary seats held by women), and economic status (economic activity rates). While enrolment rates in primary education (Figure 1.1) provide a generally more egalitarian picture (India being an exception), inequality sets in at the secondary level (Figure 1.2) especially for some low-income countries. Gross enrolment rates at the tertiary level (Figure 1.3) provide a more complex picture with gender gaps being in favour of males in some countries (such as Japan, South Korea, Bolivia, Tanzania), and in favour of females in others (such as Sweden, Argentina, Jamaica), cutting across

3 Japan ($26,940)

1.00 1.03

Country (per capita GDP, $US, PPP adjusted)

Sweden ($26,050) 1.00

South Korea ($16,950)

0.99

Czech Rep. ($15,780)

1.00

Argentina ($10,880)

0.99

Poland ($10,560) 0.96

South Africa ($10,070)

0.98

Chile ($9,820)

0.99

Mexico ($8,970)

0.98

Costa Rica ($8,840) 0.96

Thailand ($7,010)

0.96

Iran ($6,690)

1.00

China ($4,580)

0.99

Jamaica ($3,980)

1.00

Ecuador ($3,580) 0.85

India ($2,670)

0.99

Bolivia ($2,460) Tanzania ($580) 0.80

0.97 0.85

0.90

0.95

1.00

1.05

Figure 1.1 Ratio of female to male gross primary school enrolment rates Note: Data are from 2001–02. Source: World Development Indicators 2005, World Bank.

Japan ($26,940)

1.01 1.21


Sweden ($26,050) 1.00

South Korea ($16,950)

1.03

Czech Rep. ($15,780)

1.06

Argentina ($10,880) 0.97

Poland ($10,560)

1.08

South Africa ($10,070) 1.02

Chile ($9,820)

1.07

Mexico ($8,970)

1.08

Costa Rica ($8,840) 0.95

Thailand ($7,010)

0.94

Iran ($6,690)

0.92

China ($4,580)

1.03

Jamaica ($3,980)

1.02

Ecuador ($3,580) India ($2,670)

0.74 0.96

Bolivia ($2,460) Tanzania ($580) 0.65

0.81 0.75

0.85

0.95

1.05

Figure 1.2 Ratio of female to male gross secondary school enrolment rates Note: Data are from 1999–2002. Source: World Development Indicators 2005, World Bank.

1.15

1.25


4


Japan ($26,940) Sweden ($26,050) South Korea ($16,950) Czech Rep. ($15,780) Argentina ($10,880) Poland ($10,560) South Africa ($10,070) Chile ($9,820) Mexico ($8,970) Costa Rica ($8,840) Thailand ($7,010) Iran ($6,690) Jamaica ($3,980) India ($2,670) Bolivia ($2,460) Tanzania ($580)

0.86 1.54 0.61 1.09 1.48 1.43 1.15 0.93 0.95 1.16 1.09 1.07 2.24 0.70 0.55 0.44

0.40

0.90

1.40

1.90

2.40

Figure 1.3 Ratio of female to male gross tertiary enrolment rates Note: China and Ecuador are excluded due to lack of information. Data are from 2001–02, with the exception of the figure for Bolivia which is from 1998.


Source: World Development Indicators 2005, World Bank.

South Korea ($16,950) Argentina ($10,880) Poland ($10,560) South Africa ($10,070) Chile ($9,820) Mexico ($8,970) Costa Rica ($8,840) Thailand ($7,010) Iran ($6,690) China ($4,580) Jamaica ($3,980) Ecuador ($3,580) India ($2,670) Bolivia ($2,460) Tanzania ($580) 0.60

0.97 1.00 1.00 0.98 1.00 0.96 1.00 0.95 0.84 0.91 1.09 0.97 0.66 0.87 0.81 0.70

0.80

0.90

1.00

1.10

Figure 1.4 Ratio of female to male adult (15⫹) literacy rates Note: Japan and Sweden are excluded because they have nearly universal adult literacy. The Czech Republic has been excluded due to lack of information. Data are from 2000–02. Source: World Development Indicators 2005, World Bank and Human Development Report 2004, UNDP.

income groups. Figure 1.5 captures maternal mortality, which seems to be more sensitive to income levels, although again there is great diversity between countries reflecting differences in health systems and the accessibility of health care (with Argentina and South Africa doing particularly badly for their income level).

5

1,600 1,500 1,400 1,200 1,000 800 540

600

420

400

230 130 87 56 76 44 43 83 31

200

82

13

20

9

10

2

Ta nz a Bo nia liv ($5 ia 80 In ($2 ) , d 4 Ec ia 6 ua ($ 0) 2, d Ja or 67 m ($ 0) ai 3 ca ,58 0 ( C hi $3, ) Th na 98 ($ 0) ai 4 la nd ,58 ($ 0) Ir 7 C os an ,01 ($ 0) ta 6, R 69 M ica ex ($ 0) ic 8, o 84 So ut Ch ($8 0) i h , Af le ( 970 ric $9 ) Po a ( ,82 $ 0 Ar land 10, ) 07 ge 0 n ($ C ze tina 10, ) 56 ch ( So $ 0 ut Rep 10, ) 88 h . Ko ($ 0) 1 r Sw ea ( 5,7 ed $1 80) 6, e Ja n ($ 950 pa 2 ) n 6,0 ($ 5 26 0) ,9 40 )

0

Country (per capita GDP, $US, PPP adjusted) Figure 1.5 Maternal mortality rates, 2000 (maternal deaths per 100,000 live births) Source: Maternal Mortality in 2000: Estimates Developed by WHO, UNICEF, UNFPA, Geneva: WHO, 2004.

50.0%

45.3%

45.0% 40.0%

35.1%

35.0%

29.8%

30.7%

30.0% 25.0% 21.4% 18.5% 20.0% 10.0%

20.2% 17.0%

16.0% 11.7% 8.8%

15.0%

22.6%

20.2%

12.5% 9.2% 4.1%

5.0%

5.9%

7.1%

0) 67 m r ($ 0) ai c 3,5 C a ($ 80) hi na 3,9 ( 80 Ir $4 ) Th an ,58 0 ( C aila $6, ) os n 6 ta d ( 90) R $7 ic ,0 M a ($ 10 ex 8, ) ic o 840 So ( C ut hi $8 ) , h l Af e ($ 970 ric 9, ) Po a ( 82 0 $ Ar lan 10 ) ge d ( ,07 $ n 0 C ze tina 10,5 ) ch 6 ( $ So 1 0) R ut ep 0,8 h . Ko ($ 80) 1 Sw rea 5,7 ed ($1 80 en 6, ) Ja ($ 950 pa 26 ) ,0 n ($ 50 26 ) ,9 40 ) 2,

a

Ja

Ec

ua

di

do

($

46

58 ($

In

($ ia

ia liv

Bo

an nz Ta

2,

0)

0.0%

Country (per capita GDP, $US, PPP adjusted) Figure 1.6 Percentage of parliamentary seats held by women, 2004 Note: For countries with upper and lower houses of parliament, the data refer to the lower house only. Source: Human Development Report 2004, UNDP.

6


Japan, 2003 ($26,940) Country (per capita GDP, $US, PPP adjusted)

Sweden, 2004 ($26,050)

25.7% 4.0%

South Korea, 2003 ($16,950)

26.0%

Czech Rep., 2002 ($15,780)

18.3%

Argentina, 2003 ($10,880)

25.7%

Poland, 2003 ($10,560)

14.2%

South Africa, 2004 ($10,070)

15.8%

Chile, 2003 ($9,820)

35.5%

Mexico, 2004 ($8,970)

41.6%

Costa Rica, 2004 ($8,840)

38.9%

Thailand, 2004 ($7,010)

16.7%

Iran, 2000 ($6,690)

49.6%

Jamaica, 2003 ($3,980)

11.3%

Ecuador, 2003 ($3,580)

26.8%

India, 2000 ($2,670)

42.4%

Bolivia, 2000 ($2,460) Tanzania, 2000/1 ($580) 0.0%

29.6% 2.9% 10.0%

20.0%

30.0%

40.0%

50.0%

60.0%

Figure 1.7 Difference between male and female activity rates (economically active population as a percentage of total population, 15⫹) Note: Age ranges vary for some countries: Jamaica: 14⫹, South Africa: 15–65, Sweden: 16–64. For India and Iran, estimates are projections based on EAPEP (Economically Active Population Estimates and Projections) data, ILO. Sources: LABORSTA Database, ILO; EAPEP Database, ILO; Labour Force Survey, September 2004, Pretoria: Statistics South Africa, March 2005.

Figure 1.6 captures women’s relative access to parliamentary seats, which seem to bear little relation to income levels, with Sweden and South Africa being the two front-runners. Gender gaps in economic activity rates are shown in Figure 1.7, with Sweden and Tanzania at the two ends of the income spectrum displaying the narrowest gender gaps, while the widest gaps appear in Iran, India and Mexico with income levels that are much higher than Tanzania’s.

The Economy as a Gendered Construction: Labour and Care We make two central arguments in this section. First, we note that historically a major preoccupation of social policy has been to respond to labour market risks (such as unemployment, old age, maternity) through transfer payments conditional on previous employment.2 However, women’s access to paid work does not easily translate into their enjoyment of social protection mechanisms that flow from paid employment. Gender-blind analysis of social policy has tended to underestimate the extent to which labour markets are themselves gendered (for example, sex-segregation of jobs, differential pay, gendered definitions of ‘skill’), features which in turn shape and constrain women’s access to such

Gender and Social Policy in a Global Context 7

benefits. Furthermore, the gender-segmented features of the labour market have been exacerbated by liberalization policies that have weakened the link between paid work and entitlements to social protection and provisioning. Second, for gender analysts a central feature of women’s entry into paid work is the tension that this produces with regard to their responsibilities to provide unpaid care. How these tensions are experienced and understood diverge substantially across contexts, and shape the particular balance of responsibilities between markets, states, families and communities. Paid labour and social protection: the historical legacy Welfare-state development in all its regional variations has been marked by numerous inequalities and exclusions (of gender and race). This is evident not only in Europe and North America, but also in many developing countries, where for various reasons the construction of effective and inclusive welfare systems proved difficult. In the advanced industrialized countries of Western Europe, the postwar social contract between capital and labour underpinning state social regulation and provisioning was based on dominant normative assumptions about gender difference, with breadwinning prescribed for men and caring/ homemaking for women. Many women of course were in the labour force, sometimes continuously, but they tended to occupy the less protected niches as secondary workers with limited access to social insurance benefits. Hence, for many women who spent large parts of their lives outside the paid workforce, and even for those who worked on an irregular basis, access to a pension or health insurance became possible through their relations with a fully employed husband or father, as a derived rather than individual entitlement. Given this pattern, feminists have used the extent of women’s integration into the paid labour market as a mechanism to distinguish between different welfare states. At one end of the spectrum, Sweden demonstrated the most (although not completely) egalitarian form of welfare state, and was inclined to a ‘weak male breadwinner’ or ‘dual breadwinner’ model (Lewis 1992).3 A formal emphasis on egalitarianism also underpinned state socialism, which shared the Swedish model’s aim of getting women, like men, into the workforce but without the democratic political institutions of the Swedish state. In the state socialist countries, state policy and rhetoric, at least initially, celebrated women’s liberation by defying bourgeois models of the family and of femininity, by encouraging women’s presence in continuous full-time employment, and by taking public responsibility for the provision of childcare. Gender equality was modelled on a male norm of paid work, and labour-force entry was the route through which many women accessed a wide array of social benefits and services. These egalitarian impulses notwithstanding, gender inequalities in wages and labour market status (though far less accentuated than in Western Europe) along with the burden of unpaid work in a shortage economy, remained a palpable part of the legacy of state socialism for many women in the region. A good portion of care work continued to be carried out within the family and by women, while parental leave schemes were made available to women; only under exceptional circumstances could fathers qualify for such leave.

8


Many developing countries, by contrast, have been characterized by weak state institutions, partially commodified economies, low levels of formal waged labour and a weak fiscal base. The colonial legacy, though experienced very differently, left many countries with deepened social cleavages and lopsided economic structures that postcolonial governments had a hard time shaking off. The colonial impact was particularly devastating in the ‘enclave’ economies of southern Africa, such as Zambia, where race, gender and location intersected to create highly differentiated rights of access to state social provisioning. Most of the population was excluded from welfare on the grounds of their rurality and reliance on subsistence production (Mhone 2004). The combination of the pattern of male labour migration and colonial policy to keep women out of urban areas intensified women’s responsibility for household reproduction and care in the subsistence-based rural economies (Tsikata 2004). They tended to exhibit the most tenuous links with the urban economy and any social benefits that came from it. After independence state provision of important social services like health, housing and education retained a bias towards the more developed urban areas, despite stated intentions to make development broad-based. Where the developmental state was successful in forging strong national industries, namely in parts of north-east Asia such as South Korea and Japan, both the industrial structure and welfare provision remained stratified, with a dual labour market structure that overwhelmingly privileged male workers in core industries. The sectoral distribution of women’s employment, the size of the firms in which they were employed, the occupations in which they were clustered and the nature of their contracts combined to ensure that both the direct benefits of employment and access to social welfare insurance were less advantageous for them. For example corporate social welfare – which was an important source of welfare in South Korea prior to the 1997 crisis – was far more generous in the large firms, whereas the bulk of women workers were concentrated in small- and medium-sized firms that could ill afford the same level of benefits (Cho et al. 2004). In the case of Latin America, from the late nineteenth century some forms of social protection and provisioning developed, even if to varying degrees, to create the embryos of the future ‘social state’ in countries such as Argentina and Uruguay (Filgueira forthcoming). These efforts were mainly concerned with the provision of public health and primary education often as a means to ‘discipline and homogenize’ (p. 5) the rural migrants and the European immigrants, while social insurance was made available to privileged (and largely male) sectors of the labour and armed forces. Such efforts were reinforced in the 1930s as corporatist arrangements were put in place in countries like Argentina, Brazil and Mexico, in the aftermath of the 1929 crisis, and established more securely in the postwar period. This resulted in some expansion in entitlements, notably for organized labour (Molyneux this volume). Social provisioning was expanded in the 1960s and 1970s so that by 1980 human development indicators in Latin America were on a par with those of East Asia (ibid). However, the coverage that the social state provided in Latin America varied enormously: social exclusion was far more extensive in Central America, for example, while the southern cone countries tended


towards a more universalistic, even if highly stratified, model (Filgueira & Filgueira 2002). In short, in deeply hierarchical and segmented societies, where some crucial forms of social protection were linked to formal employment and where the latter never included more than a small fraction of the population, vast sections of the population, including the majority of women, were frequently excluded from coverage. Yet it would be wrong to assume that women were absent from state social provisioning and protection altogether. Not only did women make up a significant proportion of social security beneficiaries as wives and daughters (‘dependents’ in the language of social insurance) of male breadwinners, they were also direct beneficiaries of some public services (health, education) as well as being targets of so-called maternalist programmes aimed at mothers and their children (Molyneux this volume). Women have also traditionally constituted a significant share of state employees in the social sectors, as teachers, nurses and carers. Labour market informalization: the demise of the ‘male breadwinner’ model? The small size of the formal economy in most developing countries meant that job security and work-related benefits remained privileges available to a relatively thin stratum of workers, predominantly men. While these benefits could have been extended over time to other sectors of the population (as in many successful welfare states, and more recently in South Korea), since the early 1980s there has been a global trend in the opposite direction. Paid work is becoming increasingly informal and casual as workers have lost their work-related social benefits, although the extent of convergence between patterns in North and South should not be exaggerated. In Latin America in the 1980s and 1990s eight out of every ten new jobs created were in the informal sector, while the 1999 manufacturing wage was only 3 per cent higher than its 1980 level (Tokman 2002). Even in Costa Rica – the country that has one of the strongest social states in the region – informal employment accounts for nearly half of all employment (Heintz 2005). Those who work in the informal economy are not covered by labour legislation for social protection and earn less, on average, than those in the formal economy (ILO 2002). Processes of labour informalization and casualization have been largely driven by corporate interests, increasingly unhindered in their global search for ‘appropriate’ forms of labour, while trade unions have been weakened and sidelined and, with few exceptions, unwilling to take informal workers on board. Hence, employers are no longer forced to take responsibility for the social wage. In many developing countries labour ‘flexibility’ was further imposed as a policy condition for debt relief (via stabilization and structural adjustment programmes), on the ground that labour markets were too rigid. This process of casualization has coincided with another momentous change – the increasing feminization of the work force. Gender and labour markets: continuity and change With some striking exceptions (East and Central Europe and Central Asia), the last twenty years have seen a surge in women’s labour-force participation worldwide,

10 Shireen Hassim and Shahra Razavi

with women’s activity rates nearing men’s in some countries. The forces propelling women into the work force are complex and diverse. In the OECD countries, the trend of going to work is most noticeable among mothers with young children – the group that was most likely to drop out of employment in the post-second world war period (Orloff 2002). However, workforce participation rates are crude indicators of working women’s situations. Women in these countries, for example, tend to work on a part-time basis far more frequently than men (ibid). While taking on part-time work may involve an element of real choice in some cases, for others it may be ‘involuntary’, because of either the lack of full-time employment options or the need to accommodate care in the absence of other viable sources for its provision, or both. Feminists have been particularly interested in Nordic social democracies that appear to have achieved relatively high levels of gender equality through female labour-force participation and the redistributive mechanisms of social policy. Sweden, for example, has been able to forge what Hobson (this volume) calls ‘participation parity’ in the labour market with nearly equal numbers of women and men in the workforce (Figure 1.7). Yet this achievement masks the manner in which gender inequalities have been reinscribed in new ways. For example, a significant portion of women – over a third – are working part time4 and more than 90 per cent of all part-time workers in Sweden are women. As Hobson argues, the Swedish model is thus in practice a ‘one and three-quarters’ model: men work full time and invest in their careers, while women work part time in the public sector, where it is easier to combine employment with having a family. Even though parental leave schemes and ‘daddy leave’ quotas were designed to be gender-neutral, the outcomes are not. Throughout the 1990s, between 10 and 12 per cent of parental leave days were taken by fathers. In 2005 men’s share rose to 17 per cent – still a far cry from the equal participation of men in unpaid work. As Lewis and Giullari (this volume) remind us, although the balance of contributions women and men make to households in the form of cash and care is changing it remains gendered. In most countries, women have added paid work to their existing responsibilities for care, while men have decreased the amount of paid work they do and increased their carework only slightly (see Table 1.1 for a snapshot of selected OECD countries). Recent research finds that despite some improvements in the 1990s, levels of gender segmentation in the labour market remain high throughout the world (Anker et al. 2003). Women tend to congregate in relatively low-paid and lowstatus work at the bottom of the occupational hierarchy, and also to have little job security. Gender segmentations in labour markets are more difficult to capture in developing countries with pervasive agrarian and informal sectors, which are not sufficiently covered in most large-scale statistical surveys. For many developing countries increasing poverty and the commodification of the economy are changing the coping strategies of households and communities in a multitude of ways, causing upheavals in gender and generational patterns of work and responsibility. Research from sub-Saharan Africa, for example, shows that in the context of economic crisis and reform, it is becoming increasingly necessary for all household members – whether female or male, young or old – to

Gender and Social Policy in a Global Context 11 Table 1.1 Time spent in unpaid and paid work by men and women in two adult families with a child under 5 years old (average hours per day). Men (average for all men)

Canada (1998) United States (1995) Denmark (1987) Finland (1987) Sweden (1991) Italy (1989) UK (1995) Austria (1992) Gemany (1992) Netherlands (1985) Australia (1997)

Women (employed full-time in paid work)

Ratio: Women to Men

Unpaid

Paid

Unpaid

Paid

Childcare

All unpaid

4.0 2.5 2.3 2.8 3.7 1.8 3.1 2.2 3.4 2.9 2.9

6.3 6.2 7.2 6.1 6.4 6.6 6.3 6.9 6.1 5.2 6.1

5.1 4.2 4.0 5.6 6.1 6.4 7.4 5.8 6.2 6.2 4.6

5.9 4.9 5.4 3.9 3.9 4.2 3.5 4.7 4.1 1.7 6.0

1.4 1.9 2.0 2.8 1.9 2.7 1.4 2.2 2.1 2.4 1.8

1.3 1.7 1.7 2.0 1.6 3.6 2.4 2.6 1.8 2.1 1.6

Source: OECD Employment Outlook, Paris: OECD, 2001, Table 4.5, p. 140.

take on paid work (Bryceson 1999). Much of this tends to be badly remunerated, with women being overwhelmingly clustered in low-entry, low-return type activities (Whitehead 2004). According to the ILO (2002) informal employment5 comprises between one-half and three-quarters of non-agricultural employment in developing countries. But there are also important stratifications within the informal economy, based on productivity and income as well as gender. The informal economy tends to be a larger source of employment for women than for men in most countries (ILO 2002); Figure 1.8, based on a recent six-country study, shows strongly gendered patterns of employment in the formal and informal economy (with the exception of El Salvador where male and female rates are comparable). Women informal workers tend to be over-represented in the more precarious and less remunerative segments of informal work: they are more likely to work as own-account workers, domestic workers, and unpaid contributing workers in family enterprises than are men, while men are more likely to work as employers and wage workers (ILO 2002). This is confirmed by Beneria and Floro’s evidence (this volume) from Bolivia and Ecuador where women tend to have relatively more precarious jobs than men. Furthermore, as time allocation studies show, while informal work, especially home-based work, may enable women to combine paid and unpaid work (such as sewing garments on a piece-rate basis while looking over children and doing housework), it entails an intensification of work which can seriously affect women’s well-being (see Beneria and Floro’s chapter). It is very difficult to find gender-disaggregated data on income and poverty. The reliance on poverty lines and household expenditure data has profound implications for how gender issues are analysed. Measuring poverty on the basis of


100%

88.0%

90%

89.5%

78.4%

80%

69.8% 70.0%

70%

68.7% 56.6%

60% 50%

95.1%

93.9%

48.6%

50.9% 44.0%

40% 30% 20% 10% 0% Costa Rica (2003)

Egypt (1998)

El Salvador (2003) Female

Ghana (1998/9)

India (1999/2000)

South Africa (2003)

Male

Figure 1.8 Informal employment as a percentage of total employment (15⫹) Source: Heintz, James. ‘Summary of Country Case-Studies and Tabulations for UNIFEM’s Progress of the World’s Women 2005’ Background paper prepared for Progress of the World’s Women 2005: Women, Work, and Poverty. New York: UNIFEM.

household expenditure data effectively ignores the longstanding feminist concerns about intra-household distribution, and it is very rare to find standard surveys embarking on a quantitative exploration of intra-household poverty (Razavi 1999; Whitehead and Lockwood 1999). Hence, evidence from smaller surveys on men’s and women’s wages and earnings can be very useful to fill this lacuna. Table 1.2 and Figure 1.9, which draw on the UNIFEM study, confirm that women’s hourly earnings typically fall below those of men in identical employment categories; the gender gap in earnings is particularly pronounced among own-account workers while it is narrowest in public wage employment. The broad conclusion that one can draw from some of the available data is that despite the convergence in men’s and women’s crude economic activity rates and the erosion of the male-breadwinner model, gender segmentation is not disappearing from the world of work. It is surprisingly robust, and places serious limits on women’s access to income. It also has important implications for social policy – making women’s access to social protection mechanisms and social services more constrained if these are provided on a commercial basis or on the basis of employmentrelated contributions, as in the social insurance model. In theory it is possible to extend the coverage of social insurance programmes to include informal workers. Lund’s chapter shows that this is happening in a number of countries, including Costa Rica, but only if their contributions are heavily subsidised by the state. In the following section we examine the contours of social sector restructuring in the 1980s and 1990s and the implications for women’s access to social services and transfers.

13 Table 1.2 Women’s hourly earnings as a percentage of men’s hourly earnings Costa Rica

Egypt

El Salvador

Ghana

South Africa

78.9 45.1 87.5 116.2

n.a. 54.6 n.a. 84.2

n.a. n.a. 89.5 95.6

105.4

n.a.

66.3

Formal Non-agricultural Employers Own-account Private wage Public wage

56.6 62.1 84.6 87.7

Private wage

85.1

n.a. n.a. 151.9 107.6 Agricultural n.a.

97.6 50.6 n.a. 79.5 n.a. 57.4

n.a. n.a. 263.3 317.1 n.a. n.a.

83.8 65.1 n.a. 75.4 135.2 56.2

n.a. 80.2 69.8 n.a. 88.0 n.a.

83.6 59.6 n.a. 107.0 99.2 100.0

53.3 n.a. n.a.

n.a. n.a. n.a.

56.9 86.4 177.6

65.0 n.a. n.a.

n.a. 98.5 n.a.

Informal Non-agricultural Employers Own-account All wage Private wage Public wage Domestic Agricultural Own-account Private wage Public wage

Note: n.a. indicates that data were not available or that there were insufficient observations to derive statistically significant estimates. Source: Heintz, James. ‘Summary of Country Case-Studies and Tabulations for UNIFEM’s Progress of the World’s Women 2005’. Background paper prepared for Progress of the World’s Women 2005: Women, Work, and Poverty. New York: UNIFEM.

120%

100%

96% 80%

80%

72%

71%

Ghana (1998/9)

South Africa (2003)

60%

40%

20%

0% Costa Rica (2003)

El Salvador (2003)

Figure 1.9 Women’s hourly employment earnings as a percentage of men’s, total employment (15⫹) Source: Calculations based on estimates from Heintz, James. ‘Summary of Country Case-Studies and Tabulations for UNIFEM’s Progress of the World’s Women 2005’. Background paper prepared for Progress of the World’s Women 2005: Women, Work, and Poverty. New York: UNIFEM.


Gender and Social Sector Restructuring There have been tremendous changes in the development policy mindset with regard to the role of the social sectors in the last two decades. In this section we address the implications of these shifts for the development of gender-equitable social policies. By the late 1980s it became increasingly evident that the poverty and social disruptions caused by stabilization and adjustment were not the ‘transitional phenomena’ or ‘frictional difficulties’ the international financial institutions (IFIs) had initially assumed; they were pervasive, long-term and systemic. Studies of the impacts of adjustment, and popular opposition to key adjustment-related measures combined to bring into question dominant policy prescriptions. Global policy pronouncements became less assertive about the imperative of cutting social spending, more apologetic about the imposition of ‘user fees’, and began to acknowledge that social policy could have a vital role to play in the development process. In the early 1990s the World Bank grudgingly accepted that adjustment packages had paid too little attention to social privations and that in view of empirical studies documenting the economic and social pay-offs from investments in health and education it would be wise to prevent the ‘depreciation of human capital’ during the adjustment process. Despite this shift, the dominant view was that ‘fiscal restraint’ had to be strictly observed. The dilemma of how to respond to social needs while remaining within the constraints of macroeconomic stabilization was resolved by attempting to ‘target’ social expenditures to populations most in need (Vivian 1995). Certain expenditures were thereby reallocated, for example from secondary to primary education; and supplementary programmes, ‘safety nets’ and ‘emergency funds’ were developed for the poor. A consensus seemed to be emerging on the importance of social provision and social protection, especially in a globalized economy where vulnerabilities were accentuated due to exposure to external risks. That this was not merely a rhetorical shift becomes apparent from the increasing share of Official Development Assistance (ODA) going to the social sectors (UNRISD 2005: Figure 8.1). Moreover, in several countries, levels of public social spending were restored in response to popular pressure and discontent (UNRISD 2005: Table 3.3). At the same time, the state’s role in the development process as well as in ensuring effective governance was increasingly recognized (World Bank 1997). But what precisely was the scope for state action in the realm of social development and welfare policy? And how was it to triangulate with the institutions of the market, family and civil society? The 1997 Asian financial crisis prompted the G7 to request the World Bank to formulate ‘social principles’ and ‘good practice of social policy’ as a guide to policy makers worldwide. The new emphasis was reflected in the World Bank’s 2000/2001 World Development Report (Attacking Poverty), which identified ‘social risk management’ (SRM) as the most sustainable basis for coping with risk and reducing the vulnerability of the poor. In this framework, the state was expected to provide ‘risk management instruments where the private sector fails’ in


addition to ‘social safety nets’ for risk-coping for the most vulnerable (Holzmann and Jorgensen 2000: 18) – displaying continuities with the earlier generation of minimal safety nets. As we will see later, the family and the community were seen as central institutions in SRM, working in tandem with the market. The welfare pluralist approach was adopted in a context in which the provision of social services and social protection was being rapidly commercialized. Selectivity in social policy thus went hand-in-hand with a trend towards multi-tierism in modes of provision in several important areas – pensions in particular, but also healthcare and education. While selectivity means narrowing the targets for support, multitierism means reducing the state component and partially privatizing social protection. Market-based, individualized entitlements (such as private pensions and health insurance) are thus seen as appropriate for those who can afford them, while scarce public resources are to be channeled or ‘targeted’ to the poor in the form of elusive safety nets and ‘basic’ public health and education services. Hence, behind the apparent consensus about the importance of social policy lurks the ‘traditional great divide in social policy debates’ (GASSP 2005) between the so-called universal redistributive model with an emphasis on universal access to social services and a focus on equity and redistribution, and the residual approach which ‘sees social policies as a residual measure to address the plight of the poorest and most vulnerable’ (p.3). The ascendance of the latter approach was at least partly related to the particular policy emphasis on poverty alleviation in the 1990s, now in full bloom with the Millennium Development Goals (MDG), which sought to ensure that public resources were geared towards only the poorest (GASSP 2005). By contrast with developed countries, the elaboration of social assistance and social security in developing countries has thus been rooted in the new global discourse of poverty, which has in turn fed into and reinforced a bifurcated view of social policy (markets for those who can afford them and ‘safety nets’ for the poorest). Below we consider the key building blocks of the currently dominant model of social policy – commercialization, targeting, and the new discourse of welfare developmentalism – from a gender perspective. Commercialization and familialization of welfare Social-sector reforms (health, education, pensions) have, among other things, entrenched the commodification of public services through the imposition of ‘user fees’ and other charges, enhanced the role of the private for-profit sector in the provision of social protection and services (sometimes through the privatization of what were previously state/public services), and shifted some of the unmet need for welfare onto families (re-familialization). Adopting Mackintosh and Koivusalo’s (2005) usage, we understand the concept of commercialization to be ‘wider than the “private sector” of provision and finance, encompassing for example commercial behaviour by publicly owned bodies … and broader than “privatization”, which refers to the sale or transfer of state-owned assets into private hands’ (p.2). In many low-income countries healthcare commercialization has been a key area of public concern and the model of reform promoted by the IFIs, widely


referred to as Health Sector Reform (HSR), has entrenched the shift toward greater commodification of public services. In sub-Saharan Africa, as Mackintosh and Tibandebage (this volume) show, HSR has been promoted in a context of severe poverty and in the wake of economic crisis. In Tanzania, for example, user fees were introduced in the early 1990s at a time when cuts in government spending and removal of subsidies on basic goods were disproportionately affecting the poor. In a context where a significant proportion of the population cannot afford its basic needs, the imposition of fees for healthcare has been impoverishing. The currently dominant model of health service provision has particularly problematic implications for women – as users of health services, as health service workers, and as providers of informal care. As Mackintosh and Tibandebage show, HSR in Africa seems to be based on unrealistic assumptions about poor women’s ability to muster the economic resources needed to access services for themselves and their dependents, about their unlimited time and capacity to provide unpaid care when formal care remains out of reach, as well as problematic assumptions about the interests of healthcare workers and clients (for example, seeing them as antagonistic). A common policy response to the exclusionary effects of ‘user fees’ has been the promotion of mutual health insurance schemes as well as social insurance schemes. Unlike social insurance schemes which are employment-based, mutual health insurance (MHI) schemes are voluntary schemes to promote the inclusion of the poor and vulnerable by pooling their risks and providing exemptions for those unable to pay. However most community-based MHI schemes face the problem of low participation rates and lack of financial sustainability; in Tanzania, for example, many rural Community Health Fund (CHF) schemes have not been able to extend their participation rates beyond 10 per cent of eligible households (Tibandebage 2004). Inability to pay constitutes one of the main reasons for nonenrolment, which is likely to affect women more severely given that they are more cash-constrained than men, and are likely to have more health needs. It is also not clear how such schemes can provide exemptions for the poor and ensure financial sustainability in the absence of significant subsidies from the state – given the difficulties of having cross-subsidies from the better off in small-scale voluntary schemes in poor communities. Enrolment in social insurance programmes is very often employment-based, with mandatory affiliation. In the case of developing countries, coverage has tended to be limited due the large size of the informal economy, and the high rate of evasion of contributions, even by employers and employees in the formal sector (Huber 2000). For these reasons even though social insurance schemes facilitate resource mobilization via contributions, they may not be the most effective vehicle for extending coverage to the majority of the population, particularly women who, as we showed in the previous section, tend to be informally employed. But in some countries efforts are being made to extend social protection mechanisms to formerly excluded categories of workers (Lund, this volume). The full implementation of these schemes, however, remains a challenge given the administrative difficulties of reaching dispersed workers with erratic incomes,


monitoring the implementation of their new rights, and making their membership financially sustainable. The health insurance scheme built by SEWA (Self Employed Women’s Association) in India, discussed in Lund’s chapter, is an example of an employmentbased scheme that is successful in reaching women informal workers; this is done through an integrated insurance scheme which also offers life and asset insurance. The reasons for its success include exceptionally strong leadership, top-flight expertise from insurance experts, a willingness to respond to members’ needs and set realistic rates, as well as the fact that it has been built on existing patterns of solidarity of SEWA as a trade union and as a set of cooperatives for women with strong organizational capacities. Replicating such conditions will not be easy. Health sector reform in China, discussed in Jufen’s chapter in this volume, is taking place alongside a fundamental restructuring of the labour force marked by massive unemployment in the state industrial sector and large-scale migration of the rural workforce into export-oriented factories. This stands in marked contrast to the ‘full-employment’ scenario of pre-reform China when industry was exclusively in state hands and welfare was provided through the enterprise. To be sure, gender segmentations in the workforce often translated into stratified rights to welfare in the pre-reform era: men greatly outnumbered women as permanent state workers and also predominated in senior grades, while collectives constituted a feminized sector (Lee 2005). But the proposed schemes for health insurance do little to reduce gender segmentations, and are in fact likely to exacerbate gender-based and other forms of exclusion. The ‘basic health insurance scheme for urban workers’, which is the principal component of China’s health insurance scheme for the urban population, covers those who are in the formal workforce and have permanent residence permits, thereby leading to the exclusion of informal workers, migrant labourers and those who are not part of the workforce. These exclusions are exacerbated by the scheme’s highly individualistic design which does not even provide coverage for the ‘dependents’ of the insured. Furthermore, as Jufen’s contribution to this volume clearly shows, a social insurance model with gender-neutral design and individualized accounts is likely to produce very unequal outcomes for men and women in terms of access to benefits (relative to need) when it is filtered through structural inequalities, especially inequalities in wages/income and years of employment. If coverage in social insurance programmes remains employmentbased and individualized with little subsidy from the state, then women’s labour market disadvantages are likely to feed into their weaker claims on healthcare. In the education sector the logic of ‘targeting’ promulgated at the international level has prioritized primary education, where the ‘rate of return’ is presumed to be higher and where public expenditure is considered to be pro-poor. In countries such as India, discussed in Jha and Subrahmanian’s chapter, this logic seems to have led to a significant reallocation of public social expenditure from higher education to primary education. While this redistribution and the accompanying reforms in Indian education have been vital for rapidly boosting India’s abysmal education enrolment rates (Figures 1.1–1.4), it has also led to the unfortunate neglect of


secondary education. The systemic interconnections between different parts of the education system have been ignored: the availability of post-primary education, for example, can strengthen the pipeline that channels students through the education system by giving parents an incentive to send their children to primary school and by providing the next cohort of teachers. Moreover, many of the benefits that girls and women reap from education – access to employment, access to contraception, ability to negotiate intra-household relations – materialize at the post-primary level (UN Millennium Project Task Force on Gender Equality 2005: Chapter 3). The reallocation of funds has been facilitated by donors’ financial support for new investments in primary education, which require ‘counterpart’ government funding. The concentration of public funds at the primary level has in turn facilitated an expanding role for commercial provision at the secondary level. This raises questions about affordability and access for both boys and girls from less privileged backgrounds. It poses particular problems for girls in a cultural context where parents prioritize their sons’ education, especially when the direct costs of schooling are high relative to household income. Such mechanisms seem to have been at work in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, where state directives and infrastructure grants for the provision of private single-sex secondary schools for girls have been subverted at the local level, as schools benefiting from such grants were not able to recruit enough girls to make their enterprises profitable. While the larger concern for girls’ education at the national and international levels made it a good political decision to have schemes to improve the provisioning of girls’ schools, narrow political and electoral considerations at the local level subverted the very basis of allowing subsidy for a private enterprise. As Jha and Subrahmanian conclude, ‘In an environment where girls’ education is not a highly valued choice, increased privatization [commercialization] is bound to act against their schooling participation’. In particular, the role of the state in mobilizing demand and influencing change in the domestic calculus that leads families to under-invest in adolescent girls’ schooling is underappreciated where commercialization is seen as the dominant policy choice. An important set of reforms that swept through many middle-income countries over the past decade was the reform of public pension programmes, where multilateral financial agencies and private commercial interests were strongly represented, in addition to technocratic elites and domestic constituencies such as trade unions and political parties. The outcomes have been diverse, and in some countries domestic political coalitions were able to resist the privatization model being imposed by the IFIs. While gender concerns do not seem to have surfaced in the public debates on pension reform, the moves towards privatization have major implications for women with typically lower labour market capabilities. The fact that benefit levels in privatized and individualized systems correspond closely to the overall contributions made by the insured person, means that women with their typically lower wages and fewer years of employment are likely to gain lower benefits (Huber and Stephens 2000b). The fact that fully privatized systems also take into account life expectancy further works against women although this is typically partially mitigated by allowing women to draw a pension at an earlier age


than men. In public systems women’s disadvantages are often mitigated by generous minimum pensions, by the fact that life expectancy is not taken into account, and that credit is sometimes given for periods of full-time care. Targeting versus universalism: is it gender-coded? Social policy regimes are hardly ever purely universal (providing benefits to the entire population as a basic right) or purely based on targeting (providing benefits to selected members of the population, usually on the basis of their ‘neediness’); they tend to lie somewhere between the two poles along a continuum and often in hybrid forms (Mkandawire 2005). As we noted earlier, targeting has become particularly attractive in the context of tight fiscal policies and aid dependence. In such contexts the relationship between social provisioning and the political economy of resource mobilization tends to be weakened; indeed targeting concentrates on the problem of disbursing given external resources, and not on that of generating and disbursing domestic resources through taxation (Mkandawire 2005). The emphasis of poverty discourses on support only for the most vulnerable groups in society has evaded some difficult distributional questions related to the position of middle-income and formal-sector workers in developing countries, many of whom relied on public-sector employment for their mobility and educational opportunities. In both African countries and post-socialist countries cutbacks in public-sector employment have led to the downward mobility of these strata. As Haggard and Kaufman (1995: 11) argue, this has significant consequences for resource allocation disputes because downward mobility can lead to antidemocratic mobilization: it is difficult to emphasize solidaristic principles to underpin social policies since ‘blue-collar and middle-class groups are unlikely to support antipoverty subsidies unless they can share in the benefits, and they are likely to oppose them if they entail a reduction in existing services’. Targeting has been justified in terms of cost containment and efficiency – the ‘most efficient and commonsensical thing to do under the circumstances’ (Mkandawire 2005: 3). Ironically though, many developed and developing country governments persist with targeting despite the ‘stubborn slew of empirical evidence suggesting that targeting is not effective in addressing issues of poverty (as broadly understood)’ (ibid p.20). It involves heavy administrative costs and demands the kind of administrative sophistication, information-gathering capability and infrastructural capacity that is difficult to find in many developing countries, with the result that significant numbers of poor people are often missed from targeted programmes while some of the non-needy are included (ibid). Targeted programmes may also divide communities and create tensions between those who are included as beneficiaries and those who are not (Molyneux, this volume). Most strikingly, targeting tends to be associated with increasing levels of inequality; this is well-captured in Korpi and Palme’s (1998) phrase ‘paradox of redistribution’: ‘the more we target benefits at the poor and the more concerned we are with creating equality via equal public transfers to all, the less likely we are to reduce poverty and inequality’ (p.661).


The current jargon – ‘fiscal restraint’ and ‘efficient allocation of resources subject to budget constraints’ – seems to suggest that the problems of targeting are technical. By contrast, Mkandawire (2005) underlines the ideological and political imperatives which determine the choice of instruments used to address poverty, inequality and insecurity. As the literature on social assistance programmes providing unreciprocated aid to the ‘deserving’ poor has repeatedly shown, there is a strong element of control that underpins targeted programmes which goes against current notions of citizenship and empowerment. In measures such as community targeting much discretionary power can be vested in local unaccountable administrators who then wield enormous powers over ‘matters of life and death’ (Mkandawire 2005). It has long been argued in the context of US welfare policies that government programmes were divided into two, gendered streams: those with the most legitimacy guaranteed secure entitlements to some citizens in return for their contributions, while other programmes provided unreciprocated aid to the ‘deserving’ poor (Fraser and Gordon 1994). The gender-coded contract-versuscharity dichotomy persists today in many countries in the opposition between social insurance and public assistance programmes. Welfare benefits targeted to women as mothers, for example, tend to identify women and their children as needy and poor, while shading out their contributions as workers/carers (whether paid or unpaid) and their rights as citizens. Social insurance programmes, on the other hand, confer entitlements on workers in return for their labour/financial contributions, even if in fact benefits depart from actuarial principles and do not reflect financial contributions (Fraser and Gordon 1994). Current anti-poverty initiatives also invoke and depend on gendered assumptions about identities, interests and responsibilities of citizens. In recent years women have been heavily present in targeted social assistance programmes. This can, perhaps, be seen as a response to feminist policy advocacy in many national and global forums where women have been identified as ‘the poorest of the poor’ and governments were requested to take appropriate action. One response has been in the form of micro-credit initiatives, which have been directed at women on the basis of their assumed thriftiness, efficiency and entrepreneurial skills. Elsewhere social assistance is provided on the condition that clients conform to certain normative understandings of ‘good motherhood’ or appropriate female behaviour. This is most evident in the Mexican programme Oportunidades, explored by Molyneux in this volume. This is a programme that aims to enhance human development by focusing on children’s health, education and nutrition. It is premised on strongly normative – but implicit – assumptions about the ‘natural’ role of mothers as full-time carers and nurturers of children. The programme seems to be driven by the expectation that low-income mothers would accept benefits for their children even if these are made available on demanding terms (the unpaid work expected of them) as well as intrusive levels of control exercised by programme managers. This may very well be the case, given the lack of any better option as well as the side benefits that women may derive from involvement in such programmes, such as greater self-confidence, an ability to access public


spaces and connect with other women beyond kinship and marriage networks. But such objectives are not always built into the programme (through training and group activities, for example), nor is it clear whether participation in such programmes enhances women’s economic autonomy and security. The dual gender stream in ‘developmental’ social policy Given the poor record of neoliberal policies in reducing levels of poverty, an effort has been made in recent years by some social policy analysts and international organizations (or parts thereof) to re-think the basis of anti-poverty programmes by focusing on the historical experiences of Northern welfare states. Some analysts have attempted to shift the global discourse away from targeting by reasserting the politics of social solidarity and universalism.6 Drawing on the historical experiences of Nordic states the argument is made that social policy is not only an end in itself but also a means of enhancing economic dynamism, development and growth – in short, that social policy is developmental (Mkandawire 2004). The concept of developmental social policy, which is sometimes used interchangeably with the notion of ‘productivist’ welfare state, has appeared in very diverse policy contexts. The early ‘productivist’ logic in East Asian social policy was premised on protecting and enhancing conditions for male workers in selected core industries, concentrating public expenditure on education, and relying on the family for the provision of care. The concept of ‘developmental social welfare’ also appears in various South African government documents, where it is defined as a welfare system ‘which facilitates the development of human capacity and self-reliance within a caring and enabling socio-economic environment’ (cited in Hassim, this volume). Here it seems to have, perhaps unintentionally, instituted a hierarchy of entitlements in which wage-earning programmes such as public works are ideologically privileged over social assistance programmes. In yet another policy context, that of the EU, the notion of developmental social policy has been equated with ‘active labour’ and ‘work first’ strategies aimed at getting all adults into the labour force. One of the common concerns that seems to underpin the ‘productivist’ logic in its different manifestations is the longstanding anxieties about the disincentives that welfare ‘handouts’ can create for work effort, leading to apathy and clientelism. Paid work, on the other hand, is seen as contributing to development while providing a route out of poverty. There is clearly some truth to this logic: economic and social policies must be able to create economic dynamism and full employment – what East Asian developmentalist states were amply able to achieve in the 1970s and 1980s, and what is so out of reach for many developing countries (including South Africa) in the present era. But as we argued above, if poverty is to be reduced then what is needed is decent employment because some forms of paid work actually entrench poverty and erode people’s capabilities. But even with this proviso we would argue that the ‘productivist’ logic remains problematic because it does not take into account the relationship between paid and unpaid forms of labour, and does not acknowledge that the latter is just as much at the heart of provisioning of needs as the former.


The Confucian principle of ‘filial piety’, which underpinned the reluctance of East Asian states to fund social care services, relied on women’s unpaid care work within families. Similarly as Lewis and Giullari (this volume) extensively argue, the EU ‘active labour’ agenda, which aims to get everyone, regardless of gender, into the labour force but with scant attention to how individuals and households would make arrangements for care work, is likely to have gender-differentiated implications. As Elson puts it, ‘in order to be gender equitable, full-employment policies must be complemented by entitlements for those in informal or part-time paid work and entitlements for the providers of unpaid caring labour as citizens in their own right’ (2004: 70). Education, health and contributory pensions are often treated as productive investments, while welfare grants tend to have a Cinderella-like status for finance authorities, especially when they compensate women for their unpaid care work. As Steinhilber’s contribution in this volume shows, this has been the fate of family benefits in both Poland and the Czech Republic since the ‘transition’. Aggregate expenditure on family benefits declined over 1990s: in Poland from 1.7 per cent of GDP in 1990 to 1.06 per cent in 1998; in the Czech Republic from 1.6 per cent of GDP in 1996 to 1.2 per cent in 2002, even while total social expenditure increased. A similar reading emerges from Hassim’s analysis of the struggles of the Lund Committee in South Africa in its efforts to protect and reform the child maintenance grant against criticisms from many in government for fostering dependency and having no developmental potential. Comparative research on welfare states finds that service-heavy states (social democratic states that typically fund and deliver welfare services such as health, education, daycare and elderly care) tend to be more ‘woman friendly’ than transferheavy Christian democratic ones which tend to fund but not deliver public services (Huber and Stephens 2000a). The services considered include health and education as well as daycare, which tend to be citizenship-based and which facilitate women’s entry into the workforce (both by releasing women from unpaid care work and also by creating jobs for women in the public care sector). In the case of developing countries care services for children and the elderly are far less developed (much of the care taking place through informal kinship networks as well as informal paid care) but there is no doubt that welfare services such as health and education have the potential of reversing wider gender inequalities and discriminations. As Mackintosh and Tibandebage argue, ‘health systems’ immense political and social importance, and the association of health care reform with political and economic crisis, implies that health systems can be sites of challenge to gender disadvantage’. But there should also be a place for cash transfers or non-contributory income supports such as child allowances, family benefits and pensions within ‘productive’ welfare – resisting the notion that these are ‘handouts’ for passive clients. Income supports can play a crucial role in helping households to provide care, smooth out consumption and build up the capabilities of all household members, as the evidence cited by Lund on the South African old age pension clearly shows.


The provision of accessible and accountable health and education services, as well as universal or near-universal entitlements to non-contributory pensions and other income supports remains of utmost importance to correct market outcomes and social arrangements that disadvantage low-income households, and low-income women in particular. It also requires a sound system of taxation – as Huber’s chapter argues and explores. Looking at four countries – three in Latin America and one in the Caribbean – Huber documents the mixed record that these countries have had over the last two decades in reforming their tax systems, with the predominant trend being a negative one. In three of the four countries overall tax receipts as a percentage of GDP has fallen (the exception being Costa Rica), and three of the countries have come to rely more heavily on indirect taxes levied on domestic goods and services (the exception being Jamaica). Both developments are bad news for the state’s capacity to reduce poverty, inequality, and gender-based disadvantages. With a lower tax revenue the state has less fiscal capacity to provide the kind of social services that we know are critical for low-income households and for low-income women in particular, and indirect taxes also tend to be generally regressive. And yet while it is politically difficult, it is nevertheless possible to construct overall progressive tax systems that are effective in raising at least moderate levels of revenue to fund state social provisioning, even at comparatively low levels of development, as demonstrated by the example of Jamaica. As Huber concludes, the requirements for this are: reliance on direct taxes with an adequate standard deduction and few special deductions for higher income earners for an important share of the total, a structure of indirect taxes that exempts only basic goods and services, and social security taxes without a cap. However, there is no escaping the fact that taxing high-income groups is politically costly, and that liberalization has made taxing corporations more difficult.

Families, politics and state development in a global context Debates about the relative balance of responsibilities between state and non-state institutions in the provision of social services and social support are underpinned by normative assumptions about the role of the state as well as about gender roles. The residualist approach to social policy is not just an innocent statement describing the limited role played by the state in social provisioning, but one prescribing how states ought to behave. As feminist critics have repeatedly argued, the shedding of state responsibilities shifts even further the burden of social provisioning to the unpaid providers of care within families, households, and communities. On the other hand, defining the state ‘as the central locus of social policy’, as Molyneux (forthcoming) notes, also carries normative assumptions, alluding to a vision of a strong, capable and socially responsive state. While much of the debate between neoliberals and their critics tends to be cast in terms of markets versus states, in many countries, low-income populations have to creatively combine


social supports from a mix of formal and informal social institutions for their security. As Molyneux goes on to argue, ‘social reproduction is in such cases secured by a variety of social practices and institutions that exist independently or work in conjunction with “state action”; yet this interface, if it is acknowledged at all, is rarely analysed in the social policy literature’ (Molyneux forthcoming). In this section we address the interface between the state and other social institutions. Firstly, we discuss the implications for gender equality strategies of the assumptions made by states about the role of the family in social provisioning, and the ways in which state policies attempt to reform the family. Secondly, we address the implications for developing gender-responsive social policies of differing levels of capacity, reach and legitimacy of state institutions. Finally, we consider the ability of women’s organizations to extract benefits for women out of processes of political liberalization and democratization. Assumptions about families and the politics of familialism Existing welfare-state models are based on culturally and historically specific conceptions of the divisions between public and private (and in particular on relatively secularized public sectors), of the nuclear nature of the family, and of fairly differentiated institutional spaces occupied by the care economy and paid work. In these contexts, feminist critiques of Gösta Esping-Andersen’s (1990) test of ‘decommodification’ (the extent to which citizens can attain a basic standard of living independently of the market) have focused on adding the test of ‘defamilialization’. This is defined as ‘the degree to which individual adults can uphold a socially acceptable standard of living independently of family relationships, either through paid work or through social security provision’ (Lister cited in Sainsbury 1996: 39). Hobson (1990) and Orloff (1993) have further refined this concept by suggesting that feminist analysis should focus on access to paid work and capacity to form and maintain an autonomous household. These critiques emerged in a context where support to individuals was channelled through families as the unit of entitlement, with women often required to conform to dominant stereotypes of ‘good’ wives and mothers. Entitlements based on citizenship are potentially defamilializing, as they de-link entitlements from marital status and motherhood. Yet both the test of decommodification and the test of defamililialization are difficult to apply to less-industrialized developing country contexts, where commodification is weak and families and social networks, such as extended families and religious groups, remain important cultural and survival resources. Feminist social policy analysts by no means argue for a notion of individuals as atomized and autonomous beings. Yet even the limited forms of defamilialization that are proposed (for example, women’s capacity to maintain households autonomously of their dependence on others) are difficult to apply in contexts where family and kinship networks remain important to people’s livelihoods and security, and where non-familial provision of social security is weak. This kind of social embeddedness is not only a primary source of identity; it also structures women’s economic entitlements by offering them some access to resources such as land, housing and childcare even if only as a consequence of


their marital or maternal status. In extended families, the presence of multiple contributors to the household’s security in high-risk environments acts as a mechanism for spreading risk and mobilizing resources for investments and for social reproduction (Whitehead and Kabeer 2001). In the midst of economic crisis, when jobs disappear and the little state provision that there is becomes eroded, these networks take on an even more critical role as the ultimate safety net. Beneria and Floro’s contribution to this volume documents the ways in which low-income households in Ecuador and Bolivia draw on kinship and family networks and systems of reciprocity and mutual support for protection, incomemaintenance and as a way of smoothing consumption. Formal social protection mechanisms in these communities are conspicuous by their absence. Yet, there are at least two issues that we need to consider when analysing the ways in which families and households provide security and social provisioning in many developing countries. First, feminist research amply shows the ways in which women are often disadvantaged vis-à-vis men in the pursuit of livelihood security, through both intra-household inequalities in the allocation of resources and the sharing of burdens, as well as inequalities generated by biases in the wider institutional arena. One example of such inequalities emerges from Beneria and Floro’s chapter: not only do women in these low-income households continue to shoulder a disproportionate share of the unpaid work involved in household reproduction (alongside their increasing participation in paid work), but they also have a higher debt burden than the men in their households as a consequence of assuming greater responsibility for debt repayment and household maintenance. Second, while classical liberal theory sees the family as a realm unto itself – distinct from civil society and shielded from incursions by the state – the notion that states and families operate as ‘separate spheres’ does not hold up to historical scrutiny (Haney and Pollard 2003). Nor does such a framework assist our understanding of contemporary reforms in state roles and obligations vis-à-vis social welfare, which carry enormous implications for what is expected of families (and women in particular). Indeed, comparative work on the family in contemporary societies, especially post-socialist Eastern Europe, shows how ‘the familial’ may be deployed to assist states’ reform of – and often retreat from – social life (Haney and Pollard 2003; Haney 2003). There is growing policy interest in devolution of responsibility from the central government to local governments (through decentralization) as well as non-state actors, especially ‘communities’, according to the principle of subsidiarity – reliance on the smallest possible unit that can perform a given social function effectively. These ideas have always been very strong in religious-based conservative political parties and movements, for example in Christian democracy, which has also placed strong emphasis on traditional family values and arrangements. But the underlining of women’s traditional roles associated with caring and the neglect of their economic autonomy and security is also evident in some contemporary anti-poverty programmes, as Molyneux’s analysis of the Oportunidades programme shows. The current policy emphasis on subsidiarity tends to show very little interest in the gendered workings of non-state institutions and the ways in which they can


reproduce and entrench gender inequalities. Who in the community does the caring and on what terms? Who does the voluntary work? Who benefits from social provisioning provided by religious-based voluntary institutions and on what terms? Who in the household does the bulk of social provisioning and caring? These questions are not new. They lie at the heart of debates to measure the extent of social rights in welfare states and are central to contemporary processes that have been loosely termed ‘reprivatization’. The care burden imposed by the AIDS epidemic, as Mackintosh and Tibandebage note, has cruelly exposed the inadequacy of the assumptions about women’s coping capacity and unlimited labour supply. This is forcing onto the policy agenda questions about care and its provision, and the costs to the carer of unpaid and voluntary work.7 Steinhilber’s chapter shows that despite the divergent reform paths taken in Poland and the Czech Republic, in both countries the family was addressed as ‘the most natural’ social institution to ensure care for its members; as increasing responsibilities were assigned to families in the reform process, supporting families in coping with the social fallouts from the transition was considered eminently important. Gender relations in families, however, and the impact of family benefits on them did not become an issue for public debate. Indeed, reform discourses have invoked and aimed to recreate traditional gender arrangements with motherhood as a full-time dedication. These idealized notions of the family and of women’s roles are often in conflict with the reality of women’s day-to-day lives and their continued attachment to the labour market (more so in the Czech Republic than in Poland). Indeed, women face greater difficulties in the postreform era in combining employment and family responsibilities than they did prior to the reforms. Ironically, despite the pro-family rhetoric, in both countries aggregate expenditure for family benefits declined over the course of the 1990s. In Poland, the share of family benefits in total social expenditure declined while total social expenditure increased. A more radical engineering of the family is evident in the Islamic Republic of Iran where a revolutionary Islamist state has sought to restructure the family, and society more broadly, along traditionalist lines by attempting to segregate all public spaces, and to fully domesticate women.8 Moghadam argues in chapter 4 that state ‘developmentalism’ in the Middle East was undermined by its ‘neopatriarchal’ approach to women, gender, and the family, codified in family laws/personal status codes that define women largely in terms of their filial, marital, and maternal roles, place them under male guardianship, and deny them equality in access to family wealth. Although state social expenditures did allow for social mobility and access by some women to education and employment, on the whole, oil wealth and family laws served to prevent the ‘commodification’ of women’s labour. On these grounds she argues that processes of individuation and commodification need to be supported as without these developments women are unlikely to be considered as economic agents and right-bearing citizens. Hence, some disembedding of social provisioning may be desirable as far as gender justice is concerned. Individualist approaches to development have, however, been criticized for assuming that poverty is the result of individual (or even broader cultural) deficits,


rather than structural features of dependent peripheral economies. Instead, from both the left and the right of the political spectrum, there has been a tendency to focus on the community as the locus of welfare and the site for social justice. Left perspectives on community tend to emphasize the building of agency and participation through local-level democracy that often draws on indigenous practices of collective responsibility, mutuality and reciprocity. While women provide the backbone of caring and sharing within communities, notions of justice and entitlements embedded in community institutions may, however, be oblivious to gender equality. Many community-based initiatives for addressing poverty have drawn on women’s skills and capacities to develop programmes over which poor people have control and to develop collectivist strategies that assist in broader democratization of society. These kinds of collectivist programmes link community well-being to political goals, often tied to socialist advocacy. In some cases, they are so successful that populist governments co-opt them as part of the project of legitimation (see Blondet 2002 on Peru). The political framework of collectivism, however, is very different to communitarian approaches that emphasize sharing and caring within communities rather than directing demands to the state (Midgely 1995: 91). These attempts to enhance community self-control can often be retrogressive for women, particularly when linked to the entrenchment of traditional forms of authority and cultural stereotyping of gender roles. These cultural contestations can often be very muted yet the effect of powerful traditionalist interests and visions can be far-reaching, as the case of Iran clearly demonstrates. The resilience of these informal institutions, their ability to substitute for state services, and their effectiveness at providing members with dignity and social purpose, mean that these institutions must be recruited to the task of rebuilding social cohesion in failing states (UNRISD 2005: 259). It may however prove very difficult to insert gender-equality concerns (or broader social equality concerns) to these processes, especially where traditional institutions have a patriarchal character. But traditional institutions can be held accountable to basic constitutional standards of social equality, if there is a strong, legitimate and capable state that is committed to women’s rights. As Lewis and Giullari show in chapter 8 , this kind of state was hard-won in the North, and the commitments to gender equality have to be continually renegotiated in the face of economic and political shifts. Yet these struggles have been difficult for feminists to pursue in developing countries in the late twentieth century. The closed, nation-state model of development that, for example, enabled organized labour to extract some livelihood guarantees has been undermined by processes of economic liberalization and the indebtedness of many countries. This has impacted on political struggles to reduce the vulnerabilities of citizens to the market. Finally, the institutional legacies of the state play a major role in determining the extent to which states are able to carry through developmental programmes to reduce social inequalities. Developmental state variation is marked by the different capacities – economic and political, to be sure, but also infrastructural – of different states that shape the


extent to which collective struggles for greater protection are successful. The next section examines the interplay between these factors more closely. Reach, capacity and legitimacy of state institutions There are enormous variations in state-society linkages and state capacity between developmental states in Latin America, Asia and Africa. Postcolonial governments in Africa were initially committed to the idea of an active state that would drive development and poverty reduction. As Robert Bates points out, although African governments adopted different developmental paths, ‘they were virtually all activist’ (Bates 1994: 15). However, for at least three decades following independence, most governments did not expand the institutions established by colonialism (executive, civil service, police and army) in ways that consolidated democracy or even their long-term ability to sustain a developmental focus. In particular, institutions that would constrain executive power such as multi-party elections, judicial independence and, outside the state, institutions that might expand the legitimacy of the state and its capacity to represent diverse interests (such as vibrant civil society) were either severely restricted or actively repressed. By contrast, those institutions that were seen as either enhancing the capacity of elites to manage or to remain in power, such as the bureaucracy, expanded rapidly. Importantly, however, bureaucratic expansion was not tied to efficiency or to citizen responsiveness. Structural adjustment policies further weakened states’ commitments to socialsector spending, undermining the purchase of nationalist governments on the loyalties of poor people. Donald Rothschild (1994) argues that state autonomy was weakened at a crucial stage and the state was unable to regulate society effectively or to implement its ambitious developmental programmes. The inability of postcolonial states to deliver on the developmental promises that accompanied political independence, whether as a consequence of leadership deficiencies or external impositions, weakened state legitimacy, with many groups in society disengaging from making demands on the state and instead entrenching informal, traditionally-based systems of governance and resource allocation. Citizens bypassed the state as the locus of their demands, meeting their needs through a combination of informal mechanisms and developing allegiances to local political actors rather than the state per se. These developments reinforced the peculiar dilemma that new democracies face, as Gordon White (1996) has pointed out: lacking legitimacy, new democracies cannot become effective; lacking effectiveness they cannot develop legitimacy. To be sure, policy outcomes are shaped not just by political commitments to invest in the reduction of social inequalities, but also by the capacity of institutions to implement policy. Yet there is no simple relationship between public spending and outcomes in terms of poverty reduction. A key intervening feature in the struggles to develop effective systems of risk reduction for poor people is the institutional character of the state. Democratization depends to a significant extent on the consolidation of state power and the institutionalization of political contestation within elites and between elites and other social groups (Rueschemeyer et al.


1992). Gordon White argues that the effective linking of democratic and developmental goals depends on the construction of ‘an effective developmental state that is regulatory, competent and redistributive, and has the political authority to manage social and political conflicts’ (quoted in Minogue 2002: 127). The ‘good governance’ approach of the World Bank, which promoted democratization through institutional development, recognizes the importance of ‘getting the state right’. However, the emphasis is on strengthening the institutions that are considered to be essential for capitalist development such as those responsible for financial management, private property rights and rule of law. The aim of contributing to more efficient government has not necessarily been linked to the value of promoting government accountability downwards to citizens. Women clearly have an interest in a responsive and accountable state, but one that is responsive to their particular needs. There are gender-specific capacity failures in all public institutions targeted for reform. Public expenditure management systems fail to acknowledge women’s needs or distribute budgetary resources equally. The civil service or judiciary may be dominated by men antipathetic to gender equality. Women public-sector workers clustered at the bottom of state bureaucracies may be the first to be fired when cost-cutting efficiencies are introduced (UNRISD 2005: Chapter 11). As the Latin American and East Asian chapters suggest, competent public bureaucracies that are at least internally accountable can be made responsive to the needs of women. In these regions states appear to be more able to act on political agreements struck between political parties and other actors. Latin American states achieved consolidation relatively early, often in association with demands for mass incorporation into political institutions (Rueschemeyer et al. 1992). Although there are variations in the social composition and democratic credentials of states, on the whole Latin American states have been pervasive, relatively wellinstitutionalized and with a strong history of interventionism. Grindle (1986: 13) argues that ‘the Latin American state has played a considerable role in the mediation of social conflict through co-optation, manipulation and coercion and this helps account for the complexity and conflict that exists within the bureaucratic apparatus of individual countries’. The institutional context of democratization was also different in East Asian states compared to sub-Saharan Africa. East Asian states inherited highly evolved bureaucracies from a combination of Japanese models as well as from strong networks between state and political and economic dynasties. This left a strong foundation for the developmental states (indeed the authoritarian legacy allowed developmental states to intervene in markets in productive ways). In these contexts, the development of gender-equitable social policies was dependent far more on winning political support and social consensus over the direction of social policy than on state capacity to absorb women’s demands. Weak state capacity also impacts on the kinds of strategies feminists can employ in making social policy more gender-equitable. One of the most innovative of these strategies, gender-responsive budgeting (GRB), has suffered from the combined problems of political will and state capacity. This strategy is often adopted


because it is seen as the key tool for exposing and thereby re-directing government policies and spending patterns to more gender equitable ends. As a ‘technical’ tool, it is often regarded as a strategy that can bypass political and cultural obstacles to equality. However, as Budlender argues in chapter 15 of this volume, GRBs can often become a panacea for the more politically difficult work of redirecting political will and institutional capacity. Budlender very clearly demonstrates the differential outcomes of particular political contexts as well as the effects of the lack of receptivity of politicians and state bureaucracies to change. Policy inertia seems to dominate while opportunities for change (brought about by a combination of strong politicians, often female, with effective alliances in the face of government receptivity to change) seem to be very rare moments. Social policy as political struggle Opportunities for creating states and political systems that are more responsive to the needs of constituencies of poor people were greatly enhanced by the wave of political liberalization that swept through developing countries from the late 1980s. Processes of political democratization raised expectations in civil society that more redistributive policies would be followed, as indeed in many countries they were. However, an important factor that needs to be taken into account when considering the link between liberalization and redistribution is the strength of political organization among poor and working people in developing countries. To what extent was democratization forced from below rather than imposed from above by a combination of local and foreign elite interests? Even with the recognition of the need for a more activist state in global lending institutions and the provision of more comprehensive protection for the poor, in many African countries the impetus to provide social protection was externally set, as part of the conditionalities of debt relief. The combination of this factor with the weak tax base and small middle class in very poor countries had the effect of removing social policy from the arena of national politics. As we suggested above, these factors have consequences for the quality and financial sustainability of social programmes. However, they also impact on the process of building a social value consensus and on the political sustainability of social programmes (Tendler 2004). As Tendler points out, in such situations the ‘national anchor’ for social programmes is easily lost, and the anti-poverty agenda inadvertently can become an ‘anti-labour’ agenda. Building programmes that provide protections beyond the ‘poorest of the poor’ to include the organized working poor becomes more difficult in the face of the combination of residualism promoted from above by global lending institutions and populist arguments that employed workers represent a labour aristocracy. Similar political consequences are evident in the interventions of global lending agencies in Eastern Europe. As Steinhilber shows, in Poland, which pursued a rapid reform path, there was a wholesale dismantling of the welfare benefits system that had existed under state socialism. The resulting residual, familial model, apparently gender-neutral, downscaled ‘costly’ benefits and services that supported women’s dual role as worker and mother. The absence of strong, local feminist lobbies or


allies in political parties allowed the adoption of a residualist welfare model that seriously undermined women’s social rights. A different dynamic was at play in East Asian developmental states, where the process of democratization was more successfully pushed by local actors, and with clear consequences for the expansion of social protection. Peng shows how male bias in both the Korean and Japanese systems only softened as a consequence of demographic shifts – declining birth rates and an ageing population – that in turn became the touchstone for political competition. These demographic changes, together with broader social changes, facilitated the erosion of traditional living arrangements, increasing divorce rates and increasing numbers of single mothers, accompanied by the increasing employment rates of women (including married women). These social trends created a tension between caring needs on the one hand (of children and the elderly) and the availability of women to provide unpaid care on the other. Together these factors resulted in shifts in social policies with increasing welfare expenditures. Care of the elderly shifted from being means-tested to being rights based, while public supply of childcare was increased and parental leave extended. All of this was facilitated by political regime shifts, the extent to which social policy became an electoral issue and increasing numbers of women in political office. On the other hand, as Hassim’s chapter shows, similar processes of democratization in South Africa have not had the same effects on the social welfare system. There, the potential redistributive effects of regime shift and expansion of women’s access to political office were mitigated by a dominant party system in which social policy did not become part of electoral contestation, and by a labour market characterized by high levels of unemployment rather than labour shortages. Women’s movements in developing countries have an uneven record of organizing for better and more appropriate forms of social protection. Many women’s movements in developing countries have eschewed state-centred politics, questioning whether women’s citizenship could be expanded by states that were fundamentally undemocratic in character. States are clearly not neutral in designing and implementing social policies, but they are not self-evidently patriarchal either. Gender relations are shaped by, and themselves shape, the nature of the state and its relationships to other social institutions; in this sense institutions are interpretive systems that give meaning to particular notions of social positioning and citizenship. Yet unlike institutions such as the family and community, states may be more permeable to women’s interests in contexts of strong social conservatism. This may offer openings for women’s movements to extend the reach of social programmes in ways that address women’s gendered vulnerabilities. For example, in Latin America collectivization among poor women did lead to successful pressures being brought to bear on ruling parties that were seeking to extend their legitimacy among poor citizens. Populist governments in the region sought to expand the basis of their legitimacy by expanding the welfare net in ways that benefited both men and women. It can be argued, therefore, that women have successfully made claims on the state, very often by harnessing their maternal roles to political claims-making and


advocacy for better conditions and social support for women. Although maternalist politics has had contradictory and different outcomes in different countries, this form of claims-making shares an implicit acceptance that the rights women were claiming should come in return for certain pre-given responsibilities tied to traditionally-ascribed gender roles. This acceptance of traditional gender roles rendered maternalist movements and demands controversial. The protean character of maternalism also leant itself to subtle shifts from ‘a vision of motherhood in the service of women to one serving the needs of paternalists’ (Koven and Mitchel 1993: 5). As such maternalism may reinforce the patriarchal gender order and entrench women’s economic dependence on men – it can become ‘a cloak for paternalism’ (ibid). For example, Islamist women activists in Iran have tended to use maternalist arguments for greater social protection focusing on rewarding women’s unpaid labour without addressing the underlying power relations of gender. Consequently, Moghadam argues for a secular politics that focuses on women’s access to the public sphere of paid labour and political participation. From this platform, she argues, women are more likely to succeed in making family relations more equitable. Representation, political parties and social policy change More recently, the international women’s movement (for example, in the Beijing Platform for Action and WEDO’s global 50–50 campaign) is focusing on access to formal political institutions as a key strategic lever to advance gender equality. Such campaigns attempt to create mechanisms through which women can enter into parliament in their own right rather than at the behest of benevolent political parties. The success of this strategy rests on a number of factors, most importantly the strength of gender equity lobbies in political parties and civil society, the way in which political competition is organized and on the extent to which women can make issues of social policy into electoral issues. There are many examples of women’s movement activism, but fewer examples of successful party mobilization in support of social policies. On the face of it, certain kinds of one-party and authoritarian regimes have paradoxically been permeable to some kinds of gender claims. These openings were created not only for conservative maternalist political claims (as in the authoritarian regimes in Latin America) but also for feminists. For example, women in Uganda did benefit in many respects from the patronage of Yoweri Museveni, gaining a large number of reserved seats in parliament. However, the dependence of the women’s movement on the National Resistance Movement was tested severely by the end of the 1990s, when women failed to gain support for removing traditional obstacles to women’s ownership of land (Tripp 2002). The Ugandan experience is a salutary reminder of the limits of party-political patronage for gender activists. The contributions by Peng (chapter 6) and Hobson (chapter 7) examine countries where gender equality was successfully inscribed in social policies. Hobson argues that winning support from political parties and raising the electoral stakes of gender is crucial to women’s movement success. However, there is enormous


variation in the political party landscape in developmental states. Where party formation is relatively strong with deep histories and clearly developed ideologies, the ability to make electoral gains depends on the extent to which there is political commitment to redistribution. In Japan, for example, social policy emerged as a key electoral issue in the 1990s, political parties distinguishing themselves on the basis of their positions on social welfare. Women’s organizations had been campaigning for social policy reform since the early 1980s, but it was only as a result of broader political shifts that women in association with groups representing the elderly became an electoral constituency. Their prior organization around social policy enabled them to offer policy alternatives to which political parties had to respond. By contrast, in many liberalizing African states, political parties are not as well established around issues and social programmes, but tend rather to be vehicles for personalistic power and ethnic ambitions. Trade unions are relatively weak, exacerbated by the large informal and agricultural sectors. Policy alternatives are rarely the basis on which voting takes place, even in a country with a relatively diverse and long tradition of party mobilization such as South Africa. In these cases, the elite bias of political competition is reinforced and women’s organizations, like other sectors of civil society, may see few incentives in advancing their claims through the party system. In post-socialist states, for different historical reasons, both political parties and women’s organizations are not deeply institutionalized and the relationship between gender equality and social policies is not a central political issue. As Hassim’s chapter shows, the inclusion of women in the formal institutions of the state, and references to ‘gender equality’ in policy documents, do not necessarily lead to the redistribution of resources and power in ways that change the structural basis of gender inequality. Inclusion can be an avenue for reinforcing elite women’s access to the formal political system while not translating clearly into policies that address the needs of larger constituencies of women. Although many new women members of parliament have taken ‘poor women’ as their constituency (at least in moral terms), it has been all too easy for them to focus on anti-poverty programmes as the only form of pro-women intervention (Hassim 2006). Yet, as we have argued above, a focus on the ‘poorest of the poor’ is an inadequate strategy for advancing gender equality as it does not build a sustainable system of social protection that takes account of women’s particular gender interests, which can sometimes cut across social class. As Tsikata points out, we need to be careful that the emphasis on the basic needs of poor women and their children does not displace issues of gender relations and power (Tsikata 2000: 6). On the other hand, without political rights and access to the public sphere, women cannot even enter debates about social policy. Moghadam’s chapter underscores the argument that economic and political rights are important prerequisites for gender equality. ‘Neopatriarchy’ offers women few avenues for political intervention and democratization of the formal institutions of state and policy-making is self-evidently necessary as a key step in advancing democratic social policy. Unlike South Africa, transitions from state socialism did not open


spaces for feminist interventions. Rather closer to the experiences of the Middle East, post-socialist countries ‘retraditionalized’ the family, upholding the distinction between the public and the private spheres (Haney and Pollard 2003). The family was seen as ‘a site of refuge amidst chaos and unpredictability … and served as a model and metaphor for transition’ (p.7). In Poland, even the several brisk changes from left-to right-wing governments during the 1990s did not result in progressive policies for women, because of the dominant social conservatism (Steinhilber, this volume). Women were poorly represented in government and the bureaucracy and there were few openings for feminists to make policy interventions. However, in response to the scaling back of benefits women’s organizations are beginning to make social policy reform part of their political activism. Similarly in countries such as Iran the family is idealized as the antithesis to Western individualism, making feminist struggles for more egalitarian social policies that recognize women’s rights extremely difficult to pursue.

Concluding remarks We have noted that historically state social provisioning and protection was premised on a normative male-breadwinner/female-carer model, even if in reality many women were in the labour-force. That model has eroded over the past two decades, with the global increase in women’s labour-force participation. However, despite the convergence in men’s and women’s crude economic activity rates, gender segmentation is not disappearing from the world of work – not even in Sweden where men continue to work full time and invest in their careers, while women work ‘part time’ in the public sector, where it is easier to combine employment with having a family. The link between paid work and entitlements to social benefits has been further weakened by processes of labour informalization or casualization, which have been part and parcel of liberalization policies over the past two decades. A greater proportion of women’s paid work (compared to men’s) tends to be of the informal kind, and within the informal economy women tend to dominate the more casual and less remunerative niches. Labour market segmentation and casualization mean that increasing numbers of people, particularly women, are likely to be excluded from access to social services and income supports if these are provided on a commercial basis or on the basis of labour ‘contributions’ as in the social insurance model – ironically the two paths that have dominated social sector restructuring in the 1980s and 1990s. In theory it is possible to extend the coverage of social insurance programmes to include informal workers – as some countries in East Asia and Latin America have attempted – but only if their contributions are heavily subsidised (by the state). An effective means for reducing gender-based poverty and inequality would be public provision of accessible and accountable social services (especially health and education) as well as citizenship-based entitlements to basic income support (pensions and family/child allowances). Despite significant differences played by families and households in social protection and provisioning (these being the ultimate safety nets in many poorer


developing countries), it is nevertheless intriguing that the provision of unpaid care remains so feminized everywhere.9 This is a major factor feeding into women’s disadvantages in the market economy. But it is also important to underline that care is central to human flourishing and to social and economic development. However it is also an area that remains marginal to the concerns of mainstream policy actors across ideological and political divides. Only under exceptional circumstances is any explicit attention paid to women’s unpaid care work. Otherwise policy actors either assume that families and communities (i.e. women within those units) will continue to provide care, or as in the case of conservative and religious-based movements and policies, reinforce women’s caring duties as part and parcel of their ideological crusades to restrict women’s choices. But there are also serious policy questions about what to do about care: how in particular to reconcile the needs and rights of those who require care with the needs and rights of those who provide care (whether paid or unpaid), and how to foster responsibility for sharing care between men and women? Provision of accessible, affordable and high-quality care services (for children, the elderly and others with intense needs) is of course a sine qua non. But it is impossible to fully defamilialize care, as Lewis and Giullari emphatically argue. The bulk of unpaid care work is carried out, largely by women and girls, within families, households, and community and kinship networks. These are the institutional arenas that are also likely to reproduce gender disadvantage. States often do mould certain kinds of families and gender arrangements through legal instruments, often emphasizing women’s domesticity and restricting their economic citizenship. While it is difficult for states to oblige men to share equally in care work, they can provide incentives for them to do so. In the Nordic countries, for example, while ‘daddy leave’ quotas may have had a small impact on how men and women divide their unpaid care responsibilities, they nevertheless have enormous symbolic value. The same countries have been less forthcoming in reforming the male employment model, by reducing working time (a shorter working week and the regulation of overtime, for example). In the case of many developing countries, public or private care services for children and the elderly remain underdeveloped and the great bulk of care is assumed by women and girls as members of families and households, while some of it (in middle-class households) is purchased through informal arrangements. In these contexts, a priority must be the strengthening of states’ capabilities to provide basic infrastructure (piped water, roads, electricity) and accessible and affordable public health services, which are likely to reduce women’s unpaid workloads. The sharing of unpaid care work between women and men would require different strategies from those used in advanced welfare states, given that the bulk of paid work is unregulated in many of these countries. The state is a key institution as an organizer if not necessarily a provider of social protection and provisioning. It is clear that states that are well-institutionalized are better able to translate political commitments into effective social policies and delivery systems. Women thus have an interest in making states more responsive


and accountable to their citizens. Neoliberal approaches to state reform in developing countries have, however, tended to undermine the capacity of states to be responsive to the needs of their citizens. The renewed interest in the state (in the ‘good governance’ paradigm) offers some opportunities for the creation of gender-responsive states. But this would require that more attention be paid to developing political accountability to citizens and that women be seen as part of the ‘publics’ that need to be responded to and served. Related to the point above, this volume suggests that we need ‘thicker’ understandings of democracy that go beyond supporting multi-partyism and the numerical increase of women in national parliaments. Both of these are important prerequisites for reducing inequalities, but they need to be buttressed by deeper levels of political participation. This would include developing the capacity of women’s organizations and civil societies in general to interpret and articulate the needs of different constituencies of women in policy terms. It would also include more strategic use of political parties as vehicles of representation by pushing for social policies to become electoral issues. Last, but not least, women have fought for the state to recognize their needs in various ways (including maternalist demand-making) but not always in ways that challenge the underlying power relations of gender. In some countries the absence of strong feminist lobbies, or allies within political parties, has allowed the adoption of a residualist welfare model that has seriously undermined women’s social rights. Difficulties in clearly articulating women’s needs in social policy terms seems to be as much a problem in the South as it is in the North.

Acknowledgements We thank Alexandra Efthymiades for excellent research assistance, James Heintz for the preparation of tables, and Francie Lund and Silke Steinhilber for extensive comments on an earlier draft of this chapter.

Notes 1 One response has been the ‘good governance’ agenda promoted by the World Bank, which rehabilitates the state by emphasizing the role of ‘lean’ state bureaucracies and judiciaries in creating the conditions for market competition through the enforcement of private property rights and contracts, and by ‘regulating’ private industry and commercial social services (World Bank 1997, 2003; Fukuyama 2004). 2 The welfare state broadly defined not only includes transfer payments but also the public funding and delivery of goods and services, such as education and health. However, the quantitative literature on the development of the welfare state contains a one-sided focus on transfer payments (and neglect of social services), which is related to the other major lacunae in this research – the role of gender (Huber and Stephens 2000a). 3 The other categories were ‘strong male breadwinner states’ where Ireland and Britain were placed, and ‘modified male breadwinner countries’ which included France (Lewis 1992). 4 Though long part-time, 20 to 30 hours per week. 5 ‘Informal sector’ covers informal enterprises. Informal employment is a broader category that includes all workers who work without secure contracts, worker benefits or social protection; so it can include those who work as informal wage workers for formal enterprises or households (e.g. casual labourer, domestic worker) (ILO 2002).

Gender and Social Policy in a Global Context 37 6 ILO, UNRISD, UN/DESA, UNESCO, UNDP (and even some parts of the World Bank) are among the organizations often mentioned as those promoting this global discursive shift (see GASPP 2005). 7 There are some similar gender concerns about the burden and division of care work in the more affluent countries in the context of ageing (Stark 2005). 8 What the Islamist state has attempted to do however should not be mistaken for social reality. Processes of social change, in which women have been major change agents, have subverted many of the Islamization measures promulgated by the state. 9 For developing countries, however, we need more systematic analysis of unpaid work than is currently available through the existing time use surveys.

References Anker, R., H. Melkas and A. Korten (2003) Gender-Based Occupational Segregation in the 1990s. ILO Working Paper No. 16. Focus Programme on Promoting the Declaration on Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work. Geneva: ILO. Bates, R. (1994) ‘The Impulse to Reform in Africa’. In J. A. Widner (ed.) Economic Change and Political Liberalization in Sub-saharan Africa. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Blondet, C. (2002) ‘ “The Devil’s Deal”: Women’s Political Participation and Authoritarianism in Peru’. In M. Molyneux and S. Razavi (eds) Gender Justice, Development and Rights. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bryceson, D. F. (1999) African Rural Labour, Income Diversification and Livelihood Approaches: A Long-Term Development Perspective. ASC Working Paper No. 35. Leiden: African Studies Centre. Cho, Hyoung, Ann Zammit, Jinjoo Chung and In-Soon Kang (2004) ‘Korea’s Miracle and Crisis: What Was in It for Women?’ In Shahra Razavi, Ruth Pearson and Caroline Danloy (eds) Globalization, Export-Oriented Employment, and Social Policy: Gendered Connections. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Devereux, Stephen and R. Sabates-Wheeler (2004) Transformative Social Protection. Working Paper No. 232, Brighton: IDS. Elson, Diane (2004) ‘Social Policy and Macroeconomic Performance: Integrating “the Economic” and “the Social” ’. In T. Mkandawire (ed.) Social Policy in a Development Context. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Esping-Andersen, G. (1990) The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism. Princeton: NJ Princeton University Press. Filgueira, F. (forthcoming) ‘The Latin American Social States: Critical Junctures and Critical Choices’. In Y. Bangura (ed.) Democracy and Social Policy. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Filgueira, F. and Filgueira, C. (2002) ‘Models of Welfare and Models of Capitalism: The Limits of Transferability’. In E. Huber (ed.) Models of Capitalism: Lessons for Latin America. University Park PA: Pennsylvania University Press. Fraser, N. and L. Gordon (1994) ‘Civil Citizenship Against Social Citizenship? On the Ideology of Contract-Versus-Charity’. In van Steenbergen (ed.) The Condition of Citizenship. London: Sage. Fukuyama, F. (2004) ‘The Imperative of State-Building’. Journal of Democracy, Vol. 15, No. 2, pp.17–31. GASPP (Globalism and Social Policy Programme) (2005) Copenhagen Social Summit Ten Years On: The Need for Effective Social Policies Nationally, Regionally and Globally. Policy Brief No 6, Helsinki: GASPP/STAKES. Grindle, M. (1986) State and Countryside. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press. Haggard, S. and R. R. Kaufman (1995) The Political Economy of Democratic Transitions. Princeton: NJ Princeton University Press. Haney, L. (2003) ‘Welfare Reform with a Familial Face’. In L. Haney and L. Pollard (eds) Families of a New World: Gender, Politics, and State Development in a Global Context. New York: Routledge.

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Haney, L. and L. Pollard (2003) ‘In a Family Way: Theorizing State and Familial Relations’. In L. Haney and L. Pollard (eds) Families of a New World: Gender, Politics, and State Development in a Global Context. New York: Routledge. Hassim, S. (2006) ‘Women in African Parliaments: The Virtuous Circle of Representation’. In G. Bauer and H. Britton (eds) Women in African Parliaments. Boulder: Lynne Rienner. Heintz, J. (2005) The Growing Informality of Labour Markets. Paper presented at the UNRISD/CGGS Conference on Gender and Social Policy, Marstrand, Sweden, 28–29 May. Hobson, B. (1990) ‘No Exit No Voice – Women’s Economic Dependency and the Welfare State’. Acta Sociologia 33, 235–250. Holzmann, R. and S. Jorgensen (2000) Social Risk Management: A New Conceptual Framework for Social Protection and Beyond. Social Protection Discussion Paper Series, No. 6, Washington DC: World Bank. Huber, E. and J. D. Stephens (2000a) ‘Partisan Governance, Women’s Employment, and the Social Democratic Service State’. American Sociological Review, Vol. 65, No. 3, 323–42. Huber, E. and J. D. Stephens (2000b) The Political Economy of Pension Reform in Latin America. OPG No. 7, Geneva: UNRISD. Huber, E. (2000) Social Policy in a Development Context: Notes on Social Security and Pensions Systems. Presentation at the UNRISD Conference on Social Policy in a Development Context, Stockholm, 23–24 September. International Labour Organization (ILO) (2002) Women and Men in the Informal Economy: A Statistical Picture. Geneva: ILO. Korpi, W. and J. Palme (1998) ‘The Paradox of Redistribution and Strategies of Equality: Welfare State Institutions, Inequality, and Poverty in the Western Countries’. American Sociological Review, Vol. 63, 661–87. Koven, S. and S. Michel (1993) ‘Introduction: Motherworlds’. In S. Koven and S. Michel (eds) Mothers of a New World: Maternalist Politics and the Origins of Welfare States. New York: Routledge. Lee, C.K. (2005) Livelihood Struggles and Market Reform: (Un)making Chinese Labour After State Socialism. OP No. 2, Geneva: UNRISD. Lewis, Jane (1992) ‘Gender and the Development of Welfare Regimes’. Journal of European Social Policy, Vol. 2, No. 3, 159–73. Mackintosh, M. and M. Koivusalo (2005). ‘Health Systems and Commercialisation: In Search of Good Sense’. In M. Mackintosh and M. Koivusalo (eds) Commercialization of Health Care: Global and Local Dynamics and Policy Responses. Basingstoke, Palgrave. Minogue, Martin (2002) ‘Power to the People? Good Governance and the Reshaping of the State’. In U. Kothari, and M. Minogue (eds) Development Theory and Practice: Critical Perspectives. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Mhone, G. (2004) ‘Historical Trajectories of Social Policy in Post-Colonial Africa: The Case of Zambia’. In T. Mkandawire (ed.) Social Policy in a Development Context. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Midgley, J. (1995) Social Development: The Developmental Perspective in Social Welfare. London: Sage. Mkandawire, T. (2005) Targeting and Universalism in Poverty Reduction. Programme Paper No. 23, Geneva: UNRISD. Mkandawire, T. (2004) ‘Social Policy in a Development Context: Introduction’. In T. Mkandawire (ed.) Social Policy in a Development Context. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Molyneux, M. (forthcoming) Poverty Relief and the New Social Policy in Latin America: Mothers at the Service of the State? Programme Paper, Geneva: UNRISD. Orloff, A. S. (1993) ‘Gender and the Social Rights of Citizenship: The Comparative Analysis of Gender Relations and Welfare States’. American Sociological Review, No. 58, 303–28. Orloff, A. S. (2002) Women’s Employment and Welfare Regimes: Globalization, Export Orientation and Social Policy in Europe and North America. SPD No.12, Geneva: UNRISD. Phillips, A. (2001) ‘Feminism and Liberalism Revisited: Has Martha Nussbaum Got It Right?’ Constellations 8, No. 2, 249–66.

Gender and Social Policy in a Global Context 39 Polanyi, K. (1957) The Great Transformation. Boston: Beacon Press. Razavi, S. (1999) ‘Gender, Poverty and Well-being: Introduction’. Development and Change, Vol. 30, No. 3, 1–27. Rothschild, D. (1994) ‘Structuring State-Society Relations in Africa: Toward an Enabling Political Environment’. In J. A. Widner (ed.) Economic Change and Political Liberalization in Sub-saharan Africa. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Rueschemeyer, D., E. Huber and J. D. Stephens (1992) Capitalist Development and Democracy. Chicago: Universty of Chicago Press. Ruggie, J. G. (2003) ‘Taking Embedded Liberalism Global: The Corporate Connection’. In David Held and Mathias Koenig-Archibugi (eds) Taming Globalization: Frontiers of Governance. Cambridge: Polity. Sainsbury, D. (1996) Gender Equality and Welfare States. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stark, A. (2005) ‘Warm Hands in Cold Age – On the Need of a New World Order of Care’. Feminist Economics, Vol. 11, No. 2, 7–36. Tendler, J. (2004) ‘Why Social Policy is Condemned to a Residual Category of Safety Nets and What to Do About it’. In T. Mkandawire (ed.) Social Policy in a Development Context. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Tibandebage, P. (2004) Health Sector Reforms and Gender Implications: A Case Study of Mutual Health Insurance in Tanzania. Mimeo, Geneva: UNRISD. Tokman, V. E. (2002) ‘Jobs and Solidarity: Challenges for Labour Market Policy in Latin America’. In E. Huber (ed.) Models of Capitalism: Lessons for Latin America. University Park PA: Pennsylvania State University Press. Tripp, A.M. (2002) ‘The Politics of Women’s Rights and Cultural Diversity in Uganda’. In M. Molyneux and S. Razavi (eds) Gender Justice, Development and Rights. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Tsikata, D. (2000) ‘Lip Service and Peanuts: The State and National Machinery for Women in Africa’. Accra: Third World Network. Tsikata, D. (2004) Economic Liberalization, the Informalization of Work and Urban Women’s Livelihoods in Sub-Saharan Africa since the 1990s. Background paper for Gender Equality: Striving for Justice in an Unequal World. Geneva: UNRISD. UN Millennium Project Task Force on Gender Equality (2005) Taking Action: Achieving Gender Equality and Empowering Women. London: Earthscan. United Nations Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD) (2005) Gender Equality: Striving for Justice in an Unequal World. Geneva: UNRISD. Vivian, J. (1995) ‘How Safe are “Social Safety Nets”? Adjustment and Social Sector Restructuring in Developing Countries’. In J. Vivian (ed.) Adjustment and Social Sector Restructuring. London: UNRISD/Frank Cass. White, G. (1996) ‘Civil Society, Democratization and Development’. In R. Luckham and G. White (eds) Democratization in the South: The Jagged Wave. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Whitehead, A. (2004) The Gendered Impacts of Liberalization Policies on African Agricultural Economies and Rural Livelihoods. Background paper for Gender Equality: Striving for Justice in an Unequal World, Geneva: UNRISD. Whitehead, A. and M. Lockwood (1999) ‘Gendering Poverty: A Review of Six World Bank African Poverty Assessments’. Development and Change, Vol. 30, No. 3. Whitehead, A. and N. Kabeer (2001) Living with Uncertainty: Gender, Livelihoods and Pro-poor Growth in Rural Sub-Saharan Africa. Working Paper 134, Brighton: IDS. World Bank (1997) World Development Report 1997: The State in a Changing World. Washington DC: World Bank. World Bank (2000) World Development Report 2000/1: Attacking Poverty. Washington DC: World Bank. World Bank (2003) World Development Report 2004: Making Services Work for the Poor. New York: Oxford University Press.


Part I Historical and Regional Trajectories in Social Provisioning


2 Mothers at the Service of the New Poverty Agenda: The PROGRESA/ Oportunidades Programme in Mexico1 Maxine Molyneux

In Latin America as elsewhere in the world, gender bias and masculine prerogative have prevailed in social policy as in social life more broadly, with entitlements resting on culturally sanctioned and deeply rooted notions of gender difference and patriarchal authority. These have generally accorded with idealized assumptions about the asymmetric social positions occupied by the sexes with male breadwinners and female mother-dependents receiving benefits according to these normative social roles. Such assumptions have proved remarkably universal and enduring even where, as in Latin America, gender divisions have been modified by women’s mass entry into the labour force and by equal rights legislation. This chapter considers the changes and continuities in social policy provision in Latin America through a focus on the ways that women, in particular mothers, are positioned within the new anti-poverty programmes that have followed structural reform. It examines a flagship anti-poverty programme known as Oportunidades (Opportunities) established in Mexico at the end of the last decade.2 Seen by some commentators as a quintessentially neoliberal programme, and embodying many of the main ideas of the ‘New Poverty Agenda’,3 Oportunidades represents a novel combination of earlier social policy approaches with the contractarian, co-responsibility models associated with new approaches to social welfare and poverty relief. This chapter is in two main parts; the first provides the background context for the emergence of the new approaches to poverty; the second describes and critically examines the Mexican programme’s selective construction of social need.

Social policy in Latin America prior to the reforms In Latin America, low tax revenues and weak commitments to redistributive policies ruled out the development of effective, universal welfare systems. Only five countries, Argentina, Uruguay, Costa Rica, Chile and Cuba4 developed a form of welfare state and, with the exception of the latter, none achieved universality of entitlement or coverage.5 Nonetheless, from the late nineteenth century, if to 43

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widely different degrees, some forms of social provision began to evolve. These were principally concentrated on the education and health sectors and, where Bismarckian models were influential, as in Mexico and Chile, state pension schemes, along with other forms of social insurance for privileged (predominantly masculine) sectors of the labour and armed forces, accompanied the process of state formation. From the first decade of the twentieth century social rights increased as a result of successful demands by organized labour and socialist parties for social reform, with an incremental assumption of social responsibility by governments. In the 1920s and 1930s ‘improving the “race” ’ in order to secure the conditions for development and head off threats of disorder became the leitmotif of the social reform and eugenics movements. Many women were among the promoters of ‘social hygiene’ and its derivative, the science of puericultura (child development). They energetically supported policy and legal changes which were maternalist in orientation, demanding benefits and services for mothers and children. Mothers were among the first to be recognized as social policy claimants whether as married women or as ‘unfortunates’, that is, impoverished single mothers. However, it was often stated in the discussion of these provisions that it was primarily in the interest of their children that women might receive benefits of a financial, educational or medical kind. In other words it was in the construction of children’s needs that their mothers received entitlements, that is, in order to better fulfil their maternal responsibilities. The era of nationalist state-centred development under corporatist populism was inaugurated by the crisis of 1929 but was more securely established in the postwar period. It brought some expansion in entitlements, notably for organized labour, the natural constituency of corporatist regimes and a relatively privileged sector for long afterwards. Social rights correspondingly expanded in Mexico, Chile, Argentina and Brazil among others, and even as populist corporatism waned, the technocratic developmentalism that replaced it continued to expand the social sector. By the end of the 1960s all but the poorest states had established the main planks of social welfare, if at times in skeletal form. Health and education were publicly funded, and social insurance systems covered some categories of formalsector workers. Regional policies were now influenced by the ECLAC (United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean) or CEPALISTA guidelines which drew on human capital theory to anchor social policy more firmly in a discourse of development priorities, as Latin American states presided over a rapid expansion of literacy programmes and primary education. At this time too, the ‘basic needs’ approach was gaining support, leading to some greater attention to ‘subsistence rights’6 through the provision of food to the poor, sanitary works, potable water and affordable housing. Positive growth rates, rapid urbanization and social mobilization, all caused Latin American states, irrespective of political inclination, to embark on programmes to meet rising social demands and expectations. These decades saw Latin America leading the developing countries in terms of social expenditure and social coverage. There was a corresponding

Mothers at the Service of the New Poverty Agenda 45

improvement in human development indicators as life expectancy steadily increased and infant mortality declined, to place Latin America by 1980 at the top of the developing regions (Filgueira and Filgueira 2002). While CEPALISTA developmentalism was associated with universalist principles and despite the expansion of social provision from the 1960s, most of the region still suffered from poor and skewed coverage and low-quality services. Social policy provision in Latin America remained unevenly distributed between the richer and poorer states and within these, between rural and urban populations, as well as across sectors.7 The state sector was often underfunded, but was all too often also blighted by poor administration with governments reactive to problems as they arose, and susceptible to interest groups’ political demand-making. Entitlements remained for the most part tied to formal employment with pensions available only to a minority of workers, with some insurance schemes for disability, unemployment and maternity. These arrangements did not cover the rural sector or the large proportion (sometimes as much as 40 per cent of the active population) which was in the informal sector or in domestic service, often the largest employer of urban women. In 1980 some 130 million people or 33 per cent of the total population of Latin America lived below the UN-defined poverty line. Since many of the poor were rural workers, or employed in the informal sector, they were unable to qualify for social insurance systems. In the lower-income countries such as Guatemala, Nicaragua, Bolivia, Ecuador and Peru, and in some of the better-off states such as Brazil and Mexico, the situation was one of widespread poverty, sharp regional and ethnic inequalities, poor state provision, a weak entitlement framework, minimal and far from efficient safety nets. Organizational and managerial deficiencies added to the problem in many countries, exemplified in multiple and overlapping welfare institutions, legal complexity, statistical inadequacies, and lack of coordination between departments (Mesa-Lago 1994: 76). For those living in and on the margins of poverty, that is, up to half the population in half of the countries of the region in the 1990s, the principal safety net was emergency relief (food aid, primary health), family and kinship support, supplemented by the voluntary sector, comprising NGOs, church-based relief and charitable organizations. Gender and social policy Social policy in Latin America, contrary to some readings, was not gender blind but instead worked with gendered conceptions of social needs, ones which were familial, patriarchal and paternalistic. While women gained access to education and health, and entered the workforce, by broad consensus their primary duties lay within the family. Liberal citizenship might extend to women in the public realm, but in the private domain, a different order prevailed. Built into the earliest forms of social provision were assumptions of female dependency on a male breadwinner which positioned women as under the protection of ‘their’ men, whether husbands of fathers. Motherhood, too, was assumed to be a natural and inevitable destiny of women, one that brought them both rights and duties. Thus, in Latin America, women enjoyed some universal rights, but other rights and

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entitlements remained closely bound to the family, and were accessed by virtue of their status as wives and mothers. If, in the public realm of work, women employees gained recognition as mothers and were granted comparatively generous maternity leaves, in the private realm, on marriage, they lost certain citizens’ rights. Instead, like children, they gained a measure of protection, as those of dependent status. Widows of soldiers, professionals and some formal-sector workers were able on this basis to claim their deceased husbands’ pensions. Yet most working women were located in low-paid jobs, in unorganized sectors of employment, and in work that was considered supplementary to the male wage and lacked social protection. In Mexico, the cataclysmic upheavals of the revolution did not greatly alter this general picture. The constitution of 1917 and the civil code of 1928 accorded women legal equality and gave them some new rights, such as the right to divorce, but denied them full civil rights and political rights; universal female franchise was not granted until 1953, later than in most other Latin American states. Over time the law placed limits on men’s authority over their wives, but it was only in 1974 that the code making women responsible for the domestic sphere, and abandoning the home a specifically female offence, was repealed (Varley 2000). As elsewhere in Latin America, Mexican women workers and women’s organizations pressed for the regulation of their working hours, in order to protect them from over-exploitation. They gained popular support for these demands in a context where there were widely expressed concerns that this was necessary to safeguard their ‘maternal functions’.8 Paternalist sentiments were aroused by such claims, with women and children positioned in this discourse as requiring protection; many women protested that this was an excuse to deny them the right to equal work and well-paid jobs. Mexico’s ‘perfect dictatorship’, a blend of one-party rule and corporatism, combined revolutionary rhetoric, radical reform measures and social conservatism. Catholicism retained a hold over the population and, despite the secular disposition of the early revolutionaries, exerted a continuing influence over social policy and women’s rights. In other ways too, women lost out in the process of post-revolutionary state formation. Corporatism established a political bond between the worker and the ruling party ensuring the loyalty of the more powerful sectors of organized labour. Male-dominated trade unions were the principal beneficiaries of corporatist social contracts that enrolled men in the service of the state as workers and patriots, their compliance secured through negotiated pacts over wages, working conditions and social security (Rosemblatt 2000). Where women had acquired a significant presence in the workforce, they laboured in poorly paid, less-organized sectors. Not only were they marginal to the contractual negotiations of the corporatist state, but they also occupied an ambiguous place in wage negotiations since their very presence in the workforce could compromise the historic demand of organized labour for a ‘family wage’, one premised on female dependency and the presence in the family of the full-time housewife and mother. Corporatist bargaining did however secure the passage of some welfare measures, but what evolved was a selective, predominantly urban system of


welfare, with rural and indigenous women largely excluded from these and other entitlements. Despite the agrarian reform’s revolutionary momentum, women were more often than not denied rights to property in land, which through law or custom remained a male prerogative, thus revealing the gender bias as well as the limits of the ruling Party’s inclusive pretensions. If women gained entitlements as workers, these too were not only restricted to a small section of the female population, but were often unclaimable in practice.9 What little social protection was available to women was more likely to be accessed through marriage and family law which specified that it was a husband’s duty to provide for his wife and children, and afforded women conjugal property rights. While there occurred some limited individuation of women’s rights from the family as a result of reforms spearheaded by feminist movements, these general features of women’s social rights endured in Latin America. The restricted reach and scope of social policy, the poor quality and difficulty of accessing many of the services and benefits, meant that most low-income women could not and did not look to the state for much in the way of support on their own behalf. They might be fortunate enough to attain some minimum provision in education and health, and some support for their children, but individual entitlements such as income support and pensions were distant dreams for the majority. Security, such as it was, came from paid work where it could be found, from marriage, kin and community, and from the church.

Reforming the social sector The fragility and inefficiency of the social security systems prevailing across much of Latin America were features that were sharply accentuated by the broader socioeconomic trends that set in from the mid-1970s. The oil shocks, the debt crisis and subsequent recession of the 1980s combined with demographic pressures – and in much of the region with political conflict – to erode the social sector at precisely the moment when its expansion was most needed. This was a period which saw more women entering the labour force, while households sought to cut consumption, substituting market-purchased goods and services with reproductive labour, largely provided by women (González de la Rocha 1994). The human and social costs of the first phase of the structural reforms helped to revive longstanding debates over social sector reform which now took place both within the region and in international development policy arenas. Cornia et al.’s UNICEF study, Adjustment with a Human Face (1987) is widely acknowledged as a ‘wake up call’ to international agencies to pay attention to the social costs of adjustment, but it was also important for the policy recommendations that it made. While presaging future policies, these recommendations also confirmed trends that were already under way; these included more targeting as a means to enhance the redistributive role of the state, employment-creating labour-intensive public work schemes, subsidies of certain items, and, crucially, for the scope of social policy to be widened during times of adjustment. These ideas were already achieving wide acceptance in development institutions, but would take time, political will, and resources to implement across the region.

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Poverty was beginning to be acknowledged as a more enduring phenomenon than initially supposed. If, as many argued, it was not transitional but a structural effect of the New Economic Model, it would require closer attention to social assistance, with anti-poverty measures and state programmes that were more extensive in scope than Emergency Social Funds had allowed. By the end of the 1980s many governments and international development agencies accepted that there was an urgent need to address the ‘social deficit’ if the neoliberal reforms were not to be violently rejected by the populations that had suffered so harshly from them. There was also broad agreement that if the social sector was to be more efficient it had to be brought into closer alignment with the market and with trends elsewhere towards pluralizing service delivery. A new approach to social policy, in which poverty was a crucial element, was evolving. The central features of the new social policies as they evolved from the mid-1970s conform to general descriptions of neoliberal policy assumptions, containing as they do the familiar elements of targeting, privatization, multi-tierism and pluralization of service providers, along with a greater reliance on the market for poverty relief, most evidently in micro-credit programmes. But the way these elements were interpreted and incorporated into social policy reflected not only broader shifts within international development policy but also specific regional developments. ‘Neoliberalism’ in Latin America passed through at least two main phases. The first, from the 1970s, generally seen as the period of ‘high neoliberalism’, coincided with the policies of structural adjustment and stabilization adopted in the debt crisis. These were the policies that were dubbed ‘market fundamentalism’ when governments, often under conditionalities imposed by the international financial institutions, sharply decreased the realm of state action through privatization, imposed tight fiscal controls, liberalized capital accounts, and opened up their economies. Since then, there has been some revision of these policies, with results summed up as ‘the post-Washington consensus’, sometimes hailed as ‘the end of neoliberalism’.10 The original adjustment package was modified in three ways that concern us here: the state was partially rehabilitated in development policy and planning, its role described as ‘facilitator’ by the World Bank and its efficiency to be enhanced through good governance reforms; there was a clear recognition by the international financial institutions and by Latin American governments that the social deficit had to be addressed, so social policy was returned to the regional agenda; and poverty relief became a central component of social policy. If in the 1980s policy attention focused on ‘getting the economy right’, in the 1990s there were attempts to attend to the hitherto neglected social realm and to build appropriate institutions. Significant though these policy shifts might be, they did not greatly alter the broader outline of macroeconomic policy; governments remained committed to fiscal discipline and market-led growth.

The new social policy materializes As Brock et al. (2001) argue, the evolution of development policy is not usefully seen as following a uni-linear dynamic; the social policies and development


rhetorics that accompanied the post-adjustment phase are better described as ‘hybridized’, and seen as the result of a complex dynamic of power and agency, involving a wider range of actors, interest groups and discourse coalitions than top-down accounts usually allow. This is particularly true of social policy which is less subject to influence by IFIs than some other areas of policy, as it has to be approved by parliaments as well as by interest groups such as trade unions. In Latin America by the early 1990s, reforms and policies affecting the social sector were being developed, some of which had first been applied experimentally from the 1970s, some of which were new. In the latter category were more decentralized health and education provision, and the privatization of pensions; in the former, a greater emphasis on participatory mechanisms in the delivery of social welfare. All were intended to increase efficiency, accountability and quality (Grindle 2000). As poverty moved up the scale of international priorities, 1990 saw the launch of the World Bank’s New Poverty Agenda and towards the end of the decade the Millennium Development Goals committed governments to halving extreme poverty and hunger between 1990 and 2015. Development policy analysts acknowledge that the ideas being advanced at this time marked a significant departure from the structural adjustment objectives pursued during the first phase of the reforms (Lipton and Maxwell 1992: 1). Among the main changes were the importance of civil society, along with an emphasis on certain concepts that became central to the New Poverty Agenda, ones that were not novel in themselves but perhaps were so in combination. These were the principles of participation, empowerment and co-responsibility. Participation is the least novel of the three but it moved from the margins of development practice in the 1970s to form part of mainstream thinking in the 1990s. Its combination of ethical (democratic) principle with efficiency arguments gave it a wide appeal, seeming to trump bureaucratic centralism on both counts. A wide range of participatory programmes were established, following the model of demand-led assistance, first introduced in the Emergency Social Funds, which were later renamed as Social Investment Funds and established on a more permanent basis. Decentralization too, has proceeded in tandem with novel forms of participatory policy fora. From a broader societal perspective, participation was also argued to tackle the condition of social exclusion that frequently attends poverty and deprivation and is seen as central to, if not synonymous with the creation and maintenance of social capital, itself a policy concern of the 1990s.11 Empowerment, like participation with which it is linked (since participation is one of the means to secure empowerment), moved into mainstream development practice in the 1980s. Widely used in the practice of women’s organizations and by NGOs, it has generally been understood as a process of transformation involving both the acquisition of capabilities and changes in subjectivity that enable agency to be exercised. Empowering the poor and the disadvantaged should result in their gaining more voice and presence in decision-making arenas that affect their lives and in developing the capabilities to enable them to escape poverty. In Latin America support for such ‘empowerment approaches’ built on the critique of traditional philanthropy that lived on in ‘assistentialist’ policies and which saw

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‘beneficiaries’ as passive recipients of charity. The new policies instead situate ‘users’ as ‘stakeholders’ – with interests and responsibilities – who are ‘participants in the policy process’. They are no longer ‘beneficiaries’ or ‘clients of the state’ but empowered, active citizens capable of formulating their own needs and engaging in the setting of priorities and the implementation of projects, whether community development schemes, health and housing or micro-credit enterprises. As the capabilities approach has gained wider acceptance in policy circles, empowerment has come to mean that the poor are to be trained and educated to prepare them for employment. Poverty ‘relief’ must not be considered a short-term palliative, but through incorporating elements that enhance the capacities and choices of the poor, they will be helped to develop the means to secure a route out of poverty. A further dimension is added to the conceptual basis of the new approach by ‘social risk management’ as outlined in the 2000/1 World Development Report Attacking Poverty wherein sustainable poverty alleviation entails measures to increase the security of the poor, through developing their capacity to ‘cope, mitigate or reduce’ their risks. The risk-management approach has been adopted by a wide range of multilateral lending institutions. Third, and again, closely related to these previous concepts, is the principle of beneficiary responsibility variously articulated in ideas of ‘co-management/ responsibility’ self-help or self-sufficiency, ideas that gained resonance in the 1980s when the state was identified as a major cause of development failure and accused of nurturing a ‘dependency culture’. At the same time the World Bank, concerned with cost-sharing and efficiency, formulated policies in which the no-longer-passive recipients of state handouts became active participants in meeting the costs of development. The growth of cost recovery, co-financing and co-management schemes along with community participation and voluntary work became a means to promote self-help in development and welfare projects. As states moved towards targeted assistance programmes, attention focused on how the poor could be encouraged to ‘help themselves’. This idea informed a range of policies, from giving economic assistance (as in the case of micro-credit), to providing basic education in nutrition and healthcare. These latter were designed, as in the earlier ‘social hygiene’ movements of the 1920s and 1930s, to ‘modernize and civilize’ the poor, but also to equip them with the attitudinal wherewithal to manage their own destinies, ‘free’ of state dependency but subordinated to the discipline of the market (Rose and Miller 1992).

Latin America’s new social policy In Latin America the novel features of this ‘post-Washington consensus’ phase of policy evolution lay in the specific regional interpretation of its key elements. This was most evident in three areas: the changes in the locus and character of state activities; the rise of parallel institutions to assist in the delivery of social welfare; and the promotion of civil society partnership in development and poverty relief programmes. How these elements combined with efforts to create a democratic politics in post-authoritarian Latin America and resonated with historic demands


for reform are essential in understanding the ways in which social policy was refashioned in the changed circumstances of the 1990s. The Latin American experience of post-adjustment policy-making was marked by an ad hoc accommodation to the precepts of the New Economic Model, combining new and old policy elements, while at the same time generating some original trends and initiatives that entered the global debate on poverty relief. In practice policies range along a spectrum from social liberal variants with universalist inclusionary principles to those based on targeted provision with a greater role for privatized services. Brazil for example introduced a universal public pension to which everyone over a certain age is entitled. Indeed the Brazilian Constitution of 1988 was the first to combine proposals for an alliance between state and civil society, with a commitment to universal social polices and raising total public expenditure, along with new institutional structures, such as management councils and public hearings, where state and civil society could ‘work together to ensure that priority-setting matched the public and private interests and secure accountability in the definition and delivery of social policies’ (Coelho et al. 2002). In all of these variants, the Latin American region has seen the establishment of a wide range of new agencies and institutional structures for providing access to social services. Government-sponsored poverty programmes have been established to complement the continuing work of Social Investment Funds, and consultative processes and institutions have been put in place at local and national levels. As elsewhere, the official policy discourses and forms of entitlement that are being created in Latin America tend to place more emphasis on individual responsibility, while social security is defined in official statements as no longer residing solely with the state. It now involves the ‘co-management of risk’: that is, the individual has to make responsible provision against risks (through education and employment); the family too, must play its part (through better care); while the market (through private interests) and the community (through decentralization, ‘co-responsibility’ and the voluntary sector) are all involved in the decentring of expectations of welfare from the state. The specificity of the Latin American region not only stamped its mark on how these ideas would materialize in policy but also how they would be received by citizens. In a context of widespread distrust of the state and weak social protection, the refiguring of state–society relations offered by the NSP received a mixed response, not by any means all negative. The core ideas at least seemed to offer some potential for advancing much needed reforms, if social and political conditions allowed. Decentralization, ‘good governance’, accountability, participation and urgent attention to poverty, resonated with the reform agendas of democratic parties, movements, and civil society organizations that were working to democratize politics and society following years of military rule.12 From the 1980s calls to ‘deepen’ democracy, and to address the ‘social deficit’ of the adjustment years converged with some of the Good Governance and state reform agendas. The human rights movement in the 1990s was enjoying a particularly prominent international role, and this impacted on Latin America at a time of considerable receptivity to the new inclusions of women’s and children’s rights and indigenous

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claims for recognition and justice (Molyneux and Lazar 2003). Women’s organizations of various kinds were particularly active in promoting women’s rights, working simultaneously within communities and at state level to advance reforms in the areas of violence against women, legal and political representation and reproductive rights. They also helped to establish and sustain popular health movements, leadership and legal literacy training for women throughout the 1980s and 1990s.13 Where was the state in this scenario? Analyses of neoliberal restructuring have documented the scaling down of entitlements and of governments’ commitments to universal provision showing the trend towards a greater reliance on the private and third sectors for welfare delivery. These trends have been seen as evidence of the shrinking of the state, its ‘hollowing out’, ‘evacuation’, even ‘disappearance’. Does this accurately describe what has occurred in Latin America? The evidence suggests a more complex picture, a less ‘zero sum’ situation. There has undoubtedly occurred a decisive shift from the state-centric principles that previously governed social policy, but this has not gone along with the ‘evacuation of the state’ from social provision. This widely held view of post-1980 reforms does not allow us to capture what is different about current social policy figurations of the state, or the substantial changes that the state itself has undergone during the decades of ‘neoliberal hegemony’. In Latin America social reproduction in the domains of health and educational provision remains by and large the responsibility of the state across a range of countries, despite decades of creeping privatization and underfunding. After the critical watershed years of the debt crisis when social expenditure per capita fell to unprecedented levels,14 by 1991 it recovered the levels registered at the beginning of the 1980s, and in recent years social expenditure has generally risen across the region. While these figures must be treated with caution, the role of the state in public welfare remains significant. The state itself however has undergone reform in this process, led by efforts to advance good-governance agendas designed to make state institutions more efficient and accountable and by democratic reform parties and movements. This has gone along with support for decentralization and deconcentration, with Latin America taking the lead in the 1990s as the region that advanced furthest down this path. Re-democratization involved a wave of constitutional reform across the region, and decentralization was one of the democratic principles incorporated in the new frameworks to redress a historic legacy of over-centralization. Across the Latin American region from the 1980s, states have been engaged in a process aimed at strengthening and reforming local government, while devolving a greater share of the budget to locally administered state agencies. This process of ‘municipalization’ has brought the state back into the domain of welfare provision, albeit in a new guise. As we will see in the case of Mexico, poverty relief has engaged states, both central and local, in a wide range of programmes involving millions of dollars of public and international funding. None of this is to suggest that the decentralization process in Latin America has overcome distributive problems or secured adequate citizen representation. Devolved resources remain sparse and without plans to tackle regional economic regeneration, decentralization has


not generally produced a marked improvement in welfare coverage. Yet, while moribund, corrupt and clientelized states abound in the region, states are still central actors in the development and welfare domains. As Judith Tendler shows in the case of Ceará with a population of 40 million in the Brazilian North East, the state ‘is doing more’ not less ‘and something quite different as well’ (Tendler 1997: 24). These multiple changes in social welfare provision were bound to have consequences for the large numbers of female poor. In recent years female poverty, as distinct from the gender dimensions of poverty, acquired considerably more policy attention. If during the period of SAPs women were the invisible army who bore the costs of the adjustment to ensure household survival, the New Poverty Agenda appeared to render women more visible. From the later 1980s women’s poverty as well as their role in poverty relief programmes became increasingly evident to policy communities. Feminist advocacy and research into the gendered effects of adjustment played their part in securing this visibility: female poverty was a central theme of all the International Women’s conferences and the Beijing Platform for Action (PFA) called for it to be addressed as a matter of urgency. The PFA proposed a number of priorities for assistance: the targeting of female-headed households, greater participation of women in decision-making at community and other levels, and the extension of credit to low-income women were among them. The promotion of these ideas was also part of a broader effort by Latin American women’s organizations to incorporate a gender analysis into regional declarations and government policies. The ‘new social policy’ (NSP) therefore evolved during the high point of global feminism and yet, as we shall see, its practical realization often meant that it existed in tension with the latter’s emphasis on equality. However, while the current focus on poverty has its novel features, it is also marked by a continuum with earlier Women and Development approaches that saw ‘integrating women’ as a way to secure broader development objectives, while failing to tackle underlying causes of gender inequality. If this is a general rule that all too often applies today, it is nonetheless important to emphasize the considerable diversity in the conception and implementation of these new programmes. As we will see, the objectives of these programmes determine how women will be involved and how they are affected. To illustrate this point, we now turn to consider the Mexican anti-poverty programme, PROGRESA/Oportunidades.

PROGRESA/Oportunidades Mexico is an upper-middle-income country and one of the most industrialized in Latin America, but poverty is estimated to afflict half of the population, with a fifth in extreme poverty, due to its highly skewed income distribution.15 Social divisions inherited from the colonial period and deepened through urban bias exist along regional, ethnic and gender lines, with 44 per cent of indigenous Mexicans found in the poorest income quintile. Mexico’s state welfare system is based on formal employment but coverage is restricted to just 55 per cent of the population due to the character of its labour market (Laurell 2003: 324). Up to half

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of the economically active population depends upon the informal sector for its income, and has access to few benefits. Moreover the size of the informal sector means that Mexico collects only 11 per cent of GDP in tax, well below the average for Latin America (which is 18 per cent) and below that of relatively low-tax countries such as the United States.16 The election of Partido Acción Nactional (PAN) leader Vicente Fox in 2000 ended 71 years of one-party rule by the Pártido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI), and was accompanied by efforts to reform existing institutions along more democratic and accountable lines. Fox pledged to make social justice a priority of his government, recognizing that poverty was a ‘multidimensional phenomenon’, and raising social expenditure by an average of almost 10 per cent per annum. The main poverty relief programme directed at those in extreme poverty, PROGRESA was modified and relaunched in 2002 under the name of Human Development Opportunities (Desarrollo Humano Oportunidades) known today as Oportunidades. The programme’s coverage, formerly restricted to the rural poor, was extended to include urban and semi urban areas,17 and the number of those inscribed in the programme was expanded from 2.6 million families (in 1999), the equivalent of 40 per cent of all rural families (Rocha Menocal 2001: 520), to 4.2 million families in 2002 (of whom 2.9 were rural) (González de la Rocha 2003: 14). By 2005 it covered five million households with an estimated 25 million beneficiaries. Oportunidades is one of the most extensive programme of its kind in Latin America. It is also considered to be the most successfully developed example of the region’s NSP-inspired anti-poverty programmes.18 It has been judged to be particularly effective in meeting its goals, and this is attributed to an unusually high degree of presidential support and inter-ministerial collaboration along with an annual budget (in 2004) of 25 billion pesos and a recent loan of $1 billion from the IDB. An undoubted strength of the programme is that it is subject to regular evaluations, including some by outside bodies, and has been responsive to suggestions for improvements and modifications. Oportunidades is a targeted cash transfer programme that attempts to combine short- and long-term objectives of sustainable poverty reduction, as advanced by the social risk-management approach. As noted earlier this approach aims to tackle poverty though helping the poor to ‘cope, mitigate or reduce’ their risk of falling into or being trapped in poverty. Oportunidades aims to improve human development by focusing on children’s education, nutrition and health. It is based on the assumption that poor households do not invest enough in their human capital, and are thus caught in a vicious circle of intergenerational transmission of poverty with children dropping out of school and destined to suffer the long-term effects of deprivation. Families selected for the programme are therefore helped, through cash transfers, with the financial and opportunity costs of having children in school. The transfers are primarily in the form of ‘scholarships’ for children to attend school,19 supplemented by additional cash to improve nutrition where required. The practical functioning of the programme centres on mothers as the key to securing improvements in the life chances of their children, born and unborn. It seeks to strengthen, through workshops and monitoring, the mothers’ responsibilities for children’s


health and education and to improve the nutritional status of their children (and of themselves, if they are pregnant or breastfeeding). Secondary outcomes such as building the mothers’ capacities, empowerment, citizen participation and strengthening community ties are part of the programme’s goals, but how these are interpreted has varied over time and the quality of what is on offer under these headings depends upon local authorities and cooperating professionals. Oportunidades’ guiding principles are designed to differentiate it from assistentialist programmes through an emphasis on the participants’ ‘active management’ of their risk through ‘co-responsibility’ (cogestion) or co-management. Responsibility for health and education is to be recognised as not only the government’s but the whole of society’s, and therefore should be assumed by the entire community. However, the responsibility of the ‘entire community’ is perhaps better described as being devolved to mothers who are those designated as being primarily responsible for securing the programme’s outcomes. Co-responsibility is formalized through a quasi-contractual understanding that in return for the entitlements proffered by the programme, certain obligations are to be discharged by the two parties, that is, the programme and the participating mother. This conditional form of entitlement, although well established in other regions and emanating from the United States, is of more recent origin in Latin America but it is being widely adopted. In this case the responsible participants (mothers) receive their stipend on condition that they fulfil the duties laid out by the programme managers: this involves taking children for regular health checks, meeting targets for ensuring their children’s attendance at school, attending workshops on health and programme coordinators’ meetings, and contributing a set number of hours of work to the community, typically for cleaning buildings or clearing rubbish. Failure to comply with the requirements can lead to being struck off the programme. On the available evidence collected through regular evaluations, the programme has been largely successful in its own terms.20 Its stipends have reduced household poverty, and have improved school attendance of children, as well as the health and nutritional levels of all those inscribed in the programmes.21 These are important gains, and are extensively discussed elsewhere. Here we will focus on some of the more contentious aspects of the programme as highlighted by the women participants in interviews and evaluations before considering the question of the programme’s gender impacts. As far as the design of the programme is concerned there appear to be two main criticisms made by participants which raise some general issues of principle. These are the issue of targeting and that of co-responsibility. With regard to the first, one large-scale multi-site assessment carried out by the World Bank and others22 found that while none of the women who participated in the programmes doubted that Oportunidades had helped them in their struggle against poverty, there were some criticisms of the way targeting was applied. Despite the rigour of the selection mechanisms, and despite the claim that the programme is intended to be seen as a way to ‘[access] a social right in a situation of social inequality’ (Rivero 2002: 6), the targeting process attracted the strongest criticism from participants in some

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evaluation exercises. Along with a general sense that more information should be made available on the programme and on the means-testing mechanism itself, dissatisfaction was expressed over the selection process, which was felt to be arbitrary, excluding people whose needs were considered just as pressing as those included in the programme. Means-testing was felt to ‘generate a lack of trust, social divisions and feelings of envy and exclusion’ among those not selected. (González de la Rocha 2003: 17). These are common problems faced by targeted social-protection programmes in contexts where poverty is extensive and deep, although Oportunidades’ coverage is more extensive than most programmes, a factor which has caused it to be dubbed by those in charge of it, ‘a near universal programme’. A second general complaint voiced by participants was that they felt ‘discriminated against’ by its demands on their time. They believed that they were ‘treated badly or […] were asked to do things in ways that offended their dignity’ (Rivero 2002: 4). As they expressed it, because they were ‘paid by the government’ they were expected to perform community work, such as cleaning schools and health centres, while others in the community did not.23 In another evaluation women complained of being made to do ‘absurd’ tasks just for the sake of keeping them occupied. The requirement to do community work had been incorporated into the earlier programme and was continued into the new post-PROGRESA design by the Fox administration, but following recommendations by evaluators the amount of work time contributed was reduced, and it is still an issue under consideration. In light of such findings it is not surprising that there was, among some communities, resistance to accepting the notion of ‘co-responsibility’. Rather, the requirements of the programme were seen in terms of ‘obligations’ and participants felt that genuine co-responsibility would also oblige teachers to accept their ‘responsibility not to miss classes so much’. This ‘inequality of responsibility’ made some participants resentful of the way they were expected to meet targets set for monitoring the health and education of their children and could be ejected from the programme for failing to do so. Why, they asked, should a teacher’s salary not be reduced if they fail to turn up to teach, since mothers were fined for not meeting their targets? This latter point reflected a general criticism that there were few reliable mechanisms of accountability where complaints regarding the behaviour of officials or professionals could be processed. Nor were the participants given an active role in the design, management and evaluation of the programme (González de la Rocha 2003). It is hard to square these findings with the view that the programme was intended to function as a way of exercising civil, political and social rights and as a means to achieve full citizenship (Rivero 2002).24

Gender relations: now you see them, now you don’t One of the claims made by Oportunidades programme managers is that it has helped to empower the mothers and daughters who are its beneficiaries. It is to this claim that we now turn. As far as gender is concerned it is clear that gender is


not only incorporated into, but is central to, the management and design of the Oportunidades programme. There are four main aspects to this gender sensitivity: first, the programme was one of the earliest in Latin America to give the financial transfers (and principal responsibilities associated with them) to the female head of participating households; second, the transfers associated with children’s school attendance involved an element of affirmative action: stipends were 10 per cent higher for girls than for boys at the onset of secondary school which is when the risk of female drop-out is highest;25 and third, the programme’s healthcare benefits for children were supplemented by a scheme which monitors the health of, and provides support for, pregnant and breastfeeding mothers, and children under two years of age. The fourth aspect of the project design which displays gender sensitivity is the goal to promote the leadership and citizenship of the women subscribed. These goals represent a combination of equality measures (for the girls) and maternalist measures for their mothers, but with what outcomes and gender impacts? There is a paucity of detailed evidence on this question, and far from sufficient to make an accurate estimate.26 Most information that is available comes from a large-scale survey by Adato et al. (2000) and qualitative research by Escobar and González de la Rocha (2004). These allow certain general points to be established. In the first place, as is well known, improving the educational opportunities of girls has strong potential to enhance their self-esteem and life chances, while at the same time sending a message to households and to communities that girls are ‘worth investing in’. Secondly, stipends paid directly to mothers are widely accepted to benefit their households through more equitable redistribution, but in giving women direct control over cash resources, their standing in their communities as well as their leverage within the household can be enhanced. The evidence from evaluations of the Mexican programme confirm these trends, although, as one evaluation noted, while the mothers enjoyed some increased autonomy, this did not necessarily translate into empowerment, since the latter depended on more factors than control over a small money income (Escobar and Gonzalez de la Rocha 2004). Women did however appear to feel that their self-esteem was enhanced as a result of the stipends.27 They also appreciated the programme’s education and training projects (including health and community leadership) where these were well organized, but they wanted more access to education and training (Adato et al. 2000). More research into the gender impacts of the programme is needed to establish if it is producing a redistribution of power and status within households and if so to explain what effects this status reordering has on household livelihoods and well-being. Transfers paid directly to women have the potential to generate conflict if men feel that they are entitled to control money resources and resent any undermining of their authority. However, existing data indicate that no strong relationship has been found linking the programme and the incidence of violence in the home.28 These positive developments however might need to be qualified in the context of more critical appraisals. While those available refer to the earlier years of the

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programme they indicate issues that arose, some of which are ongoing, but also the reflexive response of the programme to these problems. One evaluation of Oportunidades by the Network of Rural promotoras and assessors (Red de Promotoras y Asesoras Rurales) concluded that there was no significant improvement in women’s position in their families,29 the stipend was insufficient to overcome poverty, and the programme did not generate employment opportunities for school-leavers which would enable the cycle of poverty to be overcome.30 Escobar and Gonzalez de la Rocha (2004) further noted that the programme did not take sufficient account of women’s income-generating and other activities such as collective community work ( faenas) and that as a consequence women could be overloaded with competing demands on their time. In sum, Oportunidades has several positive features as a new human development programme beyond its successes with regard to improving children’s health and life chances. It has, over time, expanded its coverage and has sought to respond to some of the gaps in its provision taking account of evaluations in the modifications of its programme. It has also made some headway in detaching poverty relief from political patronage although much still remains to be achieved. It has also helped low-income households to cope financially with the demands of schoolage children. It has remained, however, in essence a maternalist programme in that it aims to fortify and normalize the responsibilities of motherhood as a way to improve the life chances of children. Its human development rationale accurately describes the programme’s goals as far as children are concerned, but its combined focus on mothering and reproductive health has made it less likely to develop a more differentiated set of capacities for the mothers. In effect Oportunidades creates a dependency on a subsidy which confirms mothering as women’s primary social role, one which may enhance their social status and self respect, but nonetheless puts them at risk of remaining in poverty for the rest of their lives.

Female altruism at the service of the state? Oportunidades exemplifies the maternalism at the heart of many of the new antipoverty programmes being established in Latin America, and its organizational principles raise some important questions for gender analysis. Feminist theory and practice has suggested that if gender equality is to be tackled in development and welfare programmes these must have some potential to empower women and enhance their capabilities in ways that enable them to challenge relations of inequality and subordination and at the same time provide some scope for female economic autonomy. The new anti-poverty programmes may successfully identify some unmet needs within poor households and communities but attending to the needs of the women (the mothers) who are central to the functioning of these programmes is not their explicit aim, any more than is gender equality a key objective. The social construction of need in these programmes is child-centred, as is their overall organization. Women are incorporated into programme design (i.e. are visible) but in a way that depends upon the gender divide for its success. Thus, even as women might be empowered within these structures (through managing


the subsidy), such programmes in effect reinforce the social divisions through which gender asymmetries are reproduced. In the first place they depend upon women fulfilling their ‘traditional’ social roles and responsibilities. Oportunidades does so by basing its programme on normatively ascribed maternal responsibilities, in effect making transfers conditional on ‘good motherhood’. Men are not incorporated in any serious way, and no effort is made to promote the principle that men and women might share responsibility for meeting project goals. These programmes unambiguously rest on normative assumptions concerning ‘women’s roles’ so that the work women undertake in ensuring that children’s needs are met is taken for granted as something that mothers ‘do’. The social relations of reproduction therefore remain unproblematized, and the work performed easily naturalized. Latin American cultural constructions of femininity are strongly identified with motherhood, and serving the needs of children and household is generally considered a primary maternal responsibility. Motherhood is often offered as the explanation for political or civic activism, and allied with moral virtue, altruism and self-sacrifice. It is likewise assumed by programme managers and participants alike that any actions that improve the well-being of children are not, as Bradshaw and Quirós Víquez express it, a ‘burden’ for women, and any ‘costs’ they bear are ‘simply part of the mothering role’ (2003). If femininity is closely bound up with an affective investment in a self-sacrificing or altruistic motherhood, the ideological site for contesting the demands of maternalist programmes is not one that is easily occupied. Beneficiaries who miss a clinic appointment or a workshop because they were working, lay themselves open to the charge of being ‘bad mothers’ who do not care for their children (Bradshaw and Quirós Víquez 2003). The Mexican programme seeks even greater commitment from mothers through the regulation of their domestic responsibilities, situating them as the principal managers of their families’ needs. This does however involve some status reordering in the family in favour of mothers but within the traditional division of labour. While much is said about the ‘individuation of the social’ in regard to neoliberal policies, this does not apply to the women in these programmes who are bound ever more securely to the family. If there is a new element beyond the purely technical administration of the project, it is that which is introduced by some (albeit limited) sensitivity on the part of the designers to issues of gender equality at least in the case of the girl children, if far less so in the case of their mothers. One must conclude that gender equity considerations had some influence in the design of these programmes in recent years, sometimes as a result of feminist advocacy through NGOs, sometimes as a result of the shift in public and professional attitudes occasioned by the spread of feminist ideas. It remains the case that the women in such programmes are primarily positioned as a means to secure programme objectives; they are a conduit of policy, in the sense that resources channelled through them are expected to translate into greater improvements in the well-being of children and the family as a whole.31 Such benefits as are derived by the mothers themselves as a result of participation

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in the programme are a by-product of servicing the needs of others. This is compounded by the fact that there is little in the design of the programmes that advances women’s economic autonomy or security. Training for the job market is limited or non-existent, and there is scant if any, childcare provision for those women who want or need it because they work, train or study. Poor women are often involved in income-generating activities which, while precarious, may leave them without much disposable time or flexibility.32 Indeed, while rarely acknowledged in the case of women, participation in anti-poverty programmes can have negative consequences in incurring opportunity costs by preventing or restricting women’s freedom to engage in paid work (Bradshaw and Linneker 2003). In the Oportunidades programme the assumption that mothers were available to carry out ‘their’ stipulated duties in respect of their children takes no account of the fact that there was according to one evaluation, an ‘increasing dependency’ on women’s earnings, even though these were often meagre.33 This is not to deny that many women might choose not to work and might not perceive the programme’s demands as anything other than helpful in relieving some of the pressure on them to obtain paid work – especially if little is available to them. However given the importance of women’s lifelong economic precariousness and their need to secure cash incomes, the relative lack of attention to this issue is striking.34

Conclusions Women have much to contribute to anti-poverty programmes. Their gendered assets, dispositions and skills, their inclination towards involvement in household survival and at community level, and their precarious relationship to the wage economy, all help to make them appear a peculiarly suitable ally of anti-poverty programmes. This is not least because they also represent an army of voluntary labour, and can serve as potential generators or guardians of social capital. This ‘suitability’ can be understood as arising from the positive and negative aspects of the gendered relations of poverty. If poverty is a multidimensional condition involving deprivation and exclusion, then on the basis of indicators such as those developed in the capabilities approach, women, lacking assets and with fewer capabilities, might be considered to be more subject to deprivation and exclusion than men. Yet, if this is often so, well-being is not only a question of material goods but involves self respect, dignity, belonging and participation and it may be the case that even disadvantaged women might have more access to forms of social inclusion and well-being than men in similar material circumstances. Women are vulnerable economically, chiefly because their labour-market situation is precarious and interrupted by periods of childbearing and the demands of caregiving. They often lead lives that are busy, engaged as they are in the informal and care economies, both private and public, typically performing unpaid or poorly paid work. Yet they can and frequently do, gain satisfaction, self-esteem, recognition and respect from motherhood and from activities that constitute a kind of ‘informal citizenship’ that takes their domestic activities from the isolation of the


family to public spaces, with some (albeit variable) development of their capacities. These gendered assets and dispositions are being increasingly recognized by the international development agencies, but so far this has not brought significant material benefits to the women involved. The costs many women bear through juggling these multiple responsibilities in terms of weak labour-market links, lack of support for carework and long-term security are rarely taken into account. Prevailing policy assumptions still tend to naturalize women’s ‘roles’ and seek to make use of them and influence how they are developed and managed subjectively and situationally. Poverty relief is still treated all too often as a matter of an unproblematized social need, abstracted from the social relations that produce it. The classic assistentialist programmes that targeted women and children as high risk and in poverty were based on this view, and were commonly associated with paternalist notions of care and charity. They made little if any attempt to address the conditions which placed their beneficiaries in these circumstances and concentrated on short-term relief typically delivered in the form of food aid and primary healthcare. The ideas of the New Social Policy try to go beyond this through participation, gender awareness, capacity building, and by ‘responsibilizing’ the poor, yet in practice programmes still rely on outdated conceptions about women’s social roles that take little account of their differentiated needs. Programmes that give money or food to those in ‘vulnerable’ positions and fail to strengthen households’ assets do little to reduce vulnerability (Bradshaw and Quirós Viquez 2003). If women are to be provided with an opportunity for redefining the terms of their inclusion in their societies and in their polities, the unequally valued forms of social participation for men and women that are inscribed within the public and private spheres, and pervade the organization of carework, the public sphere, paid work, and public institutional life need to be challenged rather than deepened. The radical challenge to social policy from an equality perspective is to de-ontologize ‘women’s roles’ and to help reconstruct gender relations along more egalitarian lines in both the domestic and public spheres. Marginalizing men from these responsibilities is not in their overall interests any more than it is in children’s. For women in poverty, current programmes appear to offer both risks and opportunities. Women are placed to occupy a central role in the new poverty agendas, and the evidence shows that many women in Latin America experience well-being from participating in activities that are not tied to monetary reward. But such participation is always conditional on the participant’s support of the project, and on the gains, individual and collective, that it brings. Those involved in voluntary work may be happy to give their time and effort but they still need projects that enhance their capabilities through education or training, providing links to employment, advancing credit for successful projects that enable them to acquire their own assets. Above all, women need a reliable income source and sustainable routes out of poverty, ones that are at the same time more realistic and imaginative than the maternalist options that are currently in place. The limits of programmes like Oportunidades are evident not only in their selective approach to

62

Maxine Molyneux

tackling social need, but in their narrow vision of how to overcome poverty; stipends are no substitute for economic regeneration, and without attention to the household livelihoods and long-term prospects of the poor, including women, such programmes despite their good intentions, remain fundamentally trapped in ‘assistentialist’ paradigms.

Notes 1 This chapter is extracted from a comparative research paper entitled Poverty Relief and the New Social Policy in Latin America: Mothers at the Service of the State? (Molyneux forthcoming). I would like to thank Edurne Larracoechea for her invaluable research assistance on this project. Thanks also to my colleagues at the Institute for the Study of the Americas – Helga Baitenmann, Fiona Macaulay and Rachel Sieder – as well as to Sarah Bradshaw, Jasmine Gideon, and María de la Paz López for their encouragement and generous help with materials. Thanks, too to Elizabeth Jelin for her comments and to the Oportunidades programme directors for their cooperation. 2 The analysis draws on conversations with Oportunidades Director Rogelio Gómez Hermosillo and Concepión Stepa, Director of Planning and Evaluation, as well as on fieldvisits to Huachinango, San Miguel de Tenango and Zacatlán de las Manzanas in July 2005. 3 This term was first used by the World Bank but it has acquired a wider currency since. 4 Colombia is a possible sixth according to some analysts. For overviews and analyis of Latin American social policy see inter alia Abel and Lewis 1993 and 2002, Abel 1996, Mesa-Lago 1994, Haagh and Helgo 2002, and Tulchin and Garland 2000. 5 It is significant that this group includes a socialist (Cuba), a market (Chile) and a mixed economy (Costa Rica) model of welfare. See Mesa-Lago 2000 for elaboration of these comparative observations. 6 See Eckstein and Wickham-Crowley (2003: 19) on subsistence rights. 7 Filgueira and Filgueira (2002) differentiate between countries characterized by ‘stratified universalism’ (Uruguay, Chile, Argentina); ‘dual regimes’ (Brazil, Mexico) and ‘exclusionary regimes’ (DR, Central America, except Costa Rica), Bolivia and Ecuador. 8 As early as 1906 in Uruguay bills were proposed to give rights to maternity leave, and legislation to restrict women’s working hours were first introduced in Argentina in 1905. 9 Barriers to claim-making included administrative obstruction, low female educational attainment, ignorance of rights; and for indigenous women, the lack of an identity card would be sufficient to bar them from their entitlements. 10 By 2005 the talk was of the ‘post-post-Washington non-consensus’ reflecting the greater pluralization of approaches to development in Latin America and in policy circles. 11 But one that was singularly gender blind. For a critical analysis see Molyneux 2002. 12 See Jelin and Hershberg 1996 for further discussion. 13 See Craske and Molyneux 2002 for case studies of women’s movement activism in the 1990s. 14 In real terms social spending per capita declined by 10 per cent between 1982 and 1986. Even as it grew afterwards it remained 6 per cent below 1980 at the end of that decade, and only recovered slowly in the 1990s (IDB 1996). 15 ECLAC and the Mexican government’s estimates broadly agree that 45 per cent of the population live under conditions of poverty while other estimates put the figure as high as 61 per cent in poverty and 26.5 per cent (25 million) in extreme poverty (Urquidi in Middlebrook and Zepeda 2003). The top 20 per cent accounted for 59.3 per cent of income in 1989; the bottom 20 per cent for 3.9 (Grindle 2000: 20). 16 In 1997 social expenditure accounted for 7.8 per cent of GDP. It has risen slightly since. 17 PROGRESA was preceded by PRONASOL also known as Solidarity, Mexico’s first largescale anti-poverty programme. Established in 1988 its conception of poverty relief was


18

19

20

21

22 23 24 25

26 27 28

29 30

31

quite different from PROGRESA and had party political objectives. It was designed by the Salinas’ administration to offset the political consequences of the adjustment years and revive the flagging political support of the PRI. According to Molinar and Weldon, PRONASOL’s regional priorities were developed with three aims in mind: to reward PRI loyalists, to reconvert PRD supporters and to punish PAN supporters (in Rocha Menocal 2001: 524). Such manoeuvres delivered the expected returns to the ruling party, but the programme was discredited. When Zedillo assumed the presidency in 1994, he replaced PRONASOL with PROGRESA claiming that his new anti-poverty programme did not have a political agenda (Rocha Menocal 2001: 513). Although some political bias continued, it was much reduced, the PRI lost the 2000 elections to the opposition PAN party. Oportunidades has since sought to distance itself from this record of political clientelism, with a public campaign message stating that social protection is a right and allegiance is not due to any political party. Some observers have preferred to ignore the Mexican contribution to the development of the programme and have seen it as originating with the World Bank as it appears to be in sympathy with its broader recommendations. PROGRESA was not imposed by the World Bank and was intended to run only on federal funds with no direct funding from the World Bank. Oportunidades is government-funded with loan support from the IDB as above. Monetary and educational grants are provided for each child under 22 years of age who is enrolled in school between the third grade of primary and third grade of high school. The International Food Policy Research Institute website contains a number of evaluation reports on different aspects of PROGRESA/Oportunidades. See in particular Skoufias and McClafferty 2000, which covered the three years up until 1999, as a result of which the programme was extended to rural areas. The results of a qualitative evaluation carried out in six communities by Escobar and González de la Rocha were published in 2004 and will be referred to here. Another large-scale evaluation is currently under way. Escobar and González de la Rocha’s qualitative research confirmed Skoufias and McCafferty’s findings that the largest positive impacts were on children in secondary school. The latter’s survey finds a 10 per cent increase in enrolment for boys and 20 per cent for girls along with an overall narrowing of the gender gap in education, particularly in primary school. Cited in Rivero 2002. In the PROGRESA programme such work involved on average 29 hours per month. Since the programme strives to separate social entitlements from political clientelism, this is another sense in which citizenship is understood. Grants rise with the age of the child and the sex difference in the grant starts with secondary school, which is normally when girls drop out. In the third year of secondary school monthly grants are about US$58 for boys and US$66 for girls. An audit of the gender effects of the programme is currently under discussion. Escobar and González de la Rocha 2004. This is clearly contentious and requires further in-depth research. According to Adato et al. 2000 and my own interviews with specialists in gender and poverty, there has been considerable evidence of violence against women over control of the stipend in some regions (Author’s interview, Oaxaca, July 2005). Based on responses from 309 beneficiaries and 60 professionals in eight communities. A new component has been added to the programme since these findings, the ‘Jovenes con Oportunidades’ which provides youth training and work experience. However on a field visit young people interviewed saw themselves as having no future in their localities and dreamt of migrating. Without attention to rural livelihoods Oportunidades risks educating the young for the US labour market. BID data cited in Bradshaw and Quirós Viquez 2003.

64 Maxine Molyneux 32 See for example Gideon on Chile (2002), Bradshaw (2002) on Nicaragua. 33 Escobar and Gonzalez de la Rocha 2004. 34 A pilot project undertaken by the BID is working with mothers to engage in productive activity; this is clearly a step forward and signals an awareness of this shortcoming.

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Mothers at the Service of the New Poverty Agenda 65 Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) (2000). The Challenge of Gender Equity and Human Rights on the Threshold of the Twenty-First Century. Report to the eighth session of the Regional Conference on Women in Latin America and the Caribbean. Lima, Peru: ECLAC. Enrique Rosas, Rocío (2002). ‘Women and Survival Strategies in Poor Urban Contexts: A Case Study from Guadalajara, Mexico’. Journal of Development Studies, 18 (2–3): 81–108. Escobar, A. (2002). ‘The PROGRESA Programme and social change in Rural Mexico’. In Louise Haagh and C. Helgo (eds.), Social Policy Reform and Market Governance in Latin America. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Escobar Latapi, A. (2003). ‘The PROGRESA Programme and Social Change in Rural Mexico’. In A. Escobar and M. González de la Rocha (eds), Evaluación Cualitativa del Programa de desarollo humano Oportunidades. Mexico City: Serie, Documentos de investigacion 3, SEDESOL. Escobar Latapí, A. and M. González de la Rocha (2004). Evaluación Cualitative del Programe Oportunidades. Mexico City: Centro de Investigación y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social. Filgueira, Carlos and F. Filgueira (2002). ‘Models of Welfare and Models of Capitalism: The Limits of Transferability’. In Evelyne Huber (ed.), Models of Capitalism. University Park PA: Pennsylvania State University Press. Gideon, Jasmine (2002). ‘Decentralization, Participation and Inclusion: Reassessing Primary Healthcare Delivery in Chile’. In L. Haagh and C. Helgo (eds.), Social Policy Reform and Market Governance in Latin America. Basingstroke: Palgrave Macmillan. Goetz, A. M. and D. O’Brien (1995). ‘Governing for the Common Wealth: The World Bank’s Approach to Poverty and Governance’. IDS Bulletin 26, 2. González de la Rocha, M. (1994). The Resources of Poverty: Women and Survival in a Mexican City. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. González de la Rocha, M. (2001). ‘From the Resources of Poverty to the Poverty of Resources: The Erosion of a Survival Model’. Latin American Perspectives 28: 72–100. González de la Rocha, M. (2003) ‘Oportunidades y Capital Social’. Paper presented at the Comisión Económica Para America Latina, Workshop on Social Capital and Anti Poverty Programmes, Chile. González Bombal, I. and R. Villar (eds) (2003). Organizaciones de la Sociedad Civil e Incidencia en las Politicas Publicas. Buenos Aires: Libros de Zorzal. Graham, C. (1991). From Emergency Employment to Social Investment: Alleviating Poverty in Chile. Washington DC: Brookings Institute Press. Graham, C. (1992). ‘The Politics of Protecting the Poor During Adjustment: Bolivia’s Emergency Social Fund’. World Development, Vol. 20, No. 9. Graham, C. (1994). Safety Nets, Politics and the Poor: Transitions to Market Economies. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press. Grindle, Merilee (2000). ‘The Social Agenda and the Politics of Reform in Latin America’. In Tulchin and Garland (q.v.): 17–52. Haagh, Louise and Camilla Helgo (eds) (2002) Social Policy Reform and Market Governance in Latin America. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Hirst, P. and G. Thompson (2000). Globalization in Question. 2nd edition, Cambridge: Polity. Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) (1996) Economic and Social at Progress in Latin America. Report, Making Social Services Work, special edition, Washington DC: Johns Hopkins University Press. IFRI at http://www.ifpri.org Jackson, C. (1998). ‘Rescuing Gender from the Poverty Trap’. In C. Jackson and R. Pearson (eds), Feminist Visions of Development: Gender Analysis and Policy. London: Routledge. Jelin, E. and E. Hershberg (eds) (1996) Constructing Democracy: Human Rights, Citizenhip, and Society in Latin America. Boulder: Westview. Kabeer, N. (1997). ‘Editorial. Tactics and Trade-Offs: Revisiting the Links Between Gender and Poverty’. IDS Bulletin 28, 3: 1–25.

66 Maxine Molyneux Kabeer, N. (2003). Gender Mainstreaming in Poverty Eradication and the MDGs. London: Commonwealth Secretariat. Kaufman, R. and G. Trejo (1997). ‘Regionalism, Regime Transformation and Pronasol: The Policies of the National Solidarity Programme in Four Mexican States’. Journal of Latin American Studies, Vol. 29, No.3: 117–45. Laurell, A. C. (2003). ‘The Transformation of Social Policy in Mexico’. In K. J. Middlebrook and E. Zepeda (eds), Confronting Development: Assessing Mexico’s Economic and Social Policy Challenges. Stanford CA: Stanford University Press. Linneker, Brian (2003). ‘Gender Comparisons of Capital Influences on the Well-Being of Women and Households Experiencing Poverty in Nicaragua’. Unpublished report, mimeo. Lipton M. and S. Maxwell (1992). The New Poverty Agenda: An Overview, IDS Discussion Paper No. 306. Middlebrook, Kelvin and Eduardo Zepeda (eds) (2003) Confronting Development: Assessing Mexico’s Economic and Social Policy Challenges. Stanford CA: Stanford University Press. Mesa-Lago, C. (1994). Changing Social Security in Latin America: Toward Alleviating the Social Costs of Economic Reform. Boulder CO: Lynne Reinner. Mesa Lago, Carmelo with Alberto Arevas de Mesa, Ivan Brenes, Verónica Montecinos and Mark Samara (2000). Market, Socialist and Mixed Economies. Comparative Policy and Performance: Chile, Cuba and Costa Rica. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press. Mkandawire, T. (2004). ‘Disempowering New Democracies and the Persistence of Poverty’. In Max Spoor (ed.), Globalisation, Poverty and Conflict. Dordsecht, London and Boston: Kluwer. Molinar Horcasitas, Juan and J. A. Weldon (1994). ‘Electoral Determinants and Consequences of National Solidarity’. In Wayne A. Cornelius, Ann L. Craig and Jonathan Fox (eds), Transforming State-Society Relations in Mexico: The National Solidarity Strategy. San Diego: Center for US–Mexico Studies. Molyneux, M. (2002). ‘Gender and the Silences of Social Capital: Lessons from Latin America’. Development and Change, Vol. 33, No. 2: 167–88. Molyneux, M. (forthcoming). Poverty Relief and the New Social Policy in Latin America: Mothers at the Service of the State? Programme Paper, Geneva: UNRISD. Molyneux, M. and S. Lazar (2003). Doing the Rights Thing: Rights-Based Development and Latin American NGOs. London: Intermediate Technology Publishing Group. Moser, C. (1996). Confronting Crisis: A Comparative Study of Household Responses to Poverty and Vulnerability in Four Urban Communities. World Bank, Washington DC. O’Donnell, G. (1993). ‘On the State, Democratization and Some Conceptual Problems: A Latin American View with Glances at Some Postcommunist Countries’, World Development, Vol. 21, No. 8: 1355–69. OECD DAC (2001). Guidelines for Poverty Reduction, at http://www.oecd.org/ dataoecd/47/14/2672735. pdf. Pastor, M. and C. Wise (1997). ‘State Policies, Distribution and Neoliberal Reform in Mexico’. Journal of Latin American Studies Vol. 29: 419–56. Piester, K. (1997). ‘Targeting the Poor: The Politics of Social Policy Reform in Mexico’. In D. Chalmers, C. Vilas, K. Hite, S. Martin, K. Piester and M. Segarra (eds), The New Politics of Inequality in Latin America. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Red de Promotoras y Asesoras Rurales (2000). ‘Dinero del Diablo’. Unpublished report, mimeo, May. Rivero, Margot Aguilar (2002). ‘Oportunidades y Derechos Sociales: Un Proceso de construcción social de Ciudadanía’. Unpublished report, mimeo. Rocha Menocal, Alina (2001). ‘Do Old Habits Die Hard? A Statistical Exploration of the Politicisation of Progresa’. Journal of Latin American Studies, Vol. 33: 513–38. Rose, Nikolas and Peter Miller (1992). ‘Political Power Beyond the State: Problematics of Government’. British Journal of Sociology Vol. 43 (2): 173–205. Rosemblatt, K. (2000). ‘Domesticating Men: State Building and Class Compromise in Popular Front Chile’. In E. Dore and M. Molyneux (eds), Hidden Histories of Gender and the State in Latin America. Durham NC: Duke University Press.

Mothers at the Service of the New Poverty Agenda 67 Schell, P. (1999). ‘An Honourable Vocation for Ladies: The Work of the Mexico City Unión de Damas Católicas Mexicanas, 1912–1926’. Journal of Women’s History, Vol. 10, No. 4: 78–103. Schild, V. (2002). ‘Engendering the New Social Citizenship in Chile’. In M. Molyneux and S. Razavi (eds), Gender Justice, Development and Rights. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Skoufias, E., B. Davis and S. de la Vega (2001). ‘Targeting the Poor in Mexico: An Evaluation of the Selection of Households into PROGRESA’, World Development, Vol. 29, Issue 10, October: 1769–84. Skoufias, Emmanuel and B. McClafferty (2000). ‘ “Is Progresa Working?” Summary of the Results of an Evaluation by International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) and Food Consumption and Nutrition Division (FNCD)’. Discussion papers No. 118, Washington DC, at http.//www.ifpri.org. Stallings, B. and W. Peres (2000). Growth, Employment, and Equity: The Impact of the Economic Reforms in Latin America and the Caribbean. ECLAC: Brookings Institute Press. Tendler, J. (1997). Good Government in the Tropics. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Ticknell, A. and J. Peck (2003). ‘Making Global Rules: Globalisation and or Neoliberalisation?’ In J. Peck and H. Yeung (eds), Remaking the Global Economy: Economic Geographic Perspectives. London: Sage. Tulchin, J.S. and A. Garland (eds) (2000). Social Development in Latin America: The Politics of Reform. Boulder CO: Lynne Reinner. United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) (1995). Human Development Report: Gender and Human Development. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Urquidi, Victor. (2003). ‘Mexico’s Development Challenges’. In Kevin Middlebrook and E. Zepada (eds), Confronting Development: Assessing Mexico’s Economic and Social Policy Challenges. Stanford CA: Stanford University Press. Varley, A. (2000). ‘Women and the Home in Mexican Family Law’. In E. Dore and M. Molyneux (eds), Hidden Histories of Gender and State in Latin America. Durham NC and London: Duke University Press. Weyland, K. (1995). ‘Social Movements and the State: The Politics of Health Reform in Brazil’. World Development, Vol. 23, No.10: 1699–712. Whitehead, Ann (2003). Failing Women, Sustaining Poverty: Gender in Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers. Gender and Development Network Report, Oxford: OXFAM and Christian Aid. Whitehead, L. (1993). ‘On Reforms of the State and “Regulation of the Market” ’. World Development, Vol. 21, No. 8: 1371–93. Wood, C. (2003). ‘Adjustment with a Woman’s Face: Gender and Macroeconomic Policy at the World Bank’. In S. Eckstein and T. Wickham-Crowley (eds), Struggles for Social Rights in Latin America. New York and London: Routledge. World Bank (1997). World Development Report: The State in a Changing World. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. World Bank (2000). World Development Report 2000/2001: Attacking Poverty. Washington DC: World Bank. World Bank (2002). The Gender Dimension of Bank Assistance: An Evaluation of Results Washington DC: World Bank. Yaschine, I. (1999). ‘The Changing Anti-Poverty Agenda: What Can the Mexican Case Tell us?’ IDS Bulletin, Vol. 30, No. 2: 47–60.

3 Gender and Post-socialist Welfare States in Central Eastern Europe: Family Policy Reforms in Poland and the Czech Republic Compared Silke Steinhilber

Introduction Since 1989, post-socialist1 Central and Eastern European countries have undertaken significant reforms of their social policies and social security systems. One of the key challenges in so doing was balancing the tension between a tradition of – and in some countries continued commitment to – extensive welfare provisioning and income redistribution on the one hand, and the residualist social policy set-up advocated by the currently dominant global neoliberal economic framework on the other. Among the multiple challenges faced during the reforms, abolishing gender inequality was given little, if any, priority. Through an analysis of family benefits after 1989, including maternity and childcare benefits, as well as transfers to families, this chapter illustrates that reforms have nevertheless had important gender implications. I trace how and why ‘costly’ benefits and services supporting women’s dual role as worker and mother – a feature of the socialist past often considered ‘women-friendly’ – changed dramatically. Thereby, I explore how the broader dynamics of post-socialist social policy reforms have transformed the institutional and social environment in which gender relations are reenacted and renegotiated.2 Both Poland and the Czech Republic faced the ‘competing demands of building capitalism and democracy’ at the beginning of the 1990s (Orenstein 2001: 6). Yet the two countries responded somewhat differently: Poland chose a rapid and radical economic transformation strategy – ‘shock therapy’. In the Czech Republic, on the other hand, neoliberal and social democratic elements were combined into a ‘social liberal strategy of reform’ (Orenstein 2001: 7). Both countries also followed different reform paths in the field of social policy. During the 1990s Poland moved further than other post-socialist countries toward a residualist and familial model of a welfare state, scaling down state involvement 68

Gender and Post-socialist Welfare States in Central Eastern Europe 69

in social protection, and promoting individual responsibility and – de-facto, if not always explicitly – greater reliance on the family for the provision of well-being.3 Reforms in the Czech Republic also revoked important elements of the inherited universalist tradition of welfare-state provisioning. On the whole, however, Czech social policy discourses continued to refer more explicitly to social solidarity. As a consequence, to date, a higher level of state involvement as well as a greater commitment to income redistribution has been maintained. Feminists have highlighted that it is not the degree of state intervention as such, but the particular kind of policy configurations that shape state–gender relations (e.g. Lewis 1993, 1997; Sainsbury 1999).4 As state-organized mediators between paid employment and unpaid care work, family benefits are one key policy area in this respect. Changes in family benefits thus have far-reaching consequences for gender relations. The analysis of family benefit reforms in post-socialist Poland and the Czech Republic here focuses on three aspects and their intersections: (1) the influence of the state socialist legacy on present-day reforms, (2) the overall economic and political shifts in family policy since 1989, including the gendered values of key reform actors, as well as (3) the power dynamics between reform actors, including, among other aspects, the relative strength of women’s voices in the reform discourse. I deal with each of these issues below in a comparative fashion.

The legacy of economic and social policies Three main features characterized the gendered patterns of post-World War II labour markets in state-socialist Central Europe.5 First, women were integrated into the labour market in unprecedented numbers, in particular into the industrial sector. This represented a significant change compared to pre-World War II economic structures. As a result, by Western European standards, employment rates of women were high throughout Central and Eastern Europe under Communist party rule. Second, greater participation of women in employment led to a partial breakdown of gender stereotypes in occupations. Women occupied professions and posts from which they had largely been excluded prior to the takeover of the Communist parties. However, both vertical and horizontal gender segregation of employment opportunities prevailed. Women were not found in posts of higher responsibility in numbers commensurate with their overall employment participation and high levels of education. Lastly, a gender gap in wages survived all state-socialist commitments to equality. Despite the Communist party’s equality rhetoric and formal commitments, illustrated for example in the early ratifications of international laws, such as ILO Convention 100 on equal pay for equal work and work of equal value,6 women earned considerably less than men in wide sectors of the economy. Family policy in pre-1989 welfare states The gendered economic structures were also reflected in state-socialist social policy, and in family benefits specifically. At the end of the 1980s Poland and

70 Silke Steinhilber

Czechoslovakia7 had elaborate systems of social security benefits (Deacon 1992; Castle-Kanerová 1992; Millard 1992). Support for families included childcare benefits and leave schemes, complemented by a state-sponsored system of crèches and kindergarten (which was, however, far less extensive in Poland than in Czechoslovakia), and price subsidies for a number of essential products.8 The family benefit system worked differently for women and men. It supported a high employment rate for women, by helping women workers to combine their dual roles as employees and mothers. Benefits and rewards for motherhood enabled the state to include women into the system of full, but not necessarily freely chosen, employment. In contrast, men were not explicitly addressed as workers and fathers, or provided support to combine employment with family responsibilities. Men were even legally excluded from a variety of family benefits, especially from childcare leave schemes. Only under exceptional circumstances, such as the death of the mother, could men claim most of the family-related benefits. State-socialist family policy thus reinforced a particular gender order within the family and society: Pre-socialist gender role models and cultural stereotypes were preserved, while women’s economic independence was strengthened (Siemienska 1983; Eermáková et al. 2000: 42). Family benefits embodied a state-socialist notion of a ‘good working-class family’, reflecting persistent conservative and patriarchal values of leading decision-makers at the time. The state valued women as unpaid caretakers and homemakers, while incorporating them as paid workers into the economy (Eermáková et al. 2000; Seibert 2001). In both Poland and Czechoslovakia, public spending on family benefits prior to 1989 was high by international standards, amounting to 4.4 per cent of GDP in Czechoslovakia, and 3 per cent in Poland at the end of the 1980s. Relatively, both countries spent a greater share of family benefit expenditure on cash benefits than on in-kind benefits (mainly childcare services) (UNICEF/MONEE 1999; Fajth 1994). Eligibility to most family benefits was linked to employment, and their level wage-based (Kucharová et al. 2003; Wóycicka et al. 2003). Yet, given the nearly full employment, benefits were available virtually universally. Czechoslovakia offered maternity leave and benefits, extended maternity leave9 and a special benefit for a parent to care for a sick child. Poland provided for maternity leave and benefits, childcare benefit (sick-child benefit) and child-raising leave for employed mothers. Other benefits or services such as crèches and kindergarten were either stateorganized, or provided through the employing organization, sometimes on-site. In addition to employment-based benefits, some family benefits were universally available and paid directly from the state budget. Czechoslovakia offered a one-time birth grant and a maternity allowance. Poland had a child-raising allowance for mothers, as well as a family allowance, which depended on the family income, but not on employment. In 1974, Poland also introduced an alimony fund to support single parents (de facto single mothers). Maternity leave and benefits had long traditions in both countries: maternity leave was introduced in the Czech Lands in 1948,10 as was the child allowance to help families cover the costs related to raising children. In Poland, maternity leave


and benefits had been introduced as early as 1924. The benefit for caring for a sick child was introduced in 1954. Parental leave schemes and benefits were of a more recent origin. They were introduced in response to declining birth rates, yet were subject to political conflict throughout. In Czechoslovakia, family benefits were debated from the second half of the 1950s. A flat-rate birth grant was introduced in 1956, and an extended two-year maternity leave in 1970, initially unpaid. At the same time, a maternity allowance was introduced for mothers of two or more children who stayed at home. In Poland, child-raising leave was first introduced in 1968, initially consisting of a one-year leave without pay. In the 1970s, with a low demand for labor because of economic difficulties, and with declining birth rates, the state encouraged women to stay home for longer time periods (Lohmann and Seibert 2003: 78). Unpaid leave was extended to three years in 1972 (Wóycicka et al. 2003: 194). Paid leave for two years was introduced only in 1980 in response to popular demand, and as a concession of the Communist government to the opposition Solidarity movement which had initiated a campaign on the issue. A great number of Polish women took advantage of the paid parental leave because the benefit level was decent, and discontent with the workplace environment widespread. Moreover, the supply and quality of institutional childcare was unsatisfactory (Cichocinska 1993). Since childcare was typically a mother’s responsibility in both countries, childcare facilities were crucial to women’s ability to combine employment and family responsibilities. In comparison with many Western European countries, childcare was relatively widely accessible, generous and comprehensive in Czechoslovakia. However, in Poland demand for childcare places greatly exceeded supply throughout the entire postwar period (Lohmann and Seibert 2003: 70). Also, regional differences in the availability of childcare services were substantial, especially between urban and rural settings. Criticism about the services was widespread: they were often overcrowded, and the ratio between children and employees was high. In both countries, nursery care enrolment, i.e. for children below age three, was always lower than kindergarten enrolment. Places were rare, the quality of nursery services was low, and state incentives for home care for young children were strong. Nursery care enrolment in Poland declined even further during the second half of the 1980s. The number of factory-run nurseries decreased by a quarter, the number of places by a third, and the number of children in nurseries by almost half, from a peak in the mid-decade. Kindergarten attendance also declined noticeably over the 1980s (Cichocinska 1993).

Economic, political and family benefit changes after 1990 Poland Poland went through profound economic, political and social changes after 1989, experiencing a triple challenge of transition to a market economy, integration into a globalized world economy, and transformation for accession to the European


Union. Popular discontent with the economic reforms caused several swings from left- to right-wing governments. Despite their divergent political orientations, however, the different governments have on the whole followed a surprisingly similar macroeconomic and social policy reform recipe. Macroeconomic austerity measures dominated all reforms in the highly indebted country. In its broad effects, gender equality policy – or the absence thereof – has also been surprisingly similar under different governments, as the discussion below illustrates. Following the postulates of the ‘Washington Consensus’, highly indebted Poland initiated a rapid economic reform process which focused on macroeconomic stabilization, price and trade liberalization, and privatization (Lavigne 1999; Orenstein 2001). Among the severe consequences was an initial steep decline of GDP by about 20 per cent, a significant decline in real incomes, and a drop in economic activity rates, as well as high unemployment and growing poverty. During 1992 more than 25 per cent of all Polish families could not afford to purchase the basic necessities of food and clothing (Seibert 2001: 42). The share of the population below the poverty line hovered between 12 and 17 per cent in the period 1995–2000 (Lohmann and Seibert 2003: 16). Poland today is regarded a successful economic reformer in CEE. Relative economic stabilization with fast economic growth ensued during the mid-1990s, followed by a slowdown of the economy at the end of the decade and renewed faster growth after 2003. Yet growth has had only a limited employment impact: both women’s and men’s employment rates have been decreasing massively since 1990, and are low by international standards. Women’s employment rates are significantly lower than men’s. Unemployment has remained at high levels of between 15 and 20 per cent since the early 1990s, with women’s unemployment consistently higher than men’s. Gender differences in wage levels are in the range of 15–30 per cent, the highest gap being found in the highest wage group (Chlon-Dominczak 2004). A joint EU/ Polish government analysis concluded that ‘there remain significant inequalities of opportunities between women and men in the labor market’ (European Commission/Government of Poland 2001). Three major social policy reforms were enacted in 1998/99: reform of the education system, the national health insurance system, and the national pension scheme, which was partially privatized. Family benefit reforms during the 1990s – while no less profound in their impact – were designed and implemented in multiple steps: among the most significant was the decoupling of the entitlement to a number of family benefits from employment. They were now paid from the state budget – in some cases the central, in others the local. A majority of family benefits became income-tested (with the exception of maternity benefits and short-term childcare benefits) (see Table 3.1). Some benefits were cut, and the real value of some further declined through inadequate adjustment for inflation (Wóycicka et al. 2003). The Czech Republic In contrast to Poland, the Czech reform path has been described as a ‘hybrid “social liberal” strategy for transformation’, referring to a more moderate reform

Gender and Post-socialist Welfare States in Central Eastern Europe 73 Table 3.1 Entitlements and financing of family benefits, Poland, 2003

Benefit Maternity leave and benefit Childcare leave and benefit11 Child-raising leave and allowance Family allowance Alimony fund

Guaranteed periodic benefit Benefits for pregnant women and women raising children

Basis for entitlement

Financing source

Employment relationship Employment relationship Employment relationship Not employmentbased Not employmentbased

Social insurance revenue Social insurance revenue State budget revenues State budget revenues State budget revenues ⫹ repayments State and local budget revenues State and local budget revenues

Former employment relationship13 Not employmentbased

Means-tested/ not means tested? Not meanstested Not meanstested Means-tested Means-tested Means-tested12 ⫹ court order Means-tested Means-tested

Source: Wóycicka et al. 2003: 193–9.

approach, and the practice of political compromises caused by ambiguous election results and negotiations of coalition partners (Orenstein 2001: 61). As in Poland, economic reforms in the early 1990s focused on financial stabilization, price liberalization, and the privatization of former state-owned enterprises. However, the relatively low level of indebtedness allowed the country to maintain many features of the former welfare system, including universal housing subsidies and health and welfare benefits (Kucharová et al. 2003). Even more radical market-oriented Czech political forces, which advocated welfare retrenchment and a focus on incentives rather than redistribution, saw state provisions as buffers against the negative consequences of the economic reforms. The centre-right Civic Democratic Party (ODS), for example, in government between 1992 and 1997, employed social compensation mechanisms to maintain public support (Orenstein 2001). On the other hand, the Social Democratic (CSSD) minority government after 1998, despite having run on a prowelfare state electoral platform, did not have enough political clout to implement major social policy reforms (True 2003: 15). Sometimes referred to as the ‘Czech miracle’, the economic reform appeared to be the most successful in the region during the first half of the 1990s. In 1996, for example, unemployment was 3.5 per cent compared to 15.7 per cent in Poland. Inflation was only 8.8 per cent compared to 19.9 per cent in Poland. But bank failures and financial scandals ushered in a three-year recession during 1997–99, accompanied by serious political turmoil. During this time, the Czech Republic was lagging behind most transformation countries in annual GDP growth. By July


1998, unemployment had surpassed 6 per cent for the first time since 1989, with wide regional differences. It was as high as 15.6 per cent in the hardest-hit localities. Almost 60 per cent of those unemployed were women and about a third young people. Women’s unemployment has been consistently higher than men’s throughout the decade of the 1990s, with particularly high rates of long-term unemployment. The fiscal deficit widened in 2001 to 3.2 per cent of GDP as compared to 1.6 per cent in 1999. An austerity programme therefore foresaw cutbacks in state spending. In 2000 and 2001, the Czech economy recovered to above 3 per cent growth on average. The unemployment rate, however, has been in the 8.5 to 9 per cent range since 1999 and above 9 per cent in 2002. Czechoslovakia, as Poland, entered the 1990s with a comprehensive social security system. Yet since the old system was inadequate to address some of the new needs emerging from the transition, such as unemployment and poverty, social security reforms were supported across the political landscape. Early reforms included the introduction of a household subsistence minimum, which serves as a poverty benchmark, and the formulation of cost-of-living increases of benefits (Kucharová et al. 2003). Two new family benefits were introduced in 1990, the state compensatory allowance – intended to buffer the negative effect of consumer price liberalization – and a parental allowance for at-home care of children.14 Other early reform steps included the revision of the maternity benefit formula, and the decoupling of the child allowance from employment. Instead, it was made dependent on the number of children in a family, and their age. A major reorganization of social security happened in 1995–96. Benefits were grouped into three subsystems: social insurance, social assistance, and state social support. Most family benefits are provided as state social support, with parental allowance, child allowance and social allowance forming 85 per cent of total state social support spending (Kucharová et al. 2003). State social support benefits are financed from general revenues and paid out through the district authorities. Some of the benefits are income-tested, but income-testing is not applied in a very restrictive manner so far (see Table 3.2).

Table 3.2 State social support benefits in the Czech Republic as of 1995/96 Non-income tested benefits

Income-tested benefits

Parental allowance Maintenance allowance15 Foster care allowance Birth grant Funeral grant

Child allowance Social allowance Housing allowance Transport allowance (until 2004)

Source: Kucharová et al. 2003: 116.


Comparative reform trends in both countries16 Several broad effects of the family benefit reforms became clear at the end of the 1990s. First, aggregate expenditure for family benefits in both countries declined over the course of the 1990s:17 In Poland during the period 1990–98, from 1.7 to 1.06 per cent of GDP; and in the Czech Republic during the period 1996–2002, from 1.6 to 1.2 per cent of GDP (Fultz and Steinhilber 2004). See Figure 3.1 and Table 3.3. It is noteworthy that in Poland, during most of the 1990s, the share of family benefits in social expenditure declined, while total social expenditure increased. This suggests that family benefits were more affected by cuts than other social security benefits, for example pensions (Wóycicka et al. 2003: 207). Further savings in family benefits were achieved by reducing benefit adjustments for inflation. Consequently, the share of family benefits in household income declined significantly (Wóycicka et al. 2003: 195). A second effect was a declining number of beneficiaries and concentration of benefits on low-income households. In the Czech Republic, the proportion of families receiving the three most important family benefits fell by half. At the same time, those still eligible for all three benefits experienced increases between

2.5

2.3 2.3

2.0 1.5

2.1 1.7

1.7

1.3

1.1

1.07

1.0

1.06

0.5 0 1990

1991

1992

1993

1994

1995

1996

1997

1998

Figure 3.1 Family benefits as percentage of GDP, Poland, 1990–98

Table 3.3 Three family benefits, total spending and spending as a percentage of GDP, the Czech Republic, 1996–2000 (CZK, thousands) Benefit

1996

1997

1998

1999

2000

2001

2002

Child allowance 12.19 12.50 12.49 12.47 12.75 12.80 13.35 Social allowance 6.24 6.22 6.27 6.25 6.20 6.00 6.27 Parent allowance 7.36 7.61 7.78 7.72 7.69 7.70 8.02 Total of three 25.79 26.33 25.54 26.44 26.64 26.50 27.64 benefits Gross domestic 1 572.30 1 668.80 1 798.30 1 833.00 1 910.60 2 175.20 2 275.60 product (GDP) GDP accounted for by 1.64% 1.58% 1.47% 1.44% 1.39% 1.22% 1.21% the three benefits Source: Government of the Czech Republic, quoted in Fultz and Steinhilber 2004: 260.


3 and 10 per cent of net family income (Fultz and Steinhilber 2004; Kucharová et al. 2003: 125). In Poland, by 1998, family benefits were significantly more important for lowincome households, as compared to higher-income households. Family benefits represented 12 per cent of household income for families in the lowest income decile, but just 0.15 per cent for those in the top decile. The numbers of beneficiaries of employment-related benefits and of recipients of the family allowance declined drastically, between 30 and 60 per cent, depending on the benefit scheme. The decline is explained by high unemployment (in the case of employment-related benefits), stricter benefit entitlements and the sharp decline in birth rates. While on the whole fewer families receive benefits in Poland, the one benefit which most directly serves women and their children, the alimony benefit, was also the one with dramatically increased numbers of beneficiaries throughout the 1990s. Initially, the income-test for the benefit had been waived in 1989, prompting increased numbers of beneficiaries (Wóycicka et al. 2003). Yet, even after the reintroduction of income-testing, the numbers of beneficiaries increased, as did overall spending. Between 2001 and 2002 the fund saw a 6.1 per cent increase of beneficiaries, and a 16 per cent spending increase (Ministry of Economy, Labour and Social Policy 2003: 44). While this is an indication of the precarious situation of single mothers in the country, the alimony fund was abolished in 2004, sparking a wave of protest among women all over the country.18 Third, evidence suggests a gap between de jure entitlements to family benefits, and their practical use and take-up (Heinen and Portet 2002; Steinhilber 2003). There are many accounts of employers discriminating against women workers with family responsibilities, and there is evidence that women in both countries do not fully use their rights for fear of reprisals by employers, such as job-loss or unfavourable reassignment (Fultz and Steinhilber 2004: 259).19

The politics of gender and family benefit reforms compared While Poland and the Czech Republic undertook profound social policy reforms since 1989, gender equality was not a high-priority topic in either country. For the Czech Republic, Eermáková et al. conclude that at least until the end of 1997 – when the Department for Equality of Men and Women was established – ‘women’s issues were the least of governmental and state administration concerns’ (Eermáková et al. 2000: 31). Similarly, Wóycicka et al. argue that the family policies implemented over the course of the 1990s range from ‘passive to harmful’ in their effect for gender equality in the reconciliation of parental and work responsibilities (Wóycicka et al. 2003: 221). Social policy reform debates in both countries did, however, focus widely on the family and highlight the importance of combating family poverty. The family was addressed as ‘the most natural social group which should (…) ensure the care for its members and form their material and intellectual needs from childhood until old age’ (Prusa 1994, quoted in Eermáková et al. 2000: 42). Since families were regarded so important and were assigned increased responsibilities in the reform


process, supporting them to cope was considered eminently important. The gendered nature of family relations, however, and the impact of family benefits on them did not become an issue for public debate. The proclaimed family focus of reforms matched popular demand. Before 1989, support for families had been a constitutive part of state responsibilities, and was regarded by citizens as at least partial compensation for the inadequacies of the planned economy. The importance of family networks for day-to-day life in an economy of scarcity has been highlighted (Veeerník 1995; Veeerník and Matßju 1999; Marksová-Tominová 2003; Seibert 2001; Cichocinska 1993; Giza-Poleszczuk 1992). In continuation, many citizens called for state-support to families as a matter of social justice after 1989 (Steinhilber 2003; UNDP / Charles University Prague 2003). In this climate, women’s needs were addressed indirectly and conceptualized in stereotypical gender terms. Women benefited as members of other social groups, such as members of low-income households or the unemployed. Echoing the strong norm of motherhood and the importance of women’s role as caregivers in both countries in the period after 1945, women today continue to be addressed as mothers, possibly also as heads of households, but not as individuals or economic actors (Kucharová et al. 2003: 134). Changes in entitlement criteria have shifted the status of beneficiaries from ‘holders of personal rights to petitioners of the state’, required to prove their need (Fultz and Steinhilber 2004: 260). Because of the pervasive practice of means-testing of benefits and the contraction of the state in social security provision, this effect is more pronounced in Poland than in the Czech Republic. Yet a renewed debate about stricter means-testing, for example of the child allowance, in the Czech Republic in 2004 (Kucharová 2004), illustrates that means-tested benefits are more vulnerable to changing political conjunctures. During the reforms, a debate about ‘good motherhood’ re-emerged in both countries. Notably, good mothers were not referred to as mothers who care for their children while also being employed. Instead, motherhood was proclaimed as full-time dedication. In the Czech Republic, income restrictions associated with the parental allowance exemplify this. While receiving the parental allowance, a mother should not maintain her links to the labour market. A proposal of the governing Social Democrats to lift the income restrictions was countered by conservatives who were concerned about Czech women becoming ‘bad mothers’ if the restrictions were lifted. Women would then focus on making money instead of caring for children (Marksová-Tominová 2003: 56). In Poland, the strength of Catholic family values and the traditional image of the ‘Polish Mother’ have also shaped the debate on ‘motherhood’ and family benefits (Plakwicz 1992; Seibert 2001; Heinen and Portet 2002). Here, religious values, the church and faith-based organizations play an important role in private and political life (Inglehart and Norris 2003). Since 1989, abortion and women’s reproductive rights have remained on the political agenda, and religious values have influenced politics widely across party lines. The Church exerts particularly strong influence on some areas of social policy, such as abortion, and remains a powerful advocate for traditional family values and gender roles (Einhorn 1993; Heinen and


Matuchniak-Krasuska 1995; Zielinska 2000). The Church gained particular influence during the right-wing government under Solidarity Electoral Action (AWS) 1997–2001. The introduction of a new ‘benefit for pregnant women and women raising children’ in 1993 is one piece of the Polish ‘motherhood’ debate; it also illustrates its bitter ironies for women. The benefit was introduced jointly with the infamously strict anti-abortion legislation. In practice, thus, the benefit offered limited economic support to women who were deprived of their reproductive selfdetermination. However, as expenditure dramatically exceeded estimations, both the duration and the level of the benefit were soon cut, in two steps in 1994 and 2002 (Wóycicka et al. 2003: 199). While the anti-abortion legislation was still not liberalized, the benefit level and duration were again significantly cut in 2002, this time under a left-wing government. The example shows the fragility and superficiality of respect for women’s needs, which can easily be overturned by fiscal priorities. Government changes in Poland created a back-and-forth movement of family policy-reform projects and proposals. The overarching goal of fiscal austerity, however, has guided both right- and left-wing governments. Right-wing governments more clearly tried to instrumentalize family benefits to boost a traditional notion of women as mothers and caregivers. It was also under right-wing governments that concerns about declining birth rates and desires to control women’s reproductive behaviour acquired particular importance in Polish social policy debates (Zielinska 2000). However, left-leaning governments have not been explicitly committed to promoting gender equality either. Many opinion-leaders of the left have used a less openly moralistic and conservative gender discourse, yet their eyes were set on fiscal austerity rather than women’s rights as well.20 In the Czech Republic, in turn, shifts in political power and the weakness of elected governments based on small (or no) majorities have led to a moderation of reform proposals and political compromises, or to reform standstill (Orenstein 2001). Radical proposals, for example the introduction of stricter means-testing of the child allowance, were softened in the political process. Moderate means-testing may be seen as a small gain only, however, since social democrats initially had strongly argued in favour of a universal child allowance (Marksová-Tominová 2003: 58). Yet observers argue that the practice of political compromise orchestrated by relatively weak political powers has been one of the reasons for a wide acceptance of the social policy reforms in the country (UNDP/ Charles University 2003: 63). The need for – and political practice of – compromise, however, has sustained the sidelining of gender equality in social policy. While not explicitly aiming at increased gender equality, both countries increased formally equal treatment of women and men in access to family benefits. Provisions of pre-existing laws that had barred fathers from using benefits or had imposed stricter rules on them were eliminated (Fultz and Steinhilber 2004: 255). In Poland, equal treatment in the eligibility to childcare benefit and child-raising allowance was guaranteed from 1995 and 1996, respectively. In the Czech Republic, eligibility to the parental allowance was equalized in 1990, and


employment protection for men finally introduced in 2001. In an exceptional move to direct a measure specifically at men, Poland extended two weeks of the maternity leave and benefit to fathers. Equal access to benefits, however, has not changed the entrenched gender roles, nor has it affected the take-up of benefits. Available data, though incomplete, suggest that fathers do not use family benefits in greater numbers than before. In the Czech Republic during the period 1995–98, fathers represented roughly 0.75 per cent of recipients of childcare benefits, increasing to 0.9 per cent in 2003 (Kucharová et al. 2003: 130, OSI Network Women’s Program 2005b). In Poland, statistics on the use of childcare benefits by men and women are not available; in the Czech Republic, they are not included in the officially published statistics – indicative for the lack of interest in gender trends on the side of public administration in both countries. To date, there has been no debate about ‘good fatherhood’ in either country, or about fathers combining employment and family responsibilities. In both countries, measures to support parents in combining both responsibilities have received only secondary attention during the social security reforms. The reform of the Czech parental allowance is illustrative: designed as a universal benefit for a full-time home carer, the parent was, in principle, allowed to work, but faced severe earnings restrictions. Moreover, the child could be placed in childcare for no more than three (later raised to five) days a month. This made continuing education as well as job search – much less paid work – very difficult (MarksováTominová 2003; Eermáková et al. 2000). The income restriction was frequently violated, reflecting a gap between policy-makers’ intentions and women’s day-to-day reality and needs. The income restrictions were finally lifted in 2003 (valid from 2004), after intense debates and lobbying efforts of women.21 Progressive voices in favour of gender equality have been institutionally weak and often politically fragmented in both countries. For much of the 1990s, women’s organizations struggled to become recognized political actors. Under conditions of radical political change and in an ‘associational wasteland’ (Offe 1993), civil society organizations, among them women’s organizations, needed to gain strength and stability first, while lack of funding and an inadequate legal framework created severe obstacles (Eermáková et al. 2000). At the same time, gender issues were marginalized politically and faced strongly negative public attitudes as issues associated with the past (Eermáková et al. 2000: 33–4). The purported women-friendliness of state socialism served to ‘delegitimate women’s political activity in postcommunism’, as Gal and Kligman argue (2000). Women’s organizations, while becoming stronger and more numerous over the 1990s, were often concerned with topics other than family benefits, for example the very low political representation of women after the first post-socialist elections and employment, where women’s losses through the transition were immediately felt strongly. In addition, in Poland reproductive rights motivated women’s organizations strongly throughout the decade, crystallizing in major debates in 1989 and 1992/1993. Though not successful in stopping the anti-abortion


legislation, the debate itself contributed to a strengthening of the organizational networks of progressive organizations in the country.22 While social security was not a central concern anyway, the ‘packaging’ of family benefit reforms caused further problems for feminist social policy discussions: Because the benefit for pregnant women and mothers was introduced in conjunction with the law on abortion, progressive women’s activists had to find a way to argue for family benefits without defending the abortion law. In turn, conservative and Catholic women’s organizations clearly benefited from this. Only the discontinuation of the alimony fund in 2004 instigated a short-lived broader coalition of women’s organizations on a social security issue in Poland. Women’s weak institutional representation at governmental and administrative levels in both countries further contributed to the lack of attention to gender issues during the reforms. It was not until the end of 1997 that a Department for the Equality of Men and Women was established in the Czech Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs. Therefore, a number of observers agree that institutional progress came mainly in response to the requirements imposed on the country as part of the EU accession negotiations, and argue that the state’s attitude toward gender issues has been formal rather than indicative of a substantive commitment to gender equality (Eermáková et al. 2000; Marksová-Tominová 2003).23 In Poland, no gender-equality institution existed during the period of the most profound social reforms. The institutional representation of women and gender equality experienced a number of turnabouts during the decade. An early proposal for an Equal Status Act was initiated in 1992 by feminist groups and carried forward by the Parliamentary Women’s Group. It proposed the creation of a Commissioner for Equal Status.24 While the ensuing several-years-long debate did not result in the enactment of the legislation, at least it helped the formation and public presence of women’s organizations (Regulska 1998). Between 1992 and 1995, the post of the Plenipotentiary for Women and Family was vacant. After the election victory of the right in 1997, the office was replaced by the Plenipotentiary for Family Affairs, explicitly entrusted with the task of promoting a traditional family model in line with the ‘family oriented policy of the state’ (ILO 1999). Again, after a change in government in 2001, and in response to strong lobbying efforts by women’s organizations, the Plenipotentiary for the Equal Status of Women and Men was established. Vocal public resistance helped avert a weakening of the institution in 2004, yet it was immediately abolished by the new government in 2005. While the institutional representation of gender equality within governmental structures in both countries is ensured today, de facto, these institutions do not focus on gender equality in family policy. This is so despite the fact that in principle, social security is in their mandate. For example, the Polish Plenipotentiary was entrusted with coordinating all activities to secure equal opportunities for women and men. Yet, for example, it has not played a visible role in the debates about the 2004 reform of the family benefit system. Similarly, the Czech ministerial department has not dedicated itself to social security issues either.


Concluding remarks In the face of similar challenges to construct a market economy and provide social protection to the citizens, post-socialist Czech Republic and Poland have opted for different social policy reform paths. These differences have in turn had important implications for gender equality, a topic which has received only scant, if any, attention in both countries. During the 1990s Poland moved further than other post-socialist countries in the direction of a residualist and familial model of a welfare state by cutting, individualizing and familializing benefits. The central state’s role in social provisioning was reduced massively by shifting responsibilities to the local administration and individual citizens and their families. The Czech Republic, in turn, where reforms often were justified in similar ways as in Poland, has maintained a greater role for the state in the provision of social welfare, and has upheld important elements of the inherited redistributive welfare structures. The individualizing and familializing effect of Czech reforms has thus been more moderate than in Poland. In the international economic reform climate of the 1990s, characterized by a clear focus on macroeconomic stability and fiscal austerity, budgetary concerns have had a strong presence in social policy debates. The Czech Republic has seen itself under weaker constraints in this respect than the highly indebted Poland. Yet fiscal pressures as such do not explain where budgets are cut: the analysis of family benefit reforms illustrates that economic reform ideologies and political dynamics and power struggles interlink with family and gender ideologies of reform actors. In the case of Poland, for example, family benefits suffered greater losses than other social security benefits. Despite the differences in reform approaches and their gendered results, family benefit reforms in both countries show a number of important commonalities. Most importantly, family benefits in both countries continue to embody a conservative family model. Rarely during the post-1989 reforms were family benefits referred to by policy-makers as instruments to advance gender equality. Moreover, the discourse on family benefits has not included ‘non-standard’ families as legitimate family forms. Also, no incentives have been developed so far to stimulate change in men’s gender roles, or to support the de-gendering of care work. Policy-makers in both countries have upheld a longstanding tradition of seeing family benefits as instruments to redress declining population growth – a practice already well in use during socialist times, with no empirically clearly proven effect. Pronatalism through family benefits, accompanied by strict anti-abortion policies, is more pronounced in Poland, but is a topic on the rise in the Czech Republic as well. While the analysis has illustrated the continuities with state socialist family policy, it also shows a profound shift in the nature of family benefits and in their justification since 1989. In the past, family benefits served the dual role of supporting women in combining paid work and family responsibilities, while also forming part of the state-sponsored system of income support and redistribution. Despite women’s continued attachment to the labour market, even more so in the Czech


Republic than in Poland, women today no longer benefit from such a wellfurnished benefit structure. Therefore, today women face greater difficulties in combining employment and family responsibilities and suffer from a widening gap between entitlements in law and their practical value. To different degrees, post-socialist governments have withdrawn from the tradition of state-organized income-distribution and welfare provision, now prioritizing the reduction of poverty through means-tested benefits while limiting state intervention and emphasizing subsidiarity, i.e. the provision of support at the lowest possible level. In fact, this often means reliance on women’s unpaid family work. While similar in its direction, this change has been more brisk in Poland than in the Czech Republic. As a consequence of reforms, the avenue to access social rights for women has become more narrow, and women’s need for state support is interpreted differently today. A few benefits are still linked to employment – yet finding and keeping employment has become more difficult under conditions of a market-economy. Entitlement to other key family benefits is based on fulfilling a traditional gender role as mother and caretaker under precarious economic circumstances. Particularly those women who do not live in low-income households have therefore lost their entitlement to benefits. This policy is questionable from the point of view of gender equality: to enhance gender equality, support for women as a matter of individual right is as important as support for combining the dual roles in the family and the world of work. Both need to be accompanied by targeted interventions to promote a shift in gender roles through policies specifically addressed at men. Reforms in Poland and the Czech Republic have not moved toward this goal so far. The legacy of past benefit systems, economic and political shifts since 1989, and power dynamics between key reform actors and their gendered values and ideologies constitute a multifaceted web in which gender is being negotiated in the daily lives of women and men. In the name of ‘women’s interests’ and ‘needs’ – but without their adequate political representation and participation in the decision-making process – family benefit reforms have impacted women’s and men’s employment and life choices. Reforms have created new challenges to women’s economic independence, public presence and reproductive options, while reform discourses have invoked a traditional gender structure, often in contradiction to women’s day-to-day reality of full employment plus unpaid care responsibilities. The durable conservatism with respect to gender roles and values in both countries, together with the political marginalization of women, have come to bear very forcefully on the reform processes since 1989. Despite the many differences, it is here that both countries show many similarities – and are not very different from their neighbouring countries, and some (fellow) EU member states.

Acknowledgement The author is currently supported by the Berlin Programme for Equal Opportunities for Women in Academia (Berlin Programm zur Förderung der Chancengleichheit für Frauen in Forschung und Lehre).


Notes 1 The terms ‘real-existing socialism, ‘real socialism’ and ‘state socialism’ are used here interchangeably, to distinguish the Central and Eastern European regimes from the ideals of socialism. See True 2003: 181. 2 For earlier gender analyses of post-socialist social reforms, see, for example, Einhorn 1993, Funk and Mueller 1993, Aslanbeigui et al. 1994, Kligman 1994, Lobodzinska 1995. 3 The ironies of a discourse on greater individual responsibility which in fact hands women the responsibility of picking up the slack have repeatedly been pointed out by feminists. 4 See also Chapter 1 of this volume. 5 For a more extensive discussion, see Fodor 2004. 6 Poland ratified ILO Convention 100 on equal pay for equal work and work of equal value (1953) in 1954, the Czech Republic in 1957. 7 Unless noted otherwise, data before 1993 used here relate to Czechoslovakia, thereafter to the Czech Republic. 8 On the problems and contradictions within state-socialist social policy, see CastleKanerová 1992, Millard 1992, Deacon 1992. 9 Before 1989, maternity and childcare leave together were regularly termed ‘maternity leave’ or ‘extended maternity leave’. Here, ‘maternity leave and benefits’ is used in the sense of ILO Convention 183 as related to the protection of mother and child in relation to the child’s birth. ‘Childcare leave’/ ‘parental leave’ is granted for a temporary absence from employment to raise a child. Childcare benefits may or may not be linked to leave. Conversely, leave may or may not come with a cash benefit. 10 Maternity benefits to insured women existed from 1928, yet the law was not consistently implemented until after World War II (Pavlik 1985). 11 Short-term sick-child leave. 12 Means-testing of alimony benefits was waïved in 1989 and reinstated in 1999. 13 The guaranteed periodic benefit is payable to a single parent who has exhausted her/his right to unemployment benefits. 14 The maternity benefit is available to mothers for a maximum of 28 weeks (37 weeks in case of multiple births). It is insurance-based, paid from sickness insurance, with a replacement rate of 90 per cent of the net income, up to a ceiling (1990). While maternity benefits are provided to fathers only under exceptional circumstances (death or disability of the mother), fathers can receive the parental benefit for full-time care directly following the birth of a child (maternity leave is not mandatory for women), but the parental benefit is lower than the maternity benefit. 15 Allowance for the families of soldiers. 16 The following section is based on Fultz and Steinhilber 2004. 17 Note that different levels of aggregation of family income data by household size complicate cross-country comparisons. 18 Further reforms foresaw some additional support for single mothers, boosting a unified social assistance benefit. 19 New data from the Czech Republic indicates an increased take-up of parental leave by women: 60 per cent now return to the labour market only when their child is three. Worse labour market conditions, an increased interest in full-time care for children at home, a small increase in fertility (second children) and the shortage of childcare facilities may account for this (V. Kucharová, private communication, June 2005). 20 A much-quoted example is the strict anti-abortion legislation which was not relaxed under the left-wing government either. 21 Restrictions about childcare use have been maintained. Only from 2006 children can attend kindergarten for four hours per day without any impact on the parental allowance. 22 Periods of right-wing governments also contributed to the consolidation of conservative and Catholic women’s organizations (M. Fuszara, personal conversation June 2005).

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23 Interestingly, the ministerial department in charge of equal opportunities for women and men was placed in the Department for the Preparation of the Integration of the Czech Republic into the European Union. 24 The bill is the longest-discussed draft in the history of the Polish parliament. It has been amended and debated in every four-year term since 1993 (OSI Network Women’s Program 2005a).

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Gender and Post-socialist Welfare States in Central Eastern Europe 85 Heinen, Jacqueline and Stephane Portet (2002) ‘Political and Social Citizenship: An Examination of the Case of Poland’. In M. Molyneux and S. Razavi (eds) Gender Justice, Development and Rights. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ingelhart, Ronald and Pipa Norris (2003) Rising Tide: Gender Equality and Cultural Change around the World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. International Labour Office (ILO) (1984) ‘Family Benefit’. In Introduction to Social Security, Chapter 11. Geneva, Switzerland, 1984. International Labour Office (ILO) (1999) Information communication by the ILO national correspondent in Poland on the Bill on Equal Status of women and men and general presentation of the situation of women. Internal Communication. Warsaw, 22 April 1999. Kligman, Gail (1994) ‘The Social Legacy of Communism: Women, Children, and the Feminization of Poverty’. In J. Millar and S. Wolchik (eds) The Social Legacy of Communism. Washington DC and New York: Woodrow Wilson Center and Cambridge University Press. Kucharová, Vera (2004) ‘Gender Dimensions of Social Security Reforms in the Czech Republic’. Presentation at the seminar, The Gender Dimensions of Social Security Reform in Central and Eastern Europe: Case Studies of Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic. Organized by International Labor Office and Central European University. Budapest, 23 February 2004. Kucharová, Vera, M. Kotynková and Ladislav Prusa (2003) ‘The Gender Dimensions of Social Security Reform in the Czech Republic’. In E. Fultz, M. Ruck and S. Steinhilber (eds) The Gender Dimensions of Social Security Reforms in Central and Eastern Europe. Case Studies of the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland. Budapest: ILO, Subregional Office for Central and Eastern Europe. Lavigne, Marie (1999) The Economics of Transition – From Socialist Economy to Market Economy. New York: St. Martin Press. Lewis, Jane (ed.) (1993) Women and Social Policies in Europe. Work, Family and the State. Aldershot Edward Elgar. Lewis, Jane (1997) ‘Gender and Welfare Regimes: Further Thoughts’. Social Politics: International Studies in Gender, State and Society, Vol. 4, No. 2: 160–77. Lobodzinska, Barbara (1995) Family, Women and Employment in Central-Eastern Europe. Westport, CN: Greenwood Press. Lohmann, Kinga and Anita Seibert (eds) (2003) Gender Assessment of the Impact of EU Accession on the Status of Women in the Labour Market in CEE. National Study: Poland. Warsaw: Karat Coalition. Marksová-Tominová, Michaela (ed.) (2003) Gender Assessment of the Impact of EU Accession on the Status of Women in the Labour Market in CEE. National Study: Czech Republic. Karat Coalition. Prague: Gender Studies Center. Marody, M. and A. Giza-Poleszczuk (2000) ‘Changing Images of Identity in Poland: From the Self-Sacrificing to the Self-Investing Woman?’ In S. Gal and G. Kligman (eds) Reproducing Gender: Politics, Publics, and Everyday Life after Socialism. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press. Marx Ferree, Myra (1993) ‘The Rise and Fall of ‘Mommy Politics’: Feminism and Unification in (East) Germany’. Feminist Studies, Vol. 19, No. 1: 89–115. Millard, F. (1992) ‘Social Policy in Poland’. In B. Deacon (ed.), The New Eastern Europe: Social Policy Past, Present and Future. London: Sage. Ministry of Economy, Labour and Social Policy (2003) Poland 2003: Report on Labour Market and Social Security. Warsaw: Ministry of Economy, Labour and Social Policy. Offe, Claus (1993) ‘The Politics of Social Policy in East European Transitions. Antecedents, Agents, and Agenda of Reform’. ZeS, Arbeitspapier No. 2/93, Bremen. Open Society Institute (OSI) Network Women’s Program (2005a) Your Sex Matters in Poland. Equal Opportunities for Women and Men. Monitoring Law and Practice in New Member States and Accession Countries of the European Union. Fact Sheet. http://www. soros.org/initiatives/women/articles_publications/publications/equal_20050502/ poland.pdf, accessed on 1 July 2005.

86 Silke Steinhilber Open Society Institute (OSI) Network Women’s Program (2005b) Your Sex Matters in the Czech Republic. Equal Opportunities for Women and Men. Monitoring Law and Practice in New Member States and Accession Countries of the European Union. Fact Sheet. http://www.soros.org/initiatives/women/articles_publications/publications/equal_200505 02/czechrep.pdf, accessed on 1 July 2005. Orenstein, Mitchell (2001) Out of the Red: Building Capitalism and Democracy in Postcommunist Europe. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Pavlik, Z. (1985) ‘Czechoslovakia’. In V. Bodrova and R. Anker (eds) Working Women in Socialist Countries: The Fertility Connection, Geneva: ILO. Plakwicz, J. (1992) ‘Between the Church and the State: Polish Women’s Experience’. In C. Corrin, Super Women and the Double Burden. London: Scarlet Press. Regulska, Joanna (1998) ‘The ‘Political’ and its Meaning for Women: Transition Politics in Poland’. In J. Pickles and A. Smith (eds) Theorizing Transition: The Political Economy of PostCommunist Transformation. New York: Routledge. Research Institute for Labour and Social Affairs (RILSA)/ United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) (1999) Human Development Report: Czech Republic 1999. Prague: RILSA. Sainsbury, Diane (ed.) (1999) Gender and Welfare State Regimes. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Seibert, Anita (2001) ‘From Matka Polka to New Polish Woman: Women and Restructuring in Poland’. Unpublished PhD thesis, Monash University, Clayton, Victoria, Australia. Siemienska, Renata (1983) ‘Women and the Family in Poland’. In E. Lupri (ed.) The Challenging Position of Women in Family and Society. Leiden: E. J. Brill. Steinhilber, Silke (2003) ‘Women’s Views on Social Security Reform: Qualitative Survey’. In E. Fultz, M. Ruck and S. Steinhilber (eds) The Gender Dimensions of Social Security Reforms in Central and Eastern Europe: Case Studies of the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland. Budapest: ILO. Subregional Office for Central and Eastern Europe. True, Jacqui (2003) Gender, Globalization and Postsocialism: The Czech Republic after Communism. New York: Columbia University Press. United Nations Children’s Fund/Monitoring Eastern Europe Project (UNICEF/MONEE) (1999) Women in Transition. Florence: UNICEF/ MONEE. United Nations Development Programme (UNDP)/ Charles University Prague (2003) Human Development Report. Where Do We Come From, What Are We, and Where Are We Going? Prague: UNDP and Charles University. Veeerník, Jiri (1995) ‘Household Incomes and Social Policies: The Czech Republic in the Period 1989–1995’. SOCO Project Paper No. 25. Vienna. Veeerník, Jiri and Matfju, Petr (1999) Ten Years of Rebuilding Capitalism: Czech Society After 1989. Prague: Academia. Wolchik, S. and A. Meyer (eds) (1985) Women, State and Party in Eastern Europe. Durham NC: Duke University Press. Wóycicka, Irena, Bozena Balcerzak-Paradowska, Agnieszka Chlon-Dominczak, Irena Kotowska, A. Olejniczuk-Merta and Irena Topinska (2003) ‘The Gender Dimensions of Social Security Reform in Poland’. In E. Fultz, M. Ruck and S. Steinhilber (eds) The Gender Dimensions of Social Security Reforms in Central and Eastern Europe: Case Studies of the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland. Budapest: ILO, Subregional Office for Central and Eastern Europe. Zielinska, E. (2000) ‘Between Ideology, Politics, and Common Sense: The Discourse of Reproductive Rights in Poland’. In S. Gal and G. Kligman (eds) Reproducing Gender: Politics, Publics, and Everyday Life after Socialism. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press.

4 Maternalist Policies versus Women’s Economic Citizenship? Gendered Social Policy in Iran Valentine M. Moghadam

That social policy is gendered is now a truism in the feminist literature. But what are the different patterns of (gendered) social policy formation and implementation across regions in the world economy? In the Middle East, for example, what are the state policies, practices and institutions that directly influence the welfare and security of various groups within a particular society, especially as far as women are concerned? And if social policy is partly about protecting against risks and contingencies while also providing social equity, do all social policies serve to expand women’s citizenship? In this chapter I examine the gendered nature of social policy in Iran, with a focus on the problems associated with women’s economic citizenship that have resulted from Iran’s economic structure and its cultural/ideological institutions. An oil-dependent economy and gender relations codified in Muslim family law have had implications for women’s access to employment and economic resources, as well as overall citizenship. The literature on social policy is overwhelmingly concentrated on the experiences and models of the welfare state in advanced capitalist countries, and in particular Europe and North America. The feminist component of this literature consists largely of historical investigations of maternalist politics and policies in the United States,1 or comparative studies of gender and welfare regimes in the core countries,2 or studies of the distribution of care and the problem of employed women’s double burden.3 Gosta Esping-Andersen’s typology of the three worlds of welfare capitalism and T. H. Marshall’s theory of the evolution of civil, political, and social rights of citizenship often conceptually frame these investigations.4 The emerging literature on social policy in a development context suggests that East Asia, among other regions, might represent a different experience and model (Kwon 2005). The present chapter expands the empirical understanding of gendered social policy in a development context, while also proposing a distinctive experience and model based on the characteristics and consequences of an oil-dependent economy and Muslim family law in one Middle Eastern country. Elsewhere I have argued that in contrast to the rights-based model of the Nordic welfare state or the developmentalist East Asian experience, social welfare 87

88 Valentine M. Moghadam

provisioning in the post-colonial Middle East and North Africa (MENA) was tied to the imperatives of state-building and legitimation, was financed by the regional oil economy, and reflected and reinforced a ‘patriarchal gender contract’ premised on women’s family roles.5 The MENA state’s ‘developmentalism’ was undermined by its ‘neopatriarchal’ approach to women, gender, and the family, codified in family laws/personal status codes that define women largely in terms of their filial, marital and maternal roles, place them under male guardianship, and deny them equality in access to family wealth. Although state expansion and social expenditures did allow for social mobility and access by some women to education and employment, on the whole oil wealth and family laws served to prevent women’s ‘labour commodification’ in the MENA region, in contrast to other regions in the world economy. Through most of the period between 1950 and 1990, the MENA model allowed for generous if non-inclusive social provisioning and high wages, and provided the (rather small) salariat with generous benefits. But in the subsequent period, the family wage was undermined by economic crisis and then by the neoliberal prescription, while the reinforcement of Muslim family law became the focus of Islamist groups (Moghadam 1998; 2003, ch. 2). These are early days in the study of social policy in the Middle East. The growing literature on poverty, the limited work on pensions and social security reform in Arab countries, and the more extensive literature on socio-economic development lack attention to the gender dynamics of social policies.6 The focus of the emerging literature on women’s citizenship in MENA is on the problems of women’s civil and political rights of citizenship, and deals only minimally with social rights associated with employment, or with economic citizenship.7 On the other hand, family law is a social policy, and a highly gendered one that has implications for women’s access to employment and income, although the large and important literature on family law has not explored the links between family law, women’s economic activity, and social development.8 In the sections that follow, I begin by elaborating on this chapter’s theoretical framework, including the concepts of economic citizenship, maternalist politics, the rentier and neopatriarchal state, Muslim family law, and the patriarchal gender contract. I then turn to the gender/social policy regime in Iran, starting with a brief historical overview and drawing attention to continuities and discontinuities before and after the 1979 Islamic revolution. I argue that the state remained rentier and neopatriarchal after the revolution, but a key difference was the strengthening of Muslim family law and a state-driven maternalist discourse and politics. The paper ends with reflections on the future of Iran’s gender/social policy regime.

Conceptual overview The central premise of a feminist approach to social policy is that the sexual division of labour – which is influenced by the organization of economic production – shapes policy decisions and results in different outcomes for women and men. Marxist-feminist research has shown how women’s and men’s differential roles in production and reproduction, and especially women’s greater responsibilities

Maternalist Policies versus Women’s Economic Citizenship? 89

for reproductive/domestic work, has rendered women a ‘reserve army of labour’ that could be marginalized, integrated or exploited according to the demands of accumulation (Jenson 1986). Feminist social policy research has posited that early welfare policies in Europe and the United States reflected the sexual division of labour and were predicated upon the male breadwinner/female homemaker ideal (Orloff 1993; Sainsbury 1996); as such, the welfare state is patriarchal (Pateman 1988). Other feminist scholars have emphasized the ‘women-friendly’ nature of welfare regimes. The relationship between gender and social policy, therefore, should be seen as complex and interactive. As Orloff notes, if gender relations ‘profoundly shape the character of welfare states’, it is also true that ‘the institutions of social provision – the set of social assistance and social insurance programs and universal citizenship entitlements to which we refer as “the welfare state” – affect gender relations’ (Orloff 1996: 51). The concept of women’s economic citizenship used in this chapter is adopted from Alice Kessler-Harris (2001), who defines it as the right to hold a job of one’s choice and the economic resources necessary to sustain an average household. In her study of women’s quest for economic citizenship in the United States, KesslerHarris demonstrates that early social policy, including labour legislation, envisioned men as primary breadwinners supporting families and viewed women as wives and mothers. To the extent that women had economic rights, these consisted largely of the right to be supported by a male breadwinner and protected by the state in their mothering role (via the protective maternity provisions of labour law). She also shows how the originally masculine rhetoric behind social security gradually was forced to change when millions of American women joined the labour force during World War II and in the decades afterwards. Kessler-Harris’ study confirms that across cultural and economic systems, many countries have upheld marriage, motherhood and family as key social institutions. As in the United States in the early part of the twentieth century, a patriarchal gender contract holds sway in the MENA region, although it is beginning to unravel under the force of new economic realities, demographic changes and women’s activism. Institutions of social provision may be women-friendly (or feminist) or they may be predicated on the male-breadwinner/female-homemaker model (or patriarchal). In the core countries, these institutions have evolved in accordance with economic imperatives, demographic changes and organized women’s demands; many welfare agencies are staffed by women at various levels who in turn help to initiate policy debates and policy reforms (e.g. on parental leaves, ‘daddy days’, flexi-time, etc.). The Nordic model of the welfare state may rightly be called women-friendly (Hernes 1987; Hobson 1998). The rentier state has a different logic. The concept of the rentier state, or rentier economy, is applied to a country’s reliance on substantial external rent, such as the sale of oil or transit charges (see Richards and Waterbury 1996). The consequences of rentierism are said to be far-reaching. First, only a small fraction of the population is directly involved in the creation of wealth. Second, the work–reward nexus is diminished; rewards come from clientelism or patronage or proximity to the state. Distributive policies or welfare provisioning amount to handouts from the state


rather than entitlements accrued to gainfully-employed tax-paying citizens. Third, because the state is not dependent on taxation, there is far less demand for political participation. (Thus: ‘no taxation, no representation.’) Saudi Arabia exhibits an extreme form of rentierism, but the concept has been applied to Pahlavi-era Iran and other MENA states. The rentier state has access to huge economic resources, and is able to finance generous social policies for key segments of the population, but it is also vulnerable to external shocks. In the Middle East, the rentier state is also ‘neopatriarchal’ (Sharabi 1988), meaning that the state rests on both modern and traditional institutions and social relationships. The neopatriarchal state upholds the ‘patriarchal gender contract’ (Moghadam 1998), by which I mean a gender ideology, a set of cultural norms, and a social relationship predicated on the male-breadwinner/ femalehomemaker role. In the MENA region, the patriarchal gender contract includes the provision – which is inscribed in the Muslim family laws that prevail in the region – that men are responsible for the ‘maintenance’ (nafaqa) of their wives, and wives are required to show ‘obedience’ (tamkin) to their husbands. Muslim family law and the family wage ensure that most women have access to social welfare programs through their fathers or husbands. This is in some sense similar to what Ann Orloff (1993) has described as ‘paternalist’ social policies in the early years of the welfare state in Europe and North America. Muslim family law is usually known as a code that governs marriage, divorce, maintenance, paternity, and custody of children (An-Naim 2002). Critics are typically concerned about its impact on civil and political rights as understood globally or as enshrined in the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW). Less is known about the socioeconomic consequences of Muslim family law, the way that it contravenes the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (the ICESCR, to which most MENA countries are signatories), and its impact on women’s economic citizenship. Derived from the Sharia, or Islamic law, Muslim family law defines the rights and responsibilities of spouses and kin members, and aims to provide complementary justice for women and men. For example, because Muslim men have the right to unilateral divorce and women do not, Muslim family law mandates a sum of money from the groom to the bride (mahr in Arabic, mehrieh in Persian), which is sometimes paid in full and sometimes deferred until the event of divorce. The highly formal Islamic marriage contract stipulates the amount, which is usually agreed to by both families. Within this legal and cultural framework, however, women are seen primarily as dependants and men as breadwinners. As a result, the discourse of motherhood is pervasive in Muslim societies, and few if any policies are in place to actively encourage the sort of adult-worker family model that is characteristic of many European countries, the US, or China. Feminist concepts of ‘republican motherhood’ and of ‘maternalist policies’ are relevant to the Middle East and especially the Iranian case discussed in this paper. Linda Kerber (1980) used the term ‘republican motherhood’ to denote the ideals of domesticity that legitimized women’s civic activity, especially moral reform, throughout most of the nineteenth century. This is a concept that travels easily to


the Islamic Republic of Iran in the 1980s and 1990s, where women sought to improve their legal status and social positions within the acceptable discursive frameworks of revolutionary motherhood and religious duty (see Gheytanchi 2001). Maternalist policies refer to mother and child welfare policies that emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, especially in the United States and Britain, and which channelled social benefits directly to women as mothers. There is some consensus that American middle-class women reformers – cut off as they were from institutionalized politics – used the language of motherhood to legitimize their political activism and to advocate better conditions and policies for poor, working-class, or immigrant women. There is less consensus as to whether these policies were ‘feminist’ or if they served to reinforce the patriarchal social order. Some studies show that mother–child policies were palliative, or temporary, or intended to strengthen rather than undermine the patriarchal family (Lewis 1980; Ladd-Taylor 1994). Skocpol (1992) has argued that maternalist social policies – which she defines as policies by women for women – characterized the early welfare state in the United States.9 Koven and Michel (1993) distinguish between radical and conservative maternalists, and demonstrate that maternalism is a political discourse that is sometimes ‘a cloak for paternalism’ and sometimes deployed by women for women. They write: We apply the term to ideologies that exalted women’s capacity to mother and applied to society as a whole the values they attached to that role: care, nurturance, and morality. Maternalism was the central and defining core of some women’s vision of themselves and of politics. Koven and Michel 1993: 4 They show, too, that at the heart of maternalism lies the paradox of entering the public political arena by reinforcing the traditional female sphere of children, family, nurturance and care.10 These feminist insights – along with a political economy approach – frame the present study of gender and social policy in Iran, as well as the Middle East as a whole. The regional oil economy combined with Muslim family law produced a patriarchal gender contract that rendered the majority of MENA women economic dependents. The dominant gender ideology has held that men are the providers of women and children, and women are primarily mothers and wives. Until relatively recently – that is, until the post-oil-boom downturn – the family wage and the family law reinforced this situation. The beneficiaries of social security systems thus have been largely men and their dependants; women’s welfare has been presumed to be attained within the family or through the provisions of Muslim family law; and the vast majority of Middle Eastern women have relied on family support systems for protection vis-à-vis risk, contingencies and disasters. This has been the case also in Iran, where, especially after the Islamic revolution of 1979, women’s family roles were emphasized and female labour-force participation declined. In the late 1980s, Islamic women bureaucrats began to campaign for improvements in women’s legal status and social conditions, and they did so within a conservative religious/maternalist discursive frame. Accordingly, the


Islamic Republic of Iran adopted ‘maternalist’ policies for women that were predicated on the patriarchal gender contract rather than on feminist concepts of individual and collective women’s rights. In the more recent neoliberal era, non-governmental organizations of all types, including women’s organizations, have taken on an increasingly important role in Iran, as elsewhere in the world economy. NGOs appear to have a three-fold role: (a) they fulfil certain neoliberal requirements in the context of the withdrawal of the state in welfare provisioning; (b) they are part of the democratization process, or political liberalization, and help to constitute the emerging civil societies across the region; and (c) they play a key role in the women’s movement, with cultural, political, and economic/employment implications for women and for gender relations. Iranian women’s NGOs have been playing an increasingly prominent role in delivering social services such as healthcare, literacy, legal counselling and the like to women and girls, as well as helping to build civil society and generate employment for women at a time when public-sector employment opportunities are diminishing and the private sector remains predominantly male. As such, the women’s NGOs serve to counter the adverse effects of the political economy and the family law on women’s economic citizenship, albeit in a limited way.

The state, family law, and women’s economic citizenship In the neopatriarchal state, unlike liberal or social democratic societies, religion is bound to power and state authority, and the family, rather than the individual, constitutes the universal building block of the community. As such, the neopatriarchal state and the patriarchal family reflect and reinforce each other. The concept describes an ‘ideal type’, and there have been variations in the region as well as important reforms in the status of women initiated by modernizing or revolutionary regimes. However, these reforms often have been undone, and Middle Eastern states remain authoritarian and bound to cultural/ ideological institutions such as Muslim family law. This is why those MENA states that have signed on to the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) have done so with reservations that undermine the spirit of CEDAW. As of March 2005, the Islamic Republic of Iran still had not signed CEDAW. Muslim family law – also known as the Personal Status Code in North Africa and the Levant – is a social policy whose political significance and consequences for women’s economic participation may be specific to the MENA region. It is intended to regulate family life according to the norms of the Sharia, or Islamic law; it is meant to ensure the rights and responsibilities of family members, especially those of the head of the family; and it aims to guarantee security to the wife in the event of divorce or widowhood. The content of family law varies to some degree across countries, depending on the legal school in place.11 But the broad


features of family law are similar across Muslim countries, as they commonly reflect, and reinforce, a patrilineal logic. The Islamic marriage contract requires the consent of the bride, and in some countries women may insert stipulations into the contract, such as the condition that she be the only wife (An-Naim 2002). However, marriage gives the husband the right of access to his wife’s body, and marital rape is not recognized (Welchman 2001). Children acquire citizenship and religious status through their fathers, not their mothers. Muslim women are not permitted to marry nonMuslim men, and non-Muslim widows cannot inherit from Muslim husbands. A key aspect of Muslim family law is that women are required to obtain the permission of father, husband, or other male guardian to marry, seek employment, start a business, or travel. This is the source of a common legal inconsistency in the Middle East, because placing women under the guardianship of a male contradicts constitutional guarantees of equality of all citizens and labour laws which ensure rights for men and women workers. As Pateman (1988) argued in relation to the ‘sexual contract’ in early modern Europe, Muslim family law denies daughters and wives their full civil rights. The unequal inheritance aspect of Muslim family law and civil codes compromises women’s economic independence but is a sensitive issue; it is seen on one level as a divine imperative revealed in the Koran and on another level as an important part of the patriarchal gender contract whereby women are provided for by their fathers, husbands or brothers. Islamic law gives women the right to own and dispose of property, but they inherit less property than men do. Sons inherit twice as much as daughters, but they are also expected to look after their parents in old age. In a polygamous context, a deceased man’s inheritance and his pension are divided among his widows, children and other relatives that he may have been supporting; this could leave the widows with insignificant pensions. Thus, even though Islamic norms require that fathers and husbands financially support their daughters and wives, it is also the case that divorced, widowed or abandoned women without access to jobs or a steady source of income, especially among the low-income social groups, are often left in a state of impoverishment. Indeed, Loewe (2000) found that among Egypt’s poorest are divorced, abandoned and widowed women. In Iran (and elsewhere), a husband has the legal right to forbid his wife or unmarried daughter to seek employment or continue in a job. As such, Muslim family law contravenes the ICESCR, which is the main framework of economic citizenship. The ICESCR prescribes the right of people to a freely chosen job; equitable and equal wages for work of equal value; dignified working conditions for workers and their families; professional training; equal opportunities for promotion; protection for families, especially for children; maternity protection; protection of boys, girls and teenagers against economic exploitation. Inasmuch as Muslim family law and norms in Iran and elsewhere prevent women from applying for or staying in a job without the permission of father or husband, and in some countries certain occupations and professions are off-limits to women (such as the profession of judge in Iran), this denies women the right to enjoy the ICESCR’s provision for ‘a freely chosen job’.


The mahr – or dower – is a sum of money promised by the groom to the wife before marriage. Typically, the wife receives a portion of it at the time of marriage, and the balance is deferred. But whereas this practice was initially meant to provide a sort of social insurance for the wife in the case of divorce or widowhood, in the modern era it symbolizes women’s economic dependence.12 Moreover, legal statutes, based on Islamic law, assert that men owe their wives material support or maintenance and cannot command them to contribute to the family economy. Indeed, one of the grounds for which women can legitimately petition for divorce is non-support by the husband. This legal requirement, too, may have been salutary in early Islamic history, but in the modern era it has functioned to perpetuate the patriarchal gender contract. In some ways, Muslim family law may be seen not only as a pre-modern or prefeminist code for the regulation of family relations, but also as a way of retaining family support systems in the place of a fully functioning welfare state predicated on concepts of citizen contributions and entitlements. The welfare of wives and children remains the responsibility of the father/husband. When a woman seeks a divorce or is divorced, her maintenance comes not in the form of transfers from the state but in the form of the mahr that is owed to her by her husband, or (in the Islamic Republic of Iran) the ojrat-ol-mesl, which is the monetary value of the domestic work she has performed over the years. I discuss this new element of Iran’s gender/social policy regime in the section below, but let us first examine the historical context.

The gender/social policy regime in Iran Women have a long history of economic activity in Iran, particularly in the carpetweaving and textiles sectors. In the late Qajar period (the turn of the twentieth century), women workers were largely concentrated in home-based and small workshop enterprises. Iran joined the International Labour Organization in 1914, and in 1920–21 the ILO informed the government of its concern over working conditions in the carpet industry in Kerman. This led to a series of decrees designed to improve working conditions with respect to length of the work-day, minimum age of employment for girls and boys, safety, sanitation and health. According to Floor (1985: 88), two articles of the decree of 17 December 1923 read in part: ‘boys and girls shall work in separate workshops; mixed workshops are absolutely forbidden’, and ‘foremen (those who dictate the pattern to the workers) shall not enter the girls’ workshop, where forewomen shall be employed.’ Iran’s Civil Pension Fund was established in 1923, although there are no data to determine how many women, if any, were enrolled at that time. In the 1930s, under Reza Shah, women’s social participation expanded as more schooling was made available and the growing state sector absorbed some of the educated female labour force (Moghadam 2000). In other areas, however, women remained disadvantaged, as they could not vote and were subordinated within the family. Moreover, they were all but excluded from Iran’s rapidly expanding oil industry, which at the time was not only a labour-intensive industry but also completely male-dominated.


After Reza Shah’s forced abdication in 1941, the coalition government of Ahmad Qavam sought to implement a wide-ranging social programme. In 1946 it promised distribution of state lands, women’s suffrage, provincial assemblies, elimination of unemployment, construction of rural clinics, schools and irrigation projects. Qavam established a Supreme Economic Council that was charged with implementing a Five Year Plan, setting of minimum wage, protecting national industry, drafting a plan to distribute crown lands, and supporting the peasantry. He recognized trade unions and appointed a Supreme Labour Council to introduce unemployment insurance, wage scales, and negotiating committees between management and labour. His government, however, did not survive to pursue these radical policies (Messkoub 2005). Thus by the mid-1960s illiteracy rates remained high in Iran: just half of the urban population was literate compared with only 15 per cent of rural population. The female literacy rate of 17 per cent was less than half that of men (40 per cent). The situation improved somewhat by the early 1970s – after nearly a decade of a rural literacy campaign spearheaded by the Literacy Corps. During this period, Iran enjoyed unprecedented economic growth, largely as a result of domestic investments fuelled by rising oil prices. Oil revenues accrued to the state, and its ever-growing budget paid for development projects, prestige projects (such as expensive monuments and royal celebrations), military procurements, infrastructural development and social programs. Skilled workers and high-level manpower were imported from South Korea and the United States, among other countries, but Iran had its own large workforce to man the oil industry, manufacturing and the booming construction sector. Oil revenues allowed for high wages and low taxes. Karshenas has studied manufacturing wage levels comparatively and has established that wages were higher in the Middle East, including Iran, than in southeast Asia and Mexico. At the same time, income and other taxes were among the lowest in the world (Karshenas 1997, 2001). High wages and generous social policies for government employees – financed not by income taxes or employee contributions but by oil revenues and other rents – also were meant to strengthen and expand the state, establish national integration, and build a social base of support for the state. As the Shah of Iran sought to establish national unity and mobilize support for his rule, the government established an array of social policies and welfare benefits. Government employees received pensions, subsidized staples, and interest-free loans for housing; a workers’ shareholding program applied to those in large establishments; the urban poor could use free schools, free health clinics, and cheap food; and peasants benefited from the land reform, a literacy campaign and a healthcare campaign. For women, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi extended the vote to women and modernized the family law – largely due to advocacy by a group of elite women in and around the state or with connections to the royal family. The oil-boom era During the state-building, oil-boom era, social policies included guaranteed public sector employment for graduates, labour legislation that favoured workers, free education, social insurance for government workers and those in large enterprises,


subsidies (utilities, petrol, bread), and paid maternity leaves for women professionals. Various state enterprises and ministries had their own policies and benefits packages. The most generous were offered by the armed forces and the National Iranian Oil Company, while the Ministry of Roads had a hospital and seaside resort for its employees.13 Social security benefits (sickness, disability, death, pensions) were available to all regular employees, including women. Stateowned factories employing a certain number of women (usually 50 or 100) were required to establish nurseries, and working mothers were also entitled to nursing breaks. Social welfare services for the poor, including poor women, were channelled in part through institutions such as the Pahlavi Foundation and the Women’s Organization of Iran. During the 1960s and 1970s, the female labour force grew, and by 1976 women comprised 12–14 per cent of the total labour force. Women were found in the civil service (largely in teaching, healthcare and social services, with some participation also in public administration), in large-scale factory employment and of course in traditional small-scale activities. Though the oil and petrochemicals industries were male-dominated, a small proportion of women worked in clerical positions in the National Iranian Oil Company. Those in the modern sector were beneficiaries of labour legislation and social insurance. In the 1970s women retired on average two to three years before men but with similar annual pensions; women comprised around 15 per cent of all pension recipients (Messkoub 2005). Class, urban, and gender biases were inscribed in the social policies, and especially in the social security policies and provisions of labour law. For the most part, the principal beneficiaries were men, members of the urban middle class or the ‘labour aristocracy’. Social security and labour legislation did not extend to domestic workers/servants, irregular or casual workers, unpaid family workers, or peasants, rural workers and small farmers. Given the size of the rural population in Iran, this meant that the majority of citizens relied on family support systems – a situation that helped to reproduce the patriarchal family through large, extended families with a preference for sons, and the unpaid labour of female members. However, this also was a time when elite women in Iran began to organize and mobilize for improvements in women’s social conditions and their legal status. Much of that work was carried out by the Women’s Organization of Iran (WOI). By the late 1970s, the WOI had over 400 branches and 120 women’s centres throughout the country that offered daycare centres, legal literacy, counselling, family planning, health, nutrition, and vocational training (Afkhami 2003; Afary 2005). The Family Protection Law of 1967 and 1975 provided unprecedented rights for Iranian women in the areas of divorce and child custody; for example, a wife’s permission was required should her husband seek a second wife. However, a man still had the right to forbid his wife from working outside the home, if he found her job ‘dishonourable’; and she could not travel outside the country without her husband’s written permission. Given the huge increases in the national income in the 1970s, more investments should have been made in creating a literate, educated and skilled labour force, both male and female. Public services did expand to a large extent, but Iran


did not achieve full literacy or eradicate child and maternal mortality. The 1979 revolution also set back socioeconomic gains by at least a decade. Thus by 1990, Iran’s educational attainment rates were far below those of other countries at comparable levels of development or income. In particular, illiteracy was high among adult women, and gender gaps were very wide. The mean years of schooling of adult men and women (aged 25 and over) was 4.6 and 3.1, respectively. But in far poorer Vietnam, the corresponding figures were 5.8 and 3.4 years. The Philippines did much better, at 7.8 years for men and 7.0 for women.14 The Islamic era The 1978–79 revolution initially had the limited objective of ending the dictatorship, but Islamization set in and transformed gender relations as well as the country’s social policies, in particular the family law (which in Iran’s case is not a separate, integrated law but consists of a series of articles found in the Civil Code). The Islamic Republic’s very ambitious constitution required the government to provide full employment to its citizens, including (presumably) women citizens. But this constitutional guarantee has been undermined by (a) poor economic conditions, inadequate domestic and foreign investments, and subsequently low levels of job creation; (b) a preference for investments in capital-intensive, male-intensive sectors such as oil, gas and nuclear energy; (c) a constitutional clause extolling the virtues of motherhood; and (d) the ubiquitous Islamic criteria, including the fact that under the Islamic Republic’s Sharia-based provisions on women and the family, women cannot seek jobs without the approval of their fathers or husbands. Iran’s Islamic Revolution had a number of adverse outcomes, especially for women. First, women’s employment patterns and rates changed dramatically. Most Iranian women had been working in the fields of teaching and healthcare, and this remained the case after the revolution. But numerous women lost their jobs due to their political, ideological or religious backgrounds and were replaced by ‘Islamic’ women. The proportion of women in public services remained stable, but a number of occupations and professions were deemed inappropriate to women, such as jobs in the judiciary and in some engineering and medical fields. Female judges and many high-ranking lawyers lost their jobs, but the greatest job loss was experienced by working-class women in medium-sized or large factories (Moghadam 1988). During the 1980s the Islamic state relied heavily on oil exports for its revenues; these were needed to fight the war with Iraq and to finance an array of subsidies for the population. As a result, the Iranian economy did not experience the diversification that the revolutionary coalition and the new constitution called for. In the 1990s, women’s share of the roughly one million civil service jobs steadily increased, but their overall share of the labour force remained small, because of men’s far higher involvement in the oil industry, stateowned industrial enterprises, hotels and the private sector. In 1996 women’s share


of all manufacturing jobs (formal and home-based alike) was 14 per cent and their overall share of paid employment was 12 per cent (Moghadam 2003, chs. 2, 7). After the revolution, a massive ideological campaign was launched to tie women to their family roles, and the new Islamic family law restored men’s rights to polygamy, unilateral divorce, custody of children after divorce, and control over their wives’ mobility. In matters of inheritance, women became severely disadvantaged. For example, a man could inherit all of his wife’s wealth, but she was entitled only to one-fourth (if he had no child) or one-eighth (if he had children) of his movable property and of the value of his estate. This pertains to cases of permanent marriage; partners in a temporary marriage receive no inheritance.15 In polygamous marriages, wives must divide among themselves the allotted onefourth or one-eighth. Article 1117 of the Civil Code stipulates that a man has the right to prevent his wife from taking employment ‘if he deems such employment would be at variance with their family interests and values’. Although women’s educational attainment rates have risen steadily, the result of both Iran’s political economy and its cultural/ideological institutions has been low levels of female salaried employment, high rates of inactivity, disproportionately high female unemployment, and a huge gender-based income gap. Iran’s labour force has been predominantly masculine. The burgeoning private sector remains a largely male domain, with work conditions that are not appealing to most women. Gender bias has been rampant in employment and in the country’s social insurance programs. Even though occupational restrictions were lifted, the profession of judge remains exclusively male. Male and female workers alike have paid 7 per cent of their wages toward their retirement insurance, but in the event of a woman’s death, her family could not collect retirement benefits. All working women are required to appear in hejab, which is at minimum a large scarf covering all the hair and neck, and a long-sleeved and loose-fitting smock or manteau that covers the body’s contours. In some government agencies, more conservative attire (chador) is required of the women employees. Of course, professional women in the civil service have been beneficiaries of social policies, and the time of writing they represented about 36 per cent of Iran’s total civil service employees. However, they constitute only a small proportion of the total female economically active population, and though they constitute only 12 per cent of the total salaried labour force, their unemployment rate in 1996 was 12.5 per cent (IRI 1997; 1999: 99).16 Clearly, Iranian women’s economic citizenship is seriously circumscribed. This may be one reason for the growth of women’s NGOs in Iran. When job opportunities in the formal sector are foreclosed, women form their own businesses or associations. This is an area that remains under-researched in Iran, although Povey (2004) has undertaken some preliminary work on women’s NGOs. Women’s NGOs include publishing houses, environmental protection groups, research centres rural women’s centres, charitable agencies and professional associations. The women’s press in Iran has been proliferating, and consists of magazines and women’s studies journals such as Zanan, Hoghough-e Zanan and Farzaneh, and a publishing house, Roshangaran Press. The Women’s Cultural Centre has produced calendars, compendiums and a feminist journal, and maintains a website.


The WID-oriented NGOs engage in advocacy for enhanced women’s rights, sometimes by using the Islamic Republic’s own maternalist discourse against it (see discussion below on ojrat-ol-mesl). Forming women’s NGOs may be seen, therefore, as a strategy to counter women’s economic dependence and high unemployment rates, as a way of enhancing women’s social participation, and as a form of advocacy for women. Lack of job opportunities also may be behind another phenomenon, similarly under-researched and largely anecdotal at this time – the expansion of the practice mehrieh, which had been in decline in the final years of the Pahlavi era, especially among the educated, westernized elite. By all accounts, mehrieh has become more rather than less entrenched in Iranian society. The Islamic state’s ideological pressure is surely one reason, but what I am suggesting here is that young Iranian women and their parents may very well be insisting on mehrieh due to economic and employment uncertainties. Maternalist politics in the Islamic Republic One of the defining features of the Islamic Republic of Iran has been its attempt to institutionalize women’s domesticity and maternalism. A constitutional clause extolling family, motherhood and the raising of ‘committed Muslims’; the abrogation of the Pahlavi state’s Family Protection Act and suspension of its familyplanning programme; the encouragement of part-time work for married women who chose to stay in the labour force; the exaltation of the ‘mother of martyrs’ – these are examples of how the Islamic Republic of Iran has sought to create a Revolutionary Motherhood or Republican Motherhood of a new type. Initially, the model of the new Islamic woman was Fatemeh, daughter of the prophet Mohammad and wife of Imam Ali, the selfless mother of martyrs who remained steadfast in the faith. Elsewhere I have written about the elements of the Islamic republican discourse on women, or ‘the three D’s’: – the danger that unveiled and unmarried women represented, their essential difference, and domesticity as the ideal state for women (Moghadam 1988). At the same time, in order not to completely alienate women and to maintain the support of the population of Islamist women, the regime under Ayatollah Khomeini instituted some measures that favoured its female supporters. For example, it did not ban women from employment; there were always several token women members of parliament; martyrs’ widows were granted custody of their children and allowed to retain custody even after remarriage; and the regime introduced a new marriage contract in 1987 that allowed for the stipulation of conditions by wives. After Khomeini’s death, the family-planning policy was reinstated – which Iranian women enthusiastically embraced.17 But throughout the 1980s and 1990s Iran’s social policies and legal frameworks ensured the persistence of the patriarchal gender contract, women’s economic dependence, and inequalities in economic citizenship. The Civil Code stipulates that a husband is responsible for the upkeep of the family, and Article 1107 even states that ‘the wife’s living expense includes shelter, clothing, food and furniture that are commensurate with her status, which may even include a maid in case she is used to having one or she needs one due to illness or incapacity.’ As one


commentator has explained, with approval and pride: the Iranian legal system does not obligate women to do any household activity. Even the wife’s nursing of her own child ‘is not one of her unwavering responsibilities’. He states, citing Article 1176 of the Civil Code: ‘The mother is not obliged to suckle her own baby unless the baby cannot be fed by any other means’ (Mehrpour 1995: 60). Here the commentator appears unaware of the larger implication of such a ‘right’ on the part of the wife and mother – which is to exempt her from any labour whatsoever other than sexual services to her husband and childbearing and therefore to deny her any economic citizenship. In the event of divorce, he continues, when the wife is free from any blame or fault, [the husband] is obliged to pay a lump sum to his wife, which payment is in addition to his obligations on marriage portion [mehrieh], recompense of the wife’s past services in married life [ojrat-ol-mesl, of which more, below], and alimony payment during the specified time after divorce when she is religiously prohibited from a new marriage Mehrpour 1995: 61; my emphasis The Islamic Republic may have exalted mothers in its official discourse, but the Civil Code stipulates a fractional share of a deceased husband’s wealth for the wife. The stated justifications for women’s lesser shares are ‘the marriage portion and provisions of women’s living expenses by the husband’ (Mehrpour 1995: 58). The Civil Code also cites the Qur’anic verse ‘God has ordained that amongst the children, the son’s share is double the daughter’s’ to establish unequal inheritance for sons and daughters. Nonetheless, advocates of the Islamic Republic’s legal and social policy frameworks insist that men and women are entitled to equal rights in possessing and executing the privileges of their legal capacity, and as such there is no distinction between men and women. All the means and tools by which men can obtain economic resources are legally at the disposal of women as well. … The only limitations on the employment of women concern jobs which defy family values and interests. Mehrpour 1995: 61 Many feminists, however, have noted that despite its ‘motherist’ discourse, the Islamic Republic of Iran has in practice devalued motherhood through its policies and laws. Lawyer Mehrangiz Kaar has highlighted the contradiction between the Islamic state’s formal praise for mothers and Iranian mothers’ lack of legal protection, such as the right to custody of their children, the right to open a bank account for their children, and control over their own bodies (Kaar 1996). Her articles in the women’s magazine Zanan – which came to exemplify the Islamic feminist perspective in the 1990s – concentrated on women’s real status under Iranian civil law and family law and called on women to engage in ijtihad (independent reasoning and interpretation) to claim their rights on behalf of their status as mothers (Gheytanchi 2001: 566). Ojrat ol-mesl was one such example of women’s ijtihad to


further their social rights. Another was to argue that in cases of divorce, the courts should calculate the wife’s deferred dower according to an index updated for inflation (Poya 1999: 101–2). Ojrat-ol-mesl, or the law mandating wages for housework, was passed by the Majles (parliament) in late 1992. The regime’s Islamist women supporters played an important role in the adoption of this policy – largely because of their dismay over the ease by which men could divorce their otherwise good Muslim wives. As believing women, their protests and recommendations were delivered in a religious idiom. As Hoodfar explains: Islamist women activists argued that women, like all other Muslims, are entitled to the fruit of their labour on the grounds that Islam is against exploitation; that in Islamic tradition wives have no duties to their husbands beyond being faithful and are not required to work in their husbands’ homes, to the extent that women are not even obliged to breast-feed their children without payment from their husbands. Therefore, because all women do, in fact, work in their husbands’ homes, they are entitled to the fruit of their labour!’ Hoodfar 2000: 311 Such women may have been advocating a maternalist policy in Skocpol’s sense. However, not all Iranian feminists supported the new policy, and many felt ambivalent about the use of the discourses of republican motherhood and the rights of mothers under Islam. Although the law clearly gave women additional benefits and increased the ‘cost’ of divorce to men, ojrat-ol-mesl was functional for the Islamic Republic in that it carried no financial implications for the government, it reinforced women’s maternal roles, and there was no onus on the government to provide jobs or social assistance to divorced women.18 Moreover, as we have seen above, these entitlements are due only to wives who are deemed to be not at fault in the case of divorce. The legal scholar An-Naim (2002: 110) emphasizes the point: ‘A woman is entitled to half of her husband’s assets if the court finds the divorce was initiated by the husband and was not caused by any failure on the wife’s part.’ This would appear to make ojrat-ol-mesl a conservative maternalist policy – in Koven and Michel’s sense – that reinforces the patriarchal gender contract rather than expands women’s economic citizenship. Moreover, ojrat-ol-mesl ‘is difficult to apply in practice, partly because of the difficulty in assessing wages for housework’ (An-Naim 2002: 110). Anecdotal evidence suggests that it is far from an equal sharing of marital assets. Unless the husband has put property or bank accounts in his wife’s name, he is entitled to keep all ‘his’ assets except for that portion which is calculated as the ojrat-ol-mesl – or the wife’s entitlement for the years of household and childcare.19 And what of other maternalist policies in the Islamic Republic of Iran, especially for working women? In the early 1990s, and in response to its supporters’ concerns about the status of women, the government of Hashemi Rafsanjani established the Bureau of Women’s Affairs, which worked with a number of Iranian WID experts and helped to establish WID or women’s units in various ministries. It also had


connections with a nationwide network of women volunteers who engaged in a variety of charitable and social service work among the poor (Moghadam 1998, ch. 7). Continuing its pattern of pro-family policies, the Islamic Republic instituted the following (IRI 1999): ●

● ● ●

●

Payment of a marriage allowance and family support allowance to insured male or female employees; Early retirement for women aged 45 with a minimum service period of 20 years; Reduction in the working hours of women in government employment; Introduction of a family support allowance for widows and women with disabled spouses; Payment of pensions to survivors of deceased female government employees.

At least two of these measures are similar to the family-friendly policies found in continental Europe, but the overall thrust of the measures is to reinforce women’s family roles. Given women’s overall lower incomes, an average retired woman’s pension can be rather low, and certainly insufficient to support a family. In fact, the policies have been designed on the assumption of a salaried male household head as the real breadwinner. The Islamic Republic’s 1990 labour law also includes maternalist measures that are similar to the maternal protection policies of many countries. The labour law bans women and all workers under 18 from working at night. For pregnant women, the law proscribes the assignment of heavy work; requires employers to transfer pregnant women to lighter work at the same pay when their regular work is deemed heavy or otherwise harmful to their condition; and prohibits women from carrying heavy loads during pregnancy and for 10 weeks after giving birth. The law entitles women to 90 days of maternity leave, at least half of which must be taken after childbirth, for the first three children. New mothers are given time off to nurse their babies in the workplace crèche (IRI 1990; Centre for Women’s Participation 1999). The crèches in which new mothers may put their babies and nurse them in the course of the work-day are usually found in factories.20 However, because factory work is generally deemed inappropriate to women, relatively few women are involved in the manufacturing sector and there have been no campaigns to encourage working-class women’s employment. The leaves, nursing breaks, crèches and childcare centres, therefore, are enjoyed by only a fraction of the economically active female population. Healthcare services have expanded in the Islamic Republic, and special programmes for pregnant women are in place, such as immunization against diphtheria and tetanus. Maternal mortality rates have fallen, and couples are required to attend a seminar in family planning prior to receiving their marriage certificate. This has been accomplished under the public healthcare system through the network of Rural Health Centres and Urban Health Centres, and since 1990 the Ministry of Health and Medical Education has employed the services of women Community Health Volunteers.21 According to a 1999 government publication, about 80 percent of urban mothers and 73 percent of rural mothers have been attended to more than twice during their pregnancy. Trained professionals


assist at 86 percent of births in I.R. Iran, although the number of deliveries attended by untrained people is six times higher in rural areas than it is in the cities IRI 1999: 103 These policies and outcomes may reflect social welfare goals, concerns for the health of mother and child, and the advancement of women. But conservative legislators and jurists have blocked bills that would raise the age of marriage to 16, give women the same inheritance rights as men, or award a temporary stipend to widows disadvantaged by inheritance laws from their late husbands’ estates (Shahidian 2003: 222). A bill that would ban sexual integration at hospitals and public health facilities was cancelled only due to a public outcry. In frustration, Mehrangiz Kaar wrote in Zanan (cited in Gheytanchi 2001: 573): In the beginning of the Persian new year, I am listening – in the midst of political battles in Iran – to understand who I am and what are my rights which I have lost under the name of motherhood. Women are asking one question: under the contemporary legal system of Iran, are women citizens or possessed objects? I hope you understand that when a victim – at the peak of her suffering – speaks of injustices and objects, a historical event proceeds. Take her seriously! Nobel laureate Shirin Ebadi similarly has observed a discrepancy between the stated objectives of some of the laws and policies of the Islamic Republic of Iran, and their real objectives and implications: Priority is given to the betterment of women’s status throughout the country, given their supreme dignity and the Muslim woman’s fundamental role in strengthening the foundations of the family, as well as strengthening social, scientific, and artistic projects. A closer look at the place of women as viewed by cultural policymakers will reveal their emphasis on family values; a woman’s independence, her social situation, and the discriminations leveled against her are never at issue. Policymakers view women as wives and mothers, who need cultural reinforcement and guidance to better fulfill their domestic roles.22 If the Islamic Republic of Iran’s ‘motherist’ policies sought to valorize motherhood and domesticity through such redistributive/allocative measures as pensions for mothers of martyrs, compensation for housework and childrearing in the event of divorce, and expansion of the mehrieh, most Iranian women seem to be more interested in the reform of family law and in increasing their economic and political participation. Indeed, like MENA feminists in general, Iranian women’s rights activists, while not discounting the economic value or cultural capital of mehrieh and nafaqa, prefer a discourse emphasizing civil, political and social rights that are in line with international standards (Moghdam 2003, ch. 8). It is for these reasons that the Center for Women’s Participation drafted in 2004 a parliamentary bill that would have the Islamic Republic of Iran sign and ratify CEDAW.


Conclusions This chapter has demonstrated how Muslim family law, as a social policy, impedes women’s economic citizenship, and why it is that Iranian women activists (like activists in other MENA countries) have prioritized reform of family law as a necessary condition for the expansion of women’s rights and welfare. Whereas the reform of family law is not in the interests of the rentier neopatriarchal state, it is necessary for the strategic gender interests of Iranian women. I have argued that Muslim family law today is an anachronistic social policy that reinforces the patriarchal gender contract, undermines women’s economic citizenship, and does little to provide for women’s welfare. For these reasons, Iranian women have embarked on a quest for economic citizenship. Although economic and cultural barriers continue to prevent largescale labour incorporation of women, middle-class women who are in the labour force have been pushing for reform of those barriers – such as Muslim family law – while also engaging in other strategies, such as forming or joining NGOs, in order to enhance their social participation, employment opportunities and access to economic resources. This study also has confirmed the contradictory nature of maternalist discourses and policies, especially as they have been practised in the Islamic Republic of Iran. Following Koven and Michel, we note that maternalism in Iran has been a ‘cloak for paternalism’ more than a radical discourse and vision emanating from the women’s movement. Whereas Islamic women advocates have deployed a religiousmotherist discourse and were responsible for the adoption of ojrat-ol-mesl, secular feminists have stressed the need to make Iran’s legal frameworks, including its family law, more consistent with international standards and norms. Similarly, because of the official discourse of women’s domesticity and the ideal maternal role, secular feminists have steered clear of a maternalist discourse that seeks rewards for women’s unpaid labour or housework. Rather, they emphasize the need for more employment opportunities and equality in social insurance. Unlike Europe, where ‘the highly unequal distribution of unpaid work and especially caring labour underlies much of the inequality found in employment and reproduced in social security’ (ILR 2000: 115), the issue in Middle Eastern countries like Iran is the highly unequal distribution of paid work, along with explicitly discriminatory family laws, that underlies the gender inequalities found in the region. Indeed, in almost all Middle Eastern countries, maternalist politics and discourses are associated with the neopatriarchal state and with Islamist movements, including their female members. The masculine nature of the labour force and the predominance of the discourse of motherhood is surely why MENA feminists tend not to engage in a maternalist politics or advocate for policies pertaining to women’s care work. Their priorities, instead, are reform of family law in order that family relations are made more equitable and that women’s economic and political participation is enhanced (Moghadam 2002a). Many non-Islamist women have distanced themselves from religious-maternalist discourses and campaigns, or have used them only instrumentally.23


There is no doubt that many Iranian families ignore Muslim family law and provide daughters with the same inheritance as sons. A husband also may put property in his wife’s name. (This was common in pre-revolutionary Iran, especially among the elite.) But the fact is that the laws disadvantage women and apparently so does much social practice. This, after all, is why Islamic women eventually campaigned against the most egregiously discriminatory aspects of Muslim family law; and why they lobbied for a mechanism to provide divorced women with some share of the husband’s assets. One may also note that, having faced the limits of the religious-maternalist discourse, Islamic women in and around the Centre for Women’s Participation have deemed it necessary to lobby for Iran’s accession to the Women’s Convention. How the state will respond remains to be seen.

Notes 1 This includes research by Linda Gordon, Theda Skocpol, Sonya Michel and Seth Koven, Sonya Michel and Robin Rosen, and Molly Ladd-Taylor – who tend to have different approaches to and definitions of ‘maternalist’ in the social policy or welfare state context. 2 Representative of this body of research are studies by Gisela Bock, Helga Hernes, Barbara Hobson, Ann Shola Orloff and Diane Sainsbury. 3 See, for example, studies by Nancy Folbre (1994), Arlie Hochschild (1989), Jane Jenson (1986) and Jane Lewis (1980). 4 Esping-Anderson (1990) and Marshall (1964). Marshall’s theory remains powerful and appealing, inasmuch as it integrates development and social policy frameworks and offers a historical perspective. 5 The argument is made in a larger study of gender and social policy in the Middle East, with a three-country focus on Iran, Jordan and Tunisia (Karshenas and Moghadam 2005). The present chapter draws on some of the conceptual discussion there. 6 See, for example, Richards and Waterbury 1996; Tzannatos and Kaur 2002. 7 Exceptions are Moghadam (1998) and Amira Sonbol (2003). See also the essay by Barbara Swirski (in Joseph 2000), on differential access to social rights and the state’s welfare benefits by Jewish and Palestinian women citizens in Israel. 8 On family law see, for example, Esposito and DeLong-Bas 2001; An-Naim 2002; Joseph 2000. 9 Among other things, Skocpol was keen to dispute the notion of the United States as a relative ‘laggard’ among the core countries in terms of social welfare provisioning, and to make a case for the revival of generous social policies in her country. What was distinctive about the early American policies, she argues, was the extent to which women reformers were involved in their design and implementation. This has been challenged by other scholars, who take issue with Skocpol’s definition of maternalist policies as woman-centered, largely progressive, feminist, and cross-class. See the debate between Skocpol and the historian Linda Gordon in the journal (now defunct) Contention, Vol. 2, No. 3, Spring 1993: 139–89. 10 It is worth noting that maternalist discourses and politics have a long history in the women’s movement, and have been especially evident in women’s peace and human rights movements. 11 There are four Sunni schools (Hanafi, Hanbali, Maliki, Shafii) and one Shia school (Jaafari) of Islamic jurisprudence. For details on Islamic family law across countries and figh schools, see An-Naim (2002). 12 Mahr also commercializes the marriage contract. See Fatemeh Moghadam (1994). 13 Information from members of the author’s family, retired civil servants from the ministries of agriculture, roads and transportation, and culture. Of course, the vast majority of employees of the armed forces, the Oil Company, and the Ministry of Roads were men.

106 Valentine M. Moghadam 14 The figures are from UNESCO (1994), and the full table may be found in Moghadam (1998), ch. 2. 15 Temporary marriage, known as sigheh, is an Iranian Shia phenomenon. 16 According to UNDP estimates, women’s earned income in 2002 was $2,835, compared with men’s earned income of $9,946. See UNDP (2004), Table 24. 17 Family planning was revived and aggressively implemented in the wake of the economic and social difficulties created by the eight-year war with Iraq, growing poverty due to declining oil revenues and the state budget, and an exceedingly high birth rate during the 1980s. In 1993 the parliament passed the Family Planning and Population Control Act. This was the beginning of the ‘rationalization’ of social policy – within limits – in the Islamic Republic. By the new century, Iranian (and Tunisian) women had, at 2.2 births per woman, the lowest fertility rates in the region, followed by Lebanon and Turkey. 18 Yesim Arat (2000: 278–79) reports that a similar debate took place in Turkey, when women’s groups proposed that an amendment to the civil code allow women to select the option of sharing assets acquired during the marriage. Some feminists opposed this measure, fearing that women would continue to see housewifery as an attractive prospect, decline to work outside the home, and continue their economic dependence. 19 In early 2005, the sister of a friend of the author was seeking, without success, a larger share of her husband’s assets after 22 years of marriage during which time the husband had been frequently abusive. The amount of ojrat-ol-mesl that was due her was considerably less than the average price of a home/apartment in Tehran. 20 In 1994, the author visited a crèche and childcare centre in a large textiles and garments factory outside Tehran, and found them to be of high quality. See details in Moghadam (1998), ch. 7. 21 In the early 1990s, the Iranian government mobilized around 20,000 women volunteers to help implement its new family planning policy, but later refused them permission to set up an independent organization. See Hoodfar (1998). 22 Shirin Ebadi, Women’s Rights in the Laws of the Islamic Republic of Iran (2002), reproduced in the Iranian on-line feminist journal Badjens at http://www.badjens.com/ebadi.html (accessed 20 December 2004). 23 Personal communication, Latifa Jbabdi of Morocco’s Union de l’Action Feminine, Helsinki, 10 September 2004. Jbabdi was describing the feminist strategy of mobilizing support for the reform of Morocco’s very conservative family code, the Mudawanna. She told the author: ‘We had to break the taboo [of tampering with the family law, seen as divine], and so we studied the Qur’an. We found that many aspects of the family law contradicted the Qur’an. We are not Islamist feminists, but our country is a Muslim country, and so we used religious language.’ The Iranian feminist lawyer Mehrangiz Kaar, a staunch secularist, nonetheless urged ijtihad as a way of motivating believing women to advocate change in the Islamic Republic.

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5 Gender Equality and Developmental Social Welfare in South Africa Shireen Hassim

Introduction Mainstream welfare-state literature identifies four welfare-state regimes: liberal, social democratic, corporatist and state-socialist. More recently, a fifth category has emerged: the developmental welfare state. As with research on EspingAndersen’s categorization of ‘three worlds of welfare capitalism’, early research on developmental social policy is revealing enormous variants within this category as well (Mkandawire 2004). Feminist studies of developmental welfare are poorly developed, and thus far we have very few analyses of how gender is conceptualized. Yet, like other welfare state regimes, developmental states are regulatory in nature: they ascribe meaning to the social category of gender and create a normative framework within which needs are adjudicated and considered to be worthy of attention. While welfare states in the north traditionally redefined the relationship between work and family, developmental states operating in the context of informalization of labour markets redraw the boundaries between and responsibilities of state, community, families and individuals. Analyses of developmental states have focused on the types of need that ought to be prioritized, and the extent to which these needs could be satisfied within a range of fiscal and global constraints. However, there has been less attention to the ways in which different types of developmental states interpret needs and particularly to the gendered nature of needs interpretation. In seeking to address the challenges of high levels of poverty, the African National Congress (ANC) government has explicitly adopted the approach of developmental welfare – indeed South Africa is regularly described as ‘probably the developing world’s largest and most generous welfare state’ (Bernstein 2005). Unusually, South African policy frameworks are underpinned by very strong formal commitments to gender equality, as social rights and gender equality have both been conceived as integral to citizenship in democratic South Africa. The constitutional obligations to gender equality are enacted by the creation of an institutional framework (the national machinery for women) to ensure the inclusion of gender equality concerns in policy formulation. In the early 1990s, women’s organizations, led by the Women’s National Coalition, argued for the 109

110 Shireen Hassim

greater representation of women in elected political bodies (Hassim 2002). As a result of the successes of these strategies, the country has consistently been among the highest performers in the world in terms of the numbers of women elected to political office. These developments created the expectation that social and economic policies would follow suit in placing the expansion of women’s social rights at the core of government priorities. However, South Africa’s political representation performance in the ten years since the inception of democracy significantly outstrips its performance in improving women’s economic position. On the Gender and Development Index (GDI) of the United Nations, South Africa ranks 90th out of 144 countries. Clearly, political presence does not necessarily mean that poor women’s interests will be adequately addressed in economic and social policy. South Africa provides a useful case study for the examination of the gendered nature of developmental welfare. In this chapter, I consider the impact of processes of democratization on the structure and ideology of welfare institutions in the post-apartheid South Africa. I analyse the extent to which these processes have expanded women’s citizenship entitlements. Has democratization shifted the nature of state regulation and conceptions of need and entitlement? How are interpretations of need concretely manifested in policies and programmes? I argue that while women have made enormous strides in gaining recognition for their particular political disadvantages, there has been slower translation of political rights into social rights. The welfare system remains constrained by narrow conceptions of the role of the state and by distrust of rights-based demands on state resources. These have impacted on the extent to which social inequalities of gender are eroded by the democratic state.

Democratizing social welfare The democratic government inherited a state that from a social policy perspective was unique in Africa. Social assistance was already inscribed as state responsibility, albeit in a racially discriminatory form, prior to the creation of apartheid. State pensions, the major area of government spending on welfare, have always been a non-contributory form of social assistance and although means tested were awarded regardless of work status and with no reciprocal obligations on recipients. Pensions were supplemented by a range of other non-contributory, means-tested social assistance mechanisms. In general, as Lund et al. (1996: 97) have characterized it, the South African system is a ‘strange combination of mainly British welfare tradition and apartheid policy’ where the distinction between the ‘deserving’ and the ‘undeserving’ poor is marked by race (Van der Berg 1997). Race was regarded as shaping lifestyle patterns as well as entitlements. Under apartheid, African exclusion from welfare was justified on the grounds that ‘people accustomed to modern lifestyles and consumption patterns had greater need of social protection than those in rural subsistence agriculture, who were not proletarianized and were thus presumed to be better placed to meet traditional subsistence needs’ (Van der Berg 1997: 486).

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The provision of pensions and other grants (primarily child maintenance and disability) expanded in the period between the two world wars partly in response to unionized white working-class struggles and as a mechanism for addressing the ‘poor white’ problem. Inclusion of poor whites (mainly Afrikaners) was a cornerstone of the Afrikaner nationalist movement and the creation of safety nets targeted at this group legitimated ideological processes of building a racially exclusive state system. Africans – even those who were workers in the urban formal economy – were excluded from welfare provisions on the grounds that the burdens of social reproduction would be carried by extended families. Indians were regarded as temporary residents in South Africa; a repatriation policy was still adhered to formally. On the basis of recommendations of the Carnegie Commission of Enquiry, which sat in 1929, a state welfare department was established for the first time in 1937. African urbanization and the rise of urban slums created enormous anxieties for the state during this period, although the response was not the comprehensive welfare system that developed to support poor whites. Over time some benefits, such as pensions and grants for the blind and disabled, were extended to African and Indian people (men and women) although benefits were pegged at different levels on the basis of racist assumptions about the basic needs of different groups.1 For example, African pensions were set at one-tenth the amount for whites and the means test employed for Africans was far more stringent (Van der Berg 1997: 487). Nevertheless, the acceptance of the idea that all groups were entitled to some benefits is startling given the denial of political and civil rights to all but whites. During the apartheid period, the racial spread of welfare benefits was retained but the gap in the levels of benefits between whites and Africans widened considerably. Apartheid also began to be inscribed not just in the ideological premises of policy but also in the ways in which services were delivered to citizens. Administratively, there was a shift in the 1950s from a single Welfare Department in government for the whole population to separate departments for different race groups, although all departments were governed by the same welfare legislation (Lund 1988: 24). Lund (1988) points out that not only did the apartheid government force private voluntary agencies to stop offering services on a racially inclusive basis, it also insisted that voluntary welfare bodies not have racially mixed management committees. State subsidies to private welfare agencies stipulated racially discriminatory salaries for social workers.2 The 1950s were also a period of heightened political mobilization against the unfolding of the apartheid state, with women being among the most vociferous critics of attempts to control the movement of African people and to limit African women’s access to the labour market through the imposition of pass controls. An independent, non-racial national women’s movement, the Federation of South African Women (FSAW) emerged that aligned itself with the ANC and linked women’s struggles for emancipation with those of the national liberation movement. The FSAW played a central role in redefining women’s political roles away from being ‘the tea ladies of the struggle’ to articulating concrete political demands, within a radical motherist frame (Wells 1992). The ideology of

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motherhood and the political language of ‘motherism’ became firmly anchored in both the women’s movement and the national liberation movement, a defining trope in nationalist discourses on gender. The strength of this approach increased in the face of apartheid’s denial of rights to family for Africans, and the state’s programmes to reduce African women’s fertility, introducing Depo Provera and IUDs through the state health system during the 1960s. Motherism had a powerful impact on the language of social policy in South Africa that persists into present policy discourses. In the anti-apartheid movement, motherism was articulated as a radical and empowering discourse and as a means through which women could gain recognition for their gendered responsibilities. The Women’s Charter of Demands, adopted by the FSAW in 1954, echoed policy reforms being promoted by proponents of the welfare state in Britain. The Charter demanded that the state provide four months’ maternity leave on full pay for working mothers, together with maternity homes, antenatal clinics, child welfare centres, crèches, nursery schools and birth-control clinics. Its list of radical demands included subsidized housing and food and provision of a range of basic services, a minimum wage and the banning of nuclear and atomic bombs. These very concrete demands went beyond a general political demand for the extension of political citizenship (Walker 1981) and reflected the importance placed by women on the creation of an inclusive welfare state. Under apartheid, the main grant for child and family care was the state maintenance grant (made up of a parent allowance and a child allowance), which was awarded on a means-tested basis to certain categories of women and their children. As with other grants, the state maintenance grant was awarded on a racially differentiated basis with whites receiving the highest amount followed by Indian and Coloured people at the same level, followed by African people at the lowest end of the scale. It was also unevenly administered under the racial and homeland-segregated welfare delivery system: some administrations did not award the grant and some awarded only the child allowance component. Although African families constituted the majority of poor households, most African families did not benefit from the grant (only two per 1000 African children received the grant); they were largely excluded through a range of administrative measures. For example, the homelands and ‘independent’ states such as the Transkei did not administer the grant, rendering vast swathes of the African population without access to social welfare. The application of a means test resulted in many white people being filtered out of the system due to their higher overall income. By contrast, grants to Indians and Coloureds increased dramatically in the 1970s and 1980s as the state embarked on a reform programme that would offer limited citizenship rights to these groups. The majority of the beneficiaries were Coloured and Indian families – 48 per 1000 children and 40 per 1000 children respectively. In the mid-1980s, welfare policy was revised to erode the ‘welfare statism’ that was seen to have permeated policy. The Department of Constitutional Planning’s Directorate of Social Planning (an interesting location for welfare policy that reflected the increasing links between meeting social welfare needs and the political and military objectives of the government (Patel 1992: 41)) issued a


report recommending further racial segregation of welfare, the privatization of welfare provision (‘the state would act as a safety net only where individuals, communities and the private sector were unable to take on new roles and responsibilities’ (Lund 1988: 25)) and the devolution of welfare provision to provincial and local authorities. By 1990 the government was well on the road to downscaling its commitment to the provision of social welfare even though reforms aimed at deracialization increased expenditure on African people dramatically. The provision of welfare was not only inflected with assumptions about race but also with very fixed, Eurocentric views about gender roles. Throughout the apartheid era the welfare system retained the view that ‘people would live in twogenerational nuclear families with a male head of household; that there would be full employment in the formal waged economy and that women would be at home’ (Lund et al. 1996: 97). In reality a wide variety of household forms coexisted both between and within population groups, and access to the labour market was racially differentiated. Influx controls and migrancy resulted in urban workers (both female and male), having attachments and responsibilities to more than one household. While unemployment was virtually non-existent for whites due to preferential access to the labour market, it was highly prevalent among Africans. The result was that whites could access a range of supplementary economic benefits in the private sphere (for example, medical and unemployment insurance, workers’ compensation and retirement provisions) that were unavailable to Africans. In part because of high levels of unemployment, pensions came to assume significant importance in poor households as a source of household security. Although pensions are allocated to individuals, they are consumed as a household asset thus having redistributive implications. Case and Deaton (1996: 23) found that pensions reached almost three times as many women as men. Their study found that 23.7 per cent of African households received an old age pension and that 66.4 per cent of pensions went to households in rural areas, the location of the poorest households (cited in Lund et al. 1996: 102). Women draw a pension at age 60, men at age 65; this has added to the evidence that pensions are a gender-sensitive mechanism of redistribution. However, as I will argue below, there are systemic barriers to women’s ability to access social assistance that may limit the gender sensitivity of all grants. In the late 1980s, the government adopted the principle of welfare privatization. The National Party government argued that welfare had to be understood as a partnership between the state, the private business sector and voluntary religious and community associations. It therefore encouraged ‘community and individual responsibility for meeting needs through market mechanisms, emphasizing volunteerism, mutual aid, reciprocity between providers and consumers, fees for service and private practice in welfare provision’ (Patel 1992: 45). In the process, no doubt the government hoped to deflect political opposition to the racialized allocation of public resources. However, among the highly mobilized communities in African townships, as well as Indian and Coloured women who were the major recipients of welfare, the idea of privatization of welfare was anathema. Similarly, cash-strapped and overburdened providers of social services assumed that the

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advent of democracy would result in an expansion rather than contraction of state responsibilities. Leila Patel’s survey among non-state, grassroots providers of social services in the early 1990s found that 75 per cent opposed privatization of social welfare and advocated the expansion of state responsibility in financing social services (Patel 1992: 102). Despite considerable discussion in anti-apartheid organizations during the late 1980s about policy alternatives that would be democratic and redistributive, and despite the social-development initiatives of grassroots organizations such as the civics movement that dealt with problems of crime, alcoholism and social conflict in street committees and ‘people’s courts’,3 there seems to have been little discussion about what role welfare specifically would play in meeting basic needs and redistributing resources. Discussions of the relationship between gender equality and social policy were even more rare, as feminists were generally marginal to political and policy debates. Discussions of economic policy occurred in isolation from debates about social policy, even though as late as 1990 Francie Lund was raising the question of the affordability of the general British model of the welfare state in South Africa and calling for a holistic discussion of social policy. It is therefore not surprising that the period since 1994 has not been characterized by an unambiguous redistributive policy vision for social welfare. Rather than locating social policy strongly and unambiguously within a redistributive framework, in the democratic period the bulk of government efforts has focused on linking welfare to a policy of developmentalism. In the next section I examine the gendered assumptions behind this approach, examining the implications of the developmental approach for the ability of women to access their citizenship entitlements. Although a highly advanced social security system was in place by 1994, there were gaps in this system: pensions covered by far the bulk of the welfare budget, while other grants (disability, parents’ allowances and child support) were relatively small. The rapid inclusion of women into government also resulted in the women’s movement being able to put through a range of new legislation, such as the Domestic Violence Act and the Maintenance Act, both of which required substantial increases in budgetary allocation if they were to be effectively implemented (Vetten 2005).

The notion of developmental social welfare The concept of developmental social welfare was first outlined in the Reconstruction and Development Programme in 1994 and is embedded in the White Paper on Social Welfare, gazetted in February 1996 and adopted in 1997. The approach is defined in the White Paper as being to create a welfare system ‘which facilitates the development of human capacity and self-reliance within a caring and enabling socio-economic environment’ (Government of South Africa 1997: ch. 2). Recognizing that economic growth in itself will not enhance the social and economic well-being of citizens, the White Paper argues for ‘the equitable allocation and distribution of resources … . Social development and economic development are therefore interdependent and mutually reinforcing’. The link


between social and economic development is not mere rhetoric. A key plank in the developmental social welfare platform is the creation of employment; this is a responsibility of macroeconomic policy in general but also specifically of the Department of Social Development (previously Welfare and Population Development) through the Community Based Public Works Programme, funded out of the social security and welfare budget. Public works programmes are seen to have the twin benefits of addressing the infrastructural needs of the country as well as reducing poverty and long-term dependence on state assistance. They are therefore seen as developmental in their impact, and considerable resources have been directed into these programmes. The White Paper identifies a wide and impressive set of guiding principles, 17 in all, including democracy, human rights, justice, transparency and accountability. An examination of the list of principles suggests the policy is based on wide-ranging and expansive conceptions of citizenship. In the particular formulations of the guiding principles, it is compatible with the capabilities approach developed by Amartya Sen, which focuses less on the elaboration of the entitlements of citizenship and much more on whether all members of society are capable of achieving an enhanced quality of life. For example, non-discrimination is specified in addition to equity; where equity refers to the distribution of material resources, non-discrimination focuses on ‘tolerance, mutual respect, diversity, and the inclusion of all groups in society’. The policy is based on the principle that the quality of life of all people should be raised through a redistribution of resources and services. In yoking the cultural concept of ubuntu (humanity) the White Paper signals the importance of cultural norms and values, particularly the principle of caring and mutual interdependence, to the project of development. Elsewhere, in the ‘Agenda for Action’, the policy emphasizes the need for government programmes to ensure the realization of citizens’ ‘dignity, safety and creativity’. This expansive notion of development initially found resonance and widespread support in civil society. The White Paper was developed under the new ‘rules of the game’ with regard to public decision-making introduced by the ANC government, in which policies would be developed through extensive consultations between government and civil society, and where public policies in a range of areas – the economy, health and welfare, trade and so on – were assumed to be synergistic. The White Paper was developed in a context of general optimism about the ability of the state to lead a process of transformation and a faith in the democratic process. As a policy document produced out of compromise between different interests, the White Paper inevitably embodies numerous tensions that are left to particular programmes to deal with. From a feminist perspective, the most noteworthy tension is between the capabilities approach and neoliberal caveats. Social assistance programmes were to be based on a principle of affordability and sustainability – that is, they were to be ‘financially viable, cost efficient and effective’. These neutral terms obscure the extent to which welfare budgets are vulnerable to the imperatives of ‘fiscal responsibility’. The plan of action for the White Paper recognized the fiscal, economic and infrastructural constraints on government’s ability to implement

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the principles of developmental social welfare. Social security provisions were thus to be ‘phased in’ on the principle of the progressive realization of benefits (this wording conforms to the constitutional provisions on social rights) as well as sustainability. The issue of how rapidly this would be done and what the targets for inclusion would be are not specified in the White Paper and, like the question of affordability, would be intensely contested in the welfare debates that ensued. Despite the emphasis on participation, poor women were relatively poorly organized and had very little voice in national-level policy debates, making it unlikely from the outset that they would have much power over budgetary choices. Although developmental welfare seeks to provide a third way between inequalityenhancing residualist systems and expensive social democratic systems, commitments to social justice are relatively weak. There is an inbuilt normative choice in the emphasis on public works programmes as opposed to expansion of the scale of welfare benefits that sets up a two-tier system of benefits, with people on work-related programmes treated as ‘deserving’ poor and those on welfare (and particularly mothers drawing the child support grant), as either passive and dependent subjects or cunning exploiters of the system. Reflecting on the notion of developmental social welfare in 2003 in the context of a debate on the Basic Income Grant, Ravi Naidoo of the trade-union research agency NALEDI argues that the ‘trendy concept of developmental social welfare has failed miserably’ and that it has embedded notions of ‘an undeserving poor’ and ‘promoted ways for the “able-bodied” to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps’ (Naidoo 2003). The White Paper names the importance of the non-state welfare sector (religious organizations and non-governmental organizations) as well as informal special support systems, including community care, in meeting social service needs. Again, this is posed in the White Paper in the spirit of ‘national collective responsibility’, but it leaves open the question of the precise balance between the different sectors of welfare provisioning. In this respect the emphasis on the cultural value of caring might perhaps be seen as loading the dice against women, who bear the practical burdens of care-work within families and communities. As Lund et al. (1996: 115) note, ‘a double equation is at work which assumes that community care is equal to care by families which is equal to unpaid care by mostly women’. Women’s caring burdens have dramatically increased as the HIV/AIDS infection rates have assumed pandemic proportions. Indeed, early evidence from the pandemic is showing that it is not only women who are carrying an even greater burden of caring but that children are increasingly having to take on these roles. The shift away from the language of rights and entitlements in the White Paper would seem to dilute the particular (and greater) responsibility of the state in meeting social security needs through the redistribution of public resources. A final area of tension in the White Paper relates to the ways in which ‘the family’ is invoked in the document. Under the subheading ‘The Family’, the White Paper simply states: ‘The family is the basic unit of society. Family life will be strengthened and promoted through family-oriented policies and programmes’. It is not difficult to understand why ‘strengthening family life’ is a desirable goal for many in South Africa, given the ways in which the migrant


labour policies of the colonial and apartheid state, and the dominance of residentially based domestic work denied basic human comfort and intimacy to so many Africans. The White Paper leaves open, perhaps intentionally, the definition of what constitutes family (while stipulating that social security provisions should include homosexuals). These specificities are left to particular policies to articulate and while in some instances (such as the Lund Committee on the implementation of a child support grant) opportunities were taken to shift away from nuclear, male-headed family forms as the norm, this approach is not guaranteed in the overarching policy framework, leaving perhaps too much to the political will and ideological perspectives of particular policy-makers. The increasing centralization of macroeconomic decision-making from 1996 undermined the assumptions of consultative, participatory decision-making assumed by the White Paper. For women’s organizations, the ability to leverage the symbolic power and legislative representation of women into policy outcomes was severely undermined. Government’s assertion of fiscal restraint introduced a new discourse into policy-making: the debate because less concerned with what was desirable and more concerned with what was possible. Affordability was often assessed in narrow fiscal terms and by prioritizing gross inequalities rather than a concern with the long-term costs of failing to address pervasive systemic inequalities. The formal provisions of the constitution proved inappropriate in dealing with the ways in which government prioritizes spending. Although the right to social security is entrenched in the socioeconomic-rights clause in the constitution (section 27) the implementation of this right is by no means automatic, nor does it guarantee that the extent of social security provided will be adequate to ensure a decent standard of living. The important proviso to the right to social security is a qualifying clause in section 27 of the Bill of Rights, which defines the state’s obligations as limited to ‘available resources’ (Government of South Africa 1996, section 27). The immediate consequences of the emphasis on affordability were seen in the process of overhauling the system of child and family benefits, which the Department of Welfare instituted in 1996 and which coincided with the public debate on the White Paper on Social Welfare. The changes to the welfare provisions for children began in a transitional context of translating broad policy formulations into concrete programmes, and the deliberations of the Lund Committee, which spearheaded the changes, reveal the tensions between pursuing equity (by ensuring that poor African families would benefit from social assistance) and affordability. By July 1996, poor mothers were paid a total monthly grant of R565 (made up of a parent allowance of R430 and a child allowance of R135) for a maximum of two children up to the age of 18 (that is, to a maximum of R700). For those families receiving it, the grant played a major poverty-alleviation role in raising overall household income above the household subsistence level. However, as noted above, the grant reached very few African households, with Indian and Coloured families being the primary beneficiaries. Attempts to entrench the racial equity of the grant produced the perverse consequence that while more poor families

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received the grant the monetary value of the grant was drastically reduced. The Committee had to work within the government’s decision not to increase overall spending. At the time, government had already cut defence spending significantly (virtually halved between the 1990/91 and 1996/97 fiscal years) and increased social security spending by 120 per cent over the same period (Gelb 2004). There was a strong perception in the Committee that no further increases were likely and that the demands on the existing budget were likely to increase under the impact of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. The Committee’s recommendations were therefore based on a fiscally constrained scenario in which the already inadequate welfare budget faced further cuts from the central government. A number of concerns have surfaced with regard to the effective implementation of the child support grant. Firstly, women’s organizations have criticized the two-tier means test to establish eligibility for the grant. The means test requires that the primary caregiver prove that he or she is a member of a household with a combined income below R9,600 (approximately $1,300) per annum for urban households and R13,200 (approximately $1,800) per annum for rural dwellings or those in informal areas. Other elements of the means test include a requirement that the primary caregiver shows that she/he is actively seeking employment. The Lund Committee was itself not convinced of the benefits of means testing, favouring instead a universal grant. The Committee noted that the means test imposed administrative costs on the system as it required extensive assessment and monitoring and imposed costs on parents, which could act as a negative incentive, particularly for foster parents. The Committee also warned that means testing could be a biased process. ‘Communities, especially in poorer areas, are so greatly under the domain of traditional leaders with extensive powers of patronage that caution should be exercised in this approach. The track record of civic associations in impartial decision-making is likewise uneven’ (Lund Committee 1996: 29). However, Department of Welfare officials insisted on the retention of this mechanism, concerned that there might otherwise be overwhelming numbers of people applying for the grant and that many of them might be ‘unworthy’, at least in economic terms. The Committee stressed that should a means test be adopted, it should be a simple economic test and should not ‘in any way depend on a definition of a family’ (Lund Committee 1996: 92). However, the old means test appears to still be in place. Recent research shows that many welfare officials informally add on new ‘tests’ of eligibility, such as proof of tax being paid, and letters certified by police officers (Goldblatt 2005). Anecdotal evidence suggests that welfare officials turn mothers who are overtly lesbian away. The South African NGO Coalition (SANGOCO) has called for the existing means test to be replaced with one that is based on the income of the primary caregiver, arguing that this will be easier to administer. As Liebenberg points out, ‘this is particularly important in view of the fact that the child support grant requires a doubling of the capacity of the welfare system to process grants. The present system is already over-burdened with huge backlogs in poverty-stricken areas’ (Liebenberg 1998: 11). These problems are exacerbated by poor management and delivery systems, and in some cases corrupt practices at the provincial level, which initially led to


under-spending of welfare budgets for three consecutive years, with the child support grant showing the slowest take-up rate (EPRI 2002). In an assessment of the effectiveness of the grant commissioned by the Department of Welfare and conducted in 2000, the Community Agency for Social Enquiry (CASE) found that the capacity and competence of the Department of Welfare to administer the grant was limited by a range of problems: insufficient information, outdated application forms, lack of coordination between the Departments of Welfare, Health and Home Affairs, poor departmental cooperation with NGOs and community organizations and by ‘indifferent and even hostile attitudes on the part of Welfare staff’ (CASE 2000: 120). The government has sought to deal with some of the administrative problems related to delivering grants by privatizing grant payments and creating a common agency for grants payments that would take back control over grants payments from the provincial to the national level of government. This has by no means made the grants more accessible; indeed many pensioners have complained that queues remain as long as ever and that the private companies are using the payment process as an opportunity to sell insurance policies and even short-term loans to pensioners. The provinces with the best resources (Gauteng and Western Cape) have been most successful in reaching delivery targets, while those with the greatest need (Eastern Cape and Limpopo) also have the least effective delivery systems and have been the least successful in reaching their targets (Guthrie 2002). Most street children and children in child-headed households cannot access the grant because they do not have the necessary identity documents to apply, or they do not know the procedures for application. The Alliance for Children’s Entitlement to Social Security (ACESS) estimates that 75.8 per cent of South African children live below a poverty line of R400 per month. Many NGOs have recommended increases in the level of the grant, but noted that ‘this would require a political decision involving a trade-off with other grants and budgetary items’ (Guthrie 2002: 122). The government has been responsive to these recommendations, improving information about the grants and increasing the amount and age limit of the grant. By 2003, close to 3 million poor children were receiving the grant (Woolard 2003) and by December 2004 this number had increased to 5.4 million, despite the administrative difficulties described above (Taylor 2004). A major discursive shift introduced by the Lund Committee was the move away from the ‘familist’, male-worker model of social policy. The Committee chose to adopt a ‘follow the child’ policy, with emphasis on the child rather than the carer – in other words, the grant would be paid to the primary caregiver on behalf of the child.4 Means-testing would therefore no longer comprise any component of moral assessment of the worthiness of carer (at least in theory); nor would carers who were not mothers be excluded from the grant. The Committee adopted the policy in recognition of the fluidity and diversity of household forms. This was a significant shift away from the normative assumption that the nuclear family was the desirable model, which was inscribed in apartheid-era social welfare; and, importantly, it addressed the rights of children born into polygamous families.

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At least in formal terms, the effect was to de-link childcare from normative assumptions about family forms or gender responsibilities and particularly to delink care work from mothering. As the Committee noted, ‘it resolves the problem of how to define the family in such a complex and multi-cultured society. It says that children, however many in a household, of whatever status, are important and need to be protected’ (Lund Committee 1996: 91). Of course, these shifts in the core assumptions of the child support grant do not as yet translate into shifts in the views of welfare officials and the media. In reality, moral discourses continue to infect social security provision, crowding out rightsbased arguments for social security. In debates about the child support grant, there was a strong view among many in government that welfare grants reinforced apartheid privileges, had no developmental potential and should be phased out in favour of greater attention to programmes such as community-based public works (Francie Lund, personal communication). Even some ANC women members of parliament took a conservative view of welfare as reinforcing a ‘culture of entitlement’, with welfare grants seen as handouts that reinforced dependency on the state. As one MP argued, ‘women should look at developing themselves’ (Parliament of South Africa 2000). Fraser-Moleketi herself accused poor people of not doing enough: ‘communities had to change the thinking of those who held out their hands for help but kept their sleeves down, a sign that they were not willing to work’ (Koopman 1999). The child support grant continues to be blamed for increasing teenage pregnancy (that is, that young girls are getting pregnant in order to access cash), that women are spending the money on ‘clothing and lipstick’ and even an allegation by the Minister of Social Development that mothers have ‘rented’ out their children to others so that they can claim social assistance. Newspaper reports castigate ‘runaway mothers’ who ‘claim the child support grant meant to feed their offspring’ (Rhupiso 2003). Even the Chairperson of the Commission on Gender Equality had to be gently reminded by feminist activists not to fall into the trap of stereotyping women receiving the child support grants as undeserving.

The Basic Income Grant The Lund Committee’s brief was a narrow one, and the debates which accompanied the release of its recommendations and subsequent problems with the implementation of the child support grant as well as major inefficiencies in the delivery of all social grants have reopened larger questions about the overall system of social assistance. A central concern among many welfare activists was the narrow reach of social security. However redistributive in effect, by their nature pensions only reach a limited number of people. Although by 2004 uptake of the child support grant outstripped government expectations, at the moment poor children over 14 do not receive support. Up to 60 per cent of the poor – mainly those between the ages of 14 and 60 – are not getting any social security at all. It is estimated that 11.8 million of the poorest 23.8 million South Africans live in households that receive no social assistance (Lund 2004). The trickle-down effects


of the Growth, Employment and Redistribution strategy (GEAR) are not materializing; levels of growth remained well below the rate required to address underlying social needs. Unemployment has continued to rise and employment creation through the public works programme was disappointing. It has been estimated that the Community Based Public Works Programme only created between 13,000 and 33,000 jobs per annum between 1996 and 2001 (McCord 2003). By the end of the 1990s, the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) as well as a range of civil society organizations were arguing strongly for a more inclusive system of social security that would have poverty-reducing effects. Poverty is, unsurprisingly, a deeply gendered phenomenon. Statistics from South Africa’s labour force study in 2003 showed that women on the whole had lower incomes, higher unemployment rates and less access to assets than men (Seidman-Makgetla 2004: 2). African women make up 42 per cent of the workforce but only 30 per cent of the employed population. Those women who are employed find themselves in the worst-paid sectors of the labour market, notably in domestic and retail work. In 2003, 96 per cent of domestic workers were black (that is, African, Indian and Coloured) women and 93 per cent of these workers earned under R1,000 (approximately US$180) per month (Seidman-Makgetla 2004: 7). African rural women are the poorest category of citizens: in 1997, 65 per cent of African female-headed households in rural areas were poor compared to 54 per cent of male-headed households (Seidman-Makgetla 2004: 40). At 29.4 per cent, the mortality rate among African women was more than twice that of white women in 1994 (11.5 per cent) (Seidman-Makgetla 2004: 41). It has been estimated that 53 per cent of South Africans, including 60 per cent of the country’s children, live in households with the lowest per capita consumption (Samson 2002: 71). On the United Nations’ Gender and Development Index, even though women and men had comparable school enrolment and adult literacy ratios, men earned twice as much as women (Budlender 2004: 10). These gender vulnerabilities are compounded by the HIV/AIDS pandemic. African women are most vulnerable to HIV infection, more women than men are HIV-positive and women are likely to become more infected at a younger age than men (Albertyn 2003). The pandemic imposes additional burdens on women in their roles as primary carers of family members who are HIV positive. These caring tasks, moreover, have to be performed in the context of poor basic services such as the availability of clean water, electricity and modern sanitation. To what extent could social policy address these gendered dimensions of poverty? There have been few concrete proposals put forward by the women’s movement. Instead, many women’s organizations have allied themselves to the proposal for a Basic Income Grant (BIG), put forward by COSATU as a universal poverty-reduction mechanism. COSATU envisaged that a relatively small universal grant (R100 per month) would be introduced for all individuals (including children). Although neither business nor government were enthusiastic about a BIG,5 COSATU kept up pressure for the grant both within the tripartite alliance and in the media. In July 2001 the BIG Coalition involving 12 organizations was formed. By this time, government had appointed a Committee of Inquiry into a

122 Shireen Hassim

Comprehensive System of Social Security for South Africa (Taylor Committee) in March 2000, chaired by feminist activist and leading member of DAWN, Viviene Taylor. The Committee’s brief included, among other tasks, a review of existing grants, including social assistance and social insurance mechanisms and, after a process of consultation, to make specific recommendations for implementation. Apart from practical administrative and fiscal considerations, the Committee’s recommendations were also to take account of the ‘adequacy of adherence to principles of social solidarity’ (Taylor Committee 2002: 10). The Committee released a report in March 2002 entitled Transforming the Present – Protecting the Future, in which it made a range of recommendations, including mechanisms to improve the institutional arrangements for grant payments, streamlining existing grants and laying out a financial framework for comprehensive social protection. Political attention, however, focused most intensely on the Committee’s recommendation with regard to the BIG. The Committee recommended the ‘gradual development of a comprehensive and integrated income support’. It noted that the ‘conditions for an immediate implementation of a Basic Income Grant do not exist. In particular there is a need to first put in place appropriate capacity and institutional arrangements to ensure effective implementation’ (Taylor Committee 2002: 63). The Taylor Committee argued that existing social assistance schemes reduced poverty by 23 per cent while the BIG would reduce the gap by as much as 74 per cent, with over six million people raised above the poverty line. The Committee recommended that a BIG be phased in by 2006. Although this was a somewhat guarded recommendation, it was taken as endorsement of the views of COSATU and the BIG Coalition, who then used it as the basis for further activism, now arguing for implementation of the Taylor Committee recommendations. Although the Taylor Committee report was received with acclaim by civil society and even supported in principle by the Minister of Social Development, the ANC voted against it at the party’s National Congress in December 2002. Senior ANC member and government spokesperson Joel Netshitenzhe, reporting on Cabinet debate on the Taylor report, commented that Cabinet had a different philosophy to that adopted by the Taylor Committee. Cabinet’s view was that ‘only the disabled or sick should receive handouts, while able-bodied adults should enjoy the opportunity, the dignity and the rewards of work’ (cited in Matisonn and Seekings 2002). The government has countered criticism of the existing welfare system by pointing to steady increases in budgetary allocations to welfare since 2000. Servaas van der Berg has shown that ‘the first years after the political transition saw a large and significant shift of social spending away from the more affluent to the formerly disadvantaged members of the population, and that most social spending is relatively well targeted to reach those most in need of it’ (Van der Berg 2001: 157). As Stephen Gelb (2004) shows in his analysis of social-sector spending (Table 5.1), there have been striking increases in budgetary allocations to welfare, even compared with other social-sector spending. The most recent research on the economic and social impact of social grants, conducted on behalf of the Department of Social Development by the Economic

Gender Equality and Developmental Social Welfare in South Africa 123 Table 5.1 Government budget: size and distribution, South Africa 1990/1 1995/6 1998/9 Education Health Housing, other social services Social services (total) Protection services Economic services Interest Other Total

2001/2 2002/3 2003/4

2004/5 2005/6

18 9 13

21 10 5

22 11 3

20 11 4

20 11 4

20 11 5

20 11 5

19 11 5

46

46

48

48

49

50

51

51

20

17

16

17

17

17

16

16

14

11

9

11

12

13

13

13

12 8 100

19 7 100

20 8 100

17 7 100

15 6 100

13 7 100

13 6 100

13 6 100

Source: Stephen Gelb, Inequality in South Africa: Nature, Causes, Responses ( Johannesburg: The Edge Institute, 2004).

Policy Research Institute (which has been associated with the BIG Coalition), shows that rising expenditure has begun to impact positively on poverty, labour-market participation and productivity. Minister of Social Development Zola Skweyiya argues that ‘income support is more than a safety net for the poorest and most vulnerable people in our society. It is also a trampoline that enables many people in these households to jump over the barriers of economic and social exclusion’ (Ministry of Social Development 2004). The study showed a 66.6 per cent reduction in poverty, when the destitution poverty line (a measure of relative destitution based on the household expenditures of households in the lowest 20 per cent of the income distribution) is used as a benchmark. The study found that the progressive extension of the child support grant up to the age of 14 would reduce the poverty gap by 57 per cent. Receipt of the child support grant correlates to increasing enrolment of children in primary school, with Lund (2004) reporting a remarkable 8 per cent increase in enrolment in grant-receiving households. The EPRI study also found that the major social grants are significantly and positively associated with greater household expenditure on food and consequently better nutritional outcomes. The impact of existing social grants also seems to be addressing other areas that are of concern to the proponents of a Basic Income Grant. The study found that ‘social grants provide potential labour market participants with the resources and security necessary to invest in high risk/high reward job search, [and that] living in a household receiving social grants is correlated with a higher success rate in finding employment’ (Ministry of Social Development 2004).

The likely impacts of a Basic Income Grant on poor women Nor surprisingly, the most prominent debates about the BIG have related to affordability and administrative capacity. The impact of the Basic Income Grant on

124 Shireen Hassim

women has not been directly addressed by the major participants in the BIG Coalition, but the proposal raises a number of issues for feminist analysts. A range of women’s organizations have argued that the BIG should be supported by women on the grounds that women carry the major burden of poverty, and that ‘women are often more responsible than men in using income collectively and developmentally’ (Goldblatt 2003: 2). The universal nature of the grant may remove the stigma attached to other social assistance grants, and the absence of a means test will reduce the degree of moral regulation of women. However, there are a number of assumptions embedded in arguments for the BIG that bear closer attention. These relate to assumptions about intra-household behaviour, the impact of a direct cash grant on women’s autonomy and the consequences of a universal grant for enhancing women’s citizenship entitlements and shifting from notions of female dependency. I will deal with these very briefly. There has been little attention among BIG proponents to the internal power dynamics within households. It is assumed that members of a household will pool their grants and that these will then be used for the benefit of the household as a whole. This assumes also that the interests of the household are unitary and that there will be consensus as to the spending priorities. There is inadequate research into internal household dynamics in South Africa and much of the discussion is thus highly speculative. However, existing research suggests that households are not monolithic entities in which incomes will be pooled (Posel 2001). Some of these concerns have been raised in relation to the BIG. As Beth Goldblatt asks, ‘is it possible or likely that lack of trust will prevent women and men from pooling the BIG or deciding together how it should be spent?’ (Goldblatt 2003: 2). Francie Lund (2004) has pointed out that there is a further assumption that people live in just one household, alluding to the fact that household forms in South Africa are fluid and diverse. Eva Harman has shown how the distribution of social grants is ‘mediated by social relations, historical dynamics and material conditions’ (Harman 2003: 3). While her research shows that grants are pooled within some poor households, this does not mean that distribution within the households is fair and grants may indeed increase dependency of non-grant recipients on recipients. Merely receiving a grant, such as a pension, does not mean that the recipient will have the power to decide how the grant will be used. The elderly, for example, may receive pensions and thereby secure their place and some degree of care from their families, but may give up the grant to younger (possibly male) and more powerful members of the household. From this point of view, a direct grant to each member of the household may reduce such dependencies, but lack of power in the private sphere may lead to grants being appropriated. Work on the spread of HIV shows the extent to which women lack power over decision-making within households – even where the risk of not asserting their voice is extreme illness and even death (Albertyn 2003). Some have argued that a BIG will reduce the extent of domestic violence as women will have access to cash and therefore independence. This seems a far-fetched expectation. An area in which there is more likely to be a gendered impact lies in the potential shift that would result in rural households away from remittances to reliance


on a BIG. Although migrant remittances are crucial to the survival of rural households, they are also part of a cycle of power. Dorrit Posel’s research on the varied patterns of distribution of migrant remittances within rural households suggests that we cannot assume that migrants remit to rural households out of altruism (Posel 2001). Posel found that remittances are being directed not at households but at particular individuals in households, and that migrants may be more responsive to the needs of some household members than to others. Some claimants within households – such as old people and children – are seen as valid claimants whilst others (notably young women) are seen as invalid. A universal grant may therefore have the effect of uncoupling support for rural households from the vagaries of the remittance system and might offer rural women greater autonomy and enable them to overcome other barriers to economic security. Although women have yet to gain equal rights to ownership and access to communal land, they are able to purchase other forms of land through accessing a state subsidy (Walker 2001). The major barrier to this thus far has been lack of cash (purchasers are required to make a cash deposit before the state will issue a subsidy). An income grant might make it possible for women in households where there is more than one woman to pool their income and purchase the land they are currently working. A basic monthly income might make it easier for women to access low levels of credit to increase their productivity. Evidence suggests that there is a definite gender pattern in household spending. Lund’s work on pensions shows that the grant is most generally put to common household use and that, moreover, pension money that goes to women is spent better (that is, on food, health and education) than that which goes to men (Lund 2004). Directing cash grants to women is therefore likely to enhance the quality of life of poor women and children. However, these assumptions have not yet been tested by empirical research and cannot be said to decisively provide support for the idea that a small cash grant will be empowering for women. The paucity of gendered analysis in social assistance debates is partly attributable to the decline in feminist activism since the advent of democracy. Gender politics in the last ten years has centred on increasing women’s representation in various institutions, while the original link between representation and equality outcomes appears to have been broken. In the apartheid era, a clear line was drawn between struggles for formal equality and those for substantive equality. Formal equality – the achievement of equal rights and opportunities – was regarded as an inadequate conceptualization of liberation. The achievement of formal political and civil rights, while an important gain in itself, was understood as a weak form of equality that would have little impact on the lives of poor women. What was needed was substantive equality, understood as the transformation of the economic conditions that produce gender equality.6 The Women’s Charter for Effective Equality, adopted by the Women’s National Coalition in 1994, articulates a notion of equality that is closer to the vision of substantive equality, with a very clear emphasis on the structural and systemic underpinnings of women’s subordinate status. Definitions of equality of course need to be grounded in the particular context in which claims are being made. I would argue that a strong notion of equality,

126 Shireen Hassim

one that would provide some guidance about appropriate policy choices in South Africa, would rest on the extent to which formal discrimination in law and policy is reduced,7 the extent to which overall poverty is reduced, the degree to which women have autonomy and are able to make choices free of the constraints of care work within families and communities, as well as free of the pressure to remain in oppressive and violent relationships (Orloff 1993: 319),8 and the extent to which women feel safe in society. This notion of equality has specific implications for social policy, as it would require that resources be directed in such a way that they serve not only to address the needs of the poorest women, but also become part of an incremental process of enhancing women’s autonomy and full participation in political and economic processes. In South Africa and in other developing-country contexts the conceptualization of equality primarily in terms of labour-market participation and autonomy from family responsibilities is flawed. Firstly, the issue of access to labour markets is different in the context of high and chronic joblessness. Secondly, the caring needs of middle-class women have not resulted in demands for publicly funded systems of family support. The availability of cheap childcare and domestic work for the middle class meant that there was virtually no demand for high quality state-provided childcare. The economic and political processes that accompanied demands for greater public responsibility in providing care in Northern welfare states (Lewis and Giullari, chapter 8 of this volume) do not exist in South Africa. In South Africa the supply (of private childcare) has outstripped demand and consequently the bulk of care work is likely to remain within the private sphere.

Conclusions This chapter has shown that although the transition to democracy has led to the elaboration of a wide-ranging set of civil, political and social rights, the gendered patterns of poverty and inequality have not been significantly reduced. The deracialization of social assistance has included some poor women in the social security safety nets, but the gap in coverage excluded the majority of poor women between the ages of 14 and 60. The extent to which poor women have been able to access their citizenship rights has been limited by the faltering political will to address poverty in a comprehensive manner, by an overarching macroeconomic framework that prioritizes fiscal restraint over redistribution and by an administrative system and infrastructure that is unable to fulfil basic tasks of service delivery. Despite some progress in using social grants as part of a developmental strategy and despite the increasing monetary expenditure on the social sector, the type of welfare system being built in South Africa retains many of the features of a residual system, reacting only to the worst effects of market or family failures and providing assistance to social groups seen as ‘deserving’. Women access support only through their children until they reach the age of 60. Provision of benefits is not generous, benefits are not universal but income-tested, and access to benefits is difficult. Unless the basis of entitlements changes in ways that recognize women’s ntitlements as citizenship rights, poor women will continue to be excluded from


the system of social entitlements. Equally importantly, unless the increased representation includes debate and activism about the meanings of gender equality in the South African context, the likelihood is the parity in representation will increase the access of women elites rather than have the outcome of increased gender equality.

Acknowledgement I would like to thank Beth Goldblatt for many hours of debate about gender and welfare in South Africa, and for her critical reading of earlier versions of this article. Thanks also to Francie Lund for her thoughtful comments and corrections of an earlier draft.

Notes 1 Notably, however, family allowances for large low-income families, instituted in 1947, did not include Africans. 2 Lund (1988) points out that welfare agencies accepted these changes because they were highly dependent on state subsidies. However, some did make private arrangements to equalize salaries of their social workers. 3 See Patel 1992, chapter 3, for a useful discussion of these initiatives. 4 However, Goldblatt (2005) argues that the removal of the parental allowance (almost exclusively accessed by mothers) that was part of the state maintenance grant denies women access to money that they were in the past able to claim as their own entitlement. 5 Paradoxically, the Democratic Party, which in many respects can be seen as the party of business, has supported the introduction of BIG. 6 Elsewhere Catherine Albertyn and I have argued that even this conceptualization of freedom is limited, as it fails to address the social and cultural dimensions of inequality. See Albertyn and Hassim (2003). 7 Of course, certain forms of gender discrimination are both inevitable and desirable, such as in relation to maternity and reproductive health benefits. 8 Orloff (1993) takes this argument much further in suggesting that social policies should aim at decommodification of gender relations by enabling women to form and maintain autonomous households. I am hesitant to apply this notion to women in the South African context, given the particular cultural attachments and support systems that women value within family and communities. It could also be argued that the high number of women-headed households in South Africa suggests that women are indeed free to form autonomous households, but this has patently not empowered women to become full and equal citizens.

Bibliography Albertyn, C. (2003) ‘Contesting Democracy: HIV/AIDS and the Achievement of Gender Equality in South Africa’. Feminist Studies, Vol. 29, No. 3: 595–615. Albertyn, C. and S. Hassim (2003) ‘The Boundaries of Democracy: Gender, HIV/AIDS and Culture’. Development Update 4(3): 138–64. Bernstein, Ann (2005) ‘Let the Market Rule in Welfare’. Business Day, 4 May. Budlender, Debbie (2004) ‘Women and Poverty’, at www.genderstats.org.za/poverty.html, accessed 30 August 2005. CASE (2000) A Social Impact Study on the Phasing-in of the Child Support Grant. Johannesburg: CASE. Case, A. and A. Deaton (1996) Large Cash Transfers to the Elderly in South Africa. Research Program in Development Studies, Princeton NJ: Princeton University.

128 Shireen Hassim EPRI (2002) ‘Social Security Reform and the Basic Income Grant for South Africa’. EPRI Policy Report, 31. Gelb, Stephen (2004) Inequality in South Africa: Nature, Causes, Responses. Johannesburg: Edge Institute. Goldblatt, B. (2003) ‘Teen Pregnancy and the Abuse of the Child Support Grant: Addressing the Myths and Stereotypes’. Agenda, No. 79: 59–81. Goldblatt, B. (2005) ‘Gender and Social Assistance in South Africa’s First Decade of Democracy: A Case Study of the Child Support Grant’. Politikon, November. Government of South Africa (1996) Constitution of South Africa. Government of South Africa (1997) White Paper on Social Welfare. Guthrie, T. (2002) ‘Family Social Security Benefits in South Africa’. Social Dynamics 28(2): 122–45. Harman, Eva (2003) ‘Social Grants and their Social Circulations’. Paper presented at the Second Annual USBIG Conference of the Eastern Economic Association, 21–23 February. Hassim, S. (2002) ‘A Conspiracy of Women: The Women’s Movement in South Africa’s Transition to Democracy’. Social Research, 69(3), Fall: 693–732. Koopman, Andre (1999) ‘Poor Urged to Roll Up Their Sleeves’. Cape Times, 25 May. Liebenberg, S. (1998) ‘Social Security and Human Rights: Current Issues’. Economic and Social Rights in South Africa Review, 1(2): 1–2. Lund Committee (1996) Report of the Lund Committee on Child and Family Support. Pretoria: Government Printers. Lund, F. J. (1993) ‘State Social Benefits in South Africa’. International Social Security Review, 46(3): 5–25. Lund, Francie (1998) ‘State Restructuring of Welfare’. Transformation 6. Lund, Francie (2002) ‘Crowding in Care, Security and Micro-enterprise Formation: Revisiting the Role of the State in Poverty Reduction, and in Development’. Journal of International Development, 14(6): 1–14. Lund, Francie (2004) ‘Gender and Social Security: What We Know, What We Think We Know and What We Really Don’t Know’. Paper presented at Centre for Applied Legal Studies Workshop in Gender and Social Security, December. Lund, Francie, with Sally Ardington and Mary Harber (1996)’Welfare’. In Debbie Budlender (ed.) The Women’s Budget. Cape Town: IDASA. Matisonn, Heidi and J. Seekings (2002) ‘Welfare in Wonderland? The Politics of Basic Income Grant in South Africa, 1996–2002’. Paper presented to the BIEN 9th International Congress, Geneva, 12–14 September. McCord, A. (2003) ‘Public Works as a Component of Social Protection in South Africa’. Paper presented to the Development Policy Research Unit/ Trade and Industry Policy Secretariat Forum, The Challenge of Growth and Poverty: The South African Economy Since Democracy, 8–10 September. Ministry of Social Development (2004) ‘Press Release on Income Support Findings’, 5 December. Mkandawire, Thandika (2004) ‘Social Policy in a Development Context: Introduction’. In T. Mkandawire (ed.) Social Policy in a Development Context. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Orloff, Ann Shola (1993) ‘Gender and the Social Rights of Citizenship: The Comparative Analysis of Gender Relations and Welfare States’. American Sociological Review, 58(3): 303–28. Naidoo, Ravi (2003) ‘The Basic Income Grant: Poverty, Politics and Policy-making’. Harold Wolpe Memorial Lecture, University of Natal, August. Parliament of South Africa (2000) Minutes of Portfolio Committee on Welfare, 13 October 2000. Patel, Leila (1992) Restructuring Social Welfare: Options for South Africa. Johannesburg: Ravan Press. Posel, Dorrit (2001) ‘How do Households Work? Migration, the Household and Remittance Behaviour in South Africa’. Social Dynamics 21(1): 165–89.

Gender Equality and Developmental Social Welfare in South Africa 129 Rhupiso, Victor (2003) ‘Dumped with Daddy’. Sunday Times Metro, 23 February. Samson, Michael J. (2002) ‘The Social, Economic and Fiscal Impact of Comprehensive Social Security Reform for South Africa’. Social Dynamics, 28(2): 69–97. Seidman-Makgetla, Neva (2004) ‘Women and the Economy in South Africa’, at www. genderstats.org.za/economy.html, acccessed 30 August 2005. Taylor Committee (2002) Transforming the Present – Protecting the Future. Report of the Committee of Inquiry into a Comprehensive System of Social Security for South Africa. Pretoria: Department of Social Development. Van der Berg, Servaas (1997) ‘South African Social Security under Apartheid and Beyond’. Development Southern Africa, 14(4): 481–503. Van der Berg, Servaas (2001) ‘Redistribution Through the Budget: Public Expenditure Increase in South Africa, 1993–1997’. Social Dynamics, 21(1): 140–64. Vetten, Lisa (2005) ‘ “Show me the Money”: A Review of Budgets Allocated Towards the Implementation of the Domestic Violence Act’. Politikon, November. Walker, Cherryl (1981) Women and Resistance in South Africa. London: Onyx. Walker, Cherryl (2001) ‘Piety in the Sky? Gender Policy and Land Reform in South Africa’. Paper presented at the UNRISD Conference on Agrarian Change, Gender and Land Rights, Geneva, 6–7 November 2001. Geneva: United Nations Research Institute for Social Development. Wells, Julia C. (1992) We Now Demand! The History of Women’s Resistance to Pass Laws in South Africa. Johannesburg: University of Witwatersrand Press. Woolard, I. (2003) ‘Social Assistance Grants, Poverty and Economic Growth in South Africa’. Research paper, Development Policy Research Unit, University of Cape Town.

6 Social Policy Reforms and Gender in Japan and South Korea Ito Peng

Introduction Feminists are sharply divided into two camps on the issue of family and gender policies in Japan and South Korea (henceforth Korea). On the one hand are those who claim that despite the remarkable developments in the social, economic and political spheres, very little has changed in terms of women’s status (Moon 2002). Proponents of this ‘no real change’ perspective point to these countries’ poor records in the Human Development Report (HDR) indices on gender equality (Gender Development Index or GDI, and Gender Empowerment Measure or GEM) as evidence of the persistence of gender inequality. Indeed, both Japan and Korea are amongst the lowest in the international rankings, and Japan has fallen even further behind in recent years despite the government’s claimed efforts to advance gender equality.1 Based on these figures, there is good reason for scepticism about these developmentalist economies’ abilities to ensure gender equality. As feminist studies have shown, economic growth in many East Asian countries has occurred simultaneously with gender inequality in both public and private spheres (Seguino 1997; Hsuing 1996). On the other hand, there are those who argue that despite their poor standings on international measures, noticeable changes have been made in terms of gender equality in Japan and Korea (Osawa 2000, 2003; Lee and Park 2003). Rather than focusing solely on outcome measures as the means to evaluate progress towards gender equality, more attention needs to be paid to the processes of policy change and to how gender issues are being incorporated into social policies.2 Evidence suggests that a wide range of policy measures have been introduced in both Japan and Korea since 1990 to address the issues of family and gender, and attempts have been made in the direction of gender mainstreaming. This chapter cautiously adopts the latter approach, examining family and gender policy reforms in Japan and Korea in the 1990s with an aim to explaining why these reforms have been made, and what they mean in terms of progress towards gender equality. I argue that some important changes have been made in social welfare policies to support family and gender equality, and that the reasons for the 130

Social Policy Reforms and Gender in Japan and South Korea 131

changes are both sociological and political. In both countries changes resulting from demographic ageing and low fertility, greater participation of women in the labour market and in politics, and political regime shifts have created pressures on the government to push for gender equality. However, there remain significant structural and institutional barriers to women’s full participation in the labour market and in politics, and a significant gap exists between individual ideas and policy claims about gender equality on the one hand, and actual practice on the other. The reasons for policy changes in relation to the family and gender are post-industrial changes and political regime shifts. The two most important postindustrial changes are firstly, demographic ageing and declining birth rates and, secondly, changes in family and gender relations.3 In Japan and Korea the rapid ageing of the population combined with declining fertility has sparked fears of an increased dependency rate, labour shortages, greater social security burden, economic slowdown, and ultimately population decline. To exacerbate the situation, the increase in women’s labour-market participation rates and widening generational divide in the ideas about family and gender relations have brought issues of child and elderly care, and the role and capacity of the family in providing individual welfare, to the centre of policy debates. These have undoubtedly created imperatives for policy change. Both countries also experienced political regime shifts in the 1990s, which disrupted the earlier structure of social policy-making, creating opportunities for new actors to engage in policy-making process and for new policy ideas to be pushed forward. In Japan political realignments following the collapse of the conservative Liberal Democratic Party’s (LDP) political hegemony in 1993 created a number of opportunities for social policy reforms. In Korea the Asian economic crisis of 1997 created openings for political regime shift and enabled subsequent governments to initiate welfare expansion. In both Japan and Korea, important changes in family and gender policies happened therefore in the context of political regime shifts. I argue that while post-industrial pressures may have forced Japanese and Korean people and governments to re-think social policies, changes in domestic political dynamics provided important openings for social and political actors to carry through the reform agenda. This view of social policy changes in Japan and Korea stands against the earlier developmentalist perspective of East Asian welfare states which sees social policies as subjugate responses to economic development. In highlighting the importance of the post-industrial and political factors, this chapter challenges such a static view of East Asian welfare states, and offers an alternative perspective that explains how structure and politics can facilitate welfare state change. Following a brief discussion of the limits of the developmentalist view of East Asian welfare states, I compare domestic post-industrial pressures confronting Japan and Korea. I will then outline social policy reforms in these countries since the 1990s, and explain how structural and political changes affected welfare state restructuring in these countries. Finally, in the last section I will reflect on the implications of family and gender policy reforms for women in these countries.

132 Ito Peng

Welfare state development in Japan and Korea: beyond the ‘productivist’ welfare regime The comparative study of East Asian welfare states has come a long way since the early 1990s, when scholars began to undertake more systematic studies of countries such as Japan and Korea. Building on the idea of the developmental state, many first-generation East Asian welfare-state scholars focused on the role of the state and the bureaucracy in shaping economic and social policies (Goodman and Peng 1996; Goodman, White and Kwon 1998). Growing out of this literature, the economic productivist approach sought to explain welfare developments in East Asia in terms of the state’s prioritization of economic development, and hence the subordination of social policies to economic and industrial policies. Holliday (2000), for example, argues that in Japan and Korea while the state underpins the market and families with some universal programmes such as health insurance and pensions, only those linked to the ‘productive’ elements of society, typically the male workers in core industries, are accorded minimal social rights.4 Alternatively, others examined the Confucian underpinnings of the East Asian welfare regime. Jones (1990, 1993) has pointed out the pervasive influence of the Confucian tradition underlying the success of East Asian welfare states. The Confucian principles of filial piety and industry are thought to contribute to a strong familial sense of welfare obligation and self-help. The notions of gender role segregation and women’s subordination to men and to the family are also used by the state as the rationale for its reliance on women’s unpaid work at home and in the community (Palley 1992; Sung 2003). These factors in turn shape the normative foundation of the dual labour-market structure that overwhelmingly privileges male workers in core industries, and leads to strong assumptions about women’s welfare responsibilities. These perspectives, however, are being challenged. First, social policy has become much more politicized in the last couple of decades. In Japan, social policy and welfare reform have become an important policy issue and political parties have became more vocal in advocating particular social policy choices. In Korea while the democratization process helped to mainstream social policy, the Asian economic crisis of 1997 further highlighted the political salience of social policy in electoral politics. Simply put, the political currency of social policy in both Japan and Korea rapidly appreciated in the 1990s. Second, the productivist welfare-state argument also faces some difficulties in explaining the evident expansion of social welfare programmes aimed at the ‘nonproductive’ sectors of society in the 1990s. If the productivist welfare-state logic prevails, social policies in these countries should be more focused on the ‘productive’ sectors of the society as the economy weakens, and one would expect preferential allocation of resources to ‘productive’ sectors and greater reliance on the family’s welfare responsibilities, as was the case for Japan in the 1980s. In the 1990s, however, the exact opposite dynamics were observed. In Korea significant social welfare expansion followed after 1997; in Japan, ongoing economic malaise notwithstanding, welfare expansion continued. What is more, not only was there expansion in social services,


most of the social policy reforms were targeted to ‘non-productive’ sectors of these societies such as the elderly, children and the unemployed.5 In Japan, social care for the elderly and children expanded alongside reforms to strengthen gender equality and to protect women and children in vulnerable situations. In Korea, universalization of healthcare benefits and pensions took place together with radical reforms of unemployment insurance, social welfare, and family and gender policies. The focus on ‘non-productive’ sectors of society is further confounded by the new emphases on gender equality, and work and family harmonization, concepts that are clearly at odds with Confucian principles of gender role segregation. Of course, one may argue that these reforms could simply be counter-cyclical measures, and that state policies remain basically ‘productivist’ in nature. True, job creation through public investment can be an effective counter-cyclical measure in times of economic crisis. The promotion of active labour-market policies in both countries can be seen as essentially ‘productivist’ as well. However, this begs two questions. First, why social welfare, and why at this time. In the past, the typical counter-cyclical measure for both the Japanese and Korean governments was to work with employers to sustain high rates of employment, and if necessary, governments used public construction and other forms of public-works programmes to kick-start the economy. Indeed, that was precisely what the Japanese government did in the early 1990s, until they ran out of steam with little success and a massive government deficit. These measures made ‘productivist’ sense because they targeted the productive sectors of society and provided male employment. Implicit in the productivist logic was a highly gendered notion of economic growth: productivism through protection and enhancement of male workers in productive sectors. Promoting gender equality in the labour market was not part of the productivist counter-cyclical logic. Even if we see the current welfare-state expansion as part of the same productivist counter-cyclical logic, we have to explain why there has been a shift in policy understandings of both the causes of economic malaise and solutions proposed to counter it. What are the underlying causes of this shift in policy thinking, and what are its implications? Second, the idea that East Asian welfare states are somehow uniquely productivist may be misplaced. As illustrated by the historical experiences of Nordic welfare states, social policies have always been implicitly linked to economic development. Indeed, as Mkandawire (2004) points out, social policy is basically developmental. What is important, then, may be not the productivist nature of social policy reforms, but rather the mechanisms and motivations underlying policy changes. In other words, we need to move beyond identification and classification of East Asian welfare regimes to analysing causal processes of change. Welfare-state expansions in Japan and Korea therefore require more in-depth examinations which go beyond description.

Post-industrial pressures Demographic shifts Japan and Korea have been experiencing similar demographic changes over the last few decades. In both countries population is ageing and fertility is declining

134 Ito Peng Table 6.1 Ageing population (% population over 65) in Japan and Korea, 1980–2030

Japan Korea

1980

2000

2020

2030

9.1 3.8

17.2 7.2

26.9 15.1

29.6 23.1

Sources: NIPSSR, Jinko Dotai Tokei (Population Statistics), 2004; KNSO (2005) Future Household Projection.

Table 6.2 Total average fertility rate in Japan and Korea, 1970–2030

Japan Korea

1970

1980

1990

2000

2003

2010

2020

2030

2.13 4.53

1.75 2.83

1.54 1.59

1.36 1.47

1.29 1.19

1.32 1.21

1.38 1.24

1.38 1.28

Sources: NIPSSR, Population Statistics, 2004; KNSO (2005) Future Household Projection.

(Tables 6.1 and 6.2). Although Korea is still demographically young compared to Japan and other OECD countries,6 the pace of ageing is rapid. As shown in Table 6.1, the elderly population in Korea will constitute about 23 per cent of the total population by 2030. The main cause of demographic ageing in both countries is the low fertility rate. Given the current total fertility rate, demographic ageing in Korea will occur within an extremely compressed time frame. The issue for Korean policy-makers therefore is not simply that of declining fertility and an ageing population, but more importantly, the speed at which these demographic changes are taking place. There is concern that Korea will not be prepared for changes of this magnitude in terms of its social infrastructure. Changes in family and gender structures The process of defamilialization (i.e. decline of the traditional family structure) is also quite evident in Japan and Korea. As shown in Table 6.3, the proportion of three- (or more) generation households has declined, while that of single-person households has increased since 1980, suggesting an erosion of ‘traditional’ living arrangements. Divorce rates and the proportions of single-mother families are also on the increase. In Japan, the divorce rate nearly doubled between 1980 and 2000, while in Korea, it increased by nearly five-fold (Table 6.4). The recent increase in divorce in Korea has been attributed to family breakdown after the economic crisis. Studies suggest that the increase in divorce rates after 1997 are largely due to economic hardship (Lee and Park 2003), while the continued increase in divorce rates after 1997 can be also attributed to changes in people’s ideas about marriage and to conflicts between family members (Park 2005). In both countries there is a growing bipolar pattern with relatively high divorce rates among those married for five years or less (i.e. the younger demographic cohort) and among those married for 20 years or more (i.e. postwar ‘baby boomers’). The increases in numbers and proportions of single-mother families also closely parallel the increase in divorce (see Tables 6.5 and 6.6).

135 Table 6.3 Family structures in Japan and Korea 1980–2000 1980

2000

Japan Nuclear Three-generation Single-person

60.3 19.7 18.1

58.4 13.6 24.1

Korea Nuclear Three-generation Single-person

76.8 17 4.8

75.0 8.4 15.5

Sources: MHWL (2001) White Paper on Health, Welfare, and Labour; KNSO (2003) Future Household Projection.

Table 6.4 Divorce rate (crude divorce rate per thousand population), 1980–2002

Japan Korea

1980

1990

1992

1995

1999

2000

2001

2002

1.22 0.6

1.28 1.1

1.45 1.2

1.60 1.5

2.00 2.5

2.10 2.5

2.27 2.8

2.30 3.0

Sources: NIPSSR, Population Statistics, 2004; Yeong-Ran Park, 2005.

Table 6.5 Percentage of single parents in Japan (Units: thousands of people; %)

Total

Widowed

Divorced

Unmarried

Others

% of single parent * families

1983

Total Single mother Single father

885.4 718.1 167.3

326.2 259.3 66.9

443.2 352.5 90.7

38.3 38.3 n/a

77.7 67.9 9.8

(1985) 5.5 4.7 0.8

1993


947.2 789.9 157.3

245.2 194.5 50.7

605.1 507.6 98.5

37.5 37.5 n/a

38.0 33.4 4.6

(1995) 6.3 5.5 0.8

2003


1,399.2 1,225.4 173.8

180.6 147.2 33.4

1107.4 978.5 128.9

70.5 70.5 n/a

37.9 27.3 10.6

(2000) 7.7 6.8 0.9

* Proportion of single parent families in relation to all families with children under 18 years of age. Source: MHWL (2005) Report of the Heisei-15th year National Survey of Single Mother and Other Families (Heisei 15-nen do Zenkoku Boshisetai tou chousa kekka houkoku); NIPSSR, Population Statistics, 2004.

136 Ito Peng Table 6.6 Percentage of single parents in Korea (Units: number of persons; %) Marital Status of Household-Heads

Total

Married (Separated)

Death of spouse

Divorce

Unmarried

% of Single parent families

1995

Total Single father Single mother

959,972 172,398 787,574

216,067 50,666 165,401

526,320 68,022 458,298

123,969 51,080 72,889

93,616 2,630 90,986

7.4 1.3 6.1

2000

Total Single father Single mother

1,123,854 219,997 903,857

252,917 58,227 194,690

502,284 64,058 438,226

245,987 92,810 153,177

122,666 4,902 117,764

7.9 1.5 6.3

Source: KNSO, Report on Population Census (1996, 2001).

Surveys of public attitudes towards marriage and divorce also suggest that divorce is becoming more socially acceptable in Japan and Korea (Cabinet Office – Japan 2005; Hong 2005; Kim 2003b). Moreover, there are also some changes in the intergenerational contract, the most significant being the weakening of the parental expectation of receiving support from children in old age, and a corresponding decline in children’s expectation of supporting parents in their old age (Cabinet Office, Japan 2005; Retherford et al. 2001). Finally, employment structures in both countries have changed over the last couple of decades. There has been a steady informalization of work throughout the 1990s. In Japan, the proportion of people in non-standard forms of work increased from 20.9 per cent to 30.4 per cent between 1995 and 2003 (MHWL 2004), while in Korea, the proportion of those employed in non-standard work rose from 45.5 per cent in 1990 to 52.1 per cent in 2000 (KNSO 2005).7 In both countries the majority of non-standard workers are women. The employment rate of married women in Japan rose from 48 per cent in 1980 to 56 per cent in 2000, while that in Korea increased from 40 per cent to 48 per cent over the same period.8 In both cases, while the informalization of work has pulled more women into the labour market, it has also widened the gap between child and elderly care needs and the availability of unpaid care provided by women.

Social policy responses The two governments’ main response to these social and demographic changes has been to ‘activate’ the labour-market participation of women and the younger elderly, while encouraging childbirth. This approach has been preferred to developing policies to encourage immigration, for example. In Korea, the postwar family planning policy was officially terminated in 1996, and a number of womanfriendly and gender-positive policies have been introduced to encourage women’s social, political and labour-market participation. In Japan a series of woman-friendly policies were introduced in the 1990s to help families harmonize work and family responsibilities. These include: the Gold Plan in 1989, the Angel Plan in 1994,


introduction of parental leave and flexible hours for workers with childcare responsibilities in 1996, and the Long-term Care Insurance in 1997. Social expenditure as a proportion of GDP in Japan grew from 11 per cent to 17 per cent between 1990 and 2000, and in Korea from approximately 3 per cent to 7 per cent between 1990 and 1999 (OECD 2004). Although a large portion of these expenditures is accounted for by pension and health insurance, social welfare expenditures also grew. In Japan, social welfare expenditure doubled from ¥4.8 trillion in 1990 to ¥10.9 trillion in 2000 (NIPSSR 2002), most of which was accounted for by the expansion in long-term elderly care and childcare. In Korea, social welfare expansion was even more remarkable: government expenditure on the Employment Insurance Program increased from 4.7 million Won in 1996 to 306,172 million Won in 1999; the budget for childcare rose from 41,876 million Won to 436,903 million Won between 1991 and 2002; and elderly welfare increased from 37,861 million Won in 1990 to 407,767 million Won in 2003 (Lee and Park 2003). Japan – social care expansion In Japan elderly care reforms began with the Gold Plan in 1989. It expanded the provision of home and institutional care for the elderly on a needs basis.9 In 1994 the Plan was revised with further increases in the target provisions and budget, until 1997 when it was replaced by the Long-term Care Insurance (LTCI) Scheme (implemented in 2000). As a form of universal mandatory social insurance, LTCI enabled the government to collect insurance premiums from all adults over the age of 40. It provides domiciliary and institutional care services to people over the age of 65, and those between 40 and 64 who need care as a result of premature ageing. The LTCI was an important reform because it shifted the principle of elderly care from a means-tested to a rights-based program. Also, unlike the German model, which is funded solely by insurance premiums, the Japanese LTCI is funded equally by the insurance premium and the general tax revenue, and therefore ensures some degree of redistribution. Policies towards families with dependent children in Japan also benefited from an expansionary thrust in the 1990s. The Angel Plan (1994) increased social care and support for families with children, particularly public childcare. Under the Angel Plan the number of public spaces for children under the age of two expanded, as well as the number of multi-functional childcare centres, spaces for extended-hour childcare, temporary childcare centres, local childrearing support centres, and after-school programmes. Parental leave policy was also introduced in 1994 to allow either one of the parents to take up to one year of childcare leave. A 40 per cent income replacement was added to this in 1998 to encourage more parents to take the leave. Moreover, flexible working hours, child allowance, and other forms of support for young families have also been introduced since 1996 to enable parents to harmonize family and work responsibilities. On the broader gender policy front, the Council of Gender Equality was established within the Cabinet Office in 1996, and in 1999 the Basic Law for Gender Equal Society (Danjo Kyodosankaku Kihon Ho) was introduced to promote

138 Ito Peng

gender equality more systematically. The law included provision for the institutionalization of gender-equality principles throughout the national and local governments, and the establishment of a monitoring system to measure the level of change. The Council also broadened its influence throughout the 1990s. For example, its policy proposals have been incorporated in the recent social policy reforms (Cabinet Office, Japan 2005; Osawa 2003),10 including reforms to divide the employee pension between husbands and wives, allowing divorced women the right to claim half of the husband’s pension, and the extension of the employee pension to part-time workers. Similarly, the Council has also introduced a proposal to abolish the special tax break for married women, which was criticized by feminists for discouraging married women’s full-time employment and privileging middle-class male breadwinners. It has also been successful in pushing for family policy reforms through the Low Fertility Measures Plus One Program (Shoshika Taisaku Plus One), which includes targets of abolishing waiting lists for public daycare, increasing the parental leave take-up rate to 10 per cent for fathers and 80 per cent for mothers, a minimum five-day paternity leave, and shorter working hours for workers with small children. The policy-making process has also become more open to women’s groups. The LTCI legislation was one of the first cases of direct engagement by women’s groups in the social policy-making process (Eto 2001; Peng 2002a). The Council of Gender Equality’s core group, for example, consists of 25 members, 13 of whom are ministers of various government ministries, while 12 others are ‘experts’ made up of university professors and representatives of business and NGOs, most of whom are women. In addition, the Council also set up a community advisory committee called Egalité Network comprised of representatives from 88 different civil society groups. Women politicians are also taking a more active role in policy reform. The Domestic Violence Law (1999) and Child Abuse Prevention Law (2004), for example, both involved a special parliamentary bill (gi’in rippo) put forward by a cross-party coalition of women MPs (Gelb 2004; Iida 2004). This method of legal reform involves MPs making a draft bill proposal directly in the parliament, and bypassing the bureaucracy. Korea – social security expansion The Korean welfare state grew steadily throughout the first half of the 1990s, and then took a sudden expansionary leap after 1997. Almost every aspect of the social security system expanded. The coverage for (un)employment insurance increased in 1998 in response to the rise in unemployment resulting from economic restructuring. (Un)employment benefits were extended to firms with five or more employees (whereas before they only covered firms with 30 or more employees), and job security and training benefits were also extended to firms with five or more employees (prior to this change only firms with 70 or more employees were covered) (Kwon 2001: 225). In 2000, the coverage was further broadened to all employees, including part-time government workers, and the length of benefit was also increased from a maximum of 60 to 210 days, depending on individual work history (Sung 2003). Table 6.7 shows this expansion in social insurance coverage in Korea since 1997.

Social Policy Reforms and Gender in Japan and South Korea 139 Table 6.7 Changes in the population coverage of the Four Major Social Insurances in Korea 1997

Firm size (number of regular employees)

⫺5 5–9 10–29 30⫹

Daily workers Temporary workers Self-employed Unpaid family workers

2000

EI

WCI

PI

HI

EI

WCI

PI

HI

X X O X X X X X

X X O O X X X X

X O O O X X X X

O O O O O O O O

O O O O 䊐䊐 X X

O O O O 䊐䊐 O O

O O O O O O O O

O O O O O O O O

O ⫽ covered, 䊐 ⫽ partially covered, X ⫽ uncovered. EI ⫽ employment insurance; WCI ⫽ workers compensation insurance; PI ⫽ pension insurance; HI ⫽ health insurance. Source: Lee, Hye-Kyung (2005).

Coverage for other social insurance schemes also expanded after 1997. The National Pension Plan (NPP) was extended to all workers, including daily, temporary, self-employed and family workers (Kim 2003). It is, however, important to point out that the outcome in relation to women is still small. Although the total number of people insured by NPP has more than doubled between 1990 (4,651,678) and 2002 (12,248,483), women make up less than a third of the total (29.5 per cent in 1990, and 30.1 per cent in 2001). The percentage of women who are covered by NPP increased from 6.4 per cent of the total population in 1990 to 15.6 per cent in 2002, but this is still significantly lower than the coverage given to men (15.2 per cent and 36.7 per cent respectively) (KWDI 2004). The main reasons for this are women’s lower employment rates and the newness of the NPP. The National Health Insurance coverage, on the other hand, has expanded since the end of the 1970s, and currently nearly the entire population is covered. However, the level of co-payment (user fees) for NHI is still relatively high, making it difficult for low-income families to utilize healthcare. The Livelihood Protection Programme, which provided basic income support to the very poor, was also reformed in 1998 to become the National Basic Livelihood Security Programme (NBLS), resulting in a 50 per cent increase in the number of recipients within a year (from 1 million to 1.5 million) (Sung 2003). A work-fare component called the ‘self-reliance policy’ was added to the NBLS in 1999 to engage recipients in public-works programmes, while providing them with medical assistance, childcare and school fees, and counselling services. In 2001, approximately 46,000 people were involved in this programme, 70 per cent of whom were women, and half of those were middle-aged single mothers (Lee and Park 2003: 16). The expenditures for NBLS nearly quadrupled from 900 billion Won in 1997 to 3,400 billion Won in 2002 (Lee 2005). The Mother-Child Welfare Programme was introduced in 1999 to provide housing support, job training, and employment and childcare assistance to

140 Ito Peng

single-mother families. This programme was renamed Mother-Father-Child Welfare Programme in 2002 to include single-father families and other working poor families. The Infant-Child Care Programme (introduced in 1991), which provides public childcare for working parents, also grew. The national budget for childcare increased more than ten-fold during the 1990s, and the number of childcare centres expanded from 9,085 in 1995 to 22,147 in 2002 (Lee and Park 2003).11 The Maternity Protection reform was also introduced in 2001, extending maternity leave from 60 days to 90 days, with a paid childcare leave benefit of 300,000 Won per month. The budget for public elderly care also increased more than ten-fold between 1990 and 2001 (Lee and Park 2003). Finally, the Ministry of Gender Equality was established in 2001 (renamed to Ministry of Gender and Family in June 2005) to advance the gender-equality agenda and to implement and manage gender-equality activities and related policies (Park 2005). Many leaders of the women’s movement and feminist NGOs have moved into the Ministry in an attempt to affect policy change from within.12 As a result, the Ministry’s profile has risen. It has expanded its social policy portfolios, including childcare, women’s social participation, skills training, and domestic and sexual violence. In addition, the implementation of the Mother-Father-Child Act and the Basic Act on Healthy Family has been added to the Ministry’s portfolio. The Basic Act on Women’s Development in 2002 has also made gender analysis a mandatory procedure for all government ministries and local governments starting in 2005 (Park 2005).

Explaining social policy reforms in the 1990s: post-industrial pressures mediated by changes in domestic politics The changes described above suggest that the 1990s was indeed a watershed decade for both Japan and Korea. Faced with similar social and demographic imperatives, both countries had little choice but to undergo welfare-state restructuring. However, translating these imperatives into policy reforms requires political will. As illustrated by the experiences of European welfare states, despite similar post-industrial pressures, social policy responses have diverged, largely because of different domestic political conditions and policy options. Similar post-industrial pressures in North America, for example, did not translate into social policy expansion in either Canada or the US. It would be therefore premature to draw direct relationships between post-industrial pressures and welfare-state expansion in Japan and Korea. It is important to trace mechanisms through which these pressures have been translated into policy changes. For this we need to turn our attention to the domestic political dynamics. In Japan and Korea, the structural changes of the 1990s also coincided with political regime shifts: in Japan with the end of the conservative Liberal Democratic Party’s (LDP) political hegemony in 1993, and in Korea with the transfer of power from the conservative party to the opposition government in 1998. In both cases, the shifts disrupted the political status quo and opened opportunities for change.


Japan In Japan the elderly population had already reached 12 per cent by 1990, and the basic social security system, introduced in the early 1960s, was beginning to experience structural pressures associated with the maturing of the system. Not surprisingly, then, a great deal of the increase in social security expenditure in the 1990s did result from rising pension and healthcare costs owing to population ageing. The important policy shift in the 1990s was therefore not so much associated with the increase in health and pension benefits, which would have been expected, but rather with the unexpected expansion of social care services. The causes of social care expansion were in fact functional as well as political. While post-industrial changes did affect people’s thinking about social welfare, not much happened until the 1990s. Social care reforms in Japan are therefore a good example of post-industrial imperatives facilitated by political regime shift. In Japan, the so-called ‘crisis of the family’ had been brewing since the 1980s when women’s groups began to agitate for more social care. This idea, however, did not make much impact on social policy debates in the 1980s, until the fertility rate declined below the historical low of 1.58 in 1989. By the early 1990s the idea of family crisis was promoted not only by the government but also by the media and civil society groups. The image of the crisis ranged from the notion of the family as a ‘caring hell’ (kaigo jigoku) for women (Higuchi 1997; Koreika Shakai wo Yokusuru Josei no Kai 1998; NFDR 1997, 2001), to young people being depicted as ‘Parasite Singles’ (Iwakami 2000; Yamada 1999), and the fear of labour shortage and population decline (MHW 1997).13 Underlying these disparate characterizations was a shared sense of crisis about the adverse effects of social and structural changes, especially fertility decline and rapid ageing, on the Japanese family and society. Work–family tensions for women were evident. Not only was the married women’s employment rate increasing, but more women were working outside of the home. The proportion of women in self-employed work or family businesses declined from 39.0 to 18.4 per cent between 1975 and 1999, while the proportion of women working outside the home rose from 59.8 to 81.4 per cent over the same period (NFDR 2001). The majority of women were also experiencing stress and psychological burdens as a result of having to care for their elderly relatives while working (Ministry of Labour 1998). Opinion polls showed a decline in support for the idea of the male-breadwinner/female-housewife model, and an increase in support for women’s lifetime employment (Cabinet Office, Japan 2005). Women in their twenties and thirties were less willing to accept the traditional division of labour within marriage and were more willing to consider divorce as an option (Retherford et al. 2001). This shared sense of the family being in crisis due to social and economic changes in Japan emerged in the context of a political regime shift. The collapse of the LDP’s political dominance in 1993 led to a chaotic political scramble as politicians and parties tried to realign themselves in a new and uncertain political situation. Within a few years, no less than a dozen new political parties appeared and disappeared, while politicians jumped from one party to another in an effort to

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gain advantage. Political cleavages were redrawn as political parties tried to capture largely middle-class votes along new issue lines (Pempel 1998; Peng and Wong 2004). Social policy emerged as an important political issue. The first coalition government headed by the Social Democratic Party of Japan (SDPJ) and Komeito (Clean Government Party) ran on the pro-social welfare ticket to distinguish itself from the conservative LDP and to gain electoral support from women and the elderly. Public opinion polls also confirmed that social welfare was a winning issue.14 As social welfare became increasingly prominent in political contestation, other political parties, including the LDP and the newly formed Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) also joined the bandwagon in support of social policy reforms. Special research teams to study and develop proposals for family support policies were established within the Ministry of Health and Welfare in response to the low fertility rate, changes in family structure, and to the shifts in the labour market. Many of the proposals that would not normally pass the conservative LDP parliament, including the expansion of public childcare, parental leave, flexible working arrangements and new child protection legislation, were incorporated into the Angel Plan in 1994, under the SDPJ-led coalition government. Certainly political competition was an important factor for social policy reform in Japan, particularly after 1993. Civil society groups such as the Women’s Committee for the Improvement of the Ageing Society (WCIAS) had been campaigning for social care reforms since the early 1980s, but the then ruling LDP paid little attention to them. Politics changed dramatically once the power shifted from the LDP to coalition governments. Women’s groups and other civil society groups saw opportunities to engage in policy-making. In the case of the LTCI, for example, the Ministry of Health and Welfare began to work closely with WCIAS to push for policy reform against the LDP opposition. In this case, the Ministry’s interests in finding alternatives to the problems of elderly healthcare outside of the medical insurance system coincided with women’s interests in social care. The SDPJ-led coalition government also began to practice more inclusive policy-making by bringing new stakeholders such as NGOs into the policy-making process (Iida 2004). When the LDP-led coalition government took power in 1996, it tried to stall the draft LTCI bill and prevent it from going through parliament. However, that attempt eventually failed as WCIAS and other civil society groups representing elderly people turned the issue into a political campaign. They formed a national coalition of civil society groups to lobby for the LTCI legislation. Campaigning under the banner of ‘Ten thousand people in support of the Longterm Care Insurance’, the civil society coalition held public forums and seminars on elderly care issues, and lobbied local and national politicians to support the bill (see Eto 2001; Peng 2002b). New social policies such as LTCI were important for the coalition governments not only because they provided a new policy focus for parties like SDPJ and Komeito, but also because they helped new political parties such as DPJ to garner support from women and the elderly (Democratic Party of Japan 2002).15 These policies also helped lay out new mechanisms for civil society engagement in


policy-making. Furthermore changes in the electoral system from the singledistrict multi-seat system to a combination of single district single-seat and proportional representation systems made linkages between civil society groups and political parties more crucial. New political parties such as Sakigake and the Japan New Party found it important to build closer ties with identifiable and organized civil society groups that could mobilize votes. These political parties have targeted emergent voluntary-sector groups to forge political links.16 Since the introduction of the Non-Profit Organization (NPO) law in 1998, which enabled NPOs to incorporate, all the major political parties have established an NPO liaison committee to help develop links with civil society organizations. New political parties and civil society groups also adopted fresh strategies to push for policy changes. For example, rather than going through the traditional route, as was the case for WCIAS in the development of the LTCI, new civil society groups also began to use the process of special parliamentary bills (gi’in rippo) to bypass the lengthy and bureaucrat-dominated draft proposal bill. The NPO law, Domestic Violence law (2000), and Child Abuse Prevention law (2004) were all passed by special parliamentary bills. This policy strategy – rarely used until 1998 because it forces politicians to take strong policy advocacy roles, often in opposition to bureaucrats – proved highly effective when civil society groups wanted to pass new legislation quickly and when they were able to mobilize themselves to gather enough political support from members of parliament. They lobbied women politicians to press for policy change through gi’in rippo. In sum, in Japan, while the structural and ideational impacts of demographic and societal changes were important, the political regime shift of 1993 provided important openings for change. The regime shift disrupted the political status quo and created new policy competition amongst politicians and political parties over social welfare issues. Civil society groups also took the opportunities to engage in public policy-making, and they actively participated in shaping the contents and directions of social policy reforms. New legislation such as the LTCI and NPO laws, in turn, further helped institutionalize civil society’s advocacy roles in social policy-making. Korea – welfare state expansion In Korea, the transition to democratic politics in 1987 was the first turning-point for the country’s social policy development. Democratization brought about political realignment, increased political competition, and rejuvenated civil society. Although the 1987 election resulted in the victory of Roh Tae Woo, backed by the military regime, it nevertheless established the notion of electoral democracy and set a new political pattern. As Wong (2004) points out, in Korea social welfare emerged as a winning issue from the beginning of the political realignment process because it effectively cut across the existing personal/regional cleavages dominant in Korea’s democratic politics. Strong economic growth also helped expand interest among middle class voters in social policy. Under the Kim Young Sam government (1993–98) a number of political reforms were introduced. Provincial and local elections were reinstituted in 1993, followed by the purge of

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the former military elites (the Hanahoe) and the jailing of the coup leaders under the military regimes. Like post-1993 Japan, in Korea new political parties emerged and new political alliances were forged and broken, as politicians vied for political advantage (Kim 2000). In the meantime, civil society groups also reorganized, and shifted their focus from the broader democracy movement to specific social policy advocacy. As Seong (2000) points out, the civil society movement in Korea after 1987 entered the mainstream as new civic organizations, representing diverse popular concerns such as environmental protection, social welfare, women’s issues, educational reforms and crime control, began to gain hegemony over special-interest groups such as employers’ associations and labour unions. They pushed for welfare-state expansion and the mainstreaming of social policies in the 1990s. The suddenness of the Asian economic crisis in 1997 caught everyone off guard: overnight, foreign investments were pulled out, stripping Korea of its assets and reserves; stocks plunged; the economy halted; and finally, in what President Kim Dae-Jung called ‘the country’s second humiliation’ (the first being its colonization by Japan from 1910 to 1945), Korea had to turn to the IMF for an emergency bail-out. The IMF conditions were stringent: currency devaluation, economic liberalization and labour-market restructuring. Ironically, it turned out to be a watershed for political regime shift in Korea. In the 1997 presidential election, public discontent with the Kim Young Sam government’s ineffectiveness in handling the crisis turned into a swing vote for the opposition candidate Kim Dae-Jung who campaigned on the platform of social policy reform on the one hand, and modernization and responsibility on the other. Kim Dae-Jung’s electoral coalition was far from united. Indeed, from the beginning significant tensions existed between the pro-welfare and pro-business interests within his camp. The imperatives of the economic crisis, however, offered him the opportunity to create a government–employer–labour tripartite council and to force the ‘grand consensus’, a two-pronged, if not contradictory, strategy of economic liberalization and welfare-state expansion. The labour movement agreed to radical market liberalization as directed by the IMF, in exchange for the expansion of the social safety net. Clearly many of the social policy reforms in Korea took place against the backdrop of social and economic imperatives following the economic crisis in 1997. However, we should not understate the impact of the economic crisis on public support for change and on civil society groups’ willingness to back a reformist leader like Kim Dae-Jung. Certainly, pro-welfare civil society groups constituted Kim Dae-Jung’s support base. Once the welfare-state reforms were introduced they became the basis from which civil society began to push for further expansion. Even after the economic crisis the expansionary reforms continued. With the economic crisis behind, the social policy reforms were increasingly informed by the idea of changes in demographic patterns and family and gender relations. Policy debates on elderly care and childcare expansion since 1998, for example, mirror the Japanese family policy debates. Despite its relatively young population, demographic ageing and low fertility are now the priority issues in the Korean


government’s social policy agenda (Park 2005; Lee 1999b; Cho 2000).17 Long-term Care Insurance pilot projects (based on the Japanese model) will begin in 2007. Similar attempts are being made in terms of the expansion of public childcare services. The policy focus has also shifted from the economic crisis to the persistence of low-income households, particularly those headed by women (Lee and Park 2003), with much of the recent family and gender policy reforms being informed by studies of poverty among women. Lee (1999) found that women were particularly hard hit by the economic crisis, with two-thirds of the poor and four-fifths of poor elderly people being women. Government studies also show the negative implications of the ‘dismantled’ families not only as they relate to financial hardships, but also in relation to problems associated with childrearing, caregiving, and emotional status. Finally, the combination of defamilialization and increased employment among married women has also been identified as creating problems for elderly care (Sung 2003; Lee and Park 2003). In summary, the mainstreaming of social welfare in Korea since 1987 was propelled by the economic crisis that brought about a shift from pro-business to a pro-welfare government. Once the crisis was over, social policies remained informed by the idea of the family crisis caused by the changes in demographic structure, and family and gender relations. Like Japan, social policy reforms occurred in the context of structural and political changes.

Implications of Social Policy Reforms for Women Have any of these policy reforms made a difference to the lives of women in Japan and Korea? The Gender Empowerment Measure and Gender Development Indexes indicate very little change. However, at the ground level more subtle changes seem to be taking place. For example, the number of women parliamentarians in Japan increased from 26 (3.4 per cent) to 79 (10.8 per cent) between 1980 and 2001, while their proportion at the prefectural and local government levels rose from 1.2 per cent in 1980 to 7.9 per cent in 2003. More evident changes in women’s political representation are observed at the city level. In large cities such as Tokyo and Osaka, the proportion of women politicians increased from 8.9 per cent in 1990 to 21.5 per cent in 2003. There has been an increase in the representation of women in national policy advisory councils as well: in 1980, less than half of these councils (46.2 per cent) had a woman member, and women represented a mere 4.1 per cent of all the council members; by 2003, however, the proportion had changed to 98 per cent and 26.8 per cent respectively (Cabinet Office, Japan 2005). In Korea, similar changes can be seen. In the 1992 parliamentary election there were 35 women amongst a total of 1,106 candidates from local and national constituencies (3.2 per cent); of this number, three were elected from a total of 296 seats (1.0 per cent). In the 2004 election, the percentages of women candidates and electees increased to 10.4 and 13.0 respectively. Part of the reason for the increase in elected women politicians is the introduction of the proportional representation system through electoral reform. Similarly women’s representation in government advisory councils also increased from 9 per cent in 1990 to

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27.3 per cent in 2002, and the proportion of women officials in the government bureaucracy also increased from 23.9 per cent in 1990 to 34.0 per cent in 2003 (KWDI 2004). In both Japan and Korea it appears that some effort has been made to raise women’s representation in public and political office over the last couple of decades. In addition to women’s entry into the government and bureaucracy, there has been a noticeable change in women’s participation in civil society groups as well. In Japan, the number of registered NGO groups increased from 1,176 to 14,657 between 1998 and 2003. A national survey of NGOs in 2001 found women made up nearly half (48.5 per cent) of all workers while elderly and retired people made up about a third (31.4 per cent) (Cabinet Office, Japan 2005). In Korea, women’s organizations have emerged as the main advocacy groups in the social policymaking process (Lee 2005). The number of women’s organizations in Korea increased from 62 in 1994 to 93 in 2001 (KWDI 2004). Studies of civil societies in both countries show NGOs are becoming increasingly politically active, and governments too have become more open to civil society groups’ engagement in public policy-making (Lee and Peng 2005; Shipper 2005). What these trends suggest is a possible change in the governance structure vis-à-vis public policymaking. As social policies in both countries become more decentralized and as civil society becomes more closely engaged in policy-making, public policies may be further re-shaped. Finally, we cannot understate the importance of ideational shifts in these countries. Public opinion polls in both countries suggest noticeable changes in men’s and women’s attitudes towards gender relations. In Japan, the proportion of those who claim that a woman should continue to work even if she has a child has risen from 26 per cent to 38 per cent for women and 19 to 37 per cent for men between 1992 and 2002. Similarly, during the same period, the proportion of respondents who endorse the male-breadwinner/female-housewife model has declined from 55.6 to 43.3 per cent for women, and 65.7 to 51.3 per cent for men; while the proportion who reject the model has increased from 38.3 to 51.1 per cent for women and 28.6 to 42.1 per cent for men (Cabinet Office, Japan 2005). In Korea, similar attitudinal shifts with respect to women’s employment are observed. Yet, these gains made at political, community and ideational levels are offset by significant structural resistance, particularly within the labour market. In both Japan and Korea employers are reluctant to adopt new gender policies, and the legislation is inadequately enforced. In Japan, despite the public campaign to promote parental leave, the rate of take-up has increased only marginally from 46 per cent for women in 1996 to 64 per cent in 2002, and in the case of men it actually declined from 0.8 per cent in 1996 to 0.3 per cent in 2002 (MHWL 2004). Workers are reluctant to take full parental leave because of negative pressures from employers and work colleagues, and the fear of being made redundant (Cabinet Office, Japan 2005). Workers will be reluctant to exercise their rights if they fear negative consequences and if the legislation does not fully and actively enforce their rights. In both Japan and Korea, despite the increase in public childcare spaces since 1990, a significant number of children are still on the waiting list. In


both countries, but particularly in Korea, the large and progressive informalization of employment also undermines women’s ability to achieve economic security. Despite the extension of social insurance coverage to non-standard workers, a significant portion of them remain uncovered, and more importantly, the social security systems in both countries remain a poor defence against insecure employment and inadequate income. These suggest that until the labour market and employment practices change, the journey towards gender equality will indeed be slow and painful.

Acknowledgement I would like to thank Kwansei Gakuin University for a travel grant to enable me to conduct interviews in Japan and Korea during the academic year of 2001/2, and Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRCC) for the research grant (2003–7) which has enabled me to continue and develop this research.

Notes 1 The UNDP report on the Gender-related Development Index (GDI), ranked Japan 12th and Korea 29th amongst 174 countries in 2002. The same report also ranked Japan 38th and Korea 68th in the Gender Empowerment Measures (GEM). 2 Interview with Mari Osawa, Professor of Gender and Social Policy, Institute of Social Sciences, University of Tokyo, and also a member of the Gender Equality Council and the Pension Reform Advisory Council, 17 February 2004. 3 Post-industrial changes also include exogenous factors such as economic globalization and internationalization. Though clearly important, it will be beyond the scope of this paper to deal with them adequately. 4 It should be pointed out here that in both Japan and Korea the male workers in core industries, such as those represented by large business conglomerates, only represent about 20 per cent of the total labour force. 5 In Japan, the economy stayed stagnant throughout the 1990s. Hope of economic recovery in 1996 was, however, dashed by the Asian economic crisis of 1997. Korea was one of the worst-hit countries in East Asia, and required financial rescue by the IMF. 6 The current OECD average is approximately 13 per cent. 7 Non-standard work normally means salaried and waged work that is part-time, temporary, contract or day work. In Japan, the majority of non-standard workers are parttimers, while in Korea, most of them are contract and day workers. 8 These figures are for both standard and non-standard employment. In both cases the majority of married women are non-standard workers. 9 The Gold Plan set targets for service expansion in elderly care for the next ten years. Some examples of expansion are: an increase in the numbers of home helpers from 31,400 to 170,000, day services for the elderly from 4,300 to 17,000, beds in short-stay centres from 1,000 to 60,000, and elderly healthcare institutions from 28,000 to 280,000 between 1989 and 1999. 10 Interviews with: Mari Osawa, 17 February 2004; Jozuka, director of the Gender Equality Commission, Home Ministry, 20 February 2004; Akaishi, co-director of Femin, a national women’s organization in Tokyo, 24 February 2004. 11 The percentage of children under six attending childcare increased from 7.4 per cent to 21.5 per cent between 1995 and 2002 (Lee and Park 2003). In Japan, it increased from 27 per cent to 33 per cent between 1995 and 2000. 12 Interviews with: Hyekyung Lee, Professor, Yonsei University, Korea, 1 February 2002; Dr Wha-Soon Byun, Dr Yeon-Ran Park, and Dr Dayoung Song, Korea Women’s

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13 14

15 16 17

Development Institute, 4 February 2002; Ae-Ryung Kim, Director of Policy, Ministry of Gender Equality, and Yang-Ji Ryu, Senior Policy Advisor, Ministry of Gender Equality, 5 February 2002. The ‘parasite singles’ refers to young and not-so-young single adults who continue to cohabit with and be financially and emotionally dependent on their ageing parents. Polls show that next to economic recovery, social welfare – particularly welfare for the aged – was the top concern for people over the age of 20. At the same time, public mistrust towards politicians, bureaucrats and governments soared to over 80 per cent in 1992, and remained there for the rest of the 1990s (Mainichi Shimbun National Opinion Surveys 1992–2000). The PMO’s own public-opinion survey conducted in May 1994 also found that social welfare and elderly care issues outweighed all other issues, including the economy. For example, to the multiple-answer question asking respondents what they would like the government to invest in, 61 per cent stated improved healthcare, social welfare and pension systems, 47 per cent indicated care for the elderly and disabled, 44.7 per cent stated a better tax system, and 37.6 per cent wanted better economic policies (Japan-PMO 1994). Interview with Mari Osawa, member of the Gender Equal Society Commission, 16 February 2004. This has been clearly an important political factor in the development of NPO law in 1998. See Pekkanen (2000) for further discussion. Interview with the Dr Kyung Tae Moon, Deputy Minister of Health and Welfare, 21 November 2003.

Bibliography Cabinet Office, Japan (2005) Danjo Kyodo Sankaku Hakusho, 2004 (2004 White Paper on Gender Equality), Tokyo: Cabinet Office. Cho, Namhoon (2000) ‘Social Impact of Korea’s Low Fertility Rate’. Chislin IIbo, 1 October. Eto, Murase Mikio (2001) ‘Public Involvement in Social Policy Reform: Seen from the Perspective of Japan’s Elderly-Care Insurance Scheme’. Journal of Social Policy, 30(1): 17–36. Democratic Party of Japan (2002) Tayona Lifestyle wo Ikiru Jidai no Jiritsu to Anshin no Seisaku (Policies for Independence and Security in the Age of Different Lifestyles). Tokyo: Minshuto Seisaku Chosa Kai. Gelb, Joyce (2004) Gender Policies in Japan. New York: Palgrave. Goodman, Roger and Ito Peng (1996) ‘East Asian Social Welfare States’. In Gosta EspingAndersen (ed.) Welfare States in Transition. London: Sage. Goodman, Roger, Gordon White and Huck-ju Kwon (1998) The East Asian Welfare Model: Welfare Orientalism and the State. London: Routledge. Higuchi, Keiko (1997) ‘Kaigo no Shakai-ka wo Koshite Susumeta’ (How We Promoted Socialization of Care). In Higuchi, Keiko (ed.) Chiiki de Miru, Minna de Mitoru: Joseiga Susumeru Kaigo no Shakaika (Everyone in the Community Takes Care of the Elderly: Women Promoting Socialization of Care). Kyoto: Minerva Shobo. Holliday, Ian (2000) ‘Productivist Welfare Capitalism: Social Policy in East Asia’. Political Studies, Vol. 48: 706–23. Hong, Joo-Yun (2005) ‘Poll Shows Shift in Korea’s Priorities’. Joong Ang Daily, 23 November. Hsiung, Ping-Chan (1996) Living Rooms as Factories: Class, Gender and the Satellite Factory System in Taiwan. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Iida, Keisuke (2004) ‘Human Rights and Sexual Abuse: The Impact of International Human Rights Law on Japan’. Human Rights Quarterly, 26(2): 428–53. Iwakami, Mami (2000) ‘Shoshi-Koreika Shakai no Oyako Kankei: 30dai wo shoten ni shite kangaeru (Parent-Child Relationship in the Low Fertility and Ageing Society: with a Focus on People in their 30s)’. Seikatsu Kyodo Kumiai Kenkyu, Vol. 2: 19–26.

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150 Ito Peng Nihon Fujin Dantai Rengokai (NFDR) (Association of Women’s Organization of Japan). (1997) Josei Hakusho, 1997 (White Paper on Women, 1997). Tokyo: Horupu. Nihon Fujin Dantai Rengokai (NFDR) (Association of Women’s Organization of Japan). (2001) Josei Hakusho, 2001 (White Paper on Women, 2001). Tokyo: Horupu. OECD (2004) Social Expenditure Database. Paris: OECD. Osawa, Mari (2000) ‘Government Approaches to Gender Equality in the mid-1990s’. Social Science Japan Journal, 3(1): 2–19. Osawa, Mari (2003) ‘Japanese Government Approaches to Gender Equality Since the mid1990s’. Occasional Paper Series 9, Wayne State University College of Urban, Labor and Metropolitan Affairs, February. Palley, H. (1992) ‘Social Policy and the Elderly in South Korea: Confucianism, Modernization and Development’. Asian Survey, 32: 787–801. Park, Yeong-Ran (2005) ‘Gender Dimensions of Family Policy in Korea’: Paper presented at Canada–Korea Social Policy Research Cooperation Symposium, Munk Centre for International Studies, University of Toronto, Canada, 26–27 January. Pekkanen, Robert (2000) ‘Japan’s New Politics: The Case of the NPO Law’. Journal of Japanese Studies, 26(1): 111–48. Pempel, T.J. (1998) Regime Shift: Comparative Dynamics of the Japanese Political Economy. Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press. Peng, Ito (2002a) ‘Japan: The Interaction of Gender and Demography in a Low-Birth Rate and Aging Society’. In Rianne Mahon and Sonya Michel (eds.), Child Care at the Crossroads: Gender, Entitlements, and Welfare State Restructuring. New York: Routledge. Peng, Ito (2002b) ‘Social Care in Crisis: Gender, Demography and Welfare State Restructuring in Japan’. Social Politics, 9(3): 411–43. Peng, Ito and Joseph Wong (2004) ‘Growing Out of the Developmental State: East Asian Welfare Reform in the 1990s’. Paper presented at International Sociological Association, Research Committee 19, Conference, 2–4 September, Paris, France. Prime Minister’s Office Japan (1994) Seron Chosa (Public Opinion Survey). Tokyo: PMO, May. Retherford, Robert D., Naohiro Ogawa and Rikiya Matsukura (2001) ‘Late Marriage and Less Marriage in Japan’. Population and Development Review, 27(1): 65–102. Seguino, Stephanie (1997) ‘Gender Wage, Inequality and Export-led Growth in South Korea’. Journal of Development Studies, Vol. 34: 102–32. Seong, Kyoung-Ryung (2000) ‘Civil Society and Democratic Consolidation in South Korea: Great Achievements and Remaining Problems’. In Larry Diamond and Byung-Kook Kim (eds) Consolidating Democracy in South Korea. Boulder CO: Lynne Rienner. Shipper, Apichai W. (2005) ‘Shaping the Japanese State: The Role of Foreigner Support Groups in Redefining Membership Rules and State Responsibilities’. Paper presented at Association of Asian Studies Annual Congress, 31 March–4 April, Chicago. Sung, Sirin (2003) ‘Women Reconciling Paid and Unpaid Work in a Confucian Welfare State: The Case of South Korea’. Social Policy and Administration, 37(4): 342–60. United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) (2002) Human Development Report. Available at http://hdr.undp.org/statistics/data/indic/indic_218_1_1.html, accessed on 3 August 2005. Yamada, Masahiro (1999) Parasite Singles no Jidai (The Age of Parasite Singles). Tokyo: Chikuma Shinsh. Wong, Joseph (2004) Health Democracies: Welfare Politics in Taiwan and South Korea. Ithaca NY and London: Cornell University Press.

7 The Evolution of the Women-friendly State: Opportunities and Constraints in the Swedish Welfare State Barbara Hobson

Introduction Sweden is an interesting case in which to consider gender and social policy, looking through the lens of institutions, social actors and gendered discourses on equality. It has been one of the most interventionist states, mitigating the power of capital and markets to control workers and working conditions. It scores highest on the dimensions of social rights that decommodify workers, that is, policies that weaken a worker’s dependence on the market (Esping-Andersen 1990; Korpi and Palme 1998). In the literature on comparative welfare regimes, it is presented as the society where social citizenship and the pursuit of equality were shaped by class-based politics; the cultural narratives that resonate in the society have been those of working-class struggles (Acker 1992; Åmark 1992). Social rights in this framework are the outcome of struggles over the distribution of society’s resources where unionized workers and employers have been the main protagonists (Korpi 1980). The redistributive effects of wage and social policies are evident in that Sweden scores very low on measures of social stratification and has one of the most compressed wage structures. Sweden is also cast as the exemplar of the women-friendly society with policies that enable women to combine employment with having and caring for families. It is considered the paradigm of the weak breadwinner society (Lewis 1992), in which women are least dependent on a male breadwinner; this is reflected in the low levels of women’s poverty after divorce. Women’s ability to form independent households without falling into poverty has been referred to as defamilialization (Hobson 1990, 1994; Orloff 1993). This process involves women’s integration into paid work but it is also dependent upon state provision of housing allowances and income-maintenance benefits, which acts as a buffer for solo mothers, who after divorce tend to have on average a third less income than married mothers (Hobson and Takahashi 1997). In coining the phrase ‘women-friendly state’, Helga Hernes (1987) underscored not only social citizenship rights, but also participatory citizenship rights, and in particular women’s agency in policy-making. She 151

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maintained that there were dynamic and interactive processes at work in womenfriendly states: policies that have facilitated participatory citizenship through incentives to enter the labour market produce active recruitment of women into unions and politics. These processes laid the ground for mobilizing women’s constituencies to make claims on the state for more power in the shaping of welfare institutions (Siim 1994). Alongside this view that highlights the importance of Swedish social policies in promoting participatory citizenship in the spheres of family, paid work and politics (Hernes 1987; Bergqvist 1999), one also finds less optimistic and critical voices toward women’s inclusion into state institutions and policy-making. For instance, some feminists argue that the Swedish welfare state has produced a system of segregating men and women into different responsibilities with different power positions (Hirdman 1989). Equality has meant privileging male norms. In the same vein, others maintain that Sweden’s women-friendly policies are top-down policies not framed in women’s interests but rather in the interest of family and children (Eduards 1991; Ohlander 1992) and that there is feminism without feminists (Gelb 1989). Taking the most pessimistic view of feminism in Sweden, Elman (1995) claims that there is neither feminism nor feminists as seen in the failure to address radical feminist issues, such as violence and sexual harassment. This contested view of Sweden and gender equality reflects ideological rifts over what feminism is, debates over gender difference and gender equal strategies, over autonomous feminism versus institutionalized feminism. This is a dead-end debate. My purpose in this paper is to broaden the conceptual terrain in gender and social policy away from the ideological debates over autonomous and institutional feminism in Sweden toward more process-oriented approaches that highlight the mechanisms of power and agency in shaping gender-equality outcomes. My approach assumes that gender strategies are contextually bound and connected to social movements. This is to take seriously the notion of capabilities (Sen 1992; and Lewis and Giullari in chapter 8 of this volume), and to consider what kinds of policy frameworks and institutions promote individual choices and participation in different spheres of life – the economic, social and political. It is also important to consider how enhanced individual capabilities and agency facilitate collective agency, that is, the ability of organizations and constituencies of women to make claims, to have a voice and influence in creating gender-sensitive social citizenship rights (Hobson and Lister 2002). Within the comparative research on gender and welfare states there is an assumption that societies with high rates of labour-force participation and defamilialization policies reduce agency inequalities (Korpi 2000); they increase women’s capabilities to be full citizens. These in turn lead to greater participatory citizenship and collective political presence, thus creating women publics. The example of the former socialist states demonstrates that high rates of labour-force participation and weak economic dependency do not in themselves lead to the creation of women’s political presence. Hence we need a more nuanced analysis of participation parity and agency inequality in order to unravel a complex set of processes: How and on what basis women are included in policy-making spheres shapes not only outcomes in

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citizenship rights, but also political identities and the meanings of emancipation. What kinds of claims are made and which women actors come to speak for women, is historically and contextually grounded, and rooted in previous interactions between social actors and institutions. In this chapter I trace the role of women’s collectivities in shaping the womenfriendly Swedish welfare state. I address three sets of questions. Firstly, how have feminist political actors (individuals and organizations) and their allies in political parties and trade unions shaped the contours of Sweden’s ‘women-friendly’ welfare state? Secondly, how have alliances and coalitions with political parties and unions acted as constraints for women’s claims for equal participation in political, economic and social spheres? And finally, which groups have been left out or marginalized in the participatory model of gendered citizenship? Linked to the question of which groups were not recognized, we need to consider which discourses became recognized as embodying gender equality and which actors became the privileged spokespersons for feminism. Embedded in these questions are mechanisms of power and agency. Two that I have used in my own work (Hobson 2003) are highly relevant to social movements involving women’s movements and claims-making: brokering and boundary-making. Brokering is a concept in social-movement theory that I have defined as the pursuit of allies who gain advantages from their linkages with a movement or collectivity, who can be sympathetic, lukewarm, resistant or even antagonistic to the claims a group is making (Hobson 2003). In the case of Swedish women’s movements, these allies have been leading men in the Social Democratic Party and Liberal Party as well as trade union representatives. Boundary-making is a mechanism that reveals the processes by which particular actors (and often their organizations) become the certified spokespersons for the group, the recognized actors in public discourse who are interviewed in the media and/or serve on government commissions (Hobson 2003). These actors have the power to shape which issues and claims are heard and legitimated, and which are shaded out and marginalized. Because Swedish feminism early on became institutionalized and linked to the Social Democracy Party and its ideologies, it is possible to view the clear path-dependencies in discourse and policy around gender equality, seen through the privileging of discourses that coupled paid work to women’s emancipation. In the following sections I provide a contextualized account of these processes in the following periods: the first phase of Social Democratic governance in the 1930s, the second phase of welfare-state expansion in 1970s, and the third phase of global restructuring and the emergence of feminist politics and feminist political parties in the 1990s.

Foundations The long duration and hegemony of the Swedish Social Democratic Party is well known; it has been the only party with the possibility of winning a parliamentary majority: from 1932 to 1988 the Social Democrats’ share of the vote was between

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42 and 50 per cent. In the policy realm, Sweden is a society where politics and markets have been coupled. Up until the mid-1980s, there was a highly institutionalized corporatist bargaining system composed of employer representatives, unions and members of government. According to one historian of Swedish politics, the political organization and political culture have inhibited the development of social movements based on identities other than class, such as gender, ethnicity and race (Åmark 1992). Whereas most studies of Sweden and gender equality begin in the ‘golden age’ of welfare-state expansion in the 1960s and 1970s, in order to understand women’s agency in the development of women-friendly policies, it is useful to go back to the first phase of welfare-state formation in the 1930s and the feminist activism that emerged in the same period. This was a period of political opportunity for women’s groups as the Social Democratic Party was courting women as voters. It was also a time in which there was a flowering of women’s organizations and cross-party alliances. Political opportunity After a serious electoral defeat in 1928, the Social Democratic strategy shifted to a mass-membership party, which downplayed the rhetoric of class struggle and revolution. This election, called the Cossack Election – the label that conservatives used in the campaign rhetoric – resulted in a decrease in Social Democratic representation from 86 to 75 seats. Talk of revolution was replaced by security (trygghet) (Olsson 1990: 94). Leaders of the party sought to broaden their base and realized that it was clearly in their interest to get women to become party members (Karlsson 1990: 323). However, there was no attempt to place women on the voting lists nor were women’s issues notably present in the party platform. It is important to keep in mind that the surge in Swedish feminist mobilization came not during suffrage but in the decade after, the 1930s, a period in which many Western feminist movements were in retreat. In Sweden large numbers of women joined organizations for the first time. Sweden’s Social Democratic Women’s Union increased their membership four-fold.1 Almost twice the number of women were mobilized compared to those who fought for suffrage. Women’s organizations that had been divided by class, education, political loyalties and ideological differences (Lindholm 1991), in the 1930s began cooperating across party lines. In 1939 a feminist wrote in Morgonbris (the Social Democratic women’s journal), ‘I have experienced a shift in the women’s movement from a strictly bourgeois phenomenon, led by middle-class women with great opposition from working-class women, to a movement that has become everyone’s concern’ (Morgonbris 1939: 5). This cooperation among women’s groups was facilitated by the shift in rhetoric within the Social Democratic Party, which opened up new discursive and political opportunities, as seen in a metaphor that became a master-frame in Social Democracy, the People’s Home (Folkhemmet). Immortalized in the famous speech of Prime Minister Per Albon Hansson, the People’s Home was compared to a home in which there ‘are no privileged or deprived members, no pets and no stepchildren.


In the good home there is equality, solicitude, cooperation and helpfulness’ (quoted in Tingsten 1973: 265). This symbol of the caring state, which would accrue in meaning over many decades of Social Democratic hegemony, reveals how boundary-making could operate on two levels: firstly, the marginalization of radicals in the party, and secondly as a frame within which Social Democracy could mobilize women, gain influence in their own party, and become the recognized spokespersons for feminism. Women’s inclusion in social democracy: participation as the mainframe Feminists seeking to mobilize women faced a situation in which a significant proportion of women did not even exercise their right to vote. An important strategy in this mobilization was to create an informed woman citizen who understood the policy debates and could influence the policy arena. A group of women called the Fogelstad Group founded a Citizenship School to achieve this objective. A feminist writing in their journal maintained, ‘The women’s movement needs its work sites, a place where its members are trained for their duty as citizens’ (Spoof 1933: 4). Women’s journals provided extensive coverage of political debates, and parliamentary proceedings were published verbatim in several women’s journals to keep readers informed. Women were urged to exercise their vote, regardless of party. That women would be seen as a constituency of voters increased the brokering and bargaining power of women’s organizations to influence policymaking in the Social Democratic Party. Participation and representation were the mobilizing frames for gender politics in the 1930s and would be the mainframe again for feminist mobilization in the 1990s, after a precipitous decline in women’s representation in parliament. This framework was strategic in that it appealed to a broad spectrum of women voters, but it also revealed the early precedents of institutional feminism, a perception that women’s groups gained power resources through an integrationist strategy, that policy-making influence came through involvement in policy-making institutions and party politics. As one author wrote in Hertha, the journal of the oldest Swedish feminist organization, Fredrika Bremer, ‘We women do not wish to be invited into the Folkhem once it is finished and ready. We will only be satisfied if we are welcome to help lay the groundwork and build it’ (quoted in Karlsson 1990: 36; see also Hertha 1938: 98). Another Social Democratic feminist, writing in her party’s journal, demanded that women be recognized as political actors: ‘We believe it is politically unjust and poor tactics to treat women as political zeros’ (Västberg 1938: 5). Women’s right to work During the 1930s the wide-angle lens of participation as active citizenship refocused and narrowed when women’s groups concentrated their energies on the campaign against the threat to married women’s right to work. In Sweden, the political debate over married women’s right to work arose in a context of high rates of unemployment, as was true in other industrialized countries in the

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Depression era (Hobson 1993). The number of unemployed rose more than fivefold between 1931 and 1932, and then reached its maximum in 1933 when over 186,000 Swedes were registered as unemployed (Tingsten 1973: 285). Married women were seen as taking men’s jobs and every party from left to right demanded restrictions. In the official statistics, only 10 per cent of working women were married, but neither part-time workers nor married women working alongside their husbands were considered as being in the labour force (Nyberg 1987). Moreover, it is important to keep in mind that half of the adult middle- and working-class women lived alone with or without children and had to support themselves up until the 1930s. Perhaps most importantly, there was the symbolic import of denying married women the right to work. In the Social Democratic worker state, in which paid work was the marker of citizenship, to exclude married women was to create a gendered category of lesser citizens. In response to the pressure for a marriage bar in employment, a branch of Open Door International, an organization formed to protect women’s right to employment, was launched in Sweden. The whole spectrum of women’s organizations, including the National Housewives Association, defended women’s right to work on the basis that it was a citizenship right, though their preference was for mothers to be at home (SOU 1938). An article that appeared in the Social Democratic women’s journal Morgonbris was reproduced in two feminist journals with a middle-class base. The link between participatory citizenship and the right to employment was clearly made: ‘the right to walk through the door of the labour market, not as a subservient, but as full citizens, equal to men. As long as there is democracy, equality and justice, the bitter war between the sexes should not exist’ (Morgonbris 1937: 4; Tidevarvet 1937: 2; Hertha 1937: 3). The Farmers’ Party, the Conservative Party and the right wing of the Liberal Party all advocated laws restricting married women’s employment and asserting the rights of male breadwinners. The majority of Social Democratic men (including the leader of the party, Per Albin Hansson) hoped that women would return to the home after they were married, but Albin Hansson was against restrictions. However, he did not envision a law protecting married women’s rights to employment (Franguer 1998). The trade unions were against the marriage bar, not because they supported women’s rights, but because they opposed any government interference in worker–employer contracts (Rothstein 1992). A small band of Social Democratic men were strong supporters who joined forces with women’s groups to turn the tide against the laws against married women’s work. They were instrumental in getting a law passed that in fact prohibited the firing of married women, pregnant women (married or unmarried) and women with children (Hobson 1993). Boundary-making: privileged speakers and discourses in social democracy The debates and public discourse around married women’s right to work signalled a change in the framing of gender politics that reflected the prominence of feminists on government commissions. They were feminist actors who championed paid


work as the path to women’s emancipation. Two key spokespersons in the debate were the chair and secretary of the Government Committee on Married Women’s Work. The chair, Kerstin Hesselgren, was the first woman to be elected to the first chamber of the Swedish parliament in the Liberal Party. Her experience as the first woman factory-inspector made her an obvious choice to speak for the women’s situation in the labour market. The secretary of the Committee, Alva Myrdal, was chairperson of the Professional Women’s Organization, and a Social Democrat with an inside track into party politics through her husband, Gunnar Myrdal.2 The committee not only steered the discourse in women’s journals and the media, but also set the terms for the debate and the framing of gender equality in the future. Myrdal represented a 180 degree turn from the earlier maternalist feminism of Ellen Key, the most prominent writer and speaker on women’s issues in the first decades of the twentieth century. Key opposed suffrage and advocated a feminism of difference, in which woman’s power derived from her maternal role and female consciousness. She maintained that feminists who championed the vote and careers for women were misguided (Key 1912). In contrast, Myrdal imagined a gender equality in which women and men would both be active participants in the labour market, and put forward proposals for collective housing and cooperative kitchens. These utopian schemes did not stick in Sweden, but what did and would be revived in the 1960s and 1970s was her vision of women’s participatory citizenship through paid work. By the end of the 1930s the maternalist position had lost ground. Although issues involving motherhood were part of feminist claim – making – women’s groups put forward demands for maternal health care, paid vacations for mothers alongside childcare, maternal leave benefits for employment – the basis for women’s activism was not bound by a maternalist world view that women had unique political identities based upon their motherly roles. In the 1930s women’s groups, through their pressure on Social Democratic government, achieved rights and protections for women in paid work (Hobson 1993; Hobson and Lindholm 1997). These included: ●

●

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Protection for all women against the loss of their jobs after marriage or pregnancy. It was against the law to fire a woman from her job because of marriage or pregnancy (the law also protected unmarried mothers). Maternal leave for all women in waged work, but those in the public sector were given a paid leave benefit. Income maintenance for unmarried and divorced mothers, in which the state gave advance payments to divorced or unmarried mothers when fathers failed to pay their support.

At the end of the 1930s, a decade after the Women’s Committee on Married Women’s Work published its findings and recommendations, Alva Myrdal proclaimed the successes that women had achieved: ‘This is a year of social political duties. We have a government under our rule. We have a Parliament elected on a worthy social program. We have women’s increased political awareness and also family politics in the forefront’ (Myrdal 1937: 21).

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This optimism was short-lived. During the war and postwar years, women’s issues were placed at the margins of the ‘real politics’. Rationing produced a reassertion of traditional female skills of canning and domestic activities. Furthermore, as the postwar years revealed, the consolidation of the Social Democratic power base shaded out women’s voices and weakened women’s brokering power with party leaders. It should not be forgotten that the historic Saltsjöbaden agreement was signed at the end of the 1930s, which laid the foundation of corporatist bargaining structures between employers, unions and the government. These postwar years from 1945 until the 1960s represented a bracketing of feminist politics and it would take over two decades before a revived feminist movement could emerge. Still, the contours of Swedish feminism that emerged in the 1930s in this early phase of welfare-state formation shaped future feminist politics and claims for gender equality. 1 Women’s collective agency was channelled through organizations and government bureaucracies, what I have called institutionalized feminism. Hesselgren and Myrdal were in fact the prototypes of the so-called ‘femocrats’ – a phrase coined in our own day, applied to women with feminist orientations who have chosen to enter public life and work within the system to promote women’s interests (Cass 1994; Eisenstein 1996). Their activities in policy-making reveal both the strengths and weaknesses of forms of institutional feminism. On the one hand, women in key bureaucratic positions provide links between grassroots feminist activism and civil society and government bureaucracy. They have access to information (early drafts of legislation) and informal networks. On the other hand, they are compelled to adapt to the rules of the game in bureaucratic organizations and this limits their ability to put forward radical agendas. 2 Claims for gender equality came to be more and more bound up with participation in paid work. This was to be the case for nearly all the Nordic welfare states, but most true for Swedish women’s claim-making.3 Participatory citizenship became coupled to paid work in this first phase of feminist mobilization and legitimized through official government policy documents. 3 Feminist actors who were recognized as the spokespersons for women’s interests in Swedish social democracy tended not to emphasize women’s difference or particularized identities. It is interesting to note that even in the early 1900s the Swedish delegation to the International Labour Organization (both men and women) was the only group who refused to sign the protective legislation for women but sought more universal protections for all workers. Those feminists who became privileged actors in policy-making in the 1930s and later in the 1970s (by being put on government commissions and given policy-making roles) encased women’s claims in a gender-neutral frame, one in which gender was not decoupled from class.

Welfare-state expansion and the dual breadwinner model Unlike many welfare states in which dramatic increases in women’ labour-force participation occurred in the late 1980s and 1990s, in Sweden the surge in


women’s employment took place during a period of welfare-state expansion and political opportunity with new coalitions and discourses around equality (Hobson 2003).4 Called the ‘golden age’ of the Nordic welfare states, the 1960s and 1970s brought to fruition the institutionalized welfare state with its comprehensive policies covering a range of protections and risks and reaching all citizens. According to Huber and Stephens (1998) the main contours of these policies include: full employment, generous welfare state, basic income security, tax system supportive of production and redistribution and a wage determination system that supports reduction of inequalities. These reforms in the Swedish welfare state were assumed to be inclusive, that is among different classes of earners. High earners were brought into the public system of earnings-related pensions (Korpi and Palme 1998). Everyone was entitled to a basic amount for part of his/her pension, sickness insurance and parental benefit; however the major part of the benefit was calculated on prior work experience and earnings (Lindqvist and Marklund 1995). As the majority of women were out of the labour force, as housewives or workers on the family farm in which the husband was the recognized breadwinner, they received the lower flat-rate benefits in contrast to the majority of the ‘working’ population (mainly men) who received the more generous benefits, and the difference was substantial (Sainsbury 1996). Women’s interests and the contests over what kinds of redistributive systems would best benefit women became central issues in political debates in this changing policy constellation. Should there be a care allowance and housewife pensions or publicly supported day care? Should there be individual taxation or a tax for the male breadwinner and his family? Or should benefits and services be linked to citizenship or paid work? Looking from a long-distance lens of nearly 25 years, Gunnar Fredriksson, social democrat, journalist, and one of the central opinion-makers in sex-role debates in the 1960s, claimed that there were three main positions in the debate on women’s role in society (Vestbro 1992). The conservative: women as housewives of male breadwinners. This had been the ideal of the 1950s for both the middle and working classes. The moderate: in which women would have two roles as housewife/ mother and as participant in waged work, and men would have one role as workers. She would be responsible for care of children and the home so therefore she could not achieve an equal position in the labour-market work. The radical: in which equality between men and women in work, family life and society were assumed. This rejected biological determinism and saw equality as a question of justice so that men and women could develop themselves (Vestbro 1992). Fredriksson concluded that these differing positions represented clear-cut political lines. The Church party espoused the conservative view; the right and centre parties stood behind the moderate position and the social democrats and liberals took the radical line. But the cleavages were not that clear and they reflected ideological positions that sometimes cut across party lines in the 1960s. In fact, Fredriksson was part of a network of intellectuals and radicals, called ‘Group 222’, who orchestrated many of the policy debates and policy frameworks for equality between the sexes. The participants now appear as prominent members of the

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Social Democratic Party, but many of the participants in the group were from different political parties (Social Democrats, Liberals and Communists), which is why they met in secret.5 They were young radicals, men and women, often husbandand-wife teams, and the most notable attending these meetings were Lisbeth and Olof Palme. Generational differences were a key divide in the contests over the malebreadwinner norm and the state’s role in promoting women’s employment (Bergqvist 1999). The male-breadwinner norm still had strong supporters in the Social Democratic Party and even within the Women’s Federation. One of the stalwart defenders of the full-time housewife was a long-time activist in the women’s section of the Social Democratic Party, Nancy Eriksson. She published her book Just a Housewife to counter the images in the media of housewives as parasites or prostitutes (Florín 1999). Eriksson launched a crusade against the individualization of taxes, which as she rightly understood devalued the carework of mothers in her generation, and which would ultimately lead to the demise of the malebreadwinner wage that supported housewives. Realizing that she had sympathizers among Social Democratic women, the party gave Eriksson a position on the commission to investigate tax reform, but she was outflanked by the younger radical men and women on the committee. The winds of change were moving in another direction. In the 1950s, 77 per cent of women without children were in the labour market, and 55 per cent with one child were employed; about 28 per cent of those with two children were in paid work (Florín and Nilsson 1999). A survey of young women in Swedish schools in the 1950s revealed that young women did not want to follow in the footsteps of their mothers as housewives ( Johansson 2000). By the time the tax reform was implemented in the 1970s, nearly half of women were already in the labour market (Axelsson 1992). Those women who championed the dual-earner model would sit on the dozens of commissions on marriage, family and childcare throughout the 1970s. Within the Social Democratic Party, they became the privileged speakers for women’s interests.

The dual-earner model and gender equality As the research from the former Soviet countries has illustrated, activation of women into the labour force in itself does not necessarily lead to gender equality in outcomes, or even a discourse on equal participation of men and women in paid and unpaid work. In Sweden, the dual-earner norm was coupled to a genderequality discourse in which men were considered to be part of the emancipatory project. From the perspective of Eva Moberg, feminist spokesperson for the Liberal Party, ‘the fulfillment of the goals of feminism requires a radical change of the habits of living, attitudes and values of the average man …’ (Moberg 1962: 116). Yet although radical men in Group 222 supported women’s participation in paid work and even envisioned gender parity in the labour market, they could not imagine the transformation in gender roles and the organization of paid and unpaid work that this would entail (Hobson 2003).


Inclusion and participation parity In the early debates at the end of the 1960s and 1970s, the assumption was that women would take full-time employment and that men would take a larger share of housework. The logic was that the greater employment of women would lead to more equality in the family. The main policy study in the period, Women’s Life and Work (Kvinnors liv och arbete), affirmed that there would be a convergence in men’s and women’s roles (Dahlström 1962). The ideological core of the of the Swedish gender equality model came to be participation parity: equal participation in the spheres of work and family life for both men and women. Olof Palme interpreted this model of gender equality in his keynote speech for the Social Democratic Party congress in 1972. For him gender equality meant increasing employment for both men and women as well as changing attitudes about male and female tasks in the home and a sharing of the division of work at home. However, he did not suggest policy incentives for men to increase their unpaid work in the home. He saw women’s struggle as part of the labour movements’ struggle for a just society. From the perspective of Fredriksson’s three positions (Baude 1992), we can say that Social Democratic men sympathetic to gender equality, such as Palme, affirmed a radical rhetoric on participation parity – equality between men and women in work, family and society, but designed policies that reproduced the moderate position. Women would have two roles as housewife/mother and participant in waged work. Men would have two roles as well – as fathers, but not as caretakers. Their main role would continue to be that of breadwinner. Both would be parent-worker-citizens, though men and women would not participate equally in both spheres of paid work and care. Parent-worker-citizen: a gender-neutral frame of rights The Swedish model of the worker-parent-citizen came into being during this period. There was a purposeful approach to family and labour-market policy in the 1960s and 1970s, a set of initiatives that sought to alter the patterns of family life so that more women would become labour-force participants. A set of coherent policies emerged from political debate, government commissions on individual taxation, family law, parental leave, and day care. Policies were aimed at shaping the choices of families around paid and unpaid work. Individual taxation raised the costs of women’s unpaid labour so that families with only a single earner paid a penalty for maintaining a traditional housewife; every Swedish crown a woman earned was extra income for the family (Gustafsson and Bruyn-Hundt 1991). Generous parental leave and highly subsidized day care and elderly care were the carrots to seduce women into the labour market. The expanded public care facilities not only provided care for young and old, but also created thousands of jobs for women. Women were integrated into the parent-worker-citizen model on men’s terms. All policies were gender neutral: leave for taking care of children was parental leave; married and cohabitating partners were treated as gender-neutral individuals in pension and tax systems; the last remnant of gender-distinctive policy, the widow’s pension, was phased out in 1990. In December 1990, the month before

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the law ending widows’ pensions came into effect, there were 64,000 marriages (the average had been about 40,000 a year (Hoem 1991)), a reflection of the gap between gender-neutral ideologies and policies and gendered practices in everyday life. Sweden was the first society in the Western world to denaturalize child-leave policy in 1975. No longer maternal leave, it became parental leave and the benefits were generous and the conditions incredibly flexible: fathers and mothers could divide the leave up in any way that they chose and use the time up to the eighth birthday of their child. By 1989, parents could take up to one year and were compensated with 90 per cent of their salaries up to a very high ceiling6 and a further three months with a flat benefit of about 60 crowns a day (equivalent to around 7 euros a day). The policy was gender-neutral; the practices were not. By the early 1990s, less than a third of men took off any time for parental leave and the proportion of days fathers took off was still no more than 10 per cent of the couple’s permitted leave. The idea that men should share the leave was an idea that had existed since the 1970s in different policy circles (Bergqvist 1999). For example, when the Commission on Family and Marriage published their report in 1972, they not only recommended that the leave be gender neutral, but also suggested that the leave be shared. This was meant to strengthen women’s labour-market position and increase men’s responsibility for care (SOU 1972: 41). Women’s organizations across the political spectrum sought legislation that would designate a portion of the leave for men. They reasoned that otherwise the reform would be meaningless and perpetuate lower wages and fewer career prospects for women. Two parliamentary members of the Centre Party proposed a 12-month parental leave in which no parent would use more than eight months. Perhaps succumbing to the realities of policy-making, Social Democratic women insisted that one month be reserved exclusively for the father out of the eight months allowable (Bergqvist 1998). It took two decades before the ‘daddy month’ (one month of parental leave reserved for the father) was enacted (1995), which in 1999 was extended to two months. Men took the lead in this reform; men in men’s groups and men in key policy-making roles who had clout in political parties, most notably the head of the Liberal Party and at that time, the Minister of Social Affairs, Bengt Westerberg. Though not equal participation by any stretch of the imagination,7 the ‘daddy months’ embody an awareness that equal participation in the labour market implies change in the division of unpaid work in the home. Moreover, this policy, though couched in gender-neutral terms, which states that each parent shall have at least two months of the leave, is understood as targeted and gender specific – for fathers (Bergman and Hobson 2002).

Brokering: opportunities and constraints There is a widely held assumption in the scholarly literature on the Swedish welfare state that policy interventions around gender were a response to labour-market


shortages – that trade unions preferred women to immigrants to fill the expanding service economy (Elman 1995; Jonung and Thordarson 1980). More recently scholars have rejected this functionalist account of gender equality and highlighted the range of actors, men and women, who were involved in the debates on sex roles and gender equality that began in the 1960s (Bergqvist 1999; Florín and Nilsson 1999; Karlsson 1996). Rather than the main determinant of enabling policies for women to enter labour-market work, according to Florín and Nilsson (1999), the shortage of labour offered a window of opportunity for brokering with men in the Social Democratic Party who were lukewarm towards feminism and with men in the blue-collar trade unions, the LO, who were even less sympathetic. Unions became crucial allies of feminists in the 1970s in the debates around publicly supported day care and individual tax reform. Their backing was essential. The large industrial unions (LO) were the main power bloc in Social Democracy. Although they supported women’s issues that were workers’ issues – they had opposed restrictions on married women’s right to work in the 1930s and they backed equal pay for women workers in the 1950s – still they had little sympathy for feminism. They tended to cast women’s movements for gender equality as bourgeois, driven by professional women and often seen at odds with the working man’s struggle for the male-breadwinner wage to maintain a full-time housewife. The LO preference for women’s labour versus immigrant labour to solve the labour shortage in Sweden is well known (Kyle 1979), and they put pressure on the government to restrict immigration. Activist women in the unions and Social Democratic Party seized upon this window of opportunity. Women in the industrial and service-sector unions had been pushing the day-care issue since the 1940s, but in the 1960s they found allies among men in LO, and they were able to push forward the day-care issue onto the LO agenda at a time when the shortage of labour was on the minds of policy-makers, employers and union officials (Hirdman 1998). Considering brokering in unions, we should keep in mind that women had little voice in the shaping of policy within the trade unions. Although LO was interested in women’s recruitment into unions, they did not recruit women into the union hierarchies until the 1990s (Mahon 2002; Hirdman 1998). Constraints Alliances in policy-making necessitate forms of brokering that not only involve strategic framing of issues, but also set the parameters for what kinds of claims will have play in the policy-making forums. From this perspective, every alliance can be an exclusion (Hobson 2003). We can see specific examples of this in response to feminist claims around working times and pay equity. Since the 1970s, women in the Social Democratic Party continuously have sought a shorter working week as a women-friendly policy. However, unions have always won out in the battles over shorter working days versus longer vacations: the mandated vacation is now six weeks. Policies to alter the discriminatory gendered patterns in pay, job recruitment and promotion have engendered the most controversy within the unions. The industrial unions promoted a wage-solidarity policy for low earners in their centralized bargaining with

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employers, which indirectly helped women who were over-represented in low-paid unskilled jobs. Still, they were adamantly against any law against discrimination on gender grounds in wages, hiring and promotion (Ruggie 1984).8 The LO maintained that such an anti-discrimination law would interfere with collective bargaining. It is no secret that Sweden has had one of the softest laws against gender discrimination in employment among democratic welfare states (Eklund 1996; Gelb 1989; Ruggie 1984). Sweden did not have a law against gender discrimination until the mid-1980s and it was extremely weak, since it did not cover gender discrimination under union/employer contracts. A revised law in 1991 eliminated this clause but the main contours of the law remained. The parameters for claiming discrimination remain highly circumscribed. The only unlawful sex discrimination exists when an employer passes over an objectively better-qualified candidate (Eklund 1996). Swedish law does not permit group or class actions based on systematic patterns of discrimination (for example female employees in a firm who are systematically passed over in promotions). Not until Sweden joined the EU was the principle of equal pay for work of equal value introduced in Swedish law (Eklund 1996). The main employer of women in Sweden is the state (including the municipalities) with nurses, teachers and health-system public-sector workers amongst their employees. The social democratic welfare states offer women a family-friendly workplace, but they also produce a female ghetto of jobs with low compensation in a sex-segregated care sector (Huber and Stephens 2000; Mandel and Shalev 2003; Persson and Wadensjö 1997). Though Sweden has been one of the most obedient of member states in implementing EU law in the area of gender equity in pay, it has shown resistance toward implementing wage equity for women employed in the highly segregated public-service sector. The equality ombudsman has lost nearly every case brought before the Labour Court over the last several years. One in particular stands out as it was appealed to the EU Court twice.9 It concerns wage discrimination of midwives in comparison with male technical assistants; the latter have less education and earn more than 4,000 crowns a month more than the midwives. Though the case was sent back twice from the European Union Court for review, the Swedish Labour Court first argued for the pay differential based on market demand and then for supremacy of collective agreements (that is, to increase the pay of the midwives would undermine the union bargaining process).10 This case makes visible the contradictions in the notion of a women-friendly state: can a women-friendly state be a gender-discriminatory employer? Should union agreements be outside the purview of legal action when the wages are systematically set lower for gender-segregated occupations? Can women who are integrated in the Social Democratic state apparatus and party machinery make challenges that prioritize a politics of redistribution that recognizes gender inequalities over class inequalities?

The limits of participation parity The belief that women’s and men’s roles would converge as more women entered the labour market appears naïve with hindsight. And the data on practices


45 40 35 30 25 20 15 10 5 0

1990/91

1990/91

2001/02

2001/02

Men

Women

Men

Women

paid work

unpaid work

Figure 7.1 Women’s and men’s paid and unpaid work, weekly hours 1990–91, 2000–01 Source: Statistics Sweden: www.SCB-se/statistik7be0503/tidsavanv.asp

between couples underscores the distance from this idealized gender-equality model that presumed equal participation in the workplace and the home (see Figure 7.1). As Figure 7.1 illustrates, the much-heralded ‘daddy month’ has not made much difference either; women still take the lion’s share of unpaid work. In 1992, women worked on average 27 hours of paid work and 33 hours of unpaid work; for men the proportions were reversed, with 41 hours of paid work and 20 hours of unpaid work per week (Flood and Gräsjo 1997). More recent surveys in 2001 show only a slight change. Men have reduced their working hours by about one hour a week, but they have not increased their share of unpaid work. In fact, men and women have decreased their unpaid work.11 What has been achieved is participation parity in the labour market. There are nearly equal numbers of women in the labour market, but participation parity does not necessarily translate into equity. Employment statistics in 2002 show that between the ages of 20 and 64, 80.5 per cent of men and 77 per cent of women are in the labour force. Looking at the active labour market years (25–54), Swedish women have one of the highest participation rates among OECD countries (nearly 90 per cent). But a significant portion of women – over one-third – are working part time. The Swedish model, built around the participation of men and women in unpaid care and in paid work, in practice, is a one-and-three-quarters model. Men work full time and invest in their careers and women work part time (though it is a long part time, 20 to 30 hours) in the public sector, in workplaces where it is easier to combine employment with having a family, in so-called women-friendly jobs. Mothers choose women-friendly workplaces with low pay. This trade-off has

166 Barbara Hobson

70 60 50 40 30 20 10 0 SW95 SW00 UK99 FR94 GE94 GE00 NL94 SP90 IT95

IE96 US00 HU99 AS94

Figure 7.2 Poverty rates of solo mothers Source: Derived from LIS (Luxembourg Income Study Data). Sw-Sweden, UK-United Kingdom, Fr-France, Ge-Germany, It-Italy, IE-Ireland, US-United States, HU-Hungary, As-Australia.

consequences for mothers after divorce. Women not attached to male earners are poorer in terms of time and money. This has intensified since the 1990s, a period of economic downturns and global restructuring and the fiscal conservatism that EU membership requires. Though Sweden continues to have the lowest poverty rates among solo mothers compared to other industrialized welfare states (see Figure 7.2), since the 1990s, there has been a decline in solo-mother earnings as a result of their deteriorating labour-market position. Solo poverty rates have doubled (Fritzell 2000). The employment rates for solo mothers are now lower than for partnered mothers, which represents a reverse of the earlier pattern. Not only higher unemployment, but also longer periods of unemployment, underemployment and withdrawal from the labour market characterized the experience of solo mothers in the 1990s (Björnberg 1997; Statistics Sweden 1998; Sainsbury 2000). Non-Nordic immigrant groups are also bearing the brunt of a highly competitive and discriminatory labour market. At the beginning of the 1990s, 70 per cent of immigrants were employed, but by the end of the 1990s, the level had dropped to 55 per cent. Non-Nordic women immigrants fared the worst, with only 43 per cent holding onto their jobs (Sainsbury 2000). And immigrant women have not had a voice in feminist organizations or immigrant organizations (Hobson et al. 2006). Participation and voice The interplay between institutions and women’s collective agency has been characterized as a virtuous circle in women-friendly states, in which social policies and institutions create female constituencies who reinforce women-friendly policies (Bryson 1999; see also Razavi 2002). This virtuous circle opens up opportunities but also closes off others, including types of claims that can be made and


discursive resources to open up new agendas. Institutionalized feminism (women’s groups ensconced in political parties and unions) and femocrats scattered throughout the Swedish bureaucracy gave women a voice in policy-making, and in the making of the women-friendly welfare state. Staying within the circle allows influence, but limits autonomy and inhibits public debate and criticism of government actors and policies. Party discipline is strong. Women’s claims-making has been lodged within political parties; each party has its own women’s organization. This has inhibited coalitions across party lines and the development of grassroots women’s movements and NGOs to push radical agendas from outside institutional structures. It was not until the early 1990s that feminist mobilization similar to that of the 1930s emerged. As was true of the earlier era, representation in policy-making was the issue that led to cross-party alliances just before the 1994 election, which took the form of loosely coordinated organizations that were represented in the public arena as a network. Calling themselves the Redstockings, feminist organizations flexed their muscle and threatened to form a women’s political party during an election year. They were taken seriously, as women made up more than half the Social Democratic voters. The mobilization lead to a dramatic increase in women’s political representation, which is now at 43 per cent;12 half the ministers are women. Still, this representation near-parity does not necessarily translate into voice and influence. The unfilled promises of the government concerning improved services for care of the elderly and children alongside the frustration of women inside and outside political parties to shape agendas has borne fruit with the emergence of another feminist network. Unlike the earlier feminist network, which only threatened to form a party, this coalition of feminists, called a feminist party by the press, has been more open to the idea of actually forming a political party. However, recent polls suggest that there has been a backlash and decline in support for the feminist party. But its very existence shapes the processes of brokering and boundarymaking within parties The current network, with its grassroots and loose organizational structure – lacking the strict party discipline of the traditional parties in which women have been weaker brokers – has the potential to produce a wider set of social-policy debates around work and care. It has already opened up new debates and pressures for tougher laws against rape and domestic violence (two issues that have galvanized younger feminists). Finally, the network has the potential to create a multi-layered feminism with new voices, including gay and lesbian groups and immigrant women’s organizations, groups whose issues have been shaded out in the institutionalized feminism of the past. Whether we see a formal feminist party with representatives in parliament in the next election or whether leaders decide to remain a cross-party network of women’s groups may be less important than the fact that women have created a political presence, a women’s public voice with a core of issues and a feminist identity. This sense of a virtual women’s constituency with a gender-equal profile has made it difficult for political parties to gain advantage through appeals to traditional gender roles and family values. Women’s political presence in parties and unions also can be seen as a factor in limiting the challenges to women’s social

168 Barbara Hobson

citizenship, the chipping-away of benefits and services, during an era of welfarestate retrenchment. Retrenchment and restructuring in many countries have cut a swathe into women’s social rights. In Sweden, many policies remain untouched, including family allowance, day care and parental leave, that have become sacred cows in Swedish society. The question that hovers in the minds of many feminists in Sweden and in other countries, however, is whether a women-friendly state can be sustained in globalized economies with the diminishing policy-making role of the state.

Notes 1 The Social Democratic Women’s Organization increased its membership from 7,302 in 1930 to 26,882 in 1940. In 1937 the Fredrika Bremer society (a Swedish organization dedicated to advancing feminism) had 37 local organizations with over 6,000 members. The National Association for Housewives’ mailing list grew from 10,000 newsletters sent in 1930 to 23,550. The Swedish Women’s Business Organization boasted 4,000 members at the end of the 1930s (Åkerman 1983: 122). 2 The committee produced a 500-page report that included masses of statistics that underscored the extent of gender inequality in the labour market (SOU 1938: 2). 3 See Leira (1992) for a discussion of Norwegian exceptionalism in this regard. 4 One might compare the women-friendly policy initiatives to those developed in the 1990s, a period with dramatic increases in women’s labour-force participation in Europe (see Bruning and Plantenga 1999). 5 The name of the group is the address of a well-known feminist, Annika Baude, who became a key person in the debates on women’s work. 6 At that time it was the equivalent of 3,200 euros. 7 Though over three-quarters of fathers take some leave, the proportion of leave remains at 17 per cent. 8 The first anti-gender discrimination law was passed during a term when the Social Democrats were out of power in the mid-1980s. 9 Swedish Equality Ombudsman brought the case against the Örebro county council who employed both workers at the hospital (case a 153/95). 10 The case was taken to the EU Court twice and rejected by the Swedish Labour Court: the first time arguing that the two jobs were not comparable, and the second time claiming that it would undermine collective bargaining (Case C-236/98). The case has not been appealed again due to cost of EU cases (Interview with Jamställdhetsombudsmannen). 11 Women have decreased their hours by about two and a half hours per week; men by about an hour per week. 12 The Social Democratic Party in the 1994 election made the decision to alternate women and men on all of their party lists. This meant greater representation in real terms.

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170 Barbara Hobson Hernes, H. (1987) Welfare State and Woman Power: Essays in State Feminism. Oslo: University of Oslo Press. Hirdman, Y. (1989) Att Lägga livet till rätta. Studier i sventsk folkhems politik (To Adapt Life the Right Way. Studies of the Swedish ‘People’s Home’ Policy). Stockholm: Norstedts Förlag. Hirdman, Y. (1998) Med kluven tunga: LO and Genusordningen (Divided Tongue: The Labour Union and the Role of Gender). Stockholm: Atlas. Hobson, B. (1990) ‘No exit, No Voice: Women’s Economic Dependency and the Welfare State’. Acta Sociologica 33, 3: 235–50. Hobson, B. (1993) ‘Married Women’s Right to Work in the U.S. and Sweden During the 1930s’. In S. Koven and S. Michel (eds) Mothers of a New World. Maternalist Politics and the Origins of Welfare States. New York: Routledge, Kegan and Paul. Hobson, B. (1994) ‘Solo Mothers, Policy Regimes, and the Logics of Gender’. In D. Sainsbury (ed.) Gendering Welfare Regimes. London: Sage. Hobson, B. (2003) ‘Recognition in Universal and Gender Distinctive Frames’. In B. Hobson (ed.) Recognition Struggles and Social Movements: Contested Identities, Agency and Power. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hobson, B. and M. Lindholm (1997) ‘Collective Identities, Power Resources, and the Making of Welfare States’. Theory and Society (Fall): 1–34. Hobson, B. and R. Lister (2002) ‘Citizenship’. In B. Hobson, J. Lewis and B. Siim (eds) Contested Concepts in Gender and Social Politics. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Hobson, B. and M. Takahashi (1997) ‘The Parent-Worker Model: Lone Mothers in Sweden’. In Jane Lewis (ed.) Lone Mothers in European Regimes: Shifting Policy Logics. London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers. Hobson, B., M. Carson and R. Lawrence (2006) ‘Recognition Struggles in Trans-national Arenas: Negotiating Identities and Framing Citizenship’, Critical International Reviews of Social and Political Philosophy, 8(4). Hoem, J. (1991) ‘To Marry Just in Case … ; The Swedish Widow’s Pension Reform and the Peak in Marriages in 1989’. Acta Sociologica 34: 127–35. Huber, E. and J. Stephens (1998) ‘The Internationalization and the Social Democratic Model: Crisis and Future Prospects’. Comparative Political Studies, Vol. 31, No. 3: 353–97. Huber, E. and J. Stephens (2000) ‘Partisan Governance, Women’s Employment and the Social Democratic State’. American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 45: 323–43. Johansson, U. (2000) Normalitet, klass och kön: Liv och lärande i svenska läroverk 1927–1960 (Normality, Class and Gender: Life and Learning in Swedish Upper Secondary Schools 1927–1960). Stockholm: Arkiv, PhD. dissertation, History Department, Stockholm University. Jonung, C. and B. Thordarson (1980) ‘Sweden’. In A. Yohalem (ed.) Women Returning to Work: Policies and Progress in Five Countries. Montclair NJ: Landmark Studies. Karlsson, G. (1990). Manssamhället till behag? (Conforming to the Patriarchy?) Tidens. Karlsson, G. (1996). Från broderskap till systerskap, Det socialdemokratiska kvinnoförbundets kamp för inflytande och makt i SAP (From brotherhood to sistership, The social democratic womens unions’ struggle for influence and power in SAP). Lund: Arkiv. Key, E. (1912) The Women’s Movement. New York: Putnam. Korpi, W. (1980) The Democratic Class Struggle. London: Routledge. Korpi, W. (2000) ‘The Faces of Inequality: Gender, Class, and Patterns of Inequalities in Different Types of Welfare States’. Social Politics, Vol. 7, No. 2: 127–91. Korpi, W. and J. Palme (1998) ‘The Paradox of Redistribution and Strategies of Equality and Poverty in Western Countries’. American Sociological Review, Vol. 63: 661–87. Kyle, G. (1979) Gästerbetskerka in mannsamhället (Female Guest Workers in the Patriarchy). Stockholm: Liber. Leira, A. (1992) Welfare States and Working Mothers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lewis, J. (1992) ‘Gender and the development of welfare regimes’. Journal of European Social Policy, Vol. 2, No. 3: 159–73.

The Evolution of the Women-Friendly State 171 Lindholm, M. (1991) ‘Swedish Feminism, 1835–1945: A Conservative Revolution’. Journal of Historical Sociology, Vol. 4, No. 2: 121–42. Lindqvist, R. and S. Marklund (1995) ‘Forced to Work and Liberated From Work: A Historical Perspective on Work and Welfare in Sweden’. Social Welfare, Vol. 4: 224–37. Mahon, R. (2002) ‘Sweden’s LO: Learning to Embrace the Differences Within?’ In F. Colgan and S. Ledwith (eds) Gender, Diversity and Trade Unions: International Perspectives. London: Routledge. Mandel, H. and M. Shalev (2003) ‘Class Conditioning of Welfare State Effects on Gender Inequality: A Preliminary Comparative Analysis’. Paper prepared for the Annual Conference of Research Committee 19, Toronto, 21–24 August. Mkandawire, T. (2001) ‘Social Policy in a Development Context’. Social Policy and Development Programme Paper No. 7, Geneva: UNRISD. Moberg, E. (1962) Kvinnor och människor (Female and Human). Stockholm: Bonniers. Myrdal, A. (1937) ‘Familjefrägorna i riksdagspolitiken’ (Family issues in parliamentary politics). Morgonbris, February: 1. Nyberg, A. (1987) ‘Vad är försvarsarbete?’ (What is Gainful Employment?) Kvinnovetenskaplig Tidskrift: 1. Ohlander, A.S. (1992) ‘The Invisible Child? The Struggle over Social Democratic Family Policy’. In K. Misgeld, K. Molin, and K. Åmark (eds) Creating Social Democracy: A Century of the Social Democratic Labor Party in Sweden. University Park PA: Pennsylvania State University Press. Olsson, S. (1990) Social Policy and Welfare State in Sweden. Lund: Arkiv. Orloff, A.S. (1993) ‘Gender and the social rights of citizenship: The comparative analysis of gender relations and welfare states’, American Sociological Review, Vol. 58, No. 15: 303–328. Persson, I. and E. Wadensjö (1997) Glastak och glasväggar? Den könssegregerade arbetsmarknaden (Glass Ceilings and Glass Walls? The Gender-Segregated Labour Market), Report to the Committee on the Distribution of Economic Power and Economic Resources between Women and Men. Stockholm: SOU, Ministry of Labour: 137. Razavi, S. (2002) ‘Project on Social Policy in a Development Context: Thematic Component on Gender and Social Policy’. Research Proposal, UNRISD, Geneva. Rothstein, B. (1992) Den korparativa staten. Intresseorganisationer och statsförvaltning i svensk politik (The Corporative State. Special-Interest Organisations in Central Government Administration in Swedish Politics). Lund: Arkiv. Ruggie, M. (1984) The State and The Working Woman: A Comparative Study of Britain and Sweden. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press. Sainsbury, D. (1996) Gender, Equality and Welfare States. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sainsbury, D. (2000) ‘Välfärdutveckling för kvinnor och män på 1990-talet’ (Welfare Developments for Women and Men in the 1990s). SOU, Stockholm: Fritzes: 40. Sen, A. (1992) Inequality Re-examined. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Siim, B. (1994) ‘Engendering Democracy: Social Citizenship and Political Participation for Women in Scandinavia’. Social Politics: International Studies in Gender, State, and Society, Vol. 1, No. 3: 286–305. Statens Offentliga Utredningar (SOU) (1938) Kvinnoarbeteskommitténs betänkande 1938:47 (Report of the womens work committee 1938:47). Stockholm. Statens Offentliga Utredningar (SOU) (1972) Familj och äktenskap 1972 (Family and Marriage 1972). Stockholm: SOU. Spoof, C. (1933) ‘Kvinnorna behöver sina verkstäder’ (Women Need their Workshops), Tidevarvet, July: 1. Statistiska Centralbyrån (Statistics Sweden) (1998) at www.SCB-se.statistik7be0503/ tidsavanv.asp, accessed 10 February 2004. Tingsten, H. (1973) The Swedish Social Democrats: Their Ideological Development, trans. Greta Frankel and Patricia Howard-Rosen. Totowa NJ: Bedminster Press.

172 Barbara Hobson Vestbro, D.U. (1992) ‘Från liberal rörelse till socialistisk kamp mot patriarkatet’ (From Liberal Movement to Socialist Struggle against the Patriarchy). In Annika Baude (ed.) Visionen om jämstalldhet. Stockholm: SNS. Västberg, D. (1931) ‘Manlig konservatism och kvinnlig sterilitet’ (Male Conservatism and Female Sterility). Morgonbris, March: 8–9.

Archives and women’s journals consulted Hesslegren, K. (Archive), The Royal Library in Stockholm: Box L 55:6 Hesslegren, K. (Archive), Gothenburg University, Boxes A14, A 48. Rydh, H. (Archive), Gothenburg University. Boxes A 12, A120, A30. Arbetets Kvinnor (Federation of Women in Work) – associated with International Federation of Business and Professional Women. Hertha (Fredrika Bremmer Society journal) 1935–47. Mödersförbundets Medlemsblad (Housewives Association journal) 1932–1947. Morgonbris (Social Democratic Women’s Federation journal) 1933–1950. Tidevarvet (Free thinking radical feminist group, Fogelstadskvinnorna, radical men and women published articles on abortion, birth control, unemployment, women’s status in labour market 1925–1940.

8 The Adult-worker-model Family and Gender Equality: Principles to Enable the Valuing and Sharing of Care Jane Lewis and Susanna Giullari

Introduction There is now agreement in the literature that the male-breadwinner-model family, in which men took primary responsibility for earning and women for the unpaid work of care, has been substantially eroded (Crompton 1999; Lewis 2001a). There is also substantial agreement that the actual patterns of family formation and dissolution and labour-market participation have changed, but there has been, if anything, a more rapid shift still in normative ideas about the contributions that women especially should make to families, and in the goals of social and labourmarket policies. There is of course substantial variation between countries in the degree of change in social trends, policy assumptions and policy development. But given the steady (and in some countries dramatic) rise in female labour-market participation together with large-scale family change, which has resulted in a rapid increase in lone-mother and single-person households, policy-makers may feel justified in making assumptions regarding increasing individualization, in the sense of increasing self-sufficiency. However, part-time employment for women is extremely common in most Northern and Western European countries, which alone is sufficient to undermine any such simple assumption. How care work is to be accommodated in this new model is also a major issue, but one that has often been subordinated to economic and labour-market concerns and hence has received only partial acknowledgement in policy-making. The balance of the contributions men and women make to households in the form of cash and care is changing, but much more for women who tend to have added paid work to their existing responsibilities for care, than for men who in most Western countries have decreased the amount of paid work they do and increased their carework only relatively slightly (Gershuny 2000). Indeed, in the adult-worker-model family it is usually assumed by governments and policy experts that the work of care will increasingly move to the formal, paid sector, which helps to account for the secondary place accorded to care on the policy agenda. 173

174 Jane Lewis and Susanna Giullari

There have been a variety of reactions in the academic literature to the shift towards an adult-worker-model family. Some have argued that women’s ‘moral rationalities’ are at variance with the new model and that many want to, and do, put the work of informal care first (Duncan and Edwards 1999; Barlow and Duncan 2000). This position is in some respects bolstered by Hakim’s (2000) argument that only a minority of women want to be and choose to be ‘career women’. Others have argued that because the shift towards an adult-worker-model family is part of a much wider trend towards emphasizing the importance of responsibilities rather than rights, and of so-called ‘active’ rather than passive ‘welfare’, it is impossible to oppose (Orloff 2002). The issue then becomes the terms and conditions on which the shift to the new model is undertaken. Many feminists have, after all, long argued in favour of women’s financial independence. But the nature of the choices women and men face and the pursuit of gender equality depend on the extent to which policies address the issue of care work as well as on the position of women in the labour market. Choice is socially ‘embedded’ and ‘genuine choice’ or ‘real freedom to choose’ in respect of the balance of paid and unpaid work at the level of the household (and hence gender equality) will involve not only a rebalancing of paid work between men and women, but a complicated rebalancing of unpaid work between the market, the state, and men and women. A mother who wishes to take up a good job offer may well hesitate if she can find only poor-quality (formal or informal) care for her child.1 Choice has become a central value in the restructuring of welfare states ( Jenson and Sineau 2001), but this example signals the central difficulty in ensuring real or genuine choice for women, which in turn impacts on gender equality. Something that is missing from the debate is a discussion of the principles on which a move towards the adult-worker model should be based, especially in regard to the issue of care work. Yet policy-makers usually operate on (often implicit) assumptions as to what is ‘good’ and desirable, especially in the field of family policy (Kaufman 2002). The first part of this chapter explores the very different ideas framing the shift to an adult-worker-model family at the EU level. These ideas tend to be dominated by economic considerations, which means that the importance attached to the choices of the individual are considered in relation to economic goals. In addition, when gender equality is acknowledged it is often defined in a particular, partial and instrumental way: in respect of the importance of labourmarket participation, but not care work. This also serves to limit genuine choice. We review the nature of the policy discourse on employment and care at EU level and go on to suggest that there are real limits to the pursuit of a full adultworker model based on the commodification of care. If this argument is accepted, and given that care work is necessary for human flourishing (particularly, but not exclusively, in respect of young, old and disabled people), it means that it must be made possible to choose to care. This in turn raises issues about the recognition and valuing of care, and about the way it is shared by men and women, and by the household and the collectivity. In our search for firmer principles to inform policies, we examine the possibilities offered by the capabilities approach (CA) developed by Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum (Sen 1985, 1992, 1999;

The Adult-worker-model Family and Gender Equality 175

Nussbaum and Sen 1993; Nussbaum 1999, 2000, 2003), who have explicitly addressed both the issues of gender equality and care. We suggest that the emphasis placed by the CA on the individual’s real freedom to choose something he or she considers to be worthwhile to do or to be provides a substantial basis for the recognition and valuing of care work, as well as providing a means of countering the more rank instrumentalist concerns expressed at the level of EU policy-making. However, gender equality also requires care to be more equally shared between men and women, which is more difficult to encapsulate with a capabilities approach. In societies where the position of men and women is unequal, it is possible that the exercise of men’s freedom to choose between work and care serves to limit women’s choices. This raises in an acute form the old issues of how to reconcile choice and equality and what kind of state intervention can be justified.

Conceptualizing the adult-worker-model family at the EU Level The trend in Western welfare states has been towards a reworking of the relationship between social provision and employment, with the emergence of what Goodin (2001: 39) has called ‘a new constellation of work-and-welfare variables’. Policy-makers have sought to shift the emphasis from rights to responsibilities, and from so-called ‘passive’ to ‘active’ welfare, such that claimants on the welfare system are ‘encouraged’ into work and the work is made ‘to pay’ (Lödemel and Trickey 2001). The relationship between employment and social provision has always been central to modern welfare states (Supiot 1999); what is striking about this reworking of the relationship is the way in which it has been couched in gender-neutral language. It is now assumed that women as well as men will be ‘citizen workers’. Linking social to economic policy At the EU level, employment growth has increasingly been seen as a key social policy goal for the Commission, because it is viewed as the means of promoting social inclusion, a position shared by European social democrats (e.g. Vandenbroucke 2001) and by many (mainly American) writers to the right of the political spectrum (most notably Mead 1986). As or more importantly, adult labour-market participation has been seen as the way of increasing economic competitiveness: the 1993 White Paper of the Commission on growth and competitiveness was the first major policy paper to make this case, and also identified the formal care sector as a source of new jobs (CEC 1993). But implicit in these two positions was a looming tension between the idea of the wage as the best form of ‘welfare’ and the inevitably more ‘flexible’ employment regime that is necessary for increasing competitiveness. Many commentators have argued that social policy goals are in fact subordinate to the goals of economic integration policy, that is, to competitiveness and macro economic stability (e.g. Scharpf 2002; Kleinman 2002). The European Commission’s Social Policy Agenda, published in 2000, sought to strengthen ‘the role of social


policy as a productive factor’, pointing to the economic benefits of health and education expenditure, of protection against a range of social risks, and of measures to facilitate adaptability in the labour market (EC 2000: 5). In this approach, social policies are justified in terms of the social investment that is necessary to sustain competition and growth. Indeed, the notion of an agenda for ‘better jobs’ (EC 2003) seems to depend heavily on a ‘high level of social protection, good social services available to all people in Europe, real opportunities for all and the guarantee of fundamental and social rights’ (EC 2000: 13), rather than good-quality jobs per se, at least for new (often female) entrants at the low end of the labour market in the short to medium term. The key adaptation strategy for achieving the new work/welfare relationship was thus conceptualized as one of flexibility and security. Furthermore, the new expression of linkage between economic and social policy has been parallelled by the adoption of a new form of governance – the Open Method of Coordination – which abandons ‘harder’ instruments like ‘Directives’ in favour of committing member states to common objectives, while leaving national governments free to determine how to make progress towards them. Government by some combination of common standards and performance indicators is one way, perhaps the only way, that states can hope to reconcile welfare ends and market means. However, as O’Connor (2003) has observed, the implementation of policies to do with the care of children have had more conspicuous success in terms of implementation in member states when governed by Directive (as in the case of parental leave (EC 1996). The implications for gender equality In respect of female workers, the discourse of social inclusion on the basis of employment has been folded into the need to promote gender equality, an idea that has often taken a central position in key policy documents. In other words, the social/economic policy divide is subsumed under the goal of gender equality. However, the history of the treatment of gender equality in respect of paid and unpaid work at the EU level has been complicated (e.g. Ross 2001; Hantrais 2000). Over the last decade the Commission has increasingly stressed the importance of the effective use of women’s skills in a competitive, knowledge-based economy (EC and Council of the European Union 2002), and has received academic backing for its position. Women have been seen as an untapped labour reserve. Reports to both the Portuguese Presidency in 2000 (Ferrera et al. 2000) and to the Belgian Presidency in 2001 (Esping Andersen et al. 2001) favoured higher female labourmarket participation both as a means of increasing both competitiveness and the tax base of the continental European social-insurance welfare states. The European Commission has set a target of 57 per cent for female labour-market participation in member states by 2005, and 60 per cent by 2010 (EC 2002b; EC 2003). However, generalizing the expectation of labour-market participation to women further complicates the ‘better jobs’ goal of the Commission. First, there is the issue of who has been most likely to fill the more ‘flexible’ jobs that are created. As Rubery et al. (1998) have argued, flexible employment in the sense of part-time


work or short-term, more precarious employment can be seen as a way for women to enter the labour market, or as a type of employment that women find very hard to escape. Furthermore, in the recent economic strategy documents of the Commission, there has been relatively little reference to the problems raised by the need to reconcile family and work responsibilities. Indeed, there is increasing evidence from recent EU documents and from the work of academic policy advisers that the extension of the ‘citizen worker’ strategy to women is part of the dominant competitiveness and growth agenda. It is significant that recent EU-level employment policy documents have put more emphasis on the provision of formal childcare services, which have been shown to be the most effective way of promoting female labour-market participation (Bradshaw et al. 1996; Gornick et al. 1997). In 2002 a benchmark for childcare was set, whereby by 2010 at least 33 per cent of children under three years of age and at least 90 per cent of children between three and the mandatory school age should have access to childcare (EC 2003). The academic arguments put to EU level bodies since 2000 in favour of the adult-worker-model family have tended to assume the desirability of a ‘defamilialization strategy’ for care work (for children and adult dependants), whereby it is commodified and put into the public, formal arena (Esping Andersen et al. 2001, 2002). The overwhelming emphasis has been on gender equality defined in terms of increased female employment. In practice, in those countries where women’s employment has increased the most dramatically over the past decade, there has been a tendency for women to enter more ‘flexible’ forms of employment. Thus gender equality defined in terms of individualization and labour-market participation has not managed to deliver ‘better jobs’ in the sense of equally secure, equally well-paying jobs, to both men and women. Rather, in the case of women, ‘better jobs’ have tended to be defined in terms of the extent to which provision is made for reconciling work and family responsibilities, and all too often the focus in respect of these policies has been on women alone, rather than on men and women. The economic productiveness and competition goal has been accompanied by a ‘work first’ strategy for women and an emphasis above all on the de-familialization (and commodification) of care work via the provision of childcare services. Differing amounts of emphasis have been placed on the provision of cash transfers (e.g. for parental leave) as a means to achieve more female labour-market participation, but very little attention has been paid to the pursuit of gender equality in respect of unpaid work at the household level. It is also significant that the principle of gender equality is deployed in EU-level documents in such a way as to eclipse the equally difficult issue of ‘choice’. The economic imperative to increase female employment has resulted in some extraordinarily instrumentalist arguments. Thus high female labour-market-participation rates are required for the health of the economies of EU member states and the EU social model, and are justified in terms of achieving ‘gender equality’ (Esping Andersen et al. 2002). The de-familialization of care work necessarily follows, and there is no further discussion of gender inequalities in unpaid work. Nevertheless, very different ideas about the


desirability of ‘choice’ in regard to the performance of unpaid work exist, both at the level of national governments and among people, and the willingness to undertake informal care work is unlikely to become less important in the future.

Care and the limits of an adult-worker-model strategy based on the commodification of care The key issue underlying the goal of making further progress towards a full adultworker-family model within existing policy approaches is thus, above all, how far it is possible to defamilialize and hence ‘commodify’ care. This in turn begs questions about the nature of care work. It also raises issues about gender equality, for policies to reconcile work and family have historically been focused in the main on women only. The commodification of care can take place in the formal and informal arena, with very different implications for defamilialization. Ungerson (1997) argues that the different kinds of cash payments for informal caregivers and care receivers introduced across welfare states, indicate a general trend towards the commodification of informal care, but obviously do not amount to a clear-cut defamilialization of care strategy. Still, payments for care can differ in relation to the distinction between formal and informal care – some payments may not be used to pay for relatives – and indeed this distinction is sometimes also differently drawn between child and adult care, and between countries (McLaughlin and Glendinning 1993; Land 2002; Millar and Warman 1996; Ungerson 1997). If care is commodified and put in the formal arena either through the provision of cash subsidies to purchase care on the market, or by directly providing public child and elderly care services, the scope for defamilialization is clearly widened. Yet we shall argue that such a strategy nevertheless results in incomplete defamilialization, because it is not possible fully to commodify care (Folbre and Nelson 2000). However, it should be noted that we are not following those who argue that care should not be commodified, because the marketization of care jeopardizes the affective dimension of care (e.g. Noddings 1984). Care is more than a task; it involves emotional labour and relationship (Finch and Groves 1983). Care is also active and passive, involving physical and nonphysical presence (Land 2002). Balbo’s (1987) concept of doppia presenza incorporates these elements of passive care and non-physical presence, which show up in the uneasy accounts of mothers who report that they are thinking simultaneously about their jobs and about whether their children are being looked after properly. The interaction between the passive and active dimension of care suggests that the shift from ‘passive’ to ‘active’ that has underpinned the reworking of the work/welfare relationship is particularly disadvantageous for women who have caring responsibilities, and makes the valuing and rewarding of care even more difficult. Folbre and Nelson (2000) show that there has been a rapid expansion of commodified care services in the US, and Daly (2001) has also argued that care services, public and private (market), have been an area of expansion in what has


otherwise been a period of retrenchment in European welfare states. Buying services enables carers to focus on a smaller number of personal and emotional caring activities, which cannot be commodified. Nevertheless, family life is increasingly characterized by what Beck and Beck-Gernsheim (2002: 91) have called ‘the divergence of tempos and abodes’, by which they mean the increasing spatial and temporal fragmentation of family life. The demand for the organizational and personal dimension of care work identified by Balbo therefore shows no sign of decreasing. In addition, welfare-state restructuring has tended to result in the greater fragmentation of services and thus to demand more rather than less by way of informal care. Thus the commodification of care work in the formal arena neither fully substitutes for women’s caring work, nor does away with their need to rely on the informal care provided by relatives and friends. Even if cash payments for childcare were to be used to pay relatives, adding such a partial commodification in respect of informal childcare to more formal strategies of commodification would not amount to an adequate strategy for fully defamilializing care, and is additionally at odds with the EU policy agenda on ‘active ageing’ (EC 2002a). Policy-makers seem to have interpreted major social trends in respect of family and labour-market change as providing evidence of increasing individualization, which has in turn bolstered their views as to the feasibility as well as the desirability of the adult worker model family. Academics have certainly emphasized the importance of a shift from a ‘community of need’ to ‘elective affinities’ and ‘families of choice’ (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 2002; Silva and Smart 1999), but they have also stressed that this does not amount to a process of atomization. Evidence indicates that obligations and practices of mutual support and care continue to bind people together (Finch and Mason 1993; Lewis 2001b; Smart and Neale 1999). Thus policies that assume a trend towards full individualization in the labour market and the commodification of care, neglect the complexities of care relationships, and may actually impede the goal of increasing female employment. Care is embedded in personal relationships of love and obligation, and in the process of identity formation. It is only when care is recognized as conflating labour and love, as a key process in female identity formation embedded in a gendered normative framework of obligations, and as relationship between informal carers and between carer and person-cared-for, that it becomes possible to understand why the commodification of care is too weak a strategy to address gender inequality in employment and care. It is also a strategy that poses problems for the issue of choice. Women experience stronger pressures to care than do men. Finch and Mason (1993) found that the negotiation of kin responsibilities, including those involving care, continues to be determined by gender, albeit indirectly. Because women are more likely not to be in full-time work and to need childcare, they are also more likely to develop cumulative commitments to care for kin, and in the process of so doing, develop an identity and a reputation as a carer. This in turn serves to weaken their negotiating power, because, having established such a reputation, they are less likely to have ‘legitimate excuses’ not to care.


The adoption of the adult-worker-family model at the policy level has been based on an instrumental approach to gender equality and care. But care cannot be fully defamilialized or commodified. Thus we need to make a case that first, enables the recognition of care work as something that is worthwhile and necessary, which in turn necessarily involves valuing it. Human beings need care – it is a human activity – which means that we must also consider the way in which care work is shared in societies, between men and women at the household level as well as between the individual and the collectivity. The current policy debates tend to treat care work as something that has to be reconciled with employment for women, and which can be addressed via commodification, whether through cash payments of some kind (through the tax/benefit system or directly to carers) so that carers may purchase care on the market, or through the provision of public-sector care services. Such policies are poorly developed compared to the other major social services (health and education) in most countries. But if it is in any case not possible to commodify all care work, then the issue of how it is shared, not just between individuals and the collectivity, but also between men and women at the household level, must also be addressed.

The possibilities and problems of the capabilities approach Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum’s work on the ‘capabilities approach’ (CA) (Sen 1985, 1990, 1992, 1999; Nusbaum and Sen 1993; Nussbaum, 1999, 2000, 2003) is promising ground for establishing a basis on which to address the issue of care, not least because gender equality is of central concern in the work of both authors. There are important differences in their approaches, the most fundamental being that Nussbaum argues for a universal list of core capabilities whilst Sen does not (Robeyns 2003). In addition Nussbaum (2000, 2003) devotes a lot of attention to care, which hardly appears in Sen’s writings. However, first, it is important to recognize the way in which the work of both authors has served to shift attention from inequalities in resources, outcomes and preferences, to inequalities in capabilities, that is, to the ‘real freedom’ that a person has to be and to do what she has reason to value, and the significance of this shift for addressing the issue of care. This notion of individual freedom is pivotal to the CA, which recognizes that genuine freedom must be underpinned, while also making important distinctions between: the resources available to a person (means); what she is and does (functionings); the personal, social and environmental factors that affect her ability to transform means into functionings (conversion factors); and the combination of being and doings that she has the real freedom to achieve (her capability set). A further crucial distinction is made in the CA between well-being freedom and agency freedom (Sen 1985). Sen (1985) argues that the outcome measure of wellbeing has major limitations because it fails to address the pivotal and distinctive part that agency plays in a person’s life. He argues that it is important to take account of agency above and beyond the role that it plays in securing well-being, because of the importance that is attached to the individual’s ‘real freedom’ to


choose in accordance with her conception of ‘the good’, regardless of whether this would actually be to her advantage (Sen 1985: 206), for instance, in respect of a decision to forgo paid employment in order to undertake care work. Advocates of the capabilities approach would argue that her capabilities set should enable her to choose to care as well as to choose not to care. There is another fundamental reason for making a distinction between wellbeing freedom and agency freedom, which Sen (1999) stresses in Development as Freedom, where he argues that the real freedom of individuals is the motor of development and social change, rather than economic growth per se. The recognition that Sen accords women’s agency in achieving social change parallels the increasing interest in the question of individual and collective agency in work on gendered citizenship and on gender and the development of welfare states more generally (Lister 1997; Misra and Akins 1998; Siim 2000; Williams et al. 1999). Gender equality of capabilities: recognizing and valuing care The key advantage of using the CA to address the problem of gender equality in relation to paid work and care is that it provides a universal equality model rooted in the recognition of human diversity. It thus offers a way of recognizing and valuing care which does not get bogged down in the equality/difference debate. This is a major advantage, given that ‘care-centred thinking’, as much as neoclassical economic thinking (Folbre 1995), has tended to be biologically essentialist, stressing the importance of gender difference as much or more than gender equality (e.g. Noddings 1984). Using the CA, equality is conceptualized in terms of the equal substantive or real freedom to choose beings and doings and is applied to all universally. The notion of capability enables us to account for the significance of human diversity in terms of diverse preferences, as well as to recognize that they are formed in the context of unequal conditions, which means that preferences are likely to be adaptive. It follows that if women are to exercise real freedom to choose, there must be equal freedom on the part of men and women to choose between alternatives (e.g. between work and care). Thus agency freedom requires underpinning: real freedom of choice has to be guaranteed independently of the utilitarian gains that individuals with different preferences might make. The real freedom to choose paid work and/or to choose carework requires that a comparable value be attached to care, independent of different preference gains. This is important not least because the preference theory commonly used by neoclassical economists takes no notice of the way in which preferences are socially embedded. Indeed utilitarian preference models are often invoked to justify why care work does not need monetary reward, arguing that the motivation for care rests on the emotional and relational benefits that care work provides for women, which make the low monetary value that is attached to it immaterial (Folbre 1995). The tendency to define the work of care as passive as much or more than active also helps to justify the low value attached to it. Thus the fact that care work is devalued regardless of whether it is carried out in the formal or informal sector (Ungerson 2000) is not of ethical concern within preference theory. Yet it


has long been argued by feminist analysts that the value attached to particular activities is affected by who does them. The activities of the less powerful are devalued (e.g. Bradley 1989). The CA also accounts for human diversity in a more fundamental way, for in order to guarantee equality of real freedom to choose and achieve functionings, different individuals will require different kinds and amounts of resources (which is why equality of resources is in and of itself an insufficient condition for the achievement of chosen functionings). The notion of personal, social and environmental conversion factors accounts for the fact that people have different capacities to gain access to the same resource, and different potentials for converting resources into chosen functionings. To choose employment and care an individual requires either more money to pay for childcare or affordable childcare services, as well as a right to reduced working time and paid time in order to care. But real agency freedom also requires there to be a genuine choice to reject alternative functions. A carer should be as free as a non-carer to choose to work. Clearly this requires anti-discrimination legislation, the right to return to the same job, and the offer of retraining. It also requires rights to income based on caring, at a sufficiently high level to secure the effective freedom to choose care. Gender equality in capabilities for paid work and for care highlights the need for a combination of a variety of social entitlements, and brings to the fore the issue of time as well as money. It thus makes manifest the biases and limitations of the current policy trend that focuses on wages as the best form of welfare, active labour-market policies, and care services aimed at the defamilialization of care. Although Sen and Nussbaum both recognize that human beings differ in regard to the values they attach to different beings and doings, they differ considerably in respect of the process of defining and selecting functionings to be included in the capabilities set. In regard to valuing care, Nussbaum’s approach appears at first sight to be more useful than that of Sen, who leaves the construction of the capabilities set open, and with it, the possibility of excluding care. But, despite Nussbaum’s concern with gender justice, care is not explicitly included in her list of the core capabilities necessary for human flourishing (unless it is taken to be part of ‘capability for affiliation’, which includes ‘showing concern for other human beings’), which is symptomatic of the problem of drawing up a core list of capabilities that are universally applicable. In contrast, in Sen’s approach the importance of human diversity is embraced further, as it is argued that real agency freedom requires the inclusion and participation of diverse voices in the definition and selection of capabilities sets. As Robeyns (2003) notes, Sen stresses that capabilities sets are context-dependent, and that their legitimacy is dependent on democratic processes of inclusion and on who is involved in their definition, valuation and selection (see also Bonvin and Farvaque 2003). Thus, paradoxically perhaps, the fact that Sen leaves the definition of capabilities open, insisting that in order to achieve equal agency freedom for men and women it is necessary to include diverse voices in the process of defining and selecting the functionings that are to be part of the capabilities set, is, if it can be achieved, a more gender-sensitive and gender-equal path to the


recognition and valuing of care. After all, policies based on universality, equality and justice have all too often been modelled on the male norm, and have resulted in the exclusion and subordination of women’s claims (Lister 1997; Okin 1989; Young 1989). In addition, by requiring the capability for voice and by arguing that policies should be designed, implemented and evaluated on the basis of the real freedom that a person has to be and to do what she has reason to value, the CA exposes the democratic deficit of the instrumental approach that has informed the shift to the adult-worker model. Gender equality of capabilities: the problem of recognising interdependency and sharing care Many commentators have focused on the importance the CA attaches to the individual’s agency freedom and the extent to which this differs from the neoclassical economists’ emphasis on individual choice. Nelson (1996) has argued that within economics Sen’s approach comes closest to appreciating that individual agency is constituted through social relationships and thus requires material underpinnings, while Robeyns (2000, 2001, 2003) argues that the CA rejects ontological individualism (which conceives of individuals as atomized) in favour of an ethical individualism (which simply maintains that what matters for the purpose of evaluation is the individual), and that this is most evident in its acknowledgement of the importance of social conversion factors. We endorse these arguments and agree that the freedom and well-being of the individual, rather than that of her family or community, is particularly important for gender equality. Women’s poverty, income levels, and control and consumption of resources have long been hidden behind the categories of household and family (Glendinning and Millar 1987), and a focus on the individual becomes even more pressing in the context of the shift towards the individualized adult-worker-model family. However through a care lens we see that the CA approach remains based on a notion of a separate and self-interested self. We would add that a capability approach that takes gender equality seriously requires recognition of the self as autonomous and interdependent, capable of making choices out of concern and responsibility for others, as well as for one’s self. In the first place a rejection of ontological individualism implies the recognition that an individual’s capability to exercise agency freedom actually depends not only on the freedom to choose to give or not to give care, but also on the receipt of care. On this crucial point Nussbaum’s recognition of the need for care appears more promising. However, Nussbaum (2003), like Kittay (1999), approaches the issue of care from the perspective of the dependant – the person-cared-for – rather than the carer. However, reconciling the demand for autonomy by both the carer and the person-cared-for is described as a central dilemma in the literature on care (e.g. Lewis and Meredith 1987; Morris 1993; Williams 2001). A person’s real freedom to be and do what she has reason to value is not simply dependent on social entitlements or procedural justice, or even simply on her nurturing by others. It also depends on the needs and actions of others. In other


words, the capabilities sets of individuals are interdependent (Basu and LopezCalva 1999), and such interdependence is particularly acute at the household level (Iversen 2003). A child’s capabilities are dependent in large measure on her mother’s choice to care or not to care for her, while her mother’s and her father’s capability to choose to engage in paid work or political activism are dependent on each other’s choices to care or not to care for their child. Nussbaum’s conceptualization of care is therefore limited because it does not enable us to recognize fully that women’s agency freedom is unequally restricted by their caregiving. In Sen’s (1990, 1999) cooperative–conflict bargaining model the individual enters into cooperation solely to maximize his or her welfare, which makes it difficult to acknowledge the kind of relational interdependency that care entails, which in turn cannot be broken down into individual benefits and costs (Held 1993). As Peter (2003) argues, Sen’s account of women’s low perception of selfinterest ignores that women’s agency is situated in relationships of care, and therefore that concern for others needs to be taken seriously as an expression of autonomy. Agency is unequally restricted along gender lines largely because men can be concerned about their relationships without being constrained by undertaking care work. If we maintain, as both Sen and Nussbaum do, that agency freedom requires that the real freedom to achieve the same capabilities set must be available to all, then, given the interdependence that characterizes care relations, it would seem to us that the key issue is not how to make women more self-interested – which Sen (1999: 144) argues will come about via their increasing attachment to the labour market – but rather how to promote conditions that foster responsibility for sharing care between men and women and that enhance women’s agency freedom by making men more accountable for their responsibility to care for others. But this is particularly difficult within the CA. The CA makes agency freedom of the individual pivotal, which means that care can only be conceptualized as an opportunity, a real individual choice. But the argument we have put forward about care suggests that it is inherently relational. This means that the individual’s autonomy and interdependence must be recognized. Ultimately, it is only when all persons are conceived from the start as autonomous and interdependent – that is as persons who need, give and receive care (Fraser 1997; Lister 1997; Tronto 1993) – that gender equality in respect of agency freedom can be embraced. We all need others to care for us in order to develop agency freedom, and gender justice therefore requires care to be valued and conceptualized as both a ‘legitimate’ opportunity/choice and as a necessary central human activity to be shared between men and women. Choices are made in the context of gendered inequalities in power relations, in all their economic, political and discursive manifestations, which skew the interdependency of men and women’s individual capabilities sets at the household level. Thus Phillips (2001) has criticized the CA’s departure from the more traditional concern with equality of outcomes and resources. It is impossible to ignore group inequalities of this kind. Inequalities in ‘group functionings’ (for example, the fact that women persistently do more care work than men) signify gender


inequalities in capabilities (unless of course we assume that the distribution of preferences between men and women is rooted in sexual difference), and gender justice requires that note be taken of them. In addition, the issue of gender inequalities in control of resources needs to be addressed. But, unlike Phillips (2001) we would argue that the idea of equality of capabilities remains important, and that once the rationale for addressing men’s freedom not to choose to care is accepted, the idea of personal and structural conversion factors, which is central to the CA’s notion of positive freedom, can be stretched to address gender inequalities in control over resources. In other words, a less powerful individual needs more resources to be able to choose the functionings that she values out of her capabilities set. While Sen’s CA enables us to make a strong case for the empowering of women’s capabilities for voice, it is also important to acknowledge that gender inequalities in political presence and power (Lister 1997; Phillips 1993; Young 1990) undermine women’s capability for voice in the definition and selection of capabilities, which means in turn that the issue of how to share care is also less likely to be raised. A more equal division of care work between men and women in the household is more likely to increase women’s economic power than attaching a material value to care work (necessary though this is), because it is unlikely that any government will ever attach a high enough value to such work (in the informal or formal sectors) (Bojer 2002; Lewis 1997). Sharing care work between the individual and the collectivity, and between men and women, also increases the possibility of women choosing to engage in some form of political participation. Thus in the Scandinavian countries, where policies to reconcile work and family (mainly, but not exclusively for women) have developed furthest, women’s participation in local and central government is also highest (Siim 2000). A more equal gender division of care work at the household level serves to increase women’s collective economic, political and discursive power (which in turn makes it more likely that material value will be attached to care).

Conclusion: policies to promote a gender equality of capabilities If there is to be ‘genuine choice’ between work and care for women and men, then a wide range of policies – in respect of time to care, cash for care, care services and the regulation of working hours – is necessary. In practice, existing measures have usually been invoked to enable individuals (mainly women) to choose to add work to care (the supported-adult-worker model of the Scandinavian countries and discernible in some, but not all, EU-level policy documents) and they rely primarily on sharing care between (women in) households on the one hand, and some form of paid provision on the other. However, we have argued that care must also be shared between men and women at the household level, and that it is necessary to recognize the importance of interdependence and unequal power, as well as the individual’s agency freedom in order to achieve this. Is there a place for compulsion in this respect? When she considers the issue of sexual harassment in the


workplace, Nussbaum is prepared to advocate the curtailment of male freedoms, something, as Bojer (2002) notes, she does not do in regard to the gender division of labour. However, compulsion, sanctions and penalties run the risk of causing a backlash and in any case threaten the moral qualities of attentiveness, responsibility, competence and responsiveness that characterize care (Tronto 1993). With this in mind, positive incentives for men as individuals to engage in care, such as the ‘daddy leave’ offered by the Scandinavian countries, alongside the reform of the male-employment model directed towards male workers as a group, for example in the form of reduced working time (a shorter working week and the regulation of overtime) appear more appropriate. Such interventions would amount to a radical transformation of the male-employment model, which has continued to dominate the shift toward the adult-worker model. Thus, the logical end of the argument presented here is a universal carer/worker–worker/carer model (see also Fraser 1997; Lister 1997, 2003), which requires a commitment to provide time to care and affordable, accessible, highquality services, as well as cash for care. In brief, the policy grid to enable genuine choice would require action on the following: ● ● ●

Time: working time and time to care Money: cash to buy care, cash for carers Services for (child and elder) care

and in relation to both: ●

●

The household level (in terms of the provision of cash and time for men and women) The collective level (in terms of services and cash, and workplace-based changes especially in respect of measuring the work accomplished, rather than the ‘face-hours’ devoted to it).

The task of devising social policies that promote real or genuine choice for both men and women in respect of paid and unpaid work poses huge difficulties. Both employment and care are necessary for human flourishing. Care is not just ‘a good thing’, it is crucial to the welfare of the person-cared-for; employment is not just ‘a good thing’, it is crucial to the welfare of the adult (and likely to become more so as governments assume the capacity for self-provision will increase). From the point of view of human welfare, it is impossible to choose not to care or not to work. In this sense, to choose between them has the hallmarks of tragedy as much or more than opportunity, which makes it all the more important to address seriously the policies that play a part in structuring people’s choices.

Acknowledgement The authors gratefully acknowledge financial support from the EUROCAP project, funded by the EC’s FP5 Programme and coordinated by Professor Robert Salais, and Susanna Giullari

The Adult-worker-model Family and Gender Equality 187 also acknowledges the support provided by a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship. They also acknowledge the stimulation provided by the invitation given by UNRISD to consider these issues further. This chapter draws on two different versions of the article: ‘The Adult Worker Model Family, Gender Equality and Care: the Search for New Policy Principles and the possibilities and Problems of a Capabilities Approach’, published as an UNRISD Working Paper (2005), and in Economy and Society 34 (1) 2005: 76–104.

Note 1 The reasons why the father of the child may not hesitate, at least to the same extent, are much debated between those who assume biological essentialism, which underpins much of the classical literature, e.g. Parsons and Bales (1995), Becker (1981), also Gilligan (1982), and those who insist on the power of socialization which underpins most of the feminist literature, e.g. Oakley (1981). New variants of the arguments have come to the fore in the face of observations that some lone mothers put the obligation to care before paid employment for reasons that include structural variables (Duncan and Edwards 1999), while Hakim (2000) argues that lifestyle choice alone is the main explanation.

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Part II Labour Market Informality and the Search for Social Security


9 Labour Market Informalization, Gender and Social Protection: Reflections on Poor Urban Households in Bolivia and Ecuador Lourdes Benería and Maria S. Floro

Introduction This chapter is an attempt to understand the ways in which poor urban households in developing countries cope with the nature and depth of current labour market informalization, poverty and economic insecurity. It explores the dynamics of informality and its distributional aspects, and it demonstrates how job precariousness and vulnerability are interconnected as well as the importance of their gender dimensions. The paper is based on a study of poor urban households in Bolivia and Ecuador, using sample surveys carried out in 2002.1 We focus mainly on three areas of inquiry: the evolving informal economy and its implications in the way households organize their lives; gender roles and gender relations; and the precariousness of work and lack of social protection.

Conceptual framework The evolving informal economy During the 1970s and early 1980s, studies on the informal sector mostly assumed that, with economic growth, it would tend to be absorbed by the modern economy. The tremendous growth of informality since then has reversed these expectations, pointing to the effects of neoliberal policies, and to the strong tendencies in the global economy to generate precarious jobs below subsistence wages. According to ILO estimates, informal employment represents one half to three-quarters of non-agricultural employment in developing countries (ILO 2002). Regional and country differences are significant but the growing importance of informality has been registered in high-income countries as well; selfemployment, part-time work and temporary work represent 30 per cent of overall employment in 15 European countries and 25 per cent in the United States. However, for developing countries, informality has clearly become the rule rather than the exception. 193

194 Lourdes Benería and Maria S. Floro

Since its inception, the notion of ‘informal sector’ was subject to debates and criticisms, particularly in terms of the heterogeneity and artificiality of the formal/informal division. The initial 1970s formulations by Keith Hart and by the ILO mission to Kenya in 1972 implied that modernization and economic growth would facilitate the absorption of the ‘informal sector’ by the modern sector. By contrast, during the 1980s the literature emphasized the links rather than the divisions between the two sectors, pointing to the dependency of the modern on the informal sector as a way of lowering costs, thus implying that there was no incentive for the former to absorb informal activities (Benería and Roldán 1987; Portes and Castells 1989). The 1990s saw a deepening of these processes and an expansion of informality, thus increasing the need to understand further the factors that have reversed the prediction of the initial formulation. Hence the continuing debates on the topic and their increasing relevance to understand the persistence of poverty and the increasing vulnerability in the midst of an expanding global economy (De Soto 2000; ILO 2002). This raises questions regarding the differences between earlier and current stages of informalization. Have conditions changed and, if so in what way? Several observations can be made in this respect.2 First, since the 1980s, the macroeconomic context has changed significantly due to the implementation of neoliberal policies in many countries, including Ecuador and Bolivia. Privatization, market deregulation and economic restructuring have contributed to set up the conditions for an expansion of informal activities and precarious working conditions. We provide specific examples related to these countries in subsequent sections. Second, the expansion and deepening of markets has extended the links, direct or indirect, between formal and informal activities while the distinction between the two has become increasingly blurred. Large firms have developed increasing links with informalized production through outsourcing and subcontracting. This trend has been examined by several studies in the case of Thailand as well as for the Latin American region (Boonmathya et al. 1999; Balakrishnan and Huang 2000; Pérez-Sainz 1994, 2005; Buechler 2002). Nevertheless, as argued below, many other types of informal work remain disconnected from more formal production particularly those related to survival activities. Third, informal activities are no longer viewed as the anomaly that eventually will disappear with modern economic growth. On the contrary, the trend has been in the opposite direction; the decline in formal employment, particularly in the public sector, and the dynamism of the informal economy in many cases has enhanced the relative attractiveness and the predominance of the latter. Likewise, social exclusion has become more prevalent among unskilled labour and rural-to-urban migrants. Fourth, although the traditional association of informal work with low skills and low productivity still holds, the last two decades have introduced many changes in this respect. With the increase in outsourcing and subcontracting, several segments of informal activities have their centre of gravity in the core firms that generate them. This implies that productivity levels in these segments tend to be high and competitive, particularly because technology transfers and skills training take place through these linkages.

Labour Market Informalization, Gender and Social Protection 195

Fifth, increasing informality and the deterioration of working conditions in developing countries during the past two decades have taken place in a climate that has emphasized citizenship, political rights, individual agency and democracy. Hence the contradictions and social tensions between these discourses emphasizing empowerment and equality on the one hand, and the realities of precariousness, poverty and powerlessness associated with informality on the other. Globalization has intensified these tensions by enlarging their scope and sphere of reference, and by contributing to the factors that generate informality. As a result, non-standard forms of employment have multiplied, thereby introducing a greater diversity in working-life patterns for both men and women. There is wide variation in the range of activities, skill and capital requirements, and in the working conditions under which informality operates. This paper makes a contribution by illustrating the heterogeneity of the informal economy and its significance for the lives of poor urban households. It is a well-known fact that the increase in the size of the informal economy has been parallel to that of women’s economic participation in paid work. For a variety of reasons, women are disproportionately represented in informal employment, which, according to ILO estimates, accounts for 60 per cent or more of female employment in developing countries. In some labour categories such as homebased work, their participation ranges between 30 and 80 per cent of all workers, while 80 per cent of industrial homework is carried out by female labour (ILO 2002). Gender roles and gender relations A close look at households involved in informal activities allows us to explore with great empirical richness the linkages between paid and unpaid work, since many informal activities take place within the space and temporal dimensions of care and reproductive work. This is particularly true of home-based work. Its flexibility allows the worker to move between paid and unpaid activities with as much frequency as necessary, thus facilitating the increase in women’s participation in the latter. It also facilitates the reduction of production costs for informal workers by using home space, utilities and labour of other family members, including children. Paid and unpaid work are often performed simultaneously (such as cooking and child-caring while working on a garment). As will be shown below, our study shows the existence of these overlapping activities which intensify especially women’s work. The consequence tends to be increased work intensity, stress, incentives for including children as unpaid family labour, and isolation from other workers. In a highly informalized economy, the fluidity of labour that shifts between formal and informal activities and also between paid and unpaid work is captured by our analytical model. It shows how individual workers (and their households) are fully responsible for their own survival and for managing risks as economic conditions change. Figure 9.1 depicts this fluidity and overlap; Figure 9.1b shows how, during economic crises, the informal and household economy expand to pick up the slack of the formal economy. Firms hire and lay off workers in order to


Interlinked formal–informal activities

Combined informal market and household activities

Informal Economy Formal Economy

Household Economy

Combined formal market and household activities Figure 9.1a Areas of economic activity and labour use during economic growth

Combined informal market and domestic activities

Interlinked formal–informal activities Informal Economy

Formal Economy

Household Economy Combined formal market and household activities Figure 9.1b Areas of economic activity and labour use during severe economic crisis

adjust labour input without much resistance from workers, thus providing maximum flexibility for capital. At the same time, many governments, including those of Bolivia and Ecuador, have adopted labour laws that tolerate and even promote labour flexibility without much concern about safety nets and unemployment compensation schemes during periods of high unemployment and underemployment. A different question is the extent to which women’s increasing participation in paid work is transforming gender relations. At the general level, the transformation of gender roles during the past decades has been profound, affecting many aspects of women’s and men’s lives. Broadly speaking, and for the purpose of this paper, these transformations fall into two categories.


One has to do with the division of labour and the location of women and men in the world of work, such as the increasing participation of women in the paid labour force. To be sure, gender remains a major axis of differentiation in terms of work and labour market adjustments. Women workers tend to earn lower wages than their male counterparts as a result of discrimination, gender norms and other factors that permeate economic and social institutions. These factors and norms vary across countries and cultures, thus influencing the ways in which gender inequality takes concrete forms (Kabeer 2003; Benería 2003; Salzinger 2003). In Latin America, and despite the fluctuating economic performance of several economies since the 1980s, there have been remarkable changes for women in the labour market (Duryea et al. 2004). At the same time, although women tend to be placed at the bottom of labour hierarchies, we have also observed increasing differentiation among women in terms of work and income (McCrate 1995; Lavinas 1996; Piras 2004). Thus, while educated women have made inroads into the professional world that used to be predominantly male, the large majority of women are confined within the more precarious jobs and informalized working conditions; they continue to be constrained by their low mobility, few alternatives and by social norms that reduce their bargaining power over their earnings and working conditions. The second category of gender transformations operates at a deeper level of gender constructions and has to do with the way men and women, as well as society in general, see themselves and each other with regard to gender norms and gender identities. As women enter the labour force in increasing numbers, an understanding of the relationships between income and capabilities becomes key to evaluate these changes (Sen 1992; Nussbaum 2003). Whether or not a worker is able to translate his/her earnings into capability-functioning depends upon a variety of factors, such as the nature of household relations and decision-making processes in addition to the terms of employment. As our study illustrates, we can observe both change and continuity in the ways gender roles and gender differences manifest themselves. Changes in gender constructions at the deeper level of the individual and society, including the most intangible ways in which gender inequality operates, are neither straightforward nor easy to measure even though they may be observable. Yet, they are crucial for our understanding of the march towards gender equality. Here an interdisciplinary analysis is important if we are to comprehend the multiple levels through which they manifest themselves. To illustrate this with one specific example from Latin America, Gutmann’s anthropological study (1996) of gender transformations in a working-class community of Mexico City provides very useful insights into how these changes can take place. His analysis of what he calls ‘degendering’ – or processes through which gender stereotypes weaken – shows how gender constructions are subject to change, even in the face of appearances to the contrary. In this sense, and as Gutmann argues, ‘the gendered character of social life is never transparent’ (p. 12). Thus, how the evolving division of labour and the world of work translate themselves into changes at the deeper level of identity construction may not be obvious or it may appear in contradictory ways.


The precariousness of work and lack of social protection According to recent ECLAC estimates (2004), over 44 per cent of the Latin American population lived under conditions of poverty in 2003, over 19 per cent of them in extreme poverty. Although there are differences between countries, the extent of the problem is compounded by the weakness of social protection programmes throughout the region. For the purpose of this chapter, we make a basic distinction between poverty and vulnerability to emphasize the notion that insecurity is not only about access to income, as defined by poverty lines. Vulnerability has to do with the lack of protection against risk in which many households find themselves, such as the lack of minimal access to health services and health insurance, protection for old age, precariousness in housing conditions, unsanitary neighbourhoods and a polluted environment affecting daily life. Our study provides an illustration of how poor urban households are exposed to a high level of vulnerability even in cases when their incomes are not below the poverty line. In Latin America, the deepening and extension of marketization during the past two decades has diminished the role of the state in social protection (Molyneux, chapter 2 in this volume). Protection has increasingly been left either to private insurance schemes or to the individual, households and, to some extent, the community. Neoliberal thinking has de-emphasized not only socialized forms of protection but also the distributive aspects of macroeconomic policies. As the effects of structural adjustment programmes have accumulated throughout the region, and as distribution, left to market forces, has led to increasing inequalities in most countries, social protection has lagged behind, diminished or been absent for a large proportion of the population. In Latin America, households and families have had to pick up the slack, often playing heroic efforts of daily survival (González de la Rocha 2000). ‘Abandoned by the state’, in the words of one Bolivian woman, we have observed a process of privatization of family survival and risks since the 1980s. To be sure, poverty-alleviation programmes have spread widely, particularly since the 1990s and as a result of the agenda set by international organizations and development agencies. This agenda was fostered by the realization that the social costs of the ‘lost decade’ of the 1980s were higher than initially expected and unequally distributed. At the same time, the gains resulting from neoliberal ‘development’ have not alleviated the magnitude of poverty and social inequality. As in many developing countries, privatization schemes and a weak fiscal sector have resulted, at most, in fragmented forms of social protection – the result of sporadic efforts to cope with the most urgent problems rather than any systematic way of dealing with universal provisioning. For women workers, the fluidity between informal and formal activities and between paid and unpaid work is linked to their concentration in domestic responsibilities and tied to gender norms. Their precarious connection with the formal labour market diminishes their access to social protection schemes. This is typically illustrated by the case of homeworking. For this reason, the pioneering work of SEWA in designing schemes of social protection for homeworkers sets an


example that has inspired further work (Lund, chapter 10 in this volume). Ultimately, however, the discussion and design of social protection schemes closer to the notion of universal provisioning remains a challenge that cannot go away. We will return to this topic in the last section.

The growth of the informal economy in Ecuador and Bolivia The socioeconomic developments in Ecuador and Bolivia since the 1980s display both similarities and differences, and the expansion of the informal economy during the period has been a common feature. In Ecuador, this expansion was facilitated by the pattern of economic growth that resulted in the formal market economy’s incapacity to generate adequate jobs. Industrialization during the 1970s was capital-intensive and generated relatively little employment growth. By the early 1980s, serious balance-of-payments problems ushered in an IMF-led stabilization and structural adjustment programme (Floro 1992).3 The deepening of trade and financial liberalization policies during the 1990s brought about a pattern of uneven development characterized by greater concentration of wealth and further deterioration of working conditions. The rapid integration of Ecuador’s economy into the global market led to the increased use of a flexible labour force by the productive sectors. Additional measures were thus incorporated in the Ecuador labour code in the early 1990s such as the use of temporary, part-time, seasonal and hourly contracts and the replacement of indefinite labour contracts with fixed-term contracts. At the same time, the reforms increased restrictions on the right to strike, collective bargaining and the organization of workers (CELA-PUCE 2002; Weinberg 2002). Ecuador’s informal economy further grew in the context of persistently high income inequality and poverty during the 1990s and a severe macroeconomic and financial crisis in the later part of the decade (CELA-PUCE 2002). The Gini index of income inequality increased from 52 to 54 between 1995 and 1999 (Parendekar et al. 2002). By 1999, the extreme poor accounted for 21 per cent of the total population (12.4 million) and the poor accounted for 52 per cent of the population (UNDP 2003).4 The Open unemployment rate increased during the period 1989–99, with women’s and men’s reaching 14.4 per cent and 19.6 per cent (UNDP 2002; ILO 2002). At the same time, underemployment remained at about 60 per cent of the economically active population (CELA-PUCE 2002). The Ecuadorian government response to the economic crisis further sustained the deterioration of macroeconomic conditions. Its decision to adopt the US dollar as its currency (called dollarization) resulted in high inflation and further reduced the purchasing power of workers’ incomes (Solimano 2002). By 2001, after dollarization, the real minimum wage had been reduced to 20 per cent of its 1980 value (CELA-PUCE 2002). Moreover, Ecuador’s fiscal austerity measures and regressive taxation system have led to inadequate, ill-funded and poorly designed social protection programs. Social spending decreased by more than a third, as public spending on social services and social programme fell from US$78 to US$51 per person between 1995 and 2000. Ecuador’s level of social health services as a


result were reduced. The cut in social-services expenditures adversely affected the Bono Solidario, a cash-transfer programme targeted at poor households, the school meals programme and integrated early childhood care, and prenatal and neonatal programmes so that their scope, type and degree of protection became even more limited (Parandekar et al. 2002). Only a small proportion of the population, mainly regular workers in medium and large firms as well as the public sector had access to the social security system. Even then, the beneficiaries suffered huge losses as the purchasing power of their monthly benefits declined drastically. In the case of Bolivia, the dramatic expansion of the informal sector has resulted from deep economic restructuring and the neoliberal reforms which began in the early 1980s and were intensified with the structural adjustment programme (SAP) adopted in 1985. Throughout the 1970s, rising foreign debt and the fall of export commodity prices generated an economic crisis that peaked during the first half of the 1980s. The crisis manifested itself in negative growth rates, hyperinflation, and the declining value of the Bolivian peso. By 1985, the inflation rate had reached levels way above 1,000 per cent,5 with debt service representing 45–50 per cent of GDP (Morales Anaya 1987). This situation led to the adoption of the IMFsponsored SAP in 1985, which resulted in the ‘new economic policy’ (NEP). The 1985 policies focused on structural reforms that redefined the role of the government, turned the economy in a free-market direction through liberalization of both the goods and labour markets, and promoted opening of the economy to the rest of the world. Typically, it imposed wage freezes, reduction of government spending, and a shift towards an export-oriented model of development. At the same time, the 1980s saw the closing of the tin mines that had been a key export sector and had provided secure employment and a way of life for an important proportion of the working population. This led not only to social upheaval but also to a rapid relocation of the mining population in 1986 (McFarren 1989). The marked tendency towards increasing labour market informalization in Bolivia was intensified with the 1994 Law of Popular Participation which included several components emphasizing administrative and fiscal decentralization, privatization, educational reform, and the restructuring of the country’s social insurance system, among others (Kohl 1999; Benería-Surkin 2003). The economy went through a period of recovery during the 1990s and economic growth was primarily based on the growth of capital-intensive sectors, such as electricity, transportation and financial services rather than that of the more labour-intensive sectors such as manufacturing and agriculture (Republic of Bolivia 2001). This implied that growth was achieved with insufficient job creation, resulting in the persistence of unemployment and underemployment. Other chronic problems also reappeared: the economy has been stagnant since 1999, with an annual growth rate of 1.6 while the urban population has increased at 3.7 per cent annually (UDAPE 2003). The current conditions of high unemployment rates, government deficits, and foreign debt pressures, as well as critical levels of poverty and significant disparities in regional economic growth have resulted in political and social tensions. Under these circumstances, the informal economy has continued to absorb a large part of the growing workforce.


As in the case of Ecuador, the process of adjustment in Bolivia has resulted in a higher level of integration with the global economy but under unfavourable conditions. Exports depend on a few primary commodities and the economy has not diversified with new products able to compete in global markets. Bolivia continues to be the poorest country in Latin America, with GDP per capita of $936 in 2001 ($2,300 on a PPP basis). Income-inequality figures are high, with a Gini coefficient above 0.60. Throughout the 1990s, 20 per cent of the poorest population accounted for 4 per cent of aggregate urban income, while the 20 per cent of the highest income levels accounted for 54 per cent (Republic of Bolivia 2001). The highest incidence of poverty seems to be related to four factors: indigenous populations, the unemployed, low educational levels and recent rural–urban migration. During the 1990s, the absolute number of households below the poverty line increased even though there was a relative decrease from 53.3 to 47.8 per cent between 1990 and 1995 (Republic of Bolivia 2001; UDAPE 2003). At present, a large majority of the population is engaged in informal activities, with estimates reaching a level above 67 per cent. One key issue in the case of Bolivia – very relevant for our study – is that the impact of growth on poverty is low because growth has concentrated on highproductivity sectors which employed less than 10 per cent of the population. The persistent lack of detailed statistical information about the informal economy remains a problem for understanding the key factors affecting the dynamics of productivity and distribution, particularly at the level of individuals and households. Our study is an attempt to fill this gap by using survey data at that level. In the following sections, we examine empirically the dynamics of informality that characterize jobs in the urban poor neighbourhoods of Bolivia’s and Ecuador’s largest cities. We use the information collected from a 2002 multi-country study of 528 urban, low-income households in these two countries to investigate the varied dimensions of job informality and to highlight the interconnectedness of job precariousness, vulnerability and gender. Our analysis makes use of the urban poor household sample (UPHWS) survey data and corresponding interview insights collected in 2002. Several low-income communities in the cities of La Paz, El Alto and Santa Cruz in Bolivia, and Quito and Guayaquil in Ecuador, were selected to provide representation of the diversity of urban poor neighbourhoods in these major urban areas.6 They were randomly selected from a purposive community list of households with at least one member (household head or spouse) engaged in home-based or other self-employed, informal sector work.

Understanding the nature of informality: evidence from Bolivia and Ecuador We first examine the nature of informality that characterizes jobs in the urban poor neighbourhoods of Bolivia and Ecuador’s largest cities. To highlight the gender dynamics, we focus on 506 husband-and-wife respondents in a purposive samples of urban, low-income households in these countries. Using information collected from these respondents, we attempt to capture the different levels of


economic security faced by women and men in urban poor communities by a) measuring what is called ‘degrees of informality’; b) considering their access or lack of access to work-related benefits; and c) by estimating their earnings variability. Degrees of job informality Numerous studies have demonstrated the predominance of women workers in the informal economy in many developing countries. In recent years, there is increasing recognition of the importance of informality, but also of its heterogeneity. Jobs held by women and men workers in urban, low-income communities, for instance, are diverse not only with respect to the type of economic activity but also to the regularity and stability of employment. To examine the latter further, we develop a job classification according to the relative degree of informality by combining pertinent, identifiable characteristics that demonstrate work security or insecurity, whether these jobs take place in the formal and informal sectors. That is, we drop the assumption that workers who are considered informal only work in those activities that fall in the informal-sector category. This is because formal-sector firms can also employ workers on a casual basis. These workers often do not appear on the firm registers nor get any of the work terms and benefits that apply to the other registered workers of the firm. Although the firm and its output are considered as parts of the formal market economy, the casual workers remain outside and their jobs are likely to be precarious compared to other firm workers. In other cases, a worker may work in two or more activities in the same time period. Some individuals may work as an own-account, unregistered worker on a part-time basis while maintaining a regular salaried job in the public or private sector. For purposes of simplicity, we classify jobs as having a low, medium or severe/ high degree of informality. Jobs with a low degree of informality refer to permanent, regular jobs in private and public sectors as well as self-employed activities that a person has steadily been engaged in for over 60 months with at least 19 steady work days per month. Medium informal jobs refer to self-employed activities held between 24 and 60 months with an average of 12–18 steady days of work per month, and piece-rate work for private individual/contractor involving work contracts with a time period of over one year. Highly informal or severely precarious employment includes those formal and informal jobs classified as temporary or casual, self-employed activities that have highly irregular days of operations or below 12 work days per month, and subcontracted or piece-rate work involving contracts with a time period of less than one year. Although 6–24 per cent of women and men workers in the sample classify themselves as permanent or regular workers, the nature of the work arrangement for some of these workers reveals some dimensions of informality. Using the above job classification, Table 9.1 shows that among those employed, more than 85 per cent of workers in the Bolivia sample and 70 per cent in the Ecuador sample have primary jobs that are medium or highly informal. For many women, these are selfemployed activities in the form of street food-vending and home-based, variety store-retailing. In the case of Bolivia, the majority are small-scale, home-based

Labour Market Informalization, Gender and Social Protection 203 Table 9.1 Employment pattern of husbands and wives in urban, poor households, 2002 Bolivia and Ecuador Sample Survey, by sex (percentage of total in parentheses) Bolivia By degree of informality of main job1

Ecuador

Women N ⫽ 137

Men N ⫽ 137

ALL N ⫽ 274

Women N ⫽ 116

Men N ⫽ 116

ALL N ⫽ 232

0 (0) 97 (71) 22 (16)

10 (7) 96 (70) 20 (15)

10 (4) 193 (70) 42 (15)

11 (10) 60 (45) 22 (19)

34 (29) 52 (45) 29 (25)

44 (19) 113 (49) 51 (22)

All workers

119 (87)

126 (92)

245 (89)

9 (80)

115 (99)

208 (90)

B. Not employed2

18 (13)

11 (8)

29 (11)

23 (20)

1 (1)

24 (10)

137 (100) 274 (100)

116 (100)

116 (100)

232 (100)

A. No. of employed 1. Formal/low 2. Medium 3. High/severe

All respondents

137 (100)

Notes: 1 The categories on degree of informality are defined in the text. 2 ‘Not employed’ refers to all heads or spouses who did not look for work in the previous month. Rounding of percentages may not add up to 100. Source: Authors’ calculations.

producers in traditional crafts, furniture, shoes, leather and garments sectors who supply most of their goods to middlepersons. Over all, women workers in our sample tend to have relatively more precarious jobs than men in both countries, implying greater vulnerability. Categorization of employment by degree of informality of a worker is made complicated by the decision of some workers, with the decline in real wages and job security, to take on multiple jobs. Nearly a sixth of total respondents in the Bolivia sample hold more than one job. The proportion is less in the case of women and men respondents in Ecuador – about 10 per cent and 8 per cent respectively. The multi-job dimension for some workers in Bolivia shows a coping mechanism that serves as a buttress against job and income insecurity. This however may have welfare consequences in terms of lengthening the working day or intensifying the work activities performed that can lead to, among others, stress and deterioration of the health of the worker. There is also a general absence of labour or social protection among these workers, as reflected in Table 9.2. Only a very small proportion of the respondents receive social-security benefits, and they are predominantly male workers in the case of Ecuador. The lack of job benefits indicates the extent to which economic insecurity permeates the lives of these workers, particularly women. This is reinforced by the high degree of household-income variability examined below.

204 Lourdes Benería and Maria S. Floro Table 9.2 Access to benefits by workers, 2002 Bolivia and Ecuador Household Sample Survey, by type of benefit and by sex (percentage of total in parenthesis) Bolivia By type of benefit

Ecuador

Women

Men

Women

Men

None Social security only Health/medical benefit only Pension only Both social security and health benefit

118 (99)

121 (97)

88 (94.6)

91 (79.1)

1 (1) 0

0 4 (3)

4 (4.3) 0

22 (19.1) 0

0

0

1

1 (0.9)

0

0

0

1 (0.9)

All workers1

119 (100)

125 (100)

93 (100)

115(100)

1 These are workers who answered the question(s). Several respondents left the question of benefits unanswered and are therefore missing in this table.

Volatility in earnings While the average monthly earnings of workers in the sample are not the lowest in Bolivia and Ecuador, we have found a high degree of fluctuation, particularly among workers with moderate and highly informal jobs. For some workers, this variation is somewhat predictable due to the seasonal character of their activities; thus, the probabilities of expected earnings in ‘low season’ or in ‘high season’ are likely to be known. But for others, these probabilities are unknown and income variation tends to be idiosyncratic and unpredictable. Using information based on the estimated ‘high’, ‘average’ and ‘low’ by the workers and their predicted or ‘subjective estimation’ of length of ‘high’, ‘average’ and ‘low’ profit periods, we estimate an earnings-variability index that allows us to compare across workers with different earnings patterns. Table 9.3 shows average monthly earnings among self-employed workers with predictable income variability which can dip to as much as a tenth of what they earn during ‘high’ profit periods. The earnings variability index, called Zvar, is calculated as the absolute value of the ratio of the weighted difference of the incomes during high and low earnings periods to the total sum of the weighted incomes between high and low earnings periods or: 兩Zvar兩 ⫽ abs 兩 [(Ylow ⫻ Tlow)] ⫺ [(Yhigh ⫻ Thigh)]兩兩 [(Ylow ⫻ Tlow)] ⫺ [(Yhigh ⫻ Thigh)]兩 where Zvar ⫽ income variability index which ranges from 0–1 Ylow ⫽ average monthly income during low earnings period Yhigh ⫽ average monthly income during high earnings period Tlow ⫽ number of days/months considered to be a ‘low earnings period’ and Thigh ⫽ number of days/months considered to be a ‘high earnings period’

Labour Market Informalization, Gender and Social Protection 205 Table 9.3 Monthly earnings and earnings variability of self-employed workers, 2002 Ecuador and Bolivia Household Sample, by sex (earnings in US dollars) Bolivia

Average monthly earnings1 Average Days of operation (per month) Estimated earningsvariability index2

Ecuador

Women

Men

All

Women

Men

All

46.1

160.4

109.2

125.8

257.5

177.6

13.3

17.7

15.8

21.9

25.0

23.1

0.609

0.551

0.573

0.452

0.439

0.447

Notes: 1 Refer to workers with predicted low- and high-level earnings period only. Reported monthly earnings is for the previous month. 2 The earnings-variability index is discussed in the text.; a higher index (closer to one) means higher variability; a lower one (closer to zero) means more stable earnings. Reference period is for the past 12 months.

A higher value of Zvar (closer to 1) reflects higher variability of earnings while a lower value (closer to 0) means less variability. Table 9.3 gives the estimated earnings-variability index for self-employed workers in the 2002 survey sample. Workers in Bolivia overall seem to experience greater fluctuation in their income levels (Zvar ⫽ 0.573) compared to those in Ecuador (Zvar ⫽ 0.447). Women workers in both countries, however, experience greater variability as reflected in the higher index compared to that of men. Overall, these results reaffirm our distinction between poverty and vulnerability. While a fair proportion of households in our sample reach a level of income above poverty lines, their daily lives involve a high degree of economic insecurity and vulnerability, particularly in the absence of social protection. It will be shown in the next section that in the absence of any socialized means of absorbing the risks associated with variability in earnings and informality of jobs, workers and their families adopt a multitude of strategies that have both short-term and long-term welfare and productivity implications.

The fluidity of labour, gender and the household economy It is evident that low money incomes and job precariousness represent only one facet of economic insecurity experienced by poor and vulnerable groups; intensification of work is another important facet that tends to shift the burden of economic insecurity to certain members within the household. The interconnectedness of paid and unpaid work, vulnerability and gender roles is illustrated in the case of home-based workers in two studies based on the 2002 UPHWS Thailand survey data. Home-based work is carried out by two types of workers who do remunerative work within their homes, namely: a) independent own-account producers and


b) dependent subcontract workers (ILO 2002). The study of Antonopoulos and Floro (2005) of 268 husbands and wives in three Bangkok squatter communities shows that the majority (87 per cent) of the women work in the informal sector, predominantly as home-based workers (72 per cent). Among these home-based workers, about 40 per cent are piece-rate homeworkers. In contrast, 41 per cent of the husbands are waged or salaried employees in the formal sector. These informal shopkeepers, artisans and other types of own-account, homebased workers provide goods and services to others in their communities at low prices. They typify subsistence production activities without much possibility for accumulation. Piece-rate homeworkers, on the other hand, provide their labour to domestic and foreign firms through outsourcing and subcontracting – thus, they are tied to global production although at the bottom of the labour hierarchy. Several studies have shown that the associated arrangements are inherently less protective; subcontracted workers receive lower payments for their labour and little or no benefits (Boonmathaya et al. 1999; ILO and HomeNet Thailand 2002). The location of these forms of economic activity enable women to resolve the contradictions between women’s socially defined roles as wives and mothers and the necessity of earning income. They also enable women, in particular, to combine paid and unpaid work. Another study explores in greater depth the intensification of work among urban, home-based workers in Bangkok’s low-income communities that seriously affects their well-being (Pichetpongsa 2004). Using the 2002 UPHWS Thailand survey data, Pichetpongsa (2004) demonstrated the extent to which home-based workers perform both paid market work (primary activity) and overlapped childcare or household work (secondary activity) using time-allocation analysis. His study shows that when overlapped or secondary work activities are taken into account, the time spent by home-based workers on both paid market work and unpaid, household work increases. For instance, the time spent in unpaid domestic and childcare activities is shown to be nearly double what conventional timeallocation methods indicate. This work intensity is typically experienced by women workers who care for young children while minding a store, sewing shoes or selling food in a stall. Income variability associated with much of informalized jobs can complicate a worker’s control over his/her labour time and influence his/her level of work burden. For women home-based workers in particular, the resulting burden is reflected in their multiple roles both in the informal market economy and in the household economy, which they try to accomplish simultaneously within severe time constraints. This intensification of work is likely to have adverse consequences both for the well-being and for productive efficiency of the workers. Certain members end up devoting more labour resources to stabilize the incoming stream of income in order to protect the household from the dire consequences of substantial income fluctuations. The result may likely lead to tensions among household members. The distribution of work burden within the household depends on the interplay of gender norms and intra-household negotiations. A different question is whether a worker’s increased contribution to household income translates into greater bargaining power and gender equality as some


studies have examined (Benería and Roldan 1987; Kabeer 2000). If this is the case and a renegotiation of household division of tasks occurs, women’s increased participation in paid work may result in having other members take on her domestic chores. But if gender norms are resilient to any change in money income contributions, women may be compelled to increase the length of the working day or intensify their work effort by overlapping activities, say combining childcare and market work. As pointed out earlier in this chapter, gender roles in Latin America have been changing rapidly in terms of the more observable and measurable indicators. However, at the deeper level of gender norms and distribution of tasks between paid and unpaid work, we observe change as well as continuity. For example, a subsample of 29 households in Santa Cruz, Bolivia, interviewed in January 2005, typifies these trends. When asked whether they thought that gender roles were changing, 82 per cent replied affirmatively.7 However, the answers as to how they saw this change were more ambiguous; 57 per cent pointed out that women had more financial responsibility now because of their greater involvement in paid work; about 43 per cent agreed with the statement that it was easier for women to find jobs than for men; and 82 per cent responded affirmatively to the question of whether they thought that gender equality had increased. Table 9.4 lists several proxies or indicators of the relative position of workers in household decision-making. Based on the 2002 Bolivia and Ecuador household workers sub-sample, the results show that there are relatively more women respondents than men respondents who say that they require permission to work from their partners/spouses. Roughly the same proportion of women and men reported that they decide solely on the use of their own earnings. Another indicator of

Table 9.4 Patterns of household decision-making in couple households, 2002 Bolivia and Ecuador Household Sample, by sex Bolivia

Ecuador

Proportion of respondents (in %)

1. Requires permission to work 2. Decides on use of own earnings 3. Decides jointly on use of earnings 4. Knowledge of spouse’s earnings 5. Decides to borrow loan 6. Responsible for loan payment

Proportion of respondents (in %)

Women

Men

Women

Men

79.2

49.45

42.6

17.5

22.5

10.2

61.7

60.4

69.4

75.0

20.0

22.5

87.4

79.6

66.9

43.2

19.8

16.7

23.5

50.0

40.5

28.7

63.5

58.5


bargaining power is with respect to loan decisions. About 20 per cent of workers in the Bolivian sample reported having made sole decision of when to borrow; the majority reported that this is a joint decision. The proportion of individual decisions to obtain credit is much higher in the case of Ecuador, especially among men. But a different pattern emerges when it comes to the question of who pays the loan or shoulders the burden of loan payment. A higher proportion of women respondents in both Bolivia and Ecuador reported that they are solely responsible for loan repayment compared to the men respondents. These have repercussions in terms of a worker’s vulnerability and her future earning capacity as our case study of Ecuador shows.

Coping strategies and risk-sharing The mere existence of employment does not define the economic status and wellbeing of a worker or a household. It needs to be seen as acting together with a number of other factors, the most crucial being access to and control over resources – mutual support networks, credit, savings and physical assets – in the face of income shortfalls and consumption expenditure shocks.8 Income variability, alongside the persistence of job insecurity, heightens the household’s need to find ways of smoothing its consumption and designing survival strategies. Coping strategies among the poor have received much attention in the literature on economic and financial crises since the 1980s. As this section will illustrate, there is a strong propensity for households with irregular and variable sources of income to become increasingly differentiated. There is also a tendency for the risk burden to be shouldered unequally among household members. Gender, credit and debt-servicing Our study among Ecuadorian urban poor households shows the critical role of credit in consumption-smoothing and in managing losses from shocks such as family emergencies. The data enables us to identify the designated borrower in the household by also taking into account intrahousehold decision-making in terms of ‘who decides to borrow and how much’ and ‘who repays’. Our data and interviews reveal that there are clear demarcations on whose earnings and responsibility it is to pay. In most cases, incomes are not pooled in these households, at least to meet debt obligations. Based on 194 households that include both households with couples and singleadult-headed households in the 2002 Ecuador UPHWS (Urban Poor Home-based Worker Survey), Table 9.5 shows that the majority (62 per cent) of the ‘designated’ borrowers in the urban, poor households are women. Given their relatively lower earnings compared to men, more loans suggests a higher debt burden among women in low-income households compared to men. Floro and Messier (2004) estimated the debt-service burden of borrowers in the Ecuador sample by calculating the mean ratio of montly debt-servicing (the past month’s loan principal and interest amortization payment) to the past month’s earnings of the borrower. The results are shown in Table 9.5: a much higher debt-service ratio among women

Labour Market Informalization, Gender and Social Protection 209 Table 9.5 Mean debt service ratio of borrowers, 2002 Ecuador Household Sample, by sex and type of household headship

Debt-service Ratio

Men N ⫽ 133

Women N ⫽ 176

Single adultheaded households

Couples households

.0879

.3784

.1789

.2661

Source: Floro and Messier (2004).

borrowers (0.378) than that among men (0.088). Given their dual roles as income earners and primary care providers, Ecuadorian women workers in our sample seem to have a more compelling need for credit both to meet the needs of their livelihood activities, and to meet their household consumption expenses. The economic insecurity associated with informalized jobs therefore may have increased the demand for credit to help smoothen consumption but with lessened inability to repay. There can be important, far-reaching effects on future income from job insecurity if some of the loans that are intended for productive purposes are themselves used to buffer current consumption from income fluctuations. Home-based workers who may need their own resources to pay for raw materials, equipment and other inputs in their job, can find themselves severely capital-constrained and hence unable to increase their earnings. Using the 2002 Ecuador survey data, the study by Messier (2005) on poverty traps and credit provides empirical evidence on how the allocation of credit, especially by self-employed women workers, for consumption use (e.g. to meet food and educational expenses, household repair, health care, and so forth) can adversely affect the level of investment in their own enterprises. As a result, their income in the next period is likely to be lower or more precarious, thus threatening social reproduction and, again, reflecting risk and vulnerability. Informal social networks and mutual support mechanisms The degree of social cohesion and trust prevailing in a given community can help, to some extent, in providing insurance to workers and their households. Kinshipbased or other social networks allow households to share each other’s risk through some community mechanism or institutional arrangements in a given setting. These include kin-based or non-commercial loans as in Ecuador and community services provisioning in both Ecuador and Bolivia. Our observation indicates that in both countries extended family networks are most important in designing strategies to cope with risk and vulnerability but also for planning for the future (such as in decisions to migrate). We next examine these different mutual support mechanisms as they affect the lives of workers in urban low-income communities. Systems of ‘generalized reciprocity’ often take the form of kin credit. These loans are provided by those whose income is temporarily high compared to those in need. Relatives, friends and neighbours are approached for loans during times of cash shortage or family emergencies. This is reflected in the credit patterns of urban poor households in Ecuador. Table 9.6 shows that kin credit or loans


provided by friends, relatives and/or neighbours comprise nearly 32 per cent of the total number of loans, indicating the presence of socialized income-maintenance schemes based on either extended kinship ties or locational affinity in urban poor communities. In the case of one urban poor community in Quito called Itchimbia, the strong cohesion and active community organizations have facilitated a high degree of social cooperation and mutual support among its residents. While annualized interest rates are roughly 24 per cent on formal/semi-formal loans (predominantly from banks and microcredit organizations), and 73 per cent and 44 per cent on informal loans (from private moneylenders) to men and women borrowers respectively, kin loans are interest-free and require no collateral (Table 9.6). Overall, women more often approach their relatives, friends and neighbours for loans. Loan provisioning, as our Ecuador case study demonstrates, is part of the income-maintenance schemes and mutual support systems that have evolved to cope with the basic requirements and contingencies of life. Women have played an important role as participants in such networks. To some extent, community-based formal and informal networks have played some role in meeting the transport, health care and social-service needs of the community. This is the case among the urban poor communities in Bolivia and Ecuador that we have encountered in our field work. Community-based trash, sewer and medical services as well as some form of recreation facilities are Table 9.6 Loan characteristics by gender and credit source, 2002 Ecuador Household Sample (percentages in parentheses) Men borrowers Formal/Semiformal Informal N ⫽ 29 N ⫽ 10 Mean loan size1 Annual interest rate2 No. of instalments3 Payment per instalment4 No. of loans with collateral5 No. of loans with cosigners6 (6.67)

Women borrowers

Kin N ⫽ 19

Formal/Semiformal Informal N ⫽ 41 N ⫽ 25

Kin N ⫽ 30

1045.86 24.92 14.90

598 72.89 8.90

77.053 0 2.26

865.93 23.75 16.56

786.60 44.26 26.44

270.27 0 1.7

96.86

53.5

21.05

158.55

35.31

88.47

12 (41.38)

4 (40)

0 (0)

27 (65.85)

11 (44)

0 (0)

16 (55.17)

2 (20)

1 (5.26)

15 (36.59)

7 (28)

2

Notes: 1 Loan amount in dollars. 2 Nominal interest rates were annualized as follows: Interest rate ⫽ [(Repaid amount⫺Loan)/(Number of monthly payments]*12. the inflation rate in 2002 was 12.5 per cent, using consumer price index. 3 Instalments refer to single payments made by the borrower to cover loan interest and principal. 4 Average dollar value of the monthly instalment. 5 Number of loans that required some form of collateral to guarantee the loan. Collateral included land, house, durable goods, etc. 6 Cosigners include spouse, parents, other family members and neighbours. Source: Floro and Messier (2004).


provided by the government in nearly two-thirds of the community sample; but they are often precarious and represent a bare minimum. In two of the Ecuador communities, we found some form of primary-care medical services being provided by non-governmental organizations. Although these services are initiated or sponsored by the government and non-governmental organizations, they also make use of volunteer labour provided by community members. Asset ownership and asset pawning There are however limits to risk-pooling mechanisms within communities and social groups especially when there are adverse economic and social conditions such as economic downturns, crises, labour market restructuring and disintegration of social networks. For the most part, informal workers and their households often have to deal with economic insecurity and cash shortages themselves. The study on credit access by urban poor households in Ecuador shows the critical role of other types of loans in consumption-smoothing and in managing loss from shocks such as family emergencies. In addition to relatives and friends, there are moneylenders and traders as well as microcredit organizations and even banks who have provided loans. In Thailand, both men and women workers in urban squatter communties have made use of their real assets, especially jewellery, livestock and appliances as buffer assets to smooth their consumption in the face of irregular income streams. The study by Floro and Antonopoulos (2005) on asset pawning among poor households shows that nearly a fifth (17 per cent) of women workers in the 2002 Thailand UPHWS data have pawned their individually owned assets such as jewellery and even shop assets in the previous six months compared to only 5 per cent of men. Their findings suggest that women’s responsibility of reconciling income flows and cash deficits in order to keep the children in school, meet social obligations (e.g. weddings and funerals) and buy basic necessities are social constructs that affect the manner by which coping mechanisms are shared within the household. Women, in performing their gender roles, are more likely to pawn their assets for consumption-smoothing and to meet special household needs. In the final analysis, our fieldwork interviews in Ecuador and Bolivia reveal that households provide the last resort or means of protection whenever chronic or unexpected shocks increase their vulnerability or threaten their survival. The sharing of living and even working spaces between two or more families occurs in some of the households we interviewed. This meant sharing the costs of food, electricity, and often overcrowded living space. This is true for workspace as well, as with the variety of stores situated at the front part of some homes.

Concluding remarks Returning to the three areas of inquiry referred to in our conceptual framework, our empirical work brings further information to our understanding of how urban low-income households are absorbed into an increasingly informalized economy and of how they cope with the economic insecurity generated by the lack of what the ILO has called ‘decent jobs’, and by poverty and vulnerability.


First, in terms of the evolving informal economy, we document its heterogeneity and classify jobs as having low, medium or high ‘degrees of informality’ in order to analyse the wide range of combinations and fluidity between the formal/informal insertions. The large majority of jobs in our sample (over 85 per cent and 70 per cent in Bolivia and Ecuador respectively) were characterized by medium or high degrees of informality. For the majority of workers, these were self-employed activities such as street vending and home-based work, with women predictably having relatively more precarious jobs than men. However, we point out that the relationship between job informality and worker vulnerability is not straightforward, due in part to the multiple-job dimension of some workers and to the intrahousehold dynamics which enable the shifting of the risk burden among household members. As a result, some workers, by virtue of their gender roles and/or bargaining position within the household, become major bearers of risk. The study reinforces the importance of distinguishing between poverty and vulnerability, particularly because we find a high degree of income variability and other factors placing households at risk. We have found that, even in non-poor households, income variability leads them to borrow when earnings are low and exposes them to the pressures created by debt. We emphasize that there is a strong propensity for households with irregular and variable income to become increasingly differentiated and to face increased economic insecurity. Informality and job precariousness are particularly illustrated in the case of selfemployment and home-based work which involve two different types of workers: a) those representing subsistence production and providing goods and services for their communities at low prices, and b) waged or self-employed workers linked through subcontracting to other productive processes, including global production. In both cases, we describe the fluidity of labour between paid/unpaid and formal/ informal activities. This is particularly so in the case of women; the location and informality of their activities allows them to negotiate the tensions between their socially defined roles around domestic work and the need to earn an income. This fluidity of labour, however, has led to an increased intensification of work that engenders high levels of stress and a lower quality of life. Second, in terms of the gender dimensions of these processes, we emphasize the important contribution of women to household earnings and we ask whether this translates into greater bargaining power for them. Our data points to both change and continuity in this respect. On the one hand, there is a growing awareness of women’s contribution to household finances and of changing gender roles with implications for a higher degree of gender equality. On the other hand, women’s greater participation in paid work is not compensated by a decrease in their responsibilities in domestic work, thus resulting in work intensification and overlapping activities. Women are also burdened with their greater responsibility in debt repayment and household maintenance as well as in domestic work; indicators of vulnerability (e.g. debt-service ratio, the likelihood of pawning one’s assets and intensification of work) reflect a higher incidence among women. Thus, we observe both some degree of ‘de-gendering’ as well as continuity in the division of gender roles.


Third, one of the most striking findings from our study is the extremely low degree of social protection among the households in the sample. Only a very small proportion of the respondents received any type of social security benefits – the exception being 19.1 per cent of male workers in Ecuador. Neoliberal policies have had an implicit bias against any type of social protection programmes; we have observed a privatization of security in the sense that, for the most part, it has been left to kin and family networks to provide some means of protection. Mutual support mechanisms and systems of reciprocity exist for example to provide loans and as a way of smoothing consumption. Families also design living strategies around housing and living spaces, such as relatives moving into a family home at a time of crisis or loss of employment, or in cases of home-switching among family members according to the affordability of the highest rent. Ultimately, our study leads us to emphasize the notion that poverty elimination programmes are not likely to succeed unless they are accompanied with policies to create decent jobs for those living under the conditions of informality described in this paper. Second, the study joins the voices that call for new forms of universal social provisioning. Both point to a more interventionist state.

Notes 1 The sample survey is referred to here as 2002 Urban Poor Home-based Worker Survey (UPHWS). The authors would like to specially thank John Messier for the fieldwork in Ecuador and data processing, UNIFEM-Andean Region for the financial support received and FLACSO (Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales), REMTE (Mujeres Transformando la Economia) and FEDESO (Guayaquil) for their institutional support. Many thanks also to Lourdes Montero and CEDLA (Centro de Estudios sobre el Desarrollo en America Latina) in La Paz for their invaluable help with the Bolivia survey. We also want to acknowledge the assistance provided by Lucia Salamea Palacios (UNIFEM-Andean Region), Gioconda Herrera (FLACSO), Magdalena de Leon (REPEM), Maria Rosa Anchundia (REMTE and University of Guayaquil), and Elizabeth Estrella (UNIFEMAndean Region) for their help with the training workshop in Ecuador and conference in Quito in March 2004. Our thanks also to Sonali Duggal and Carmen Triana for their generous assistance. 2 An elaboration of some of these points can be found in Benería 2001. 3 One of the main elements of this package was a set of labour-policy measures. These took the form of: a) reduction of mandatory employment stability to all activities, b) wagesetting at market-determined levels, and c) abolition of a firm obligation to pay workers on strike (World Bank 1988). 4 A household is classified extremely poor if its total consumption expenditure is below the food poverty line. 5 In fact, prices increased by 20,000 per cent from August 1984 to August 1985, and by 60,000 per cent between May and August 1985 (Sachs 1987). These represent the highest inflation rates in Latin American history and one of the highest in the world. 6 The diversity of low-income neighbourhoods in the metropolitan cities can take the form of old versus newly settled areas, proximity to or distance from main city centres, density of population, and the degree of social cohesion represented by the presence or paucity of grassroots organizations. It is important to note that the community selection for the survey took into account the presence of contact such as a local community organization or a community-based researcher which helped establish trust and initial rapport. This facilitated the ‘entry’ of the survey team in the area.

214 Lourdes Benería and Maria S. Floro 7 Interviews were conducted either with men or women household members. 8 Findings from a number of studies show that although household incomes may fluctuate widely as result of weather, prices and employment-related shocks, consumption doesn’t necessarily follow such a pattern of variability. Household members make use of different mechanisms to smooth consumption (Bardhan and Udry 1999; Sebstad and Cohen 2001).

References Antonopoulos, R. and M. Floro (forthcoming) ‘Asset Ownership Along Gender Lines: Evidence from Thailand’. Journal of Income Distribution. Balakrishnan, R. and M. Huang (eds) (2000) The Hidden Assembly Line: Gender Dynamics of Subcontracted Work in a Global Economy. Bloomfield CT: Kumarian Press. Bardhan, P. and C. Udry (1999) Development Microeconomics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Benería, L. (2001). ‘Shifting the Risk: New Employment Patterns, Informalization, and Women’s Work’. International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society, Vol. 15, No. 1, September: 27–53. Benería, L. (2003) Gender, Development and Globalization: Economics As If All People Mattered. London: Routledge. Benería, L. and M. Roldan (1987) The Crossroads of Class and Gender: Homework, Subcontracting and Household dynamics in Mexico City. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Benería-Surkin, J. (2003) ‘Power, Conservation, and Indigeneous Livelihood: Guarani Strategies for Conquering Political Space in Izozog, Bolivia’. PhD dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles. Boonmathya, R., Y. Praparpun and R. Leechanavanichpan (1999) ‘The Situation of Women Subcontracted Workers in the Garment Industry in Bangkok, Thailand’. Working Paper, the Asia Foundation, Bangkok, October. Buechler, S. (2002). ‘Enacting the Global Economy in Sao Paulo, Brazil: The Impact of Labor Market Restructuring in Low Income Women’. PhD dissertation, Columbia University. CELA-PUCE (2002) ‘Evaluacion de Los Impactos Economicos y Sociales de las Politicas de Ajuste Estructural en el Ecuador 1982–1999’, at http://www.saprin.org/ecuador/research/ ecu_res_ej_fin.pdf, accessed on 8 July 2003. De Soto, H. (2000) The Mystery of Capital. Bantam Press/Random House. Duryea, S., A. C. Edwards and M. Ureta. (2004) ‘Women in the LAC Labor Market: The Remarkable 1990s’, in Claudia Piras (ed.), Women at Work: Challenges for Latin America. Inter-American Development Bank, Washington DC: 27–56. Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) (2004). Panorama Social para América Latina y el Caribe 2002–2003. Santiago de Chile: CEPAL. Floro, Maria (1992) ‘Macroeconomic Analysis Background Paper: The Case of Ecuador’. Urban Poverty and Social Policy in the Context of Adjustment Project, Working Paper, Washington DC: World Bank. Floro, M. and J. Messier (2004) ‘Credit, Gender and Debt Servicing: The Case of Urban Poor Households in Ecuador’. Paper Presented at the Southern Eastern Economics Association Meetings, 19–20 November 2004, New Orleans. Floro, M. and R. Antonopoulos (2005). ‘Asset Pawning among Urban, Low Income Households in Thailand’, Levy Economics Institute Working Paper, forthcoming. González de la Rocha, M. (2000) Private Adjustments: Household Responses to the Erosion of Work. UNDP, Social Development and Poverty Elimination Division, Conference Paper Series No. 6, New York: UNDP. Gutmann, M. (1996) The Meanings of Macho: Being a Man in Mexico City. Berkeley/Los Angeles/London: University of California Press. International Labour Organization (ILO) (2001–02). Key Indicators of the Labour Market (KILM). Geneva: ILO.

Labour Market Informalization, Gender and Social Protection 215 ILO (2002). Women and Men in the Informal Economy. Geneva: International Labour Organization. ILO and HomeNet Thailand (2002). Impact of the Economic Crisis on Homeworkers in Thailand. Bangkok, International Labour Office. Kabeer, Naila (2000) The Power to Choose: Bangladesh Women and Labour Market Decisions in London and Dhaka. London and New York: Verso. Kabeer, Naila (2003) ‘Labor Standards, Women’s Rights, Basic Needs: Challenges to Collective Action in a Globalizing World’. In L. Benería and S. Bisnath (eds) Global Tensions: Challenges and Opportunities in the World Economy. London: Routledge. Kohl, B. (1999) ‘Economic and Political Restructuring in Bolivia: Tools for a Neoliberal Agenda’. PhD dissertation, Cornell University. Lavinas, L. (1996) ‘As mulheres no universo da pobreza: o caso Brasileiro’. Estudos Feministas, 4(2): 454–79. McCrate, E. (1995) ‘The Growing Divide Among American Women’. Unpublished paper, University of Vermont, Department of Economics. McFarren, W. (1989) ‘Economic Crisis and the Politics of Adaptation: Survival Strategies of Displaced Bolivian Mining Households’. MA thesis, Cornell University. Messier, John (2005) ‘Dynamics of Poverty Trap and the Role of Credit’. Unpublished doctoral thesis, Economics Department, American University, Washington DC, August. Morales Anaya, J.A. (1987) ‘Estabilización y Nueva Politica Económica’. EL Trimestre Economico, LIV: 179–211. Nussbaum, M. (2003) ‘Women’s Capabilities and Social Justice’. In L. Benería and S. Bisnath (eds) Global Tensions: Opportunities and Challenges in the World Economy. New York: Routledge. Parandekar, S., R. Vos, and D. Winkler (2002) ‘Ecuador: Crisis, Poverty and Social Protection’. In P. Beckerman and A. Solimano (eds) Crisis and Dollarization in Ecuador: Stability, Growth and Social Equity. Washington DC: World Bank: 127–76. Pérez-Sáinz, J. P. (1994) El Dilema del Nahual. Globalización, exclusión y trabajo en Centramérica. Costa Rica: FLACSO. Pérez-Sáinz, J. P. (2005) ‘Labor Exclusion in Latin America: Old and New Tendencies’. In L. Benería and N. Kudva (eds) Rethinking Labor Market Informalization: Poverty, Precarious Jobs and Social Protection. Ithaca, NY: Cornell e-Publishing. Pichetpongsa, Anant (2004) ‘Work Intensity and Well-being: The Case of Women Homebased Workers in Thailand’. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, American University, March. Piras, C. (ed.) (2004) Women at Work: Challenges for Latin America. Washington, DC: InterAmerican Development Bank. Portes, A. and M. Castells (1989) The Informal Economy. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Republic of Bolivia (2001) Poverty Reductions Strategy Paper. La Paz. Sachs, J. (1987) ‘The Bolivian Hyperinflation and Stabilization’. American Economic Review, May: 279–83. Salzinger, L. (2003) Genders in Production: Making Workers in Mexico’s Global Factories. Berkeley: University of California Press. Sebstad, J. and M. Cohen (2001) Microfinance, Risk Management and Poverty. Washington DC: Consultative Group to Assist the Poorest. Sen, A. (1992) Inequality Reexamined. Cambridge MA: Russell Sage Foundation and Harvard University Press. Solimano, A. (2002) ‘Crisis and Dollarization: An Overview’. In P. Beckerman and A. Solimano (eds) Crisis and Dollarization in Ecuador: Stability, Growth and Social Equity. Washington DC: World Bank: 1–16. Unidad de Análisis de Politicas Sociales y Económicas (UDAPE) (2003) Crisis, Crecimiento y Pobreza. La Paz, January.

216 Lourdes Benería and Maria S. Floro United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) (2002). Human Development Report. New York: Oxford University Press. United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) (2003). Human Development Report. New York: Oxford University Press. Weinberg, S. (2002). ‘An Analysis of Informal Sector Expansion in Ecuador’s Urban Areas’. Unpublished Paper, Washington DC: American University. World Bank (1988) Ecuador Country Economic Memorandum. Report No. 7321-EC, August. Washington DC: World Bank.

10 Working People and Access to Social Protection Francie Lund

Introduction The informal economy is growing worldwide in the proportion of the workforce who work in it, in the number of informal enterprises, and in the economic contribution of the informal sector to the GDP of many countries (ILO 2002). There is an increase in the numbers of self-employed people (own-account operators, and those who employ others); growing numbers of people work on a contractualized or outsourced basis; fewer people work with secure and lasting contracts; and many formal workers are losing work-related social benefits such as access to health insurance and pension provision. This applies to countries worldwide, though ‘non-standard employment’ is the term usually used to refer to countries in the North and ‘informal employment’ to those in the South. There are variations in the position of men and women in the informal economy, in terms of their share of employment, status of employment, and incomes earned (ILO 2002; Chen et al. 2004; Heintz 2005). With few exceptions, however, informal employment in developing countries tends to be a larger source of work for women than for men. Moreover, men tend to be found in the higher segments of informal employment, notably as employers who run informal enterprises, while women are more likely to be either unpaid workers in family enterprises or industrial outworkers (or homeworkers). As a result, women working informally earn less than men working informally. Women working informally also earn less than women working in the formal economy. In developed countries, the emerging trend towards part-time and short-term employment is strongly gendered, with far more women than men in such jobs (ILO 2002; UNRISD 2005). This ‘non-standard’ work tends to come with fewer social benefits such as medical aid, pension schemes, maternity benefits or disability insurance (Vosko 2005). Parallel with and related to these changes in the structure of employment, the global neoliberal policies of the last thirty years, as espoused in the ‘Washington consensus’, have seen, in many developed and developing countries, a shrinking of the size and functions of the state in favour of market-led growth, and a reduction of many governments’ commitments to social spending. Withdrawal of state commitments to health and welfare means that more of the responsibility for this 217

218 Francie Lund

work falls to private individuals (in the family) and to ‘community care’ or ‘volunteer work’. It is overwhelmingly women who take the larger share of this unpaid caring work. In the period post-Washington consensus, there is more scope for the role of the state, and poverty relief is on the social policy agenda (see Molyneux, chapter 2 in this volume) – but women’s low paid and unpaid work is not central to the analysis. Especially for poorer women who work informally, the labour market is itself a source of risk. Formal social-protection provision is not accessible; private (selffunded) provision is not affordable, and small project-based provision is often not sustainable (or affordable by the very poor). At the same time, poorer workers are excluded from possibilities for skills generation or regeneration. While women’s responsibility for health and welfare – in their own homes and in their communities – continues, there seems to be little gendered exchange of productive and reproductive roles, even where there are high rates of male unemployment. Where chronic poverty coincides with the AIDS pandemic, the caring obligations of women, and to a lesser extent of men, increase and this influences access to and exit from the labour market. In 1952 the International Labour Organization (ILO), listed its core of contingencies of social security: healthcare, incapacity for work due to illness, disability through work, unemployment, maternity, child maintenance, invalidity, old age, and death of the breadwinner. In advanced industrial economies, there was the expectation that being in formal employment meant that there were contractual obligations between employers and employees, which included some employer responsibility for protection against risk, whether ex ante, anticipating risks that would happen, or ex post, in response to various contingencies after they occurred. This was frequently done with contributions from the state as well. While the ILO in the 1950s expressed its hope that the contingencies for social security could be expanded to all workers worldwide, there has in fact been a reversal in social protection since then, and this has happened not only in those developing countries which had some social security, but also in developed countries. What, actually, are poorer people supposed to do to cover their own risks when they cannot afford the services provided by the private sector and when their attempts at creating their own long-term formal and informal savings founder because of the pressing needs of the present? Sustainable schemes of coinsurance among poor people are difficult to achieve, as the core insurance principle of cross-subsidization is absent. Further, expecting poor people to build their own ‘institutions for the poor’ is contradictory, in terms of investments of both time and money required. This chapter explores an approach to social protection which places women’s low paid work as an important element for consideration in social policy. It holds that patterns of production generate inequalities which disproportionately affect women, and the growing size of the informal economy means that this will be a key policy issue for the foreseeable future. Social policies which seek to address both poverty and gender inequality will need comprehensive interventions from multiple interest groups – informal workers, organized labour, the private sector,

Working People and Access to Social Protection 219

the state, and organizations in civil society. It is too ambitious to expect that all workers, everywhere, will be able to get access to comprehensive protection mechanisms in the near future. The search for appropriate economic and social policy responses will be assisted by reframing the standard risks and contingencies with a focus on informally working women. This should take into account vulnerability over the life cycle, and the specific contingencies and risks faced by informal workers in their different places of work.

Gendered vulnerability and the life cycle Many systems of social protection were based on a ‘family model’ or ‘male breadwinner model’, with the idea of a male ‘primary breadwinner’ in full-time employment, and with access to insurance benefits secured through the relationship of family members to the working person. Accommodating the fact that increasing numbers of women are in the labour force, some detect a shift in welfare states to an ‘adult-breadwinner model’ – with the assumption still that being in employment will bring with it access to measures of protection against risk. Men’s and women’s risks are dependent on their relationship to other people in the household; and households themselves, and members within them, go through life-cycle stages, which affect men, women and children in different ways. Different types of risks and vulnerabilities are associated with different stages in the individual’s life cycle as well, and there are deeply gendered dynamics at play. There are clearly overlaps between the different life stages, and some people may not go through some of the stages. There are gender similarities and gender differences. Boy children may be at least as likely as girl children, in some countries, to be withdrawn from school for household or other labour. Childbearing may begin in adolescence and continue in later life. Not all women and men marry; single or lone parenting has become more common, as has divorce. A woman may become a grandmother at 50, and be responsible for the care of the children of her working daughter at the same time as being responsible for the care of her own 75-yearold mother. Older men who are widowed are far more likely to remarry, and not be alone, than older women.

Women, the life cycle and precarious work For people in precarious employment, there is a close link between economic security and social security. Loss of income may have different causes, for example seasonal failure of produce, through loss of a contract, through inability to secure a contract, or through unreliable and late payment for work done. Loss of assets may arise through theft, fire and natural disaster; poorer informal workers such as street vendors may lose assets through the destruction or confiscation by local authorities of equipment such as selling-tables, carts, sewing machines, shoe cleaning outfits, and other tools. Another common reason for loss of income is ill-health, of the worker herself, or of someone in her family for whom she has to care. Even short interruptions of work can be a major disaster for the worker who has no paid

220 Table 10.1 Gendered risks and vulnerabilities associated with different stages of the life cycle Life-cycle stage

Types of associated risks and vulnerabilities

Very young children 0 to 5

Nutritional risks faced by children of working and non-working mothers, with lifelong and irremediable developmental deficits Delays in early cognitive development if left with an inactive carer Acute vulnerability to disease and infection

Children 5 to 12

The risk of not attending school because of domestic or income-earning responsibilities. The invisibility of young children’s work, whether as ‘normal’ household responsibilities, or in non-family enterprises when it is tied to the employment of parents The double burden of occupation and schooling and therefore long-term vulnerabilities of low productivity and fewer opportunities

Adolescents 13 to 19

Vulnerability of (especially girl) children to early withdrawal from school Double burden of occupation and schooling and therefore long-term vulnerabilities of low productivity and fewer opportunities Entry into high-risk employment categories, hazardous industries, prostitution, etc.

Young adults and mothers in their twenties and thirties

Heightened lack of access to financial institutions/ asset-building opportunities Loss of employment, or employment insecurity, through pregnancy Loss of employment, or employment insecurity, through time taken out for childcare

Middle-aged adults

Loss of employment, employment insecurity, decreased productivity, through care for younger and older family members at the same time Bearing the costs of disease and death Social expenses especially the costs of marriages of children, funerals, other rituals

Older people

Loss of income when work is lost, in the absence of work-related provision for retirement, and absence of state support Widows’ loss of assets to late husbands’ family claims Onerous childcare responsibilities in countries where AIDS or military destabilization has produced high numbers of absent middle age adults, and high numbers of children in stress

Source: Adopted from Lund and Srinivas (2000: 37–8).


leave, no paid sick leave, and no healthcare scheme. There is a vicious circle where poor health lowers income, which in turns contributes to poor health. Women worldwide take greater responsibility for childcare than men do. As increasing numbers of women enter the labour market, this has an effect on the need for childcare. Even poorly paid women hold that an advantage of working from home is that multiple tasks can be seen to simultaneously, and in particular that an eye can be kept on children. However, the presence of children, and the need for children to be attended, requires inputs of both time and energy from the worker/carer, and this will affect her productivity and ability to earn. Most welfare states have a number of benefits surrounding the bearing and rearing of children. A comprehensive package would include free healthcare, the right to extended paid leave, the right not to be retarded in progressing along the career ladder by having taken such leave, and in some countries, the rights of fathers to some paternity leave (‘daddy leave’) as well. Some countries allow time off for breastfeeding while at work, and work-based childcare facilities are provided. Workers with no maternity benefits are at risk of loss of income when they take time off work to have children, and are likely to return to work sooner than is good for their own health and for the health of the newborn child, in order to earn again. Women in export processing zones may be required to sign an agreement declaring that they are not pregnant at the time of hiring, and that they will lose their employment if they do get pregnant. Though there are marked country and regional differences, girl children may be at particular risk of having their education cut short so that they can work in the family enterprise, or look after siblings while mothers work elsewhere. This may reduce their chances of acquiring the skills necessary for earning a decent income. However other factors are at work besides the demand for labour. Caste, custom and religion can mire girl children into trajectories of little education, early marriage and early pregnancy. The vulnerability of unprotected elderly people has become a significant social problem. The elderly may have been economically active all their lives, and women in addition may have played a significant health and welfare caring role all their lives, yet there is no certainty of security in their older years. There are crises in pension systems worldwide, with demographic shifts (more people living far longer), and cutbacks in social spending. Even those with formal coverage find that, especially where the levels are not inflation-linked, the pension does not stretch far enough. Many women’s access to financial security in old age is through their working husbands. In most societies, women live longer than men. Widowed men are more likely to remarry and have someone to care for them. A woman in an advanced welfare state may get widow’s benefits, benefits for children, and a lifetime pension for herself. In some societies, on the contrary, women who are widowed are especially vulnerable to asset-raiding by the late husband’s family, and to a lowering of social status (see Chen 1998 and Chen 2000 for an account of the status of widows in parts of India). Specific risks are presented by the place of work itself. There are hazards associated with all forms of work, and formal workplaces are typically regulated by

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the country’s legislation on occupational health and safety, as well as insured by the owners. It has now become common for people’s private houses to have become places of informal work – for example for garment workers, typists, backyard mechanics, caterers, incense-stick rollers, paid childcarers. Having a secure shelter becomes an important component of a secure working life; by the same token, damage to or loss of the shelter poses threats to the productivity of homebased workers. Many homeworkers (industrial outworkers) are in fact employed on a piece-rate basis, but the employer bears no responsibility for the safety of the place of work. Industrial outworkers living and working in poor and overcrowded housing may have poor lighting and ventilation. Street vendors are vulnerable to the weather, to criminals, and to passing traffic.

The vulnerability of specific groups Men and women face specific risks over the life cycle, and additional specific risks are attached to working in precarious work, as noted above. Specific groups of women workers are excluded from access to social protection in specific ways. Four such groups are considered here: migrants, sex workers, employed domestic workers and unpaid full-time carers. Migrants A key feature of globalization is the mobility of labour. Increasing numbers of people migrate in search of work, within their own countries, and across national borders. While historically most migrants were men, sometimes accompanied by women as family members, the numbers of women who migrate autonomously are increasing (Kofman 2004). The highly mobile cadre of professional selfemployed migrant workers, who face uncertainty of employment and high risks, are paid well enough to make their own provision for savings and insurance against work-related contingencies. For the majority, though, the act of migrating is a step into vulnerability. Women and men leave behind relationships with family and friends, as well as neighbourhood and religious networks. They may also leave behind or lose formal entitlements which depend on their status as citizens in their local areas, such as access to health, welfare and other services. Many people migrate through kinship or village-based networks, and go to places where there is a known receiving community. Yet migrants typically assume minority status, may be unfamiliar with the dominant language and have little knowledge of ‘how things work’ locally. Women who migrate also leave behind a care deficit (Chen et al. 2005: 28–30). The access of foreign workers to social protection through work has become a complex contemporary policy issue. For more formal workers, the access to or exclusion from entitlements is at least transparent: a Turkish migrant who works in a formal firm in Germany for a number of years will get access to social benefits while there, and may be able to transport some benefits back to his or her family. However, for millions of migrants, work comes with no social protection, and may be unregistered. Workers are unorganized in labour terms (though they may have


vibrant informal networks and associations), and are too dependent on the job to be able to express demands. They have migrated precisely to work for an income, and that income may be higher than they could ever earn in their home country. Commercial sex workers Statistics on the extent of sex work and the incomes earned by sex workers are difficult to obtain. In some countries it is not allowed as ‘occupational category’ in labour-force surveys; in others, data is collected but is hidden in a category which includes other occupations (such as beggars), and cannot be disaggregated. Some sex workers are highly paid and work autonomously as self-employed persons. However, most female and male sex workers work for someone else, and are dependent on them in complex ways. Sex workers should not be seen only as ‘victims’, and the occupation needs to be understood from the workers’ perspective (e.g. Bandyopadhyay et al. 2004). Some men and some women choose to enter sex work, albeit because there are limited options, or because incomes are high comparative to other occupations. It remains the case that men and women sex workers are highly vulnerable to specific risks: to assaults on themselves; to illness and disease; and to involvement with the drug trade. They are also likely to stop working earlier than people in other occupational groups, and their low social status may mean that they have no secure place in a family or community as they get older. Domestic workers Worldwide, most domestic workers are women. They may live away from their own homes, and in the homes of their employers (especially likely if they are cross-border migrants). Working conditions are characterized by long hours, low pay, and lack of autonomy. Working in someone else’s private domain renders them both invisible and dependent on the employer. There is usually a large class difference between employer and employee, and this may be accompanied by a language difference as well, making communication difficult. The relationship between (woman) employer and (woman) domestic worker is complex. As women, they have shared interests in, for example, child development and education. The career prospects of the working woman employer are contingent on the (typically poorly paid) work of the domestic; the employer’s children’s day-to-day security depends on the employee, who has to be away from her own children to do this work. While the employer–employee relationship offers the worker little autonomy or voice, there may be informal measures of assistance such as with health costs, or school fees of children. However these are not contractual obligations, and as such depend on the whim of the employer, and this is not a sound basis for building long-term security. Unpaid homebased carers The health and welfare care work done in hospitals, clinics, old age homes and welfare institutions, which is subsidized by the state or paid for in the private sector, is one small fraction of all the caring work that has to be undertaken in a

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society. Health and welfare policies are premised on some model of the family, typically one in which there is an infinite supply of women’s caring time. Decisions to allocate more, or less, to the development of health and welfare services will have direct effects on the time that has to be spent in families, and in communities, in unpaid care work. This work is overwhelmingly done by women, and is not classified as work or employment in the systems of national accounts. Concepts and practices such as ‘community care’ and ‘home-based care’ conceal much of this work; it is people living in families and neighbourhoods who do the caring. There can of course be a positive value-base to community care – people in need of care may live a qualitatively better life when cared for at home and in the community, as opposed to in an institution such as a hospital or home for elderly people. Many people get deep emotional satisfaction from the caring role. However, community care is too often introduced in a cost-cutting environment as part of a neoliberal regime which also carries conservative messages about the primacy of the family, and women’s place in the home. AIDS is having a catastrophic effect in many countries of the world, and where resources for formal health and welfare services are scarce, there will be increasing calls for home care and community care. Though AIDS is no respecter of social class, in developing countries the burden of AIDS falls most heavily on poorer people, and in sub-Saharan African countries, on poorer women. It is contradictory for international agencies and national governments to say that they are pursuing gender-sensitive policies, and pro-poor policies, at the same time as they advocate cutbacks in social spending, privatization of health and welfare services, and community-based care.

Innovations in social-protection provision In some parts of the world, labour-protection and social-protection mechanisms have been extended to formerly excluded categories of workers. In Argentina, domestic workers have been included in unemployment insurance coverage. In Chile, statutory health insurance which had been available only to full-time workers was extended to include the (predominantly women) temporeras – people working in the horticulture industry (Barrientos and Ware Barrientos 2003). In South Africa, agricultural workers have been integrated into the occupational health and safety regime, through the Compensation for Industrial Injuries and Diseases Act of 1994. Also in South Africa, domestic workers (nearly all of whom are women) and agricultural workers (about four-fifths of whom are men) are now covered by the Unemployment Insurance Fund. Together these two occupational categories comprised 17 per cent of all measured employment, making this a significant extension of coverage. If social policies are to be devised which address both poverty and gender inequality, the extension of social protection will need to reach poorer working women, in large numbers. This is a difficult task, the challenges are daunting, and political will on its own is not enough. Many of the barriers are administrative, with the challenge of reaching people who are often working in concealed places,


with low and erratic incomes. In many countries, the implementation of labour laws on basic conditions of employment and social protection is not properly monitored even for those in formal employment. Bearing these difficulties in mind, however, there are examples of innovation which show that progress can be made. The first example below comes from India, and describes an integrated insurance scheme, built by poor women, for poor women and their families, in partnership with government and with external support. The second comes from Costa Rica, which designed a voluntary scheme for independent and unremunerated workers, which over time will become compulsory for independent workers. The final example is the South African elderly pension, which provides basic security for millions of older and poorer men and women, and assists also the members of the households in which they live. Comprehensive insurance built by women informal workers: SEWA’s integrated social insurance1 There has been a great deal of experimentation with social insurance in general, and health insurance in particular. Many attempts have been made to reach women, and especially poorer women. These schemes have provided access to many people to insurance for the first time. Many experience problems of sustainability, and of expanding membership numbers. Few have focused specifically on reaching women in their status primarily as informal workers (but see von Ginnekin 1999 for documentation of schemes for informal workers in developing countries). One good example is the insurance scheme, Vimo SEWA, that has been built over twenty years by the Self Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) in India. SEWA is a trade union and set of cooperatives for women who work informally. It was started some thirty years ago in the city of Ahmedabad, and by 2003, there were more than 700,000 paid up members. SEWA as a whole focuses on women, and on their earnings. SEWA defines social security as ‘at least health care, child care, insurance, and shelter’ (Chatterjee and Ranson 2003: 281). One of its central services is the integrated social insurance, Vimo SEWA. SEWA had set up its own bank for savings and credit, and learned that a major reason for people not repaying loans was sickness. It responded by starting a primary healthcare programme, and then in 1992 Vimo SEWA was set up to complement the healthcare programme. It includes life insurance, asset insurance and health insurance. Chatterjee and Ranson (2003) state that by 2003 the insurance scheme had over 102,000 members, in urban and rural areas. There was a marked increase in membership in 2001 following the Gujarat earthquake. Joining requirements are being a member of SEWA, having a SEWA bank account, and subscribing to all three parts of the package. In 2003 the annual contribution was 85 rupees (of which 22.5 rupees was for health insurance). An interesting design feature is that members choose to pay either on this annual basis, or with a once-off larger deposit of 1,000 rupees, invested in SEWA Bank. The interest on this deposit then pays their annual contribution up to the age of 60 (the upper age limit of the scheme), at which point the amount of the deposit is

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repaid to the member. Those paying the fixed deposit receive a wider package of benefits, in particular access to a maternity grant. The life insurance covers natural and accidental deaths of the member (and more recently her husband). Asset insurance covers losses experienced by the woman due to fire, floods and riots, and reflects SEWA’s focus on responding to disasters in such a way that members are able to restore their income-earning ability as fast as possible. The health component includes hospitalization up to a maximum amount per year; those paying premiums through the fixed deposit get additional coverage for cataract operations, hearing aids and dentures. The scheme allows members to choose their own healthcare provider, private or public, though SEWA gives advice about reliable providers. Husbands can get access to limited benefits; they receive the insurance against wives’ natural and accidental death, and women get coverage for their husbands’ death. Children have recently been included in the scheme as well. The SEWA member, though, retains sole control of the SEWA Bank account through which these benefits operate. Vimo SEWA is a most interesting partnership between government, the insurance industry (which until recently was government-run) and SEWA. Essentially, the Indian government subsidized two large insurance corporations to offer some of their services to poor people, and SEWA was one of a few large NGOs or trade unions to take advantage of this opportunity. Vimo SEWA started in a partnership with government insurance; SEWA then took the health scheme over themselves for a while; they have recently again entered a partnership in which they purchase insurance from a government general insurance company, but SEWA keeps control of enrolment, approval and processing. SEWA attributes some of the success of the insurance to the interaction between its different programmes: the SEWA Bank, into which annual premiums are paid; the health education by SEWA Health, which heightens members’ awareness of health problems; and the literacy training provided by SEWA Academy, which enables members to interact with the literate world of formal finance. It also benefited from a large grant from Germany’s GTZ which allowed it to secure a financial base, cover administrative expenses, and also to innovate and experiment. SEWA’s documentation of the scheme shows a real alertness to emerging problems, and a process of continual innovation and experimentation, in response both to objectively changing risks, and to needs expressed by members. As an ILO study put it, it is a story of ‘a process of continuous adjustment sustained by great creativity and tenacity’ (ILO 2001: 79). A government-initiated voluntary scheme for health and pension provision for informal workers: an innovation in Costa Rica2 In Central America, Costa Rica provides an unusual example of a government initiating a new insurance programme which aims to draw into the social-security umbrella informal workers who do not have access to a formal occupationally related provision. This is at present a voluntary scheme, covering access to healthcare, and to a pensions savings scheme.


Costa Rica’s population of some four million is about 50 per cent urbanized, and it scores high in the region in terms of its per capita income, which was $3,960 in 2000. It has a long history of extensive social-security coverage for its relatively small and homogeneous population. Yet demographic changes and changes in the labour-market are presenting new challenges to social protection. The last two decades have seen a rapid increase in women’s labour market participation, but on poor terms relative to men. Most women work in the services sector where the gender earnings gap is pronounced; for those with little education, the 1999 average wage of urban women was 59 per cent of the average wage of urban men. The unemployment rate in 1999 was 6 per cent, much lower for men (4.9 per cent) than for women (8.2 per cent) – but it should be noted how low these unemployment rates are compared to many low-and middle-income countries. An increasing proportion of the Costa Rican labour force is not covered by occupationally related social insurance, partly because of the increase in numbers working in the informal economy. Some transnational firms and factories have imposed labour practices which are illegal in the country: it is common knowledge that people work for less than the minimum wage and for illegally long hours, and that the right of women to breastfeed during working hours is not respected. The World Bank tried to introduce pension reforms in 1994. The unpopularity of these reforms led to widespread unrest, and a ‘Forum of National Concertation’ was then set up to work towards consensus about restructuring the social benefit system. One of the components of the new agreement was the introduction of a voluntary insurance scheme. This is available for independent workers – ownaccount workers and non-remunerated workers, such as family workers and housewives, as well as students. This income-tested scheme is aimed at those who have never contributed to a health or pension plan, or who did so for too short a period or at too low rates to accumulate adequate benefits. Introduced as a voluntary scheme, it is to be made statutory by 2005, when independent workers will be required to join. It is funded by contributions of the state and those who join, with the state contributing 0.25 per cent and the independent worker contributing 7.25 per cent of reference income. By 2003 it was estimated that nearly three-quarters (74 per cent) of independent workers contributed to the health insurance, while nearly one-quarter (24 per cent) contributed to the pension insurance. It is remarkable that so many independent workers are reached by the health insurance component, and it makes the comparison with the much lower numbers opting for an old-age benefit very striking. Probably, people opt not to join because old age seems far away, there are conflicting immediate demands on available resources, and the returns to present contributions seem uncertain. In addition, there is a disincentive to joining because there is a non-contributory pension scheme for poor adult Costa Ricans who are not covered by another regime. This extension of social protection is an interesting example where a country with a good history of social provision is attempting to adjust to changes in the labour market, as well as to demographic changes, in flexible ways. It is trying to set up seamless links between contributory and non-contributory schemes. It does

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not yet, however, address social protection for those who are waged workers but who are not properly covered. The South African pension for elderly people South Africa’s system of state social assistance was originally set up to protect the interests of poor white people, and then was expanded under the former apartheid government to include the whole population (who were classified into four ‘racial’ groups – African, coloured, Indian and white – by that government). One component is for elderly people, and women at age 60 and men at age 65 become eligible to receive a monthly Old Age Pension (OAP) from the state, if they qualify in terms of an income-based means test. It is a non-contributory scheme, payable from general revenue, and it has become recognized as making a distinctive contribution to poverty alleviation – both for pensioners themselves, and for people in the households in which they live. The majority of poor older people in South Africa, and especially in rural areas, live in three-generational extended families. The pension is applied for by an individual elderly person; when the pension is received there is extensive income pooling of the OAP, where the whole or a large part of the pension amount contributes to the common household purse. A growing body of research documents the positive impact of this system (Ardington and Lund 1995; Case and Deaton 1998; Case 2001; Lund 2002): ● ●

● ●

● ● ●

it is well targeted to poorer elderly people; it is well-targeted in racial terms (for example it reaches 80% of the African population, most of whom are poor, and an insignificant number of the wealthier white population); it is well targeted to rural areas; it is well targeted to women, because they live longer, draw the pension earlier, and are poorer; it is valued for its reliability; it contributes to the security of the households in which elderly people live; it contributes to the production of livelihoods of elderly people themselves, and of other younger family members.

Informal men and women workers thus effectively have a guarantee of partial economic security in their elderly years, affording them an earned place in the household. There are of course problems with any system of this nature. Some are concerned that a benefit targeted to one group – the elderly – is consumed by the household at large. There is some evidence that it may reduce the amount of remittances sent from migrant household members. Pensioners themselves complain about administrative problems, particularly with delays in receiving payments, and with the review system (eligibility has to be reassessed from time to time, to check whether people are still poor enough to receive the pension, though escaping poverty in the elderly years is highly unlikely). There are relatively minor


concerns about leakage in the system to the better-off. Generally though the system delivers pensions monthly to between 70 and 80 per cent of all elderly South Africans, at an amount of approximately US$3 a day at present levels. Pensionreceiving households (which are larger than non-receiving households) are still poor, and households in the very poorest income deciles are there because they have no elderly person, and no disabled person (there is a similar social assistance system for people with disabilities). The numbers of people in the older years is a small fraction of the overall population, and the OAP has been judged to be sustainable and affordable. The AIDS epidemic has now reduced longevity drastically, and in future proportionally fewer of the population will reach eligible age. Older people have already taken on more responsibilities for caring for children whose parents have died of AIDS. The OAP will continue to make a vital contribution to household security.

Learning from innovation As noted, building large-scale systems of social protection that reliably reach informal workers with low incomes is a daunting challenge. The SEWA integrated insurance scheme provides convincing evidence that investing in the poor, through social insurance, can be successful and sustainable. The grassroots trade union of informal working women has ‘gone to scale’, to the point where it provides a comprehensive package of social insurance benefits to over 100,000 members. It has built partnerships with government and the insurance industry on terms favourable to itself, and left those partnerships when they became too problematic or inflexible. It has been inspiring in its ability to continuously respond to members’ needs. The development of Vimo SEWA shows the importance of flexibility and responsiveness to members’ needs. The attempt to be flexible is evident also in the actions of the Costa Rican government. As the voluntary insurance scheme was introduced relatively recently, it is too early to assess its performance. It has to be accepted that there will be administrative costs involved in extending social protection to informal or more dispersed workers. Costa Rica, with its small population, grafted the voluntary insurance onto an existing administrative system for delivering social security. SEWA’s solidarity and unity have meant that a large part of the administrative work is done by the members themselves. Perhaps the fact must be faced that, where there is no SEWA or similar organization, ‘sustainability’ may need to include an element of long-term subsidy. Chatterjee and Ranson tentatively suggest a direct transfer of resources to community-based health insurance schemes, ‘perhaps earmarked for administrative costs or marketing and promoting the scheme among the poor’ (Chatterjee and Ranson 2003: 296). The Costa Rican case suggests that informal workers find it easier or more preferable to insure against ill health than to commit resources to savings for their elderly years, though in this particular case there was a clear disincentive to join the old-age-pension scheme because of the existence of a non-contributory pension scheme. ‘Adverse selection’ is one of the common problems of insurance

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systems. SEWA found that an obstacle in its health insurance is that ‘it has attracted a membership that is older and more likely to experience illness’ than the general population of SEWA members (Chatterjee and Ranson 2003: 294). Chatterjee and Ranson (2003: 294) identify another lesson of Vimo SEWA: that improving access to health care may be ‘a mixed blessing where the quality of care is variable and, at worst, dangerous’. Where poorer people can only get access to poor quality health services, and facilities in which for example there may be little in the way of reproductive health services for women and for men, then it is not surprising that people may avoid going to those health services. None of the case studies focused on employer contributions, and there is a need for further exploration as to how to secure employer participation in cases where there is an employer–employee relationship. India has a system of welfare funds for workers in certain economic sectors, such as tobacco, building and construction, the film industry, certain mining sectors including limestone and dolomite, and iron ore, manganese ore and chrome ore. Levies or cesses are placed on the production or sale of goods in these sectors, and the welfare funds are used for collective benefits in housing and education for workers and their children (Subrahmanya 2000: 70). This overcomes the problem of identifying and securing contributions from individual employers. Subrahmanya draws attention, though, to significant problems, among which are administrative inefficiency, under spending of the funds, and the fact that in general they do not see to the social security needs of individual workers. A number of examples show the importance of the role of the state in being able to deliver to large numbers of people, through existing and new institutions. This is clear in the South African OAP and the Costa Rican scheme and points to the need for greater acknowledgement of this role, and for seeking ways of making state interventions even more effective. Thailand has recently introduced the ‘30 baht’ health insurance scheme which is available to informal workers (as it is to all Thai citizens). India has agreed to pilot a new scheme of social security specifically for ‘the unorganized sector’ or informal workers. Both of these new programmes should be monitored closely; both carry the potential to reach previously uncovered categories of worker, but possibly not the very poorest. None of the case study examples involving informal workers addressed the issue of AIDS directly. In countries with a high AIDS prevalence, the epidemic is eroding social protection for all people. Formal insurance companies are raising premiums for policy-holders. The actuarial basis of smaller and informal savings and insurance mechanisms is affected, as members themselves become sick, or have to use their savings and insurance on health and funeral costs for family members. Healthcare schemes are capping the value or number of services. Even in countries with relatively sophisticated health services, people in the advanced stages of AIDS are sent home from hospital to die, as hospital wards are full and priority is given to assisting those who are not yet in the terminal stage. This increases the need for home-based care.


Conclusion The world is facing a growing crisis with the problem of the increasing insecurity of poorer workers. Millions of people work all their lives yet remain poor, and whole age cohorts are entering their elderly years with no savings for retirement. This crisis will not be solved by patchwork responses. Some of the policy prescriptions that are put forward to deal with this problem are destined to fail, because they do not take into account the reality that poorer people face greater risks, through their poverty and through the kinds of work that they do. Nor do they take into account that women face specific risks of their own. In line with the conclusion of Benería and Floro (Chapter 9 of this volume), this chapter points to the need for substantial and sustained state intervention, and a role for significant donor funding as well. Examples have been given of innovations in social protection that have reached large numbers of people, including large numbers of women. They show that the state has a constructive role to play in extending existing measures of social protection to more categories of worker, and also in working in partnership with organizations of informal workers. Through the SEWA example, we see an organization that both promotes self-reliance and advocates an active role for the state. Employers and owners of capital are, however, uniformly hard to identify and to reach. It has been argued that the informal sector and workers within it are in fact covered by some aspects of labour standards (Trebilcock 2004). In addition to the call for extension of labour legislation, though, a multi-pronged strategy is needed which considers different conditions governing different industrial sectors, the institutional capacity to implement labour codes, and the potential effectiveness of different kinds of alliances between different interest groups, at different times. In addition, there is a need to understand how both international labour codes and national labour legislation can be mutually reinforcing, bearing in mind that some of the fair-trade initiatives have voluntary codes of conduct which have in fact fewer protections for workers than existing national labour legislation. A core strategic question is: what combinations of local, national, regional and supranational alliances and interventions would give access to people in different employment relationships? The access of informal workers to better (or any) measures of social protection is contingent on their building strong and effective organizations. Local-level organizations are the vehicle through which women informal workers especially can practise empowerment in day-to-day ways. Organizations are also the vehicle through which to express their voice and interests. Building organizations of informal workers is a long struggle, and social-protection benefits can be a focus around which to organize. Informal workers need to find institutional spaces where they can directly represent their own interests, and influence the way policies are formulated and implemented.3 Homenet Thailand, an organization promoting the interests of industrial outworkers in the garment industry, worked actively in the Thai Parliamentary Commission on Universal Health Care Coverage, which resulted in the introduction in 2002 of the ‘30 baht’ universal healthcare

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scheme. India’s SEWA has influenced a number of significant policy platforms in India, on child labour, insurance, disaster mitigation and local government among others. In the Philippines, the organization of homeworkers, PATAMABA, participates in the government’s Anti-Poverty Council, where it speaks specifically for the interests of poorer working women. In South Africa, the Self Employed Women’s Union engaged in a number of national policy platforms in the transition to democracy, including commissions on the labour market, rural financial services, and trade and industry policy. Women’s work in gendered labour-market institutions needs to be placed more centrally in social policy. Scholarship on reproductive health and on caring should better incorporate a working-woman lens; those concerned with women in their role as workers likewise should continue to analyse the specific difficulties that women have in reconciling their caring and their income-earning roles. And, as Molyneux (Chapter 2 of this volume) shows, with respect to the Oportunidades scheme in Mexico, the costs borne by women through their participation in conditional entitlement schemes need to be made more visible. Gendered policy analysis also needs to incorporate the differentiation between women in different classes. The focus on women in precarious employment offers a fertile ground for learning about how class, space, race, ethnicity, and gender interact to reproduce inequality in society, and provides pointers to new forms of mobilization, new organizational forms and alliances in the struggle for better conditions for working people.

Notes 1 This case study draws primarily from Chatterjee and Ranson (2003) and ILO (2001). 2 This case study relies exclusively on Martinez Franzoni and Mesa-Lago (2003). 3 There have been good examples in the last few years; for a comprehensive account of examples of good practice, see Chen et al. (2005): 67–77.

References Ardington, Elisabeth and Frances Lund (1995) ‘Pensions and Development: Social Security as Complementary to Programmes of Reconstruction and Development’. Development Southern Africa, Vol. 12, No. 4: 557–77. Bandyopadhyay, Nandinee, with Swapna Gayen, Rama Debnath, Kajol Bose, Sikha Das, Geeta Das, M. Das, Manju Biswas, Pushpa Sarkar, Putul Singh, Rashoba Bibi, Rekha Mitra and Sudipta Biswas (2004) ‘ “Street Walkers Show the Way”: Reframing the Debate on Trafficking from the Sex Workers’ Perspective’. IDS Bulletin, Vol. 35, No. 4: 104–11. Barrientos, Armando and Stephanie Ware Barrientos (2003) ‘Social Protection for Workers in the Horticulture Industry’. In Frances Lund and Jillian Nicholson (eds) Chains of Production, Ladders of Protection: Social Protection for Workers in the Informal Economy. Durban: School of Development Studies, University of Natal. Case, Anne (2001) ‘Health, Income and Economic Development’. Paper presented at the ABCDE Conference, World Bank, Washington DC, May. Case, Anne and Angus Deaton (1998) ‘Large Cash Transfers to the Elderly in South Africa’. Economic Journal, Vol. 108: 1330–61.

Working People and Access to Social Protection 233 Chatterjee, Mirai and M. Kent Ranson (2003) ‘Livelihood Security through Communitybased Health Insurance in India’. In Lincoln Chen, Jennifer Leaning and Vasant Narasimhan (eds) Global Health Challenges to Human Security. Cambridge MA: Global Equity Initiative, Asia Center, Harvard University. Chen, Martha (1998) Widows in India: Social Neglect and Public Action. New Delhi: Sage. Chen, Martha (2000) Perpetual Mourning: Widowhood in Rural India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Chen, Martha, Joann Vanek and Marilyn Carr (2004) Mainstreaming Informal Employment and Gender in Poverty Reduction: A Handbook for Policy-makers and Other Stakeholders. London: Commonwealth Secretariat. Chen, Martha, Joann Vanek, Frances Lund and James Heintz, with Chris Bonner and Renana Jhabvala (2005) Progress of the World’s Women 2005: Women, Work and Poverty. New York: UNIFEM. Doane, Donna, Rosalinda Ofreneo and Paonoi Srikajon (2003) ‘Social Protection for Workers in the Garment Industry’. In Frances Lund and Jillian Nicholson (eds), Chains of Production, Ladders of Protection: Social Protection for Workers in the Informal Economy. Durban: School of Development Studies, University of Natal. Heintz, James (2005) ‘The Growing Informality of Labour Markets’. Paper presented at the UNRISD/CGGS Conference on Gender and Social Policy, Marstrand, Sweden, 28–29 May. ILO (2001) Women Organizing for Social Protection: The Self-employed Women’s Association’s Integrated Insurance Scheme, India. Geneva: ILO ILO (2002) Women and Men in the Informal Economy: A Statistical Picture. Geneva: ILO. Kofman, Eleonore (2004) ‘Gendered Global Migrations’. International Feminist Journal of Politics, Vol. 6, No. 4. Lund, Frances (2002) ‘ “Crowding in” Care, Security and Micro-enterprise Formation: Revisiting the Role of the State in Poverty Reduction, and in Development’. Journal of International Development, Vol. 14, No. 6: 681–94. Lund, Frances and Jillian Nicholson (eds) (2003) Chains of Production, Ladders of Protection: Social Protection for Workers in the Informal Economy. Durban: School of Development Studies, University of Natal. Lund, Frances and Smita Srinivas (2000) Learning from Experience: A Gendered Approach to Social Protection for Workers in the Informal Economy. Geneva: ILO. Martínez Franzoni, Juliana y Carmelo Mesa-Lago (2003) La reforma de la seguridad social en costa rica en pensiones y salud: Avances, problemas pendientes y recomendaciones. San José, Costa Rica: Fundación Friedrich Ebert. Orloff, S (2000) ‘The Significance of Changing Gender Relations and Family Forms for Systems of Social Protection.’ Background paper prepared for the World Labour Report 1999–2000. Geneva: ILO. Subrahmanya, R. K. A (2000) ‘Welfare Funds: An Indian Model for Workers in the Unorganised Sector.’ In Renana Jhabvala and R. K. A Subrahmanya (eds) The Unorganised Sector: Work Security and Social Protection. New Delhi, Thousand Oaks and London: Sage. Trebilcock, Anne (2004) International Labour Standards and the Informal Economy. Geneva: ILO. UNRISD (2005) Gender Equality: Striving for Justice in an Unequal World. Geneva: UNRISD. Von Ginnekin, Wouter (ed.) (1999) Social Security for the Excluded Majority. Geneva: ILO. Vosko, Leah (2005) ‘Precarious Employment: Towards an Improved Understanding of Labour Market Insecurity’. In Leah Vosko (ed.) Precarious Employment: Understanding Labour Market Insecurity in Canada. Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press.


Part III Gender Dimensions of Social-sector Restructuring


11 Gender and Health Sector Reform: Analytical Perspectives on African Experience Maureen Mackintosh and Paula Tibandebage

Introduction: gender, the ‘silent term’ in health sector reform

Vignette 1 A small private dispensary in the Tanzanian Southern Highlands was run in 1998/9 on a day-to-day basis by a trained nurse, a woman, and overseen by her husband, a medical doctor, who was not often there since he was employed in a mission-run hospital. The nurse saw patients, managed other staff, and did the books; unusually in a private dispensary she provided some preventative care such as vaccinations and ante-natal care. Most of the clients we met were women, many bringing young children or other sick relatives.

Health systems are gendered institutions. That is, their organization reflects and responds to gender inequalities in the wider society. The hierarchy among health care staff places doctors, policy-makers and administrators – predominantly male – above nurses, paramedical staff and orderlies who are more likely to be female. Furthermore, in Africa as in many parts of the world, day-to-day working relations in health care are predominantly between women: nurses and lower-level staff dealing with women accompanying sick children and the elderly, women caring for relatives who are in-patients, or coming for care themselves (Vignette 1). Furthermore, mother and child health care (MCH) is known to be important to society’s health outcomes (WHO 2003a, LaFond 1995). We would therefore expect, when we turn to the prescriptive and analytical literature on the health-sector reforms that have been proposed and implemented across sub-Saharan Africa, that gender would be a key tool of analysis, and that the literature would explain how the reforms address women’s needs. Yet this is not so. The influential multilateral policy documents of the 1990s are largely silent on gender. The World Development Report 1993: Investing in Health (World Bank 1993) mentions ante-natal, delivery and post-natal care and family 237

238 Maureen Mackintosh and Paula Tibandebage

planning as ‘clinical interventions’ that are ‘highly cost effective’; and the importance of schooling for girls, of ‘educated mothers’, and of women’s access to income. It discusses the gendered pattern of disease burden and the problem of insensitivity of health care to women’s broader health needs. Yet the moment we turn to proposed reforms gender largely disappears. Discussion of the core policy recommendation to introduce user fees, and the sections on insurance, market liberalization and structural reform do not refer to gender differences in need or ability to pay. Similarly, the World Development Report 1997: The State in a Changing World (World Bank 1997) outlines ‘new public management’ reforms without reference to differential effects on men and women. The World Development Report 2004: Making Services Work for Poor People (World Bank 2004) discusses clients and providers, citizenship and health services in a largely ungendered manner, examining ‘co-production’ of health between communities and health sector staff without recognition of its reliance on low-income women’s unpaid work. The silence also runs through the Millennium Goals agreements, which identify gender equity as an objective but are mute on the institutional changes that might be needed to eradicate gendered inequity from key public-service institutions. The silence has now been broken however by the World Health Organization, in the World Health Report 2003: Shaping the Future (WHO 2003a) which identifies gender discrimination in the health professions as a serious problem for the delivery of services to poor and disadvantaged populations. The report also promotes women’s participation in health care governance and management. This chapter argues that despite the silences, health sector reform models are implicitly gendered: that is, they have gender built inaudibly into their assumptions. Section 2 explores analytical approaches to the gendered nature and impacts of health sector reform: gender equity, women’s health needs and gendered health systems frameworks. Our objective is conceptual: to examine health-sector reform through a gender ‘lens’, considering how the reform framework is gendered and the extent to which that gendered process may operate to the detriment of women, especially poor women (Sections 3–6). We illustrate our arguments with empirical evidence drawn largely but not exclusively from Africa. Section 6 considers implications of the analysis particularly for the African context.

Gender perspectives on health, health systems and reform Health sector reform in the African context Health sector reform (HSR) is not easy to analyse because the phrase is used to refer to two distinct things. First, it refers to the processes of institutional change that have swept through African, as many other, health systems since the early 1980s. And second, it refers to the prescriptive framework for institutional redesign of health care provision and public health repeatedly proposed in multilateral reports, donor policies and consultancy reports. The two do not, of course, coincide. Health systems are complex institutions, deeply influenced by cultural ideas about health and illness, by historical experience and by social structure.

Gender and Health Sector Reform 239

Health sector reform models are themselves not without internal contradictions, and contain gendered assumptions that may be problematic. Health sector reform as promoted in sub-Saharan Africa has particularly encompassed the following (WHO 2000a, Mills et al. 2001): ●

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liberalization of private clinical provision and pharmaceutical sales, and promotion of a ‘mix’ of public, private and voluntary providers; retreat of government towards a mainly regulatory and priority setting role, with responsibility for direct provision of some services in public health and for ensuring access to ‘basic’ care by the poorest; user charges for government health services, for government-provided drugs and supplies, and for community-based health services; increased contracting-out of government-funded services to independent providers; decentralization of health systems to local government control; increase in autonomy of hospital management and finance; some hospital privatization; a shift towards insurance rather than tax-based financing mechanisms.

We could summarize the model as a shift to greater ‘commodification’ of health care – that is, its provision as a set of discrete services for market payment or government ‘purchase’ on behalf of citizens – plus reduction of government activity and more systematic priority-setting in government spending based on cost-effectiveness of interventions. In sub-Saharan Africa, this HSR model has been promoted in a context of generalized and severe poverty and has often been implemented in the wake of economic crisis. In Tanzania in the early 1990s user fees were introduced at a time when cuts in government spending and removal of subsidies on basic goods were disproportionately affecting the poor. Health care fees are frequently unaffordable and impoverishing in a context where a significant proportion of the population cannot afford basic needs including food; in 2002 an estimated 15–18 million Tanzanians out of a population of 34.4 million were living below a poverty line of US$0.65 a day (World Bank 2002, 2004). Gender perspectives on health and HSR Current literature offers two broad perspectives for assessing the differential impact of HSRs on women (Standing 1997, 2002a). One is a ‘gender equity’ perspective. This applies the general concept of equity in provision of health services to men and women, asking: Do health systems respond equally to men and women in equal need? And does HSR (seek to) improve gender equity in this sense? The second perspective is the ‘women’s health needs’ perspective. It focuses on the specific health needs of women, notably (but not only) reproductive health care needs. Do health systems respond to these needs? Does HSR (seek to) improve responsiveness to women’s health needs?


We build on these two perspectives in order to evaluate HSR as a gendered process. As Standing (2002a, 2002b) points out, many aspects of health care and health sector reform are marked by sharp gender differences, including the role of women as workers in health care. In this chapter we develop this understanding of HSR as gendered institutional change by drawing on the broader literature on gender and health and also on gendered analyses of high-income countries’ health and welfare systems. We take from the gender and health literature the concept of a ‘gender lens’. ‘Gender’ here refers to structural inequalities and differences between men and women, and associated sets of behaviours, expectations and roles for men and women. Concepts of health and illness and the ideas that shape health-seeking behaviour are shown to be gendered. Gender ‘permeates social institutions’ and is an ‘organising principle of social life’ (G. Sen et al. 2002a: 6). This gender and health literature raises, but does not explore in depth, the way in which the institutions of health systems are permeated by gender. However, feminist writing on rich-country health and welfare systems centrally addresses this issue, and illustrates the type of conceptual question that can be addressed in other contexts (J. Lewis 2002; Williams 1989; G. Lewis 1998; Lister 2000): ●

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What are the assumptions about household and family structure that underlie health sector reform and are they justified? How do health financing strategies respond to changing social understandings and experience of women’s financial dependence or autonomy within the household? What are the assumptions about women’s labour market participation – including participation in the health-sector labour force? How, for example, do wider work opportunities for women influence the nursing labour market? What are the assumptions about women’s capacity to undertake unpaid care? Does health care reform make unjustified assumptions about women’s availability to care for sick children and the elderly? How do changes in health care funding and expenditure differentially affect women and men in different social groups? What are the gender-differentiated effects of changes in the pattern of public expenditure on health care, the structure of the tax system, and the balance between public and private health finance? To what extent do health and social services influence women’s circumstances as well as responding to them? How do these services (re)construct the nature of women’s citizenship and women’s rights, and how these are differentiated according to income, social class, ethnicity or location? What are the assumptions about health sector governance in reformed frameworks: who will participate and how? How can users from different social groups exert leverage over resources through governance structures?

This literature analyses health systems as themselves ‘gendered’ in the sense outlined above. A health system as it has built up historically is expressive of the gender (and other) hierarchies of the wider society; and the health system feeds


back into social patterns of disadvantage. The standards and principles of evaluation of health systems and the reform models themselves reflect patterns of established disadvantage including gender hierarchies (Twigg 2000; Mackintosh 1998). Conversely, health systems’ immense political and social importance, and the association of health care reform with political and economic crisis, implies that health systems can be sites of challenge to gender disadvantage. We seek in this chapter to contribute to a relevant set of analytical questions about gender and health sector reform for the African context.

Health finance and gender disadvantage Key questions: How do changes in health care funding affect differentially women and men in different social groups? What are the underlying assumptions in HSR models about women’s access to cash and are they correct? Health sector reform in Africa brought four linked health-financing changes: the introduction of user fees for access to government health services; liberalization and promotion of non-government fee-for-service provision; experimentation with health insurance schemes; and pressure to target public expenditure on primary care for the poorest. We argue that the key change, to more extensive and explicit reliance on private payment, is likely to have disproportionately disadvantaged poor women. Yet the gendered impact of these payment systems on access to affordable, good-quality health care remains largely unresearched. User fees and out-of-pocket payment HSR in Africa has been an important driver of ‘informal commercialization’ of health systems, in which small-scale unregulated provision coexists with formal government user-fee systems and informal payments (Mackintosh and Koivusalo 2005a; Tibandebage et al. 2001). User fees in low-income government health care are generally unaccompanied by an effective exemption system and cause widespread exclusion of those unable to pay (Karanja et al. 1995; Booth et al. 1995; Gilson 1997; Tibandebage and Mackintosh 2002). There is some evidence that women have suffered disproportionately from feebased care. In a number of countries including Nigeria, Zimbabwe and Tanzania, the introduction of user fees was associated with a decline in utilization of reproductive health care: falling admissions of pregnant women, increased maternal deaths and morbidity rates among delivering mothers and their babies, and decline in the use of Maternal and Child Health (MCH) services were recorded (Standing 2002a; Ekwempu et al. 1990; Kutzin 1995; Walraven 1996). Standing (2002c: 17) notes that ‘anecdotally expenditure on health care for women and girls in some contexts is even more sensitive to price changes’ than men’s expenditure; in Nairobi the introduction of user fees at an STD clinic caused a 56 per cent


drop in attendance by women (over a nine-month period) and a 40 per cent decrease for men (Results 2004). Health insurance schemes In Uganda, fees in primary care have now been abolished, and in Ghana a fully national health insurance scheme is under construction. However a more common policy response to the exclusionary effects of fees has been the promotion of social and mutual health insurance. In the mid-1990s, eight sub-Saharan African countries including Kenya had some form of social health insurance (SHI), and five were considering it (Ethiopia, Ghana, Nigeria, Mozambique and Zimbabwe) (Gilson and Mills 1995). Tanzania introduced a social insurance scheme, the National Health Insurance Fund (NHIF) in 2001. Social health insurance (SHI) covers only workers in formal employment, generally a small and relatively advantaged part of the population in low-income countries. Some women will be covered in SHI as dependants of employed men, but as income earners women are relatively disadvantaged: they are less likely than men to be in formal-sector employment, and if formally employed tend to be concentrated in low status poorly paid occupations or lower-level positions. Unfortunately data on wage employment in Africa rarely distinguish formal from informal wage employment by gender. Women are highly active economically, but are much less likely than men to receive a wage or salary for their work (Table 11.1). Community-based Mutual Health Insurance (MHI), by contrast, aims to promote inclusion of the poor and other vulnerable groups. Schemes have been designed with features to promote inclusion such as paying premiums in instalments, provision for exemption of those unable to pay premiums, and payment during harvest time for those with unsteady seasonal income.

Table 11.1 Selected African countries: percentage of the labour force that is female, and percentage of the male and female labour force receiving wages or salaries (most recent year available)

Country

Year

% labour force female

% male labour force waged

% female labour force waged

Ghana Ethiopia Kenya Nigeria Tanzania Uganda Zimbabwe Zambia

1990 2000 1995 1995 2000 1995 2000 1995

51 41 46 36 42 48 45 45

33 10 32 49 n/a 21 51 31

9 7 12 33 n/a 7 22 9

Source: World Bank GenderStats http://devdata.worldbank.org/genderstats, accessed on 27 April 2004 and 24 April 2005.


However most community-based MHI schemes face a problem of very low participation rates. In Tanzania, many rural Community Health Fund (CHF) schemes were found to have participation rates below 10 per cent of eligible households (Tibandebage 2004).1 Such low enrolment is not unusual in developing countries; reasons cited by non-members include inability to pay, lack of transparency and a decision-making process that does not effectively involve members (Jutting and Tine 2000; Tibandebage 2004). Implementation of exemption for poor households has been weak. The low enrolment may disproportionately affect women since they are generally less able than men to afford payment at the time of illness, and are likely to have more health needs. In one rural scheme in Tanzania, members also lacked knowledge of some of the benefits they were entitled to, such as referral to a hospital, which could be disastrous for women with, for example, complicated pregnancies in need of hospital-level care but with no out-of-pocket cash (Tibandebage 2004). Who pays? Assumptions about women’s access to income HSR changes to payment mechanisms therefore appear to have relied upon assumptions about control of income within the household that were never, as far as we can find, made explicit in reform documents. Since women are disproportionately greater users of services than men, the key assumption seems to be that they have access to household income and funds borrowed from others to support these visits, or that they can pay from their own incomes. Societies vary widely in the extent to which funds are ‘pooled’ in a household. We can (tentatively) generalize that in most African societies, women need to earn money for themselves and to contribute to the support of their children. African societies are rich in mutual savings schemes also frequently run by women. There exist well documented forms of mutual resource support for health care costs: sharing of information and medicines, networks of personalized contacts with health workers; sharing domestic work to allow others to work for cash to pay fees; and mutual loans and gifts of cash for fees (Mackintosh 2000; Mackintosh and Gilson 2002; Booth et al. 1995; MacCormack and Lwihula 1983; Gilson et al. 1994; Moser 1998; Sauerborn et al. 1994). HSR therefore, by generalizing pay-as-you-go, has increased women’s need for cash to cope with their health care responsibilities towards family members, and the strain on low-income women is severe. Furthermore falling incomes and economic crisis undermine women’s participation in networks of mutual financial support (Moser 1998). In mutual health insurance, there is some evidence that building on existing cooperative savings schemes works better than stand-alone schemes since they are rooted in existing patterns of economic solidarity, yet World Bank and donor support has generally gone to stand-alone schemes (Atim 1999; Mackintosh and Gilson 2002). The UMASIDA insurance system in Tanzania (Kiwara 2000) builds on existing cooperative groups in the informal sector, including some women’s groups; on a larger scale, the health insurance scheme built in India by the SEWA organization has become well established (Ranson 2002).


A strong assumption behind the financing reforms in HSR was thus that women’s incomes and mutual support networks were robust enough to withstand the payments demanded. The sharp decline in usage and low levels of participation in community insurance schemes documented above show how unrealistic that assumption was in contexts of generalized poverty. The gendered impact of public health expenditure Health sector reforms promoting inequitable private funding mechanisms have sometimes been justified on the grounds that they shift the better-off to the private sector, and allowing the targeting of public finance to the poor. Others counter that privatization creates political pressures for subsidy and can leach the public sector of assets through sale, theft and ‘informal’ use (K. Sen 2003). The debate has generated poverty-focused assessments of public budgeting that unfortunately do not generally disaggregate the poor by gender (Naschold and Fozzard 2002; Booth and Lucas 2002; van der Westhuizen 2004). Most gender disaggregation of public expenditure and taxation is instead the result of ‘women’s budget’ initiatives, including those in South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda, Botswana, Malawi and Mozambique (Budlender 2000; TGNP 1999). The techniques of gender budgeting have been disseminated by, among others, the Commonwealth Secretariat (Mukhopadhyay et al. 2002) and UNIFEM. The African initiatives have explored the accessibility of the budget-making process to women, the extent of programmes specifically addressing women’s needs (such as reproductive health) and, with difficulty, the gendered impact of the main sectoral programmes including health (Budlender 1997). Financial data can appear to be, as interviewees for a South African Women’s Budget study put it, a ‘state secret’ (Klugman and McIntyre 2000). In South Africa, Tanzania and Uganda women politicians have been important in pressing for and publicizing information (Fleshman 2002). Tanzanian NGOs had trouble at first in getting access to the national public expenditure review (PER) process but the Tanzania Gender Networking Programme (TGNP) later became an invited member of PER meetings. TGNP were also commissioned to contribute to the Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (PRSP) process, and have lobbied successfully for gender-relevant indicators in monitoring health spending (Bridge 2004). These are key contributions to our understanding of the impact of healthfinance changes on women. To assess the gendered impact of HSR-financing changes requires an integrated assessment of fees and public finance in terms of their differential impact on women; this assessment has barely begun.

Women as workers, users and citizens in the health sector Key questions: How has HSR affected the conditions of women as health care workers? How have those effects in turn influenced women’s experience as health care users? What are the assumptions underlying HSR about women’s interactions as workers, users and citizens and are they correct?


As the ILO noted in 2004 in its social dialogue on gender and health services, ‘in most countries the workforce in the health sector is predominantly female’, yet ‘they fall at the bottom of the hierarchy in terms of authority, remuneration and qualification’ (www.ilo.org/dialogue, accessed on 27 April 2004). Case studies repeatedly confirm this, and it is likely to hold across Africa despite a tradition in some countries, including Mozambique, of men going into nursing (WHO 2003b; Ngufor 1999; Corkery 2000). Therefore downward pressure on wages, working conditions, employment and professionalism fall particularly strongly on women health workers in all sectors. Gendered private provision and its consequences A key aspect of health sector reforms in sub-Saharan Africa has been liberalization of private practice. Across the sub-continent from the 1980s onwards informal and formal small-scale private practice expanded as health workers sought to supplement plummeting public-sector incomes with fees from private patients. Dual practice in both public and private sectors became common, as did informal charging in public facilities. Private provision, largely unregulated, much of it of dubious quality, became particularly widespread in urban areas (Tibandebage et al. 2001; Mackintosh and Koivusalo (2005b); Bennett et al. 1997; Mills et al. 2001; Alubo 2001). Yet we know little about women’s work conditions in the private health sector. Expensive private clinics may provide nurses with better working conditions than the public sector,2 but wages and working conditions can be worse in the smallscale private sector than in the urban public sector. Private employers try to keep down costs by reducing wages using poorly trained staff; those who employ trained staff on decent wages find themselves undercut by those who do not (Tibandebage and Mackintosh 2002). Users of the small-scale unregulated private sector face problems including expired drugs, very poor diagnosis, over-prescribing and outright cheating, failure to identify and refer serious cases, and low levels of participation in immunization and public health education. As a result, lowincome women users in much of urban Africa find themselves paying money they cannot afford to low-paid women working in dangerous and insecure jobs: a vicious circle of gender disadvantage in which those with the lowest income are the most vulnerable to abuse. There are private-sector exceptions to these generalizations: some small private dispensaries visited in Tanzania in 1998 were doing preventative care (Vignette 1), and some private providers catering largely for the better-off displayed higher levels of probity. Patients interviewed, in the majority female, indicated that they valued the pleasant manner of the staff, and the short waiting times and lack of hassle, but that finding the money was a serious problem. Gendered hierarchy in the public sector and its consequences post-reform The liberalization of private practice alongside severe deterioration in the funding of the government sector has created strain and demoralization for many nurses


working in African public sectors. Researchers document public dissatisfaction with rude and abusive behaviour by some government health care staff, in particular on maternity wards (Bassett et al. 1997; Gilson et al. 1994; Tibandebage and Mackintosh 2002). Jewkes et al. (1998) found in South Africa that low-income patients, and those regarded as reprehensible such as teenagers, were most likely to face such abuse. There are however two sides of this story of mistreatment of women by (predominantly) women, and during some research the authors did in Tanzania in 1998, a matron in a maternity hospital put the nurses’ side of the story (Vignette 2).

Vignette 2 This kind of thing [bad behaviour] happens, and it is because of poor morale, low commitment, severe overwork and low salaries. Imagine, you are a nurse on duty … You may have a ward of 40–60 seriously ill patients … You are two trained people at best. How will you divide yourself? You are constantly over-working and under pressure. You are worried about family problems and commitments. For twelve hours you do not know what is happening to your children. And you may not have as much as a cup of tea. Then there is the problem of the commitment of other staff. You are a nurse by profession. The doctor, who is supposed to be responsible, works his official hours and goes away, he waits to be called. You are there, someone is bleeding and you cannot help them. She needs to be operated on, no one is there, there are no facilities … . Relatives rush to send the sick person to hospital, then we are not in a position to help the patient.

Public-sector decline and health sector liberalization tend to widen the gap in wages and working conditions between doctors and nurses. More doctors than nurses do additional private practice, and the ‘going rate’ for informal payments to doctors was substantially higher than for nurses.3 Nurses have far more contact with patients than doctors, and when the service falls apart they take most of the strain. The matron quoted above described an acute shortage of trained nurses; very low pay associated with the loss of allowances (such as for transport and uniforms, which they now had to pay for) as a result of reform; and lack of access to training opportunities since specialist nurse training courses now had to be paid for by the nurses themselves ‘and if people have a family they simply don’t see this as a possibility’. The result, as this matron confirmed, was that nurses had started to go abroad, initially from Tanzania to Zimbabwe. In the five years since then, this flow has accelerated from many African countries, as high-income countries have expanded international recruitment (Mensah 2005). Doctors migrate too and in Ghana, for example, most incentives aimed at retaining health care staff have been focused on doctors, increasing nurses’ resentment. Given that, as Mensah puts it, nurses are the ‘backbone’ of African health services, the rising out-migration is having extremely serious effects on services, and very specifically on primary provision on which low income women predominantly rely.


Gendered assumptions and scope for change Writing on the human-resource aspects of health care reform in the UK and their ‘lessons’ for other countries (for example, Buchan 2000) generally does not mention gender. Yet UK health-service reforms in the 1990s had strongly gendered effects, such as the shifting of work previously done by nurses to poorly trained social carers and auxiliaries, to the disadvantage of both low-paid women staff and low-income clients. Managerially led reforms tend to restructure in favour of the more powerful: gender, status and social class can interact, as institutions change, to the detriment of low-income women as both staff and patients (Towers et al. 2000; Mackintosh 1998). In much of the world, furthermore, trade unions as a voice for low-paid staff are weak. Trade unions have been ignored or denigrated by HSR policy-makers, who characterized them as a voice for provider interests, defined by assumption as in opposition to the interests of users. This lack of representation exacerbates deterioration of morale and professional ethics, and can generate a loss of staff rights to decent working conditions and wages, as research on Eastern European health sector reforms demonstrates (Afford 2003). A gender ‘lens’ on reform suggests that better outcomes can be built on an explicitly gendered framing of provider–user relationships. The ‘Health Workers for Change’ (HWFC) projects, in Africa and elsewhere, have built efforts to improve health care quality post-reform on the observation that interpersonal aspects of health care – such as respect and ability to listen – are important to quality of care and are also gendered. Female health workers have somewhat different styles of work than men; female health care users have specific needs, and may encounter gender-specific forms of discrimination and abuse (Haaland and Vlassoff 2001; Hartigan 2001; Fonn and Xaba 2001). Projects such as the Women’s Health Project in South Africa have built collaborative efforts with health care staff to explore frustrations and shift behaviour. There is evidence of positive impact on quality of care in four African countries, resulting in part from greater recognition among health workers of the constraints on healthseeking behaviour faced by poor women (Onyango-Ouma et al. 2001). The HWFC literature argues that understanding health systems as gendered was crucial to these outcomes. While HSR models ignore trade unions, they do repeatedly propose community participation in priority-setting, notably as part of decentralization of the management of health care and Sector-Wide Approaches (SWAps) to funding that pool some donor resources. In Bangladesh and India, local women’s NGO groups have managed to bring women’s health needs to the attention of government officials and health care providers (Evers and Juarez, n.d). In Africa, that kind of organizational initiative to ensure women’s representation, and to support their capacity to take part effectively in decision-making and be committed advocates of the interests of those they represent, remains weak (Foster 1999).


Reproductive health and HSR Key question: Has HSR improved health systems’ capacity to help redress women’s vulnerability to reproductive ill health? If not, why not? Reproductive health as a key aspect of women’s health

Vignette 3 A 16-year-old girl from a poor rural family was about to complete primary school, but had often been sent home for lack of school supplies. One day a man offered her gifts and bought her exercise books. In return he wanted a relationship. Because she felt she needed his help, the girl accepted and knowing nothing about contraception she soon got pregnant. She hid her pregnancy until an advanced stage and then had to quit school. She went through almost the whole pregnancy without attending an ante-natal clinic. At delivery she was taken to a nearby health centre and there was a delay as the mother rushed back home to borrow the money. The girl had complications during delivery and because of her young age and the delay she lost the baby. Luckily the girl survived.

Globally, 20 per cent of the burden of disease among women of reproductive age is connected with sex and reproduction; in sub-Saharan Africa it is 40 per cent (UNFPA 2002). Women and adolescent girls continue to face uncontrolled fertility, maternal morbidity and mortality, unwanted pregnancy, early childbearing, sexually transmitted diseases including HIV/AIDS, sexual violence, and female genital mutilation (FGM) which often results in reproductive-health-related complications. The average maternal mortality rate in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) is 1,000 deaths per 100,000 live births as compared to a world average of 400 (UNFPA 2002) Africa has one of the highest teenage pregnancy rates in the world, often resulting in unsafe abortion (WHO 2000b). The patriarchal ideology which treats women as inferior to men and allows them few decision-making powers also continues to bear heavily on women’s sexual and reproductive health. Women lack freedom over their sexual lives, putting them at risk of contracting STDs as unwilling partners, and lack resources for reproductive and other health needs. Adolescent girls are immensely vulnerable, especially girls struggling to cope with poverty in ways that puts their health at risk in a health system that cannot assure their protection nor meet their health needs. Contrast this situation with the essential elements of reproductive health agreed at the International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) held in Cairo 1994 including: having a satisfying, safe sexual life; access to appropriate, safe, effective, affordable and acceptable methods of family planning based on informed choice and dignity; prevention, diagnosis and treatment of STIs/ STDs/HIV; services for safe pregnancy and childbirth; elimination of harmful practices (FGM, domestic violence, sexual trafficking); and emphasis on poverty alleviation, girls’ education, women’s empowerment and reproductive rights. Also


emphasized was the role of civil society and community in promoting sexual and reproductive health. HSR should be judged on whether it has focused or diverted health systems from tackling this huge burden of reproductive ill health in the context of the HIV/AIDS pandemic. In 2001, SSA had 3.5 million people newly infected with HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS 2002). There, women have generally higher infection rates than men. Women accounted for 59 per cent of the 2.23 million adults estimated to be living with HIV in Tanzania in 2001, and young women aged 15–24 had twice the prevalence rate of young men (8.06 per cent compared to 3.55 per cent) (World Bank 2002). In Uganda, HIV infection rates were rising fastest among Ugandan women aged 15–25 years (Ochieng 2003). Service disintegration and the implications for reproductive health Given this crisis, one would expect that health sector reorganization would ensure that sexual and reproductive health was given top priority. However, while funding for HIV/AIDS has risen, HSR has been associated with a much-contested retreat from the policy of integrated primary health care for all established by the Alma Ata declaration in 1977 (WHO 1978; LaFond 1995). The shift to targeted vertical ‘interventions’ associated with HSR pulled apart the principle of integrated primary care for women’s and children’s needs that had previously been seen as key to effective provision. The disintegration of primary care was reinforced over time since private providers are reluctant to undertake unprofitable aspects of preventative care and donors prefer to fund ‘vertical’ programmes operating independently of other provision. Women and men may therefore need to visit different providers for different needs, a source of strain, time loss, confusion and expense. Oliff et al. (2003) argue that new funds set up to address the crisis of HIV/AIDS have also favoured top-down, selective and donor-driven activity, noting that in Tanzania the government has since 1995 (just a year after Cairo) actively been trying to integrate reproductive health programmes with each other nationally and at district level with very limited success. It is widely accepted that effective and universal reproductive health programmes produce major benefits to women’s and children’s health, and disintegration wastes resources and undermines access. Yet pleas for dialogue between reproductive health policy-makers and campaigners and health sector reform proponents have been made for many years yet appear still to be going unheard (Lubben et al. 2002; Tangcharoensathien 2002). Standing (2002b: 25) states that ‘Health sector reforms have largely marginalised the Cairo agenda’. Berer (2002) argues that HSR has undermined reproductive health through disease-based prioritizing of public funding, insufficient attention to evidence on the effectiveness and social importance of reproductive health care, and the loss of public-sector capacity to provide care. These have combined with explicit rejection of sexual and reproductive health rights by ultra-conservative religious movements and institutions to undermine provision for women’s needs and the needs of the next generation.


Gendered health sector reform meets the labour market: paid work, unpaid work, poverty and a gendered crisis of care Key questions: To what extent is the context of HSR one of unmanageable burdens of paid and unpaid work for some categories of impoverished women? To what extent is HSR exacerbating or relieving those burdens?

Vignette 4 A middle-aged woman runs a fruit-and-vegetable stall near her home. Her husband is a clerk in a government office, and she helps in buying food items and paying for her health expenses and sometimes the children’s. She also does all the caring for her three young children, cooking, cleaning and fetching water from a nearby well. She has to run her petty business close to home because there is no one else to care for the children, since all adults are now trying to earn some money. She is usually exhausted by the end of the day, while her husband hardly does any housework. She says however that she must struggle on with the business because everything now requires money, including health care and education. Overwork is taking its toll on her health.

African women bear disproportionately the burden of unpaid work, and have long needed to earn cash for their own and their children’s needs. The economic crisis and subsequent economic and social-sector reform programmes have escalated costs of basic needs such as food, health care and children’s education, making the combined pressures of paid and unpaid work more severe. Women survive by working longer hours and years in low-return income-generating activities in the informal sector (Whitehead 2001). This survival strategy in turn generates overwork, affecting women’s health and increasing their health care needs – yet ironically it may not pay enough to cater for increased health care, creating another vicious circle of ill-health. Because of multiple working and caring roles at home and in the workplace, women find it difficult to allocate time to seeking health care when they are sick; long distance, long waits and staff absent from government facilities make the vicious circle worse. The crisis of care in the midst of HIV/AIDS and the plight of elderly women The scale of the AIDS epidemic has cruelly exposed the inadequacy of the assumptions about women’s ‘coping’ capacity that implicitly underpinned health-sector reform: notably that the fees were manageable and that care in the home to reduce the need for paid care could be supported by women. The convergence of generalized poverty, fees, high work burdens, ill-health of both care givers and care receivers, and the loss of substantial numbers of the economically active population has put a completely unmanageable burden on the shoulders of, particularly, elderly women, with very serious implications for the current generation of children.


It is in the plight of elderly women that these pressures are exposed at their very worst. AIDS death rates and the numbers of AIDS orphans in Africa are staggering. By 2001, 83 per cent of world AIDS deaths had occurred in sub-Saharan Africa, including 90 per cent of those dying before 15 years. In 2000 92 per cent of the global total of 13.2 million AIDS orphans were in SSA (UNAIDS 2002; Africa Action 2000). As women and men aged 15–49 succumb to the epidemic, the elderly are forced to take care of their terminally ill adult children and then to care for their orphaned grandchildren. In Tanzania an assessment of the economic and social impact of HIV/AIDS found 34 per cent of carers of orphans interviewed in schools were grandparents, some taking care of as many as eight grandchildren (ESRF 2004). In South Africa and Uganda 40 per cent of orphaned children were found to be living with their grandparents; in Zimbabwe the proportion was more than half (HelpAge International and the International Alliance on HIV/AIDS 2003, citing Ainsworth and Filmer 2002; Subbarao and Coury 2003) The gendered division of labour continues to ascribe domestic work and caring for children and the sick to women, in this case grandmothers, and women also live longer than men. In Zimbabwe, two-thirds of 685 older care givers interviewed were women. Often in ill-health and unable to take care of themselves adequately, elderly women are a vulnerable group needing care and financial support, yet the epidemic robs them of the support of their adult children. Doubly disadvantaged – as female and elderly – they are among the poorest groups in society, now forced to take on the additional burden of caring and raising their grandchildren within the context of decreasing economic means and disintegrating family networks. Taking on the additional responsibility of caring for their orphaned grandchildren means struggling to meet food, clothing, health and education expenses for the grandchildren. Elderly women’s poor health is exacerbated by physical and emotional stress when taking care of their terminally ill adult children, and they risk infection because they lack information on ways to protect themselves (HelpAge International and The International Alliance on HIV/AIDS 2003). After their children die, the worsening strain and hardship is illustrated by an interview with an elderly woman in a South Western town of Tanzania (Vignette 5). Vignette 5 This elderly lady is a widow who has seen her two sons die and is caring for the children of both sons. Her only way of making an income is to buy vegetables, split them up into small parcels and resell them retail. The money is not enough to feed the children properly, nor herself. The children now go to school (since primary school fees were abolished) but cannot come home for lunch because there is no food for them. She herself is weak and sick from poor diet. There will be cumulative effects of poor diet for the children.

HSR has in no way alleviated this cumulative burden of caring for the sick and dying, raising children in old age and struggling to make ends meet to pay for food, school books and clothes. Rather, it has added to needs for cash and unpaid


work in the context of an eroding family support system and inadequate or total lack of a formal social protection system for the elderly.

Conclusions The social context of unequal gender relations adversely affects women’s health and overall well-being, both directly and through its health-service effects (Cuttingham and Mynttri 2002). The health sector reflects established gender hierarchies within its staffing and priority-setting; when it responds poorly to women’s needs it reinforces women’s relative social and economic disadvantage, undermining women’s capacity to earn and care for themselves and others. A discriminatory and inequitable health sector reinforces other aspects of women’s relative lack of rights and dignity in societies that are highly unequal in terms of both gender and social class. Health sector reform, far from challenging these mutually reinforcing forms of gender disadvantage, appears to have made some of them worse. This chapter has argued that these failures appear rooted in invalid assumptions about women’s responsibilities and capabilities to cope with rising work burdens. A conceptualization of HSR as gendered institutional change would have highlighted the dangers – for women and for population health – of exacerbating women’s expenditure and work burdens to unmanageable proportions and of reinforcing women’s relative disadvantage at the lower end of health systems’ work and care hierarchies. A gender ‘lens’ on the proposed reforms would have questioned the desirability, for example, of user fees and refocused attention on improving the relationships and integration of services within primary care. So what would it take to build instead a more gender-equitable set of health sector institutions? Here are some propositions. 1. Design reform of health care finance in such a way that it does not increase the burden on the incomes of poor women, nor the relative economic disadvantage of women in general. This requires more information on women’s control over resources, integrated into the design of health-financing mechanisms. 2. Design health sector reform to promote equality between male and female health workers and to improve the working conditions of lower-level staff. This requires close attention to the gender-differentiated and interacting needs of both staff and patients. 3. Involve women equally with men, both as staff and citizens, in health sector reform from the most local to the highest level. Women’s knowledge and perspectives are essential to achieve policy design that is not discriminatory on gender lines, basing itself rather on concepts of equal citizenship: draw on and support women’s organizations for this purpose. 4. Do not undertake reforms that increase the work burden of women, especially poor women; instead, design approaches that reduce those burdens. This may also require men to carry a greater share of the burden of unpaid care.


5. Build links between reproductive health care and provision for the other health needs of women in ways that reduce the strain upon women of accessing care. This requires investigating women’s points of view on how to integrate services. 6. Introduce reforms outside the health sector that strengthen women’s rights and status, hence their ability to deal with the health sector on more equal terms with men. This requires strengthening women’s rights and dignity through supportive laws, policies and organizations.

Acknowledgement We thank Shahra Razavi, Debbie Budlender, Susan Himmelweit, Dzodzi Tsikata and all participants in the UNRISD workshop on Gender and Social Policy in Maarstrand, Sweden, May 2005, for helpful comments on an earlier draft. The chapter is the sole responsibility of the authors.

Notes 1 One scheme has subsequently achieved higher rates: P. Mujinja, personal communication. 2 Anecdotally, this seems to be the case in Accra, Ghana, where highly skilled nurses have moved from the government hospitals to private specialist clinics. 3 Authors’ fieldwork.

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12 Health Sector Reform in China: Gender Equality and Social Justice Jufen Wang1

Introduction In any country the most important aspects of social policy are the social security and social welfare systems. These systems are not only the results of social and economic development but also, through the redistribution of national income, can actively enable the harmonious, stable and healthy development of society. Moreover, these systems can strengthen people’s capacity to identify and avoid risks and accommodate unexpected events. The Constitution of China (PRC) states that the ‘citizens of PRC are entitled to obtain physical assistance from state and society in old age and ill health’. There is insufficient theoretical research on social security in China. For a long time, Chinese social security theory lacked a clear definition. Social security was understood in terms of social insurance, which in turn was equated with labour insurance. For example, social security rights were defined as the rights enabling workers to access necessary help from the nation and society when they lose their ability or opportunity to work temporarily or permanently through [factors such as] old age, disease, disability, unemployment or other difficulties Guo and Li 2001: 173 Another government publication stated that ‘social security in China is labour insurance during the planned economy era’ (DoP 1998: 401). Only in 1999 did Ge provide a clear definition of social security in his book Social Security Economics, in which he stated that Social security is a series of organized measures, systems and services in which the state or nation offers concrete assistance for those in difficulty relying on special funding forcefully raised through distribution and redistribution of national income according to state legislation to secure social stability. Social security is a basic right for members of society. The nation has a legal responsibility to secure livelihood rights for the members of its society Ge 1999: 2 258

Health Sector Reform in China 259

Ge was an early proponent of social security theory and an acknowledged expert in the field in China. This new definition was based on the government’s new vision of social security in a more liberalized context, which imposed a greater degree of responsibility for welfare on the individual rather than the government. Healthcare insurance is one of the fundamental components of social security. China’s healthcare insurance system was originally instigated at the beginning of 1950s, soon after the establishment of the People’s Republic of China. The health care sector began reforming some forty years later, in the late 1990s. The aim of this chapter is to examine the nature of social justice within the reformed healthcare system in urban areas from a gender perspective. I integrate issues of poverty, social differentiation, migration and income inequality with gender to examine the impacts of social policy on both the pre-existing urban populations and the huge new populations of migrants who are rapidly settling into Chinese cities and towns. Migrants are excluded from the social security systems through a bureaucratic inflexibility predicated on the government’s binary conception of rural and urban environments and people. Local authority management is one of the main principles of the basic healthcare insurance system for China’s urban employees. Different schemes reflect differentiation in local economic development and differences in the length of operation of the scheme itself. It is difficult to get comprehensive details about schemes across all regions of China and, as a result, it is not possible to comment comprehensively on insurance reform in this chapter. Consequently, I have restricted my focus to the Shanghai region alone. The level of economic development in Shanghai is so far in advance of other regions, especially those in the west, that Shanghai cannot, of itself, represent all of China. However, since the model of insurance reform eventually adopted in Shanghai was based on the ‘Liangjiang’ model discussed in greater detail below, the research reported here outlines one city’s experience with the implementation of a systematic reform option from which useful lessons may be drawn.

Background to health sector reform in urban China The main characteristic of the healthcare insurance system established in the 1950s was its dual operating regime: the ‘Laobao’ and ‘Gongfei’ healthcare schemes operated in the cities benefiting urban workers. The former covered workers in state-owned and cooperative businesses. The latter covered those employed in the bureaucracy, service and administrative sectors of the state, which included civil servants, teachers, doctors and so on (Zheng 2002). At the same time, the ‘Hezuo Yiliao’ or cooperative medicare scheme operated for the population in rural areas. This dual system corresponded to the differing economic development of urban and rural areas of the time and was also consistent with the linked but separate production patterns in which state ownership dominated in cities and collective ownership dominated in rural areas. The Laobao scheme came into being with the 1951 ‘Labour Insurance Regulations in China’. The beneficiaries of this system included workers and their

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direct relatives based in state-owned enterprises. Insurance covered all the workers’ own medical expenses and 50 per cent of their relatives’ medical expenses. The following year, in August 1952, the government released a set of detailed regulations for a second healthcare insurance system that became known as the Gongfei system. The latter applied to workers in government institutions, the medical and education sectors and other public-sector-oriented services. In the post-Mao economic reform era serious drawbacks in the Gongfei and Laobao systems have appeared and the main problems are discussed here with particular reference to the structural inequalities. The issue of geography is also pertinent as is the process of devolvement of responsibility by the central government. One of the first casualties of economic transition has been the two main providers of healthcare within the social security system of Maoist, socialist urban China: the Gongfei and Laobao systems. Neither system is now supported by the realities of the market-oriented economy. Previously, state ownership had dominated the Chinese economic structure and the dominant state-owned economic structure ensured that all of the urban population had access to health insurance. At the end of the 1970s, China began its economic reforms by restructuring the patterns of ownership. The new policy accepted state ownership as the main type of ownership, while all other patterns of ownership were also to be allowed. Private enterprises, joint ventures and other forms of companies and institutions were henceforth permitted, ushering in a new era of economic flexibility. With the introduction of this major structural reform and the accompanying social change, the urban population found that they had other options to add to the once abbreviated list of employment with either stated-owned or collective companies. However, while non-state-owned enterprises and companies (SOEs) proliferated they were also excluded from the established system of healthcare, something the population rapidly became aware of. The continued benefits of the Gongfei and Laobao systems not only affected the way in which the newly created labour market operated but also the nature of uptake of care. A survey conducted in 1998 by the State Medical Service determined that the highest hospitalization rate in the urban population was amongst those covered by the Gongfei (89.97 per cent) and Laobao (60.32 per cent) insurance systems. Those who have to pay at their own expense exhibited the lowest rate of hospitalization, at only 29.49 per cent. The main explanation for this differential was the nature of entitlement to healthcare insurance (Zhang et al. 2003: 148). Furthermore, the original medical insurance system as it operated through the Gongfei and Laobao systems led to conflicts concerning the schemes’ financial solvency in the post-1978 reform period. Neither system had established its own funding source: the Gongfei scheme was funded by governmental appropriations while the Laobao scheme was funded from the business welfare funds within each individual enterprise. In the post-1978 market-oriented economic system, the Laobao insurance system had to rely heavily on the new concept of business profits. In contrast the Gongfei system was affected by the capacity of local governments to raise their own revenues rather than rely on centrally distributed funds. A further problem lay in the way in which the compensation mechanism


for hospitals operated. Government budgets were proving insufficient to fund hospitals, leading to an imbalance between the supply of medical services and compensation for costs arising through the normal provision of those services. Hospitals now increasingly depend on profits generated from the difference between service price and the cost of the medicine, aided by discounts offered by the pharmaceutical industry and the expansion of commercially oriented business practices to fund hospital costs. State-owned hospitals are thus facing problematic choices about how and whether to maximize profits. One of the ways in which hospitals have pursued profits has been to increase the charges for people treated under the Laobao and Gongfei systems. Unfortunately, the new costs often exceed the financial capabilities of the government and enterprises and result in difficulties in implementing either of these insurance systems. Drug and treatment innovations, while of great benefit to patients, also increase the cost of healthcare. For instance, from 1979 to 1999 the average rate of medical costs for employees in Shanghai increased by 29 per cent per annum, significantly exceeding the average annual rate of increase in GNP of 9.5 per cent (Chen and Chou 2002). The regulations of the urban medical-care insurance system constructed in the 1950s undertook to cover all medical expenses for all types of treatment needed by the patient. This aspect of the insurance system further exacerbated the growth of medical expenditure. Unsurprisingly, by the 1990s, the traditional urban healthcare insurance system faced serious fiscal problems. In particular, since Gongfei medical care was funded by local governments, the bynow huge expenditure on healthcare placed large financial burdens on the entire society, threatening and restricting the development of the other sectors. Successful enterprises faced development problems as a result of bearing the heavy medical expenses for those employees covered by the Laobao scheme. In the most extreme cases, as a direct result of medical outlays, enterprise finances lay in arrears. Such enterprises could not afford to continue paying the medical expenses for Laobao patients, especially those with chronic illnesses. By the end of 1999 the total medical expense arrears for Laobao insurance in Shanghai alone totalled almost 20 billion Yuan (Chen and Chou 2002). The Gongfei and Laobao urban healthcare schemes were based on the ‘Hukou’ or household registration system, according to which the Chinese population is subject to a residence-based system which controls access to goods, services and products. Those in urban areas were in receipt of considerable subsidies which covered a wide range of goods and services and which were denied to the rural population. The Hukou system also prevented migration from rural to urban areas. Since the establishment of the reform policy and mass urban-ward migration the registered urban population under the Hukou system no longer corresponds to the actual urban population. It is estimated that about 120 million rural workers are living in, or migrating between, cities all over the country. Very few are granted a formal registration permit allowing them access to the medical and education systems and the other benefits accruing to the recognized urban population. By 2004, Shanghai’s migrant population is estimated to have reached 4.99 million (CPN 2005). Most did not have medical insurance.

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Reform of the Chinese urban health care insurance system Reform of the Chinese urban healthcare system started with the delivery of the document on ‘Decisions on the establishment of basic healthcare insurance for urban employees’ by the State Council in December 1996. There had been earlier attempts to reform the health insurance system. In the early 1980s, reforms aimed to reduce expenditure on medical services. These State Council-led experimental strategies considered the establishment of special insurance funds for particular diseases, cost-sharing strategies and careful accounting of the population covered by insurance schemes (Liang et al. 2003: 40). A variety of healthcare models were piloted at the local-area level, notably the Liangjiang Model named after the cities of Zhengjiang, in Jiangsu province, and Qiujiang, in Jiangxi province. The three central features of the Liangjiang model were: a public fund, personal accounts, and a three-stage payment system. By 1996, the experiment had been expanded to nearly forty cities. At the end of 1998, the State Council promulgated a further document entitled ‘Urban employees’ basic healthcare insurance scheme’ which stated that basic healthcare insurance schemes should be managed at the local authority level and reflect current levels of economic development. The implication of this was that areas with higher rates of economic growth would be expected to establish more comprehensive forms of healthcare insurance for their population, while governments in low-growth areas would not be expected to achieve the same standards of healthcare insurance, thereby resulting in a patchwork of differing health insurance regimes across the country and with restrictions on the transfer of policies between the cities. Despite this flexibility with respect to economic context, all urban residents are required to participate in the scheme. The document also requires that under this new national insurance system costs be jointly borne by employers and employees (http://www.em800.com). Health care reform in Shanghai Under the articles of the 1998 State Council document, Shanghai was directed to put together a multi-level medical insurance system, building on the reforms to the Gongfei and Laobao systems. The aim was to enable different types of medical insurance systems (including commercial insurance) to operate and respond to the needs of different groups of people. Shanghai responded not just by implementing a basic healthcare insurance scheme but also by broadening the remit of schemes to include serious disease and hospitalization insurance plans under the aegis of the Shanghai Trade Union, childbearing or maternity insurance, comprehensive insurance for migrant workers and complementary healthcare insurance for civil servants. These are discussed later. The trade union does not provide any services; rather, the function of the trade union’s insurance programme is to only remit a certain percentage of the costs to the individual. The new basic healthcare insurance system for urban employees was implemented in 2001 and currently represents the major part of the healthcare insurance system. It covers workers recorded in Shanghai’s household system or who have


been granted ‘green cards’ for residence in Shanghai.2 Basic insurance is also granted to retired workers, mainly from the city of Shanghai. It excludes those retired workers who worked in other cities and returned to Shanghai upon retirement. This exclusion results from the way in which healthcare insurance schemes are tied to individual cities and reflects the local and non-transferable nature of accumulation and social responsibility of devolved governments. Moreover, as employees’ healthcare insurance is funded by both employers and employees themselves, healthcare provision is situated within the workplace and is not transferable if or when an employee moves to another job. Participants in the basic healthcare insurance programme can choose to access medical services anywhere within a city, except private hospitals. Should workers move to another city, their right to a health insurance scheme remains with their original workplace, and they must start a new scheme with their new employers. Such health insurance schemes exclude the unemployed who only have rights to unemployment insurance. However, the self-employed can be included if they choose to pay the insurance premiums themselves. Five characteristics of the post-reform urban basic healthcare insurance, as it operates in Shanghai, can be differentiated. Firstly, the new scheme not only combines aspects of both the Gongfei and Laobao systems but has been extended to employees of all sectors. Secondly, the establishment of public funds has been an innovation. Public funds improve risk-management capacities and allow funds to be used across broader sections of society, acting as a mechanism for the reallocation of national income. Additionally, public funds support socioeconomic development in a long-term and sustainable manner. Thirdly, the post-reform scheme has emphasized the shared responsibilities of the state, employers and employees. The public fund is financed both by employers and employees through contributions from employers equivalent to 12 per cent of an employee’s salary. Employees meanwhile contribute 2 per cent of their wages. The first 50 per cent of the payment made by the employer goes into the public funds, henceforth referred to as social funds, while the second 50 per cent goes to an employee’s individual account along with the employee’s contribution. Fourthly, the new basic healthcare scheme aims to be more financially efficient. It emphasizes individual responsibility as well as the benefits of healthcare insurance. The amounts transferred into a personal account from the social funds vary according to the age and the level of individual contributions. Individuals do have a certain degree of individual control over the funds. For example, since there is no time limitation on the use of the funds in each personal account, should the fund not be used it can be accessed during older age. It is hoped that this aspect of the policy will motivate people to save into the funds as the monies are never lost to the individual and can be transferred to relatives or children. Fifthly, healthcare insurance is utilized via sequential stages of entitlement: personal account, individual payment and shared responsibility. With diagnosis of a disease or injury, patients commence using the funds in their personal accounts to pay for their healthcare expenses. After using up the money in this account, they reach the second stage of individual payments whereby the costs must be borne by

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themselves or their family. Once their payments for health care reach a sum equivalent to 10 per cent of the average wage in Shanghai for the previous year, the system moves into the third stage. At this stage, the costs are recouped from individuals and the social fund. The level of individual financial responsibility is correlated with both the grade of the hospital used by the patient and the age of the patient. Individuals bear the largest portion of medical expenses when in receipt of treatment from the most prestigious hospitals; individuals bear an intermediate cost of medical expenses if they seek treatment in second-grade hospitals while they pay the least amount if they use third-grade or community hospitals. These sums are also calculated according to age, with older people paying a smaller proportion of the incurred expenses compared to younger age groups. When expenditure exceeds 400 per cent of the average wage of the preceding year public insurance funds are closed to a particular patient. Gender implications of urban health care reforms The fundamental aim of the reforms was to secure the basic medical needs of urban workers but the new health care scheme has also generated some urgent problems. These problems have important implications for social equity, the availability of urban medical services and the coordinated development of society as a whole. The two important indices used in examining and evaluating the degree of social equity inherent in health care insurance systems are extent of coverage and benefit levels. The following discussion explores whether the new health care insurance scheme can bring equal benefits for male and female workers, and whether or not it accords with the national policy of gender equity. The conditions of admission to, or coverage guaranteed by, the insurance schemes, shows that having employee status is essential. But the extent and types of employment opportunities for women, especially formal opportunities, are more restricted than for men. This is unquestionably a barrier for women wishing to join the basic health insurance scheme; the number of female workers eligible for health care insurance is certainly smaller than the number of male workers. As insurance statistics published by the state and Shanghai city are not classified by gender, it is only possible to infer from the principle of this scheme that it is likely to cover male workers more effectively than women workers. Data from Zhenjiang province supports this hypothesis. The numbers of participants in the Zhenjiang basic health care insurance scheme in 1997, 1998 and 2001 remained almost unchanged at nearly 280,000. Men made up more than 57 per cent of the scheme’s population (Jiang et al. 2004). Different employment rates between genders will unavoidably mean that women will not benefit as much as men from the urban basic health care insurance system. The current basic medical insurance for urban workers does not take into account gender differences in income. Like other countries in the world, the average wage for males in China is higher than that for females. Currently, women’s wage levels are only 70.1 per cent of those of men. The implementation of economic reforms in China has done little to reduce the gender wage gap; instead the gap has been widening (Li et al. 2003). The present basic health care


scheme for urban workers fails to consider this gendered wage differential. As contributions to the health insurance scheme are based on wage levels and as men’s average wages are higher than women’s, men’s contribution to the social funds will be greater than those of women. This means that women are unable to build up the same levels of insurance premiums as men, which in turn means that they will not be able to access the same levels of professional care as men. In addition, the average age of retirement for women is five years earlier than that of men. Thus, men will contribute more to insurance funds over their working lifetime compared to women. Furthermore, as the regulations governing medical insurance mean that the retired population can utilize the funds on retirement age, women will access their funds sooner than men and over a longer period as female life expectancy is higher. According to the Shanghai Statistical Yearbook, the average life expectancy of women in Shanghai reached 81.8 years in 2003, while that of men reached 77.8 years (SSB 2004). If it is assumed that women will retire five years earlier and die four years later than men, they will need to use, potentially, some nine years more of funds compared to their male counterparts. The insurance system therefore effectively discriminates against both men, who make greater contributions, and women, who do not have access to the same level of funds. Age is also an important factor with regard to the basic health care insurance program for urban workers in Shanghai. Age is important for a number of reasons. Older people are more susceptible to ill-health. Different age cohorts experience differing exposure to environments, diseases and events which may compromise health and well-being. In general, the older population survive on their pensions and rarely have access to surplus income which they can invest in insurance schemes. Additionally, since the reforms’ principles mean that funds in individual accounts accrue over a lifetime the older population have been excluded from the long-term accumulation process. However, provision has been made to credit the insurance premiums of the older population: retired workers are not required to make contributions to health care insurance, rather their accounts are credited using the social funds, and the payments they are required to make, for outpatient care for example, have been reduced in comparison to the working population. Considerable research underpins the identification of differences in life expectancy for women and men. Women experience longer durations of ill-health at older ages compared with men. In Spain, in the over-65 age group, women experience, on average, some 12 years of health problems at a level sufficient to require bed-based rest; the average for men is nine years (United Nations 2000). Analyses on the healthy-life expectancy of Shanghai citizens conducted by the Shanghai Disease Prevention and Control Centre indicate that over 50 per cent of women’s excess average life expectancy is lived in a non-healthy state (Zhou et al. 2001). Chronic diseases result in medical expenses and high nursing fees, which can easily become a heavy burden for older women. The current basic health care insurance scheme stipulates that once the stage of shared responsibility has been reached, pensioners must pay between 10 per cent and 20 per cent of their total medical expenses, regardless of gender. Owing to women’s lower wages and

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reduced pensions, the same share of total medical expenses imposes a heavier burden on female pensioners. The threshold set for individual payments is relatively higher for the female population than the male. As outlined above, insurance scheme regulations separate medical payments for health care into three sequential phases: a personal account stage; an individual payment stage; and a stage in which costs are shared. The third stage is only encountered once individual payments for health care have exceeded a sum equivalent to 10 per cent of the average wage in the preceding year. Since the amount of money in the individual payment stage is not directly related to individual income, actual income will affect and restrict access to medical services when needed. This is because 10 per cent of the average wage of the whole city in the previous year is a lower sum for high-income earners compared to those on low incomes. As women’s wages are generally lower than men’s, this aspect of the insurance system has important implications for women through restricting their access to medical services. Given that the average male wage equals the average wage of the city as a whole, an individual payment represents one month’s salary for a man. For the average woman, whose wages tend to be less than the city average, an individual payment represents a month and one quarter’s salary. Consequently, with respect to proportional income, female workers are required to pay more for the same medical services. The 10 per cent threshold was originally intended to ensure that insurance participants did not abuse the shared-responsibility aspect of the system by requiring patients to first pay for a certain share of their own medical expenses. The unequal gender impacts are an unfortunate outcome of this attempt to counteract abuse of the system. Finally, because of the exclusion of workers’ spouses and children the current basic health care scheme for urban workers augments the burden on single mothers. Though no document has ever announced the exclusion of spouses and children to medical benefits (there were different provisions in the Gongfei and Laobao systems), the majority of units have abandoned this original broader aspect to medical health care. Some units still follow the previous Gongfei and Laobao regulations on the inclusion of spouses. Since children of divorced families tend to live with their mothers, any medical expenses will add to their mothers’ financial burdens. This is not the only kind of bias that adversely affects women in a strictly individualistic system such as this; the other exclusion is of women who are full-time unpaid carers (taking care of young children, the elderly and so on) who will not be able to receive any coverage as ‘dependants’ (if their husbands are covered). Gender differences in the accumulation of individual insurance accounts The accumulation of individual insurance accounts is a new aspect of medical insurance in China. This component of the system was drawn from the Singaporean experience which emphasized individual responsibility in order to try and reduce overuse of medical services. But, as discussed above, a scheme based

Health Sector Reform in China 267 Table 12.1 Shanghai social healthcare scheme, contributions by percentage and age Age

Percentage of wages contributed to scheme

Below 35 years

2% of the individual average wage ⫹ 0.5% of the average wage 2% of the individual average wage ⫹ 1% of the average wage 2% of the individual average wage ⫹ 1.5% of the average wage 4% of the average wage 4.5% of the average wage

35–44 years 45 years to retirement Retirement to 74 years 75 years and older

Source: Shanghai Health Care Insurance Bureau (2000).

on wage contributions and employment status results in gender differences in the accumulation of funds in individual accounts. This is shown in the above table, which illustrates the range of health care insurance contributions by age and wage. Table 12.1 shows that, under the present scheme, the funds in an individual’s account funds can be divided into two parts dependent on the sources of monies. The first part consists of the health care insurance fees paid by individuals and credited into individual accounts; the second part consists of an allocation from the social fund (calculated by average wage). Though the latter payment is the same for both genders of the same age, the former payment is based on individual incomes. Thus, women’s lower wages directly result in smaller average sums in women’s individual accounts compared with those of men even if men and women had started work and retired at the same age. Additionally, since wages increase with age and experience, an earlier retirement age for women means that they lose out on the opportunity to benefit from the most senior posts and most advantageous salaries. This aggravates the gender inequity in individual account accumulation. Furthermore, as part of the individual account comes from the social funds, and is based on the social average wage, the earlier retirement policy for women deprives them of a further opportunity to benefit from higher-level salaries. All these elements point to the lower capacity of female individual accounts to accumulate funds compared to their male counterparts. This lower level of fund accumulation combined with women’s longevity and higher probability of ill-health in extreme old age will mean that women will encounter illness and poverty simultaneously. Differential impacts of the shared responsibility aspects of the insurance system In the shared-responsibility stage, under the principles of joint individual and social responsibility, individual payments are made according to age, and grade of hospital, but regardless of income, and can range between 10 per cent and 55 per cent of the total medical expenses. As a result of the gender wage differential, and assuming an equal probability of disease and access to the same grade of hospital care, women pay more, relative to income, than men of the same age.

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In order to explore this further it is assumed that consumption and needs can be divided into three categories in a model based on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs (Maslow 1970). The first of these categories of demand is basic subsistence (food, shelter and transportation), the second, health (medical care), and the last category is leisure (culture, recreation and travel). These three categories differ in income elasticity, the first category having the least income elasticity, the third the greatest. Given gender income inequity (in both wages and pensions) women tend to sacrifice leisure for the sake of health, and health is sacrificed for basic subsistence. Research conducted by the author has revealed that, having used up the funds in their individual accounts, some elderly women did not access necessary health care until monies were credited to their accounts the following financial year; some women postponed necessary treatments and operations through poverty. Although this situation may also apply to men, it occurs relatively more frequently in the female population especially in the lowest-income groups, clearly revealing the problematic aspects of this medical insurance scheme. Table 12.2 shows the relationship between age, hospital capacity and the percentage of costs paid by individuals and from social funds. Generally, the younger an individual is and the further into the future their predicted retirement the lower the percentage of medical costs paid for through social funds and the greater the individual contribution. Current practices embedded within the provision of basic medical insurance for urban workers overlook physical differences, different morbidity patterns and consequently different medical demands between genders. These patterns are particularly evident in the older population. In 2003, elderly citizens aged over 65 years accounted for 14.8 per cent of the total population of Shanghai (CPN 2005). A recent survey conducted by Ministry of Public Health indicates that 71.3 per Table 12.2 Standard scale for the shared-responsibility stage of urban insurance, Shanghai Shared responsibility section Hospital grade

Individual payment %

Supplementary funds (paid by social contributions) %

Born before 31 Dec. 1955, retire after 1 Jan. 2001

Grade 1 Grade 2 Grade 3

15 20 25

85 80 75

Born 1 Jan. 1956–31 Dec. 1965, retire after 1 Jan. 2001


30 35 40

70 65 60

Born after 1 Jan. 1966, retire after 1 Jan. 2001


45 50 55

55 50 45

Start work after 1 Jan. 2001, retire at future date


45 50 55

55 50 45

Age group

Source: Shanghai Health Care Insurance Bureau (2000: 39).


cent of elderly citizens suffer from chronic diseases, the percentage being more than twice that of the general adult population. Additionally, 42 per cent of elderly citizens suffer from more than two chronic diseases (Ou 2002). In an ageing society, older female citizens are subject to more health problems than older male citizens. ‘Despite longer average life spans, the health circumstances and quality of life of female elderly citizens are worse than those of the male’ (Zeng and Gu 2002: 59–66). The basic health care insurance system currently offers the greatest coverage and best policies for urban employees in Shanghai. It also covers most of the demands on the medical services. Compared with other cities, Shanghai’s citizens enjoy one of the best insurance schemes in the country. In comparison, elsewhere policyholders only receive help with medical expenses once hospitalized.

Complementary health care insurance The complementary insurance systems operated by the Shanghai Trade Union are supplementary to the basic medical insurance for workers and the retirees. These types of insurance complement and extend the remit of the basic health care insurance system. The most important forms of complementary insurance are: serious disease insurance (e.g. renal failure, cancer etc.), hospitalization insurance, and an insurance plan for pensioners. All these schemes include both current and retired workers, but they must be members of the trade union and must join the insurance in employment-based units (at least 75 per cent of employees of a particular company or business must agree to participate). Therefore, if there is no trade union in the work unit or insufficient people want to join, an individual worker cannot participate. Membership of the trade union is a basic condition for accessing this insurance scheme. In some areas there is an attempt to extend membership of the trade union to self-employed workers. Such schemes do not increase the number of people able to receive health care insurance but they do improve the nature of the insurance as those who become ill will receive greater compensatory amounts. Further insurance packages are available to sub-groups within the trade union, such as women who can choose to participate in insurance schemes which cover for cancers of the reproductive system such as breast and uterine cancer. Maternity insurance Under the Gongfei and Laobao programmes, a woman’s entire medical expenses during pregnancy and while on maternity leave were covered, with salaries provided by companies and businesses. With health care insurance reform, the restructuring of ownership of businesses and industry and especially the introduction of profit-focused, market-oriented managerial methods, companies started to consider expenses related to child bearing as an unwelcome and additional burden. To provide salaries and medical expenses during pregnancy and the post-natal period is to both acknowledge women’s particular social contributions and promote women’s equal employment rights. With the support of the All China

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Women’s Federation (ACWF) at national and local level, the State Council issued documents establishing maternity insurance. This was part of a promise made at the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995. As a part of the reform of the whole of the Chinese urban medical insurance programme, maternity insurance will play an important role in enhancing women’s health. Maternity insurance guarantees the following two basic rights. Firstly, ante-natal care and expenses related to childbirth is covered. Secondly, it guarantees the continuation of salaries during maternity leave. It could be argued that this insurance represents progress in the protection of urban women’s rights to social security. However, although restrictions based on household registration do not exist theoretically – meaning that all working women of childbearing age can participate – some migrant women are excluded because they are not covered by the basic urban health care insurance system. The Shanghai municipal government initiated maternity insurance in October 2001. This scheme aims to improve women’s employment circumstances and secure their entitlement to maternity benefits. Prior to the implementation of this insurance, employers paid medical expenses during pregnancy and the salaries of women on maternity leave. Now, these expenses are funded through the new maternity insurance system. However, monies are not specifically collected for this system; rather they are transferred from the basic urban health insurance schemes and from pension funds. The advantage is that there is no need for society to raise money separately. However, coverage is limited to those female workers already enrolled under the basic health care insurance system. Therefore, a large number of migrant women, who work outside the formal employment sector, are excluded from this insurance scheme although they too are working in Shanghai. Under the terms of this new plan, eligible women are entitled to four and a half months’ maternity leave while receiving 100 per cent of their wages and near-free medical care during pregnancy and birth if their child is delivered in mid-grade hospitals. The levels of insurance guarantees for participants are higher in Shanghai than elsewhere in terms of maternity wage levels, length of maternity leave, as well as coverage of care. In China as a whole, however, maternity insurance has developed comparatively slowly. By the end of 2003, some 36,550,000 women had participated in maternity insurance schemes throughout the country (Xinhua News Net 2005). Some 16 provincial capitals have formulated regulations on maternity insurance.3 Moreover, maternity insurance in many places only targets registered permanent residents, a residual from the former planned economy, and thus excludes migrant women. Comprehensive insurance for migrant workers The medical-insurance reform process and the resulting new insurance system are applicable to registered permanent urban residents whilst labourers working in cities without urban residence permits are excluded. Concerned government departments identified this omission in the health care insurance system and established a ‘comprehensive insurance programme for migrant workers’. This


insurance covers workers migrating into Shanghai, but it is based on formal employment and consequently excludes certain populations such as those working in the informal sector. There are two competing theories for this omission. Firstly, it is thought that this may be a consequence of the original aim of the insurance programme which was to provide a fund for industrial injuries, assumed to be irrelevant for domestic servants and agricultural workers. Secondly, the omission may be due to the uncertainty experienced by agricultural workers and domestic servants with regard to wages, which are often paid on an hourly basis, as well as their high levels of mobility. Workers eligible for this programme are predominately male and thus male migrant workers constitute the major beneficiary group with respect to migrant insurance. Comprehensive insurance for migrant workers was enacted in Shanghai on 1 September 2003. This insurance plan includes policies protecting against work injuries, provisions for in-patient expenses, and old-age subsidies. Thus, strictly speaking, this type of insurance is not purely health care based, but a broader type of insurance devised for the population of migrant workers. Under the regulations governing coverage, all enterprises irrespective of ownership type are required to participate in this scheme if they employ migrant workers, and cover the costs. Some self-employed migrant workers who have communitybased employment cards are also required to participate in this scheme. However, this scheme does not include migrant workers engaged in domestic service and farming. Up to 98 per cent of the former are women; the latter are often men. Insurance for migrants includes industrial injury insurance (or accidental injury insurance), insurance for hospitalization and subsidies for members of the older population. While this is not medical insurance in the strictest sense, it provides a certain amount of protection for migrant labourers. But if it was intended to provide social security for all migrant workers, it has badly neglected the interests of female migrants. If this insurance is regarded as an initial attempt to protect the rights and interests of the population lacking urban residence permits then more importance has been continually placed on male health than on female health (especially where industrial injuries are concerned). In particular, women, as the population who bear the task of reproduction with its particular health care needs, have been neglected. Complementary health care insurance for government officers A final new complementary health care insurance for government officers, which will not be discussed here, replaced the Gongfei system for this employment sector and guarantees a certain level of health care as per the principles of urban health care reform laid down by the State Council. Supplementary health care scheme policy and improvements in gender equality A supplementary policy to reduce the financial burden on poorer people in chronic ill-health was set up on 15 October 2003 and enacted on 1 April 2004 in

272 Jufen Wang

Shanghai. The new policy favours those who are low-income earners and who have been diagnosed with chronic diseases because the proportion of the medical expenses borne by the individual is closely related to his or her wage or pension. The supplementary policy was subsequently revised in April 2004 and its main items are outlined in Table 12.3 below. Table 12.3 demonstrates the way in which women, who tend to be low-income earners, are more likely to be able to reduce the costs of their personal medicalcare expenses. People who for example earn a sum equivalent to, or less than, the average minimum wage in Shanghai in the year preceding the onset of medical expenses receive a 90 per cent reduction in their medical costs once those costs have surpassed a figure equivalent to 30 per cent of the average minimum wage in Shanghai in the preceding year. The supplementary aspects of the basic health care insurance system have had marked benefits for women as they challenge the gender inequalities of the previous system. Thus, to some extent these subsidiary aspects have meant that gender equality has been reached in Shanghai’s urban health care scheme. Examination of the current basic medical insurance for urban workers shows that it fails to consider gender throughout its structure including in the scope of insurance and in the share of payment. Based on age alone, the scheme appears to be gender neutral but, in effect, brings out inequities in rights and interests by ignoring the differences between genders in social status, employment, income, age at retirement and health status. Fortunately, the supplementary policy demonstrates the gains which can be made in the implementation of national gender equality. Table 12.3 Main aspects of the 2004 supplementary policy on reducing medical care expenses, Shanghai Personal wage level

Individual payments for medical care expense

Wage level equal to, or less than, the minimum wage in the city in the preceding year

Accumulative expenses up to 30% of minimum wage of the city in the preceding year

90%

Wage level higher than minimum wage but less than 1.5 times the average wage in city in the preceding year

Accumulative expenses up to 40% of personal wage

90%

Wage level higher than 1.5 times minimum wage but less than 3 times the average wage in city in the preceding year

Accumulative expenses up to 50% of personal wage

90%

Pension is worth less than minimum wage level

Accumulative expenses up to 30% of personal pension

90%

Pension is worth more than minimum wage level

Accumulative expenses up to 40% personal pension

90%

Source: Shanghai Social Security Bureau 2004, No.126.

Reduction rate once identified proportion has been exceeded


Further improvements to the urban health care insurance scheme and policy implications Expanding participation The criteria for judging a social insurance scheme should highlight coverage and benefit levels, although national and local levels of economic development, and the redistribution of socioeconomic resources must also be taken into consideration. Currently, basic health care insurance for urban workers, the principal part of Chinese urban health care security, is based on employment and permanent residence permits and thus results in the exclusion of the lowest stratum of society which encompasses the unemployed, informal workers and migrant labourers. These aspects of the social security entitlement system not only hamper coverage, but also compromise the size of available funds. For example, by the end of June 2003, the basic health care scheme covered 42 per cent of the total number of urban workers in China (Chou 2005). Currently, this means that some 109.02 million members of the urban population are included within the scheme, of which 79.75 million are workers and 29.27 million are pensioners (PRC Year Book 2005: 414). Pensioners account for some 26.8 per cent of the population entitled to the health care insurance system. Pensioners pay no contributions into the scheme but are heavy users, which places a drain on insurance funds. Statistics from the Medical Insurance Clearing Centre of Zhenjiang City reveal that in 2001 the average sum paid out for medical expenses per worker was 673.05 RMB, while that per pensioner was 1651.66 RMB, some 2.45 times higher (Li 2003: 14). ‘In 2001, retirees accounted for 27.40 per cent of the total participants [of the health insurance scheme] but consumed 44.84 per cent of the total medical expenses and 48.42 per cent of the total medical funds’ (Jiang et al. 2004: 18). Yet, health care insurance policies that have favoured retirees still fail to meet the large medical demands of the older population. If current practices of allowing pensioners to consume the majority of social funds continue, not only will younger participants’ interests be violated, but also the operation of the whole health care insurance system will be compromised. To solve this problem effectively, two measures have been identified. First, the authorities should formulate a special programme offering compensatory benefits to those pensioners who have made due contributions during the plannedeconomy era, or establish a subsidiary health care insurance scheme for pensioners, to alleviate the pressure on the basic health care insurance (which will require significant subsidies from the state, both local and central). Secondly, manipulation of the age structure of participants should take place by allowing more young migrant labourers working in cities to participate in basic health care insurance. Recruitment of part-time and informal workers The rules of entitlement to the current basic health care insurance also create gender inequity. Under the Gongfei and Laobao systems women in China enjoyed an employment rate of up to 98–99 per cent and, as the spouses of workers, had the right to have 50 per cent of their medical expenses reimbursed. Thus women’s

274 Jufen Wang

health care insurance rights were largely secure. However, the rate of women’s participation in the formal workforce has decreased sharply. A 2003 survey in Shanghai indicated that the employment rate of women in the 16–54 age group had declined to 52.6 per cent, and their unemployment rate had reached 22.5 per cent (Xu and Yuan 2004). Urban basic health care insurance schemes based on employment therefore presented an institutional barrier to women’s health care insurance rights. At present, differences between genders in medical insurance rights have not became obvious because contracts between laid-off women, early retirees and their former work units require those units to continue to pay contributions towards women’s health care insurance and pension schemes, thus fundamentally reserving their rights to basic health care. In the near future when the levels of unemployment among young women, the increase in the proportion of female informal workers and the trend towards short-term employment become significant, the gender differences in urban health care insurance rights will become a more visible form of social injustice in China. Apart from taking measures to secure women’s equal employment rights, the government should also further improve the regulation of basic health insurance, through the inclusion of part-time workers and informal workers in the urban basic health care insurance scheme. For a significant period, the health care security system in China was binary in nature, being divided between urban and rural locations with city residents enjoying higher standards of living compared with rural residents. Before health care insurance reform, the high employment rate in urban areas guaranteed that nearly every registered permanent urban resident could access health care under the Gongfei and Laobao systems while the rural population relied on a less comprehensive cooperative medical service. Entitlement to this latter system was based on access to agricultural land. In some areas the cooperative medical services did not survive the agricultural reforms, which led to the financial collapse of rural health care institutions. This has severely reduced access to any form of health care in rural areas. According to incomplete estimations, there are some 120 million migrants from rural areas working in China’s large cities. Part of this population has been living and working in the cities for up to ten years and can be considered at the least semipermanent residents. This shift of rural labourers to cities, as we have seen, has brought with it medical security problems. Despite reforms, entitlement to the basic health care insurance in urban areas still rests on registered permanent residence or ‘green cards’ which grants access to urban privileges for a select population. Chinese health care insurance reform is still bound by traditional thinking, which formulates social or public policies based on the inflexible residence-registration system. As a result the differences in urban and rural socialsecurity systems intensify and social equity problems crystallize. The form that any social security system for rural migrants may take has aroused heated discussion. In Shanghai, while a comprehensive insurance for rural migrants has been established, only a minority of rural migrant workers can participate. Due to the high mobility of rural migrant labourers and the desire to reduce costs, employers have not made contributions. Additionally, a large number of rural migrant labourers


work within the informal employment environment and are excluded from this insurance system. More attention should be paid to the increasing number of women migrating into cities who are excluded from medical insurance systems. In 1988, the gender ratio of the migrant population in Shanghai was 241 men to 100 women. By 2003 it had fallen to 134 men for every 100 women. More female migrants are excluded from the medical insurance system because more undertake independent, informal work for which there are no insurance provisions. The most significant health problems experienced by female migrant workers are those related to the reproductive health system and are also an important barrier to the further improvement of maternal health standards in Shanghai. Migrant women are less likely to participate in ante-natal care (Zhan et al. 1999) and experience problematic outcomes. In Beijing, the perinatal death rate for migrant pregnancies is 5.7 times higher than that of the local population (Huang 1999). Different levels and patterns of health care for women with different residences have affected the health of mothers and foetuses. Some pregnant migrant women, excluded from urban health care, return home to deliver their babies and to search for underqualified doctors whose fees are cheaper. Thus, they are further marginalized with respect to their maternal health compared with women holding Shanghai residence permits. The main solution to the problem of the provision of health care insurance for migrant women would be to break the link between registered residence and access to health care and admit migrant women workers into the basic health insurance system as well as maternity insurance. An alternative would be to establish migrant childbearing insurance via an individual payment system (but without government subsidies this will not be viable given migrants’ irregular incomes and the unwillingness of employers especially in the informal economy to make contributions). Relevant government departments should also consider subsidizing the migrant childbearing insurance system. The migrant women’s maternity insurance could be run by insurance companies under government supervision. This would also aid the government’s aim to establish a multi-level health insurance programme for the population of China.

Conclusion China is a developing country with a huge population and had experienced nearly twenty years of intense reform and change by the end of 1990s. By this stage there were serious fiscal concerns with regard to the provision of social security. This chapter has outlined the development and progress of health care reform from 1998 to date. Bearing in mind the nature of the needed change and the size of the population, the new policy has been a marked success. Yet, detailed examination reveals that the current basic medical insurance for urban workers failed to consider gender at the design stage, whether in terms of the scope of basic insurance or in the share of payment. Based on age, the scheme appeared to be neutral and equal but in practice exacerbated inequalities. Shanghai’s health insurance scheme overlooked initial differences between genders in social

276 Jufen Wang

status, employment, income, retirement age, physical features and health status at the inception of the scheme, resulting in gender inequity in rights and interests. Fortunately, the supplementary policy has brought about reductions in medical expenses based on individual wage and pension levels and presents a national example in the implementation of China’s national policy of gender equality. Results have shown that there is still room for improvement as the current scheme excludes informal workers, migrant workers and worker’s spouses. However, it represents a significant move forward especially when considering that the supplementary policy was not designed specifically to resolve gender inequalities. It is also true that the solution to certain social issues also requires economic development and time. The lessons we can learn from China’s urban health care reform are: firstly, the realization that mainstreaming gender issues is still a challenging process for all of society; and secondly that the design of any social policy should include gender considerations from the start and any potential negative impacts on vulnerable populations should be avoided.

Notes 1 This chapter has benefited from Caroline Hoy’s excellent editing. 2 ‘Green cards’ are normally granted to individuals who originate from outside the city of Shanghai but who have obtained a post in the formal employment sector in the city, or contributed to the development of Shanghai’s economy in some way. 3 Namely, Chengdu, Nanjing, Changchun, Ji’nan, Hefei, Yinchuan, Guangzhou, Hangzhou, Shijiazhuang, Taiyuan, Xi’ning, Kunming, Nanning, and Wulumuqi.

References Chen, Yani and Yi Chou (2002) ‘Record on Shanghai Health Care Reform’, at www.people.com.cn, accessed 10 August 2002. China Statistics Bureau (2004) People’s Republic of China Year Book. Beijing: People’s Republic of China Year Book Press: 414. Chou, Yulin (2005) ‘The Circumstances and Improvement of the Health Care Insurance System in China’. Monthly Journal of Social Security 2, 39. Information Center for Social Science, People’s University, Beijing. China Population Net (CPN) (2005) at www.chinapop.gov.cn, accessed 13 January 2005. Department of Propagation of Shanghai Municipality and Association of Social Science (DoP) (1998) The Development Report of Shanghai Philosophy and Social Science Research. Shanghai: Shanghai People’s Press: 401. Ge, Shouchang (1999) Social Security Economics. Shanghai: Shanghai University of Economics and Finance Press. Guo, Weihua and Fucheng Li (2001) The Legal Protection of Workers’ Rights. Beijing Xiyuan Publishing House. Hu, Shanlian (2002) ‘Experiences and Issues in Shanghai Health Reform’. Journal of China Health Resources 5, 5: 202. Huang, Xiaoling (1999) ‘Study on Perinatal Infant Death in the Migrant Population’. Journal of Maternal and Child Hygiene 14, 4: 242. Jiang, Licheng, Linping Xiong, Yiping Li and Xiuqiang Ma (2004) ‘An Analysis of the Medical Expenses of Insured Government Employees and Workers in Zhenjiang City’. Journal of Chinese Health Economics 23, 6: 18.

Health Sector Reform in China 277 Li, Qiufang, Simei Wang and Xiuhua Jiang (2003) ‘The Circumstances of and Measures for Chinese Women’s Employment’. China Women’s Express Vol. No. 6. Li, Yiping (2003) ‘A Study of the Aging of Health Care Insurance Participants’. Journal of Chinese Health Economics 22, 8: 14. Liang, Hong, Yuan Cheng, Ying Zhou and Ying Zhu (2003) ‘Inequality Problems with Medical Services in Cities from the point of View of the Health Care System’. Journal of Chinese Population Science 1: 40. Maslow, Abraham (1970) Motivation and Personality. Second edition, New York and London: Harper & Row. Ou, Shuisheng (2002) ‘Concerns about the Health Care Security of the Urban Poor’. Journal of Soft Science of Health 16, 4: 11. Shanghai Health Care Insurance Bureau (2000) Hand Book of Shanghai Basic Health Care Insurance for Urban Workers. Shanghai: Shanghai Health Care Insurance Bureau 19. Shanghai Statistics Bureau (SSB) (2004) Shanghai Statistical Yearbook 3.3 at www. stats-sh.gov.cn, accessed 5 August 2005. State Council document on ‘Decisions on Setting up Urban Basic Health Care Insurance for Urban Employees’, at http://www.em800.com, accessed 14 October 2001. United Nations (2000) The World’s Women, Trend and Statistics. New York: United Nations: 75. Xinhua News Net (2005) at www.xinhuanet.com/, accessed on 15 February 2005. Xu, Ke and Jing Yuan (2004) ‘Investigation into Shanghai Women’s Employment’. Shanghai Women 10, October: 8–13. Ying, Xiaohua, Wen Chen, Lijun Huang, Qin Jiang and ShanLian Hu (2004) ‘Equity of Health Care and Health Finance’. Journal of Chinese Health Economics 23,1: 52. Zeng, Yi and Da’nan Gu (2002) ‘Dynamics in International Research on the Quality of Life of the Elderly Population’. Journal of Chinese Population Science 5: 60–1. Zhan, Shaokang, Lingyu Xie, Changqin Liu and Yangguang Wang (1999) Research on the Maternal and Prenatal Care of Migrant Women in Xuhui District, Shanghai’. Journal of HaiXia Health Protection 5: 1–2. Zhang, Taihai, Maojin Cheng, Hong Wang, Yun Peng and Fang Wang (2003) ‘Thoughts and Measures for Health Care Insurance of the Urban Poor’. Journal of Soft Science of Health 17, 1: 7. Zheng, Gongcheng (2002) Evaluation of China’s Social Security System. Beijing: China People’s University Press: 120–2. Zhou, Feng, Guixiang Song, Songbai Lin, Yaling Sun and ZhiYing Wang (2001) ‘Analysis on Shanghai Population’s Health Expectancy’. Journal of China Health Statistics 18, 2: 86.

13 Secondary Education in the Indian State of Uttar Pradesh: Gender Dimensions of State Policy and Practice Jyotsna Jha and Ramya Subrahmanian

Introduction Linking gender and education to the social policy agenda is not straightforward. Many questions arise, most of which hinge on the kinds of impact education is expected to have on human behaviour, capacities and skills, and on gender identities and relations. In that sense, education within the wider social policy debate is linked to questions of society and citizenship, understandings about modernity and national identity, and the recasting of notions of masculinity and femininity at different historical moments of time. The content of education, the impact of policy choices adopted in the process of meeting universal-education agendas, and the ways in which equity and social-inclusion concerns are addressed through public institutions, are among the several issues that arise in relation to the reframing of social policy from a gender perspective. A central proposition of this chapter is that the focus on minimum ‘thresholds’ for public investment, in turn derived from the analysis of rates of return to education, has contributed to the neglect of female post-primary education. Influenced by Human Capital theory (HCT), ‘gender’ and female education have been central framing discourses of education policy, resulting in substantial policy rhetoric and concern about women’s and girls’ education as a lever of development and progress. In India, acceptance of this global rhetoric has been mediated by particular policy choices, which have resulted in the neglect of the secondary sector, the rise of for-profit schooling at all levels of education, and a fragmented formal elementary-education system, with particular implications for achieving gender parity and equality. This has resulted in a range of issues relating to female well-being being erased from the policy map. Girls disappear off the formal education policy agenda past the age of 14, at a crucial age when aspirations can be channelled into opportunities. In this chapter, we focus on secondary schooling, which we believe best serves the interests of girls, especially if supported by policies that expand its availability, address socio-cultural constraints that exclude 278

Secondary Education in the Indian State of Uttar Pradesh 279

girls (both within society and within the school), and keep its costs low. We argue that the lack of policy focus on secondary schooling for girls is linked to the curious contradictions between policy rhetoric, on the one hand, and policy prescriptions on the other, where development visions are not matched by policy decision-making processes that can realize these visions. Our choice of Uttar Pradesh (UP) as a case study is guided by three factors. One, UP is the most populous state in the country, and also considered one of the most socially ‘backward’ in terms of development indicators. Two, there is recent and high-quality research material on education in the state, on the political economy of education (Kingdon and Muzammil 2003), on sociology, gender and education (Jeffery et al. 2004), and more generally on education provision (Dreze and Gazdar 1996). Three, there has been a concerted attempt in the state to focus on reproductive health and fertility decline.1 There are also innovative programmes for empowering women through education that operate outside the formal schooling system. Given the overall correlations drawn between fertility decline and female education, exploring secondary schooling for girls against the backdrop of this orientation towards fertility decline, on the one hand, and empowerment on the other, provides an opportunity to delve deeper into the gender politics of investment in females. In this chapter, we report primarily on material garnered through secondary research, as well as field work undertaken to explore the status of secondary schooling in UP, particularly in relation to patterns of financial investment and provisioning of single-sex schools for girls. Our empirical research uncovered a vital consideration for gender-policy analysis in education – the ways in which wider discourses get played out through particular policy processes at state level, which in turn are dictated by the compulsions of democratic politics as they are played out in India. In that sense, UP offers both an interesting case study but also an impossibly complex one, given the multiple political actors who inform the education policy agenda (see, for instance, Kingdon and Muzammil’s (2003) fascinating account of teacher politics in Uttar Pradesh). Gender seems almost irrelevant in this tableau, although its very irrelevance is in itself a revealing insight into the ways in which rhetoric on gender equality that aims to please diverse publics, from vote-banks (perhaps) to union government and donor agencies, can mask actual practice. In that sense, the account that follows illustrates the ‘reality’ of policy-making in a developing-country context, not least the opaqueness of the concept of policy, and the difficulty of tracking what is or is not evidence of ‘policy’ in an intensely political policy-making environment. The political economy of market and commerce, on the one hand, and complex socio-cultural norms, on the other, find their own ways to influence the realm of policy and education system, often leading to inconsistencies between policy intents and practices adopted at ground level. An analysis of policy remains incomplete unless traced to its translation into implementation and practices at all levels. Policy practices need to be traced through penetrations and informal interactions at various levels, making it difficult to collect evidence following ‘scientific’ methods. Much of the empirical information presented in this chapter

280 Jyotsna Jha and Ramya Subrahmanian

is based on ‘leads’ gained through informal interactions. It is particularly difficult to track policy practices when there is a conflict between vested interests of socioeconomic-political considerations and stated policy priorities, as we found to be the case with girls’ secondary education in UP.

State policy and practice on female secondary schooling in Uttar Pradesh In this chapter we focus primarily on the resourcing, management and provisioning of secondary schooling in UP, with a view to assessing implications for gender equity. Characterized by very low participation rates and a slow pace of change in educational indicators over the years, secondary education has not received the desired attention in terms of either policy initiatives or resource allocation. The increase in real per student expenditure in nominal terms at secondary level has not kept pace with that in elementary education. The major proportion of state expenditure has been on maintaining the existing provisioning, mainly on teachers’ salary in government and aided sectors with little emphasis on expansion of services. Instead, private investment has been encouraged by relaxing the norms and conditions required for recognition of schools and therefore compromising the range and quality of facilities available. A policy initiative in the form of infrastructure grants to direct private investment for expanding provision of single-sex girls’ exclusive schools has been diluted by allowing boys also to be admitted. A gender-differentiated scheme of studies offering ‘feminine’ subjects to girls further reinforces gender stereotypes. In an environment where the majority of out-ofschool children are girls belonging to disadvantaged socioeconomic groups and where girls’ education is not a social norm, increased commercialization proves counter-productive. These issues are elaborated and discussed in the following subsections. Gender and secondary schooling in Uttar Pradesh Secondary education in UP is characterized by overall low participation rates and sharp gender differentials. While the participation rates are lower, gender disparities are higher than the national average in the state. The overall Gross Enrolment Rate (GER) was close to 25 per cent during the late 1990s, this being only about 15 per cent for girls. The Gender Parity Index (GPI) for GER is only 0.45 in the state as against 0.65 for the country as a whole (Table 13.1). Only about 27 per cent of girls enrolling in grade I reach grade X and only about 60 per cent of these complete the grade (Table 13.2). Despite substantial increase in enrolments, the GERs are not improving in the state, reflecting the fact that the rate of increase in enrolment is barely enough to keep pace with the rate of increase in the population. An interesting feature of girls’ schooling participation in UP is that though notable gender differentials exist in favour of boys in transition rates from primary to upper primary and from upper primary to secondary – especially the latter – the

Secondary Education in the Indian State of Uttar Pradesh 281 Table 13.1 Gross Enrolment Ratios at secondary level (Grades IX to XII) Uttar Pradesh

All India

Year

Total

Boys

Girls

GPI

Total

Boys

Girls

GPI

1980/81 1990/91 1994/95 1995/96 1996/97

32.1 23.82 25.51 25.45 25.12

39.4 34.79 33.31 33.36 33.04

11.3 11.15 15.64 15.48 15.17

0.28 0.32 0.47 0.46 0.46

17.3 19.28 30.95 31.00 31.4

23.1 33.89 37.19 37.10 37.55

11.1 10.27 23.82 23.80 24.42

0.48 0.30 0.64 0.64 0.65

Notes: GPI (Gender Parity Index) ⫽ GER for girls divided by GER for Boys These are actual data. Data available for later periods are provisional. Source: A Handbook of School Education and Allied Statistics (1996), Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD), Government of India (GOI), 1996 for 1980/81 and 1990/91 figures; Education in India (1994/95, 1995/96 and 1996/97), MHRD, GOI, 2001, 2002, 2003 for 1994/95, 1995/96 and 1996/97

Table 13.2 Crude drop-out rates and proportion of repeaters Uttar Pradesh

Drop out rates (Grades I to V) 2000/01 Drop out rates (Grades I to VIII) 2000/01 Drop-out rates (Grades I–X), 2000/01 Repeaters (%) in Grades IX and X, 1996/97

All India

Total

Boys

Girls

Total

Boys

Girls

56.51

52.93

62.11

40.67

39.71

41.90

61.02

56.26

68.54

53.67

50.33

57.95

62.11

56.22

73.17

68.58

66.41

71.51

13.84

14.88

10.68

6.49

7.02

5.57

Source: Annual Report, MHRD 2001/02 for drop-out rates and education in India (1996/97) MHRD; Government of India 2003 for proportion of repeaters.

trend changes when it comes to the transition rate between secondary and senior secondary (Table 13.3). A significantly smaller proportion of boys studying in class X continue with their senior secondary schooling as compared to the proportion of girls studying at the same level. Pass percentages are also higher for girls at both grades X and XII, explaining to some extent the higher transition rate at that level (Table 13.4). A high proportion of boys join the labour force at this age, which also is partially responsible for their discontinuation of schooling after grade X. Relatively low transition rates from primary to upper primary, and upper primary to secondary, for girls indicate that the secondary-schooling participation patterns cannot be understood in complete isolation. This is especially true for the fact that the largest drop-out incidence takes place within primary level and only 38 per cent of girls enrolled in grade I reach grade V (Table 13.2). As a corollary to

282 Jyotsna Jha and Ramya Subrahmanian Table 13.3 Crude transition rates for different levels of school education (1998/99 to 1999/2000) Uttar Pradesh

All India

Transition Rates

Total

Boys

Girls

Total

Boys

Girls

Primary to upper primary Upper primary to secondary Secondary to senior secondary

92.6

96.1

85.8

89.0

91.6

85.5

83.2

91.7

69.5

83.0

83.1

82.7

40.2

34.7

56.8

72.2

72.9

71.1

Note: This has been calculated by taking enrolment in the entry year as a percentage of enrolment in the terminal year of the previous level during the previous year. This does not take contributions of migration from other states, repetition, etc. into consideration. Also, the fact that a large percentage of children never reach Grade V, the terminal grade for primary education, is not reflected in this table. Source: Selected Educational Statistics, MHRD, Government of India.

Table 13.4 Gender-wise pass percentages for Grades X and XII, Uttar Pradesh Class X

Class XII

Year

Boys

Girls

Boys

Girls

1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002

37.01 40.32 18.21 25.62 24.46 26.78 31.73

65.61 69.57 54.92 66.91 47.19 53.27 59.39

68.16 62.41 46.31 53.06 60.37 63.49 62.34

84.17 82.39 74.24 78.49 81.88 81.42 84.56

Source: Board Examination results at a glance (2000, 2001, 2002), Board for Secondary and Intermediate Education, Uttar Pradesh.

this, the GERs at upper primary level are significantly lower than that at the primary level (Table 13.5). A combination of high drop out within primary stage, better academic performances at secondary level and a high transition rate from secondary to senior secondary indicates that though a relatively small proportion of girls continue with their post-primary schooling, those who do continue perform better in examinations and a greater proportion is likely to complete the senior secondary level. However, higher transition rates for post-secondary stage might be indicative of gender differentiation taking a different shape where girls do not have equal opportunities to join the labour market.

Secondary Education in the Indian State of Uttar Pradesh 283 Table 13.5 Gross Enrolment Ratio (GER) at different stages of school education Primary level (Grades I–V)

1980/81 1990/91 1994/95 1995/96 1996/97

Upper primary level (Grades VI–VIII)

Secondary level (Grades IX–XII)

Total

Boys

Girls

GPI

Total

Boys

Girls

GPI

Total

Boys

Girls

GPI

62.50 71.06 61.20 61.19 61.13

81.80 89.13 72.03 71.95 71.71

40.30 50.98 48.86 48.92 49.02

0.49 0.57 0.68 0.68 0.68

32.10 27.33 25.51 25.45 25.12

56.30 63.13 55.52 53.24 51.24

18.00 25.62 31.28 29.96 28.91

0.32 0.40 0.56 0.56 0.56

32.10 27.33 25.51 25.45 25.12

39.40 34.79 33.31 33.36 33.04

11.30 19.69 15.64 15.48 15.17

0.28 0.56 0.47 0.46 0.46

GPI (Gender Parity Index) ⫽ GER for girls divided by GER for Boys Source: A Handbook of School Education and Allied Statistics (1996), MHRD, Government of India, 1996 for 1980/81 and 1990/91 figures; Education in India (1994/95, 1995/96 and 1996/97), MHRD, Government of India, 2001, 2002, 2003 for 1994/95, 1995/96 and 1996/97.

The resource gap A perusal of the trends in the intra-sectoral distribution in the education-financing pattern makes it obvious that, starting from the 1960s, school education as a whole received more emphasis in terms of financial allocation. This was a shift from the relatively greater emphasis being laid on higher education in the past. However, within school education, the relative stress in favour of elementary education as against secondary education has been greater especially since 1980s. The low priority accorded to secondary education, we argue, adversely affected the expansion of state-sponsored schooling facilities for girls at post-primary level, thereby affecting their participation. The absence of gender-segregated data for finances stops us from taking the analysis further. Table 13.6 shows that school education occupied about 70 per cent of total expenditure in the sector during 1951/52, which went down to about 53 per cent in 1960/61. It then increased to more than 72 per cent in 1970/71 and went on to occupy nearly 88 per cent of the total education budget in 2001/02. However, the increase was largely due to enlarged expenditure on elementary education and the relative share of secondary education remained static around 30–4 per cent of total education expenditure during the 1980s and 1990s. What is more revealing is that nearly 95–8 per cent of the total expenditure on secondary education has been the non-plan expenditure, i.e., the expenses incurred on maintaining the system and only about 2–5 per cent is being spent annually on plan head or the new activities such as expansion of coverage by opening new schools or improvement in the quality of teaching by providing more facilities or organizing professional development activities for teachers (Table 13.7). The proportion of plan expenditure or the new investments, on the other hand, has been higher for elementary education, especially since the early 1990s. This was the period when the Uttar Pradesh Basic Education Project (UPBEP) followed by the District Primary Education Project (DPEP) was launched in a large number of districts of the state. While the former was an exclusive project for UP and covered the entire elementary-education sector, the latter was part of the national initiative and

284 Jyotsna Jha and Ramya Subrahmanian Table 13.6 Expenditure on school education by levels in Uttar Pradesh, India (million rupees)

Year 1951/52 1960/61 1970/71 1980/81 1981/82 1990/91 1991/92 1992 /93 1993/94 1994/95 1995/96 1996/97 1997/98 1998/99 1999/2000 2000/2001 2001/2002b

Elementary education 35.03 (47.16) 60.32 (33.89) 364.26 (48.33) 1 714.47 (49.42) 1 882.91(48.25) 12 109.42 (58.22) 10 659.08 (53.70) 12 146.87 (53.57) 13 335.88 (53.89) 16 101.16 (55.10) 18 621.84 (55.80) 21 306.52 (55.73) 22 521.59 (54.43) 33 168.06 (56.76) 26 892.21 (51.88) 34 271.07 (55.91) 34 446.74 (57.88)

Secondary education

Total educationa

16.78 (22.58) 35.03 (19.68) 179.48 (23.81) 1 097.20 (31.63) 1 379.97(35.36) 6 149.82 (29.57) 6 781.22 (34.16) 7 670.17 (33.82) 8 034.28 (32.47) 9 505.75 (32.53) 10 881.83 (32.60) 11 976.857 (31.33) 13 498.13 (32.62) 18 145.52 (31.05) 17 546.05 (33.85) 19 156.93 (31.25) 18 041.08 (30.31)

74.29 178.02 753.70 3 469.20 3 901.80 20 798.40 19 849.50 22 676.80 24 745.90 29 221.99 33 374.74 38 232.36 41 375.12 58 432.71 51 830.51 59 865.41 59 517.16

a

including higher and other education Budget estimates Notes: Figures in parenthesis show the percentage share of respective level in total education expenditure. These figures reveal expenditure on Revenue Account of the Education Department. In addition to these, a small amount of expenditure is incurred on Capital Account of the department, by other departments and ministries. However, together they account for less than one to two per cent of the total expenditure on revenue account of the department. b

Source: Budgeted Resources for Education (1951/52 to 1993/94), Department of Education, MHRD, Government of India, New Delhi, 1995 and Analysis of Budgeted Expenditure on Education, Government of India (different years).

covered primary grades (I–V) only. Both these projects in UP were funded by the World Bank, the former being the first basic education project being financed by them in India. Although the contribution of these externally-aided projects to total expenses of the sector has not been considerable, they formed a significant proportion of the new investments. The total amount coming from external sources amounted to nearly Rs.20,000.00 million during 1993–2002,2 which was about 82 per cent of total new investments on elementary education in UP during the period. The project design for both UPBEP and DPEP demanded that the state government provide about 15 per cent of the total project cost. Taking both external and internal allocations together these two projects accounted for more than 96 per cent of total plan expenditure or the new investment during the period. This means that the high allocation for new investment during this period was mainly due to the presence of externally aided projects and only about 4 per cent of the total allocations was spent on areas/items not covered by these two projects.

Secondary Education in the Indian State of Uttar Pradesh 285 Table 13.7 Percentage distribution between plan and non-plan expenditures on elementary and secondary education, Uttar Pradesh, India Elementary education Year 1970/71 1980/81 1981/82 1990/91 1991/92 1992/93 1993/94 1994/95 1995/96 1996/97 1997/98 1998/99 1999/2000 2000/2001 2001/2002a

Secondary education

Plan

Non-plan

Plan

Non-plan

12.24 3.33 4.39 8.34 8.06 8.26 11.81 12.73 12.84 13.52 12.95 11.84 4.18 9.33 7.03

87.76 96.67 95.61 91.66 91.94 91.74 88.19 87.27 87.16 86.48 87.05 88.16 95.82 90.67 94.93

4.93 2.17 3.07 2.91 6.04 4.78 4.27 4.32 6.19 4.61 1.66 3.05 1.42 4.64 6.07

95.07 97.83 96.92 97.09 93.96 95.22 95.73 95.68 93.81 95.39 98.34 96.95 98.58 95.36 93.93

a

Budget Estimates Source: Based on figures provided in Budgeted Resources for Education (1951/52 to 1993/94), Department of Education, MHRD, Government of India, New Delhi, 1995 and Analysis of Budgeted Expenditure on Education, Government of India (different years).

The neglect of secondary education in UP is obvious from the slow increase in per student expenditure in the sub-sector during the 1990s, especially in comparison to that at the elementary stage (Table 13.8). In real terms, the per-student expenditure rose by 8.6 per cent per annum for elementary education between 1980/81 and 2000/01 at 1993/94 prices whereas it was only 3.79 per cent for perstudent expenditure in secondary education during the same period. The annual rate of growth in real per student expenditure between 1993/94 and 2000/01 was 7.25 per cent for elementary education and 3.17 for secondary education. It could, however, be pointed out that the per student expenditure itself has been significantly higher at secondary level and hence the higher rate of growth for elementary education is to level these two. This needs to be understood in terms of the different nature of education processes and educational management structures at these two levels. The high per student expenditure at secondary stage in comparison to elementary stage is due to substantially fewer students, a significantly lower teacher–pupil ratio and relatively higher salary levels in the former. The size of physical infrastructure including laboratories and libraries at this stage is huge compared with the elementary stage and it is natural for per student expenditure to be higher. The low rate of growth in real per student expenditure at secondary stage coupled with the fact that almost the entire amount goes to pay salaries suggests a decline in expenditure on development and quality improvement.

286 Jyotsna Jha and Ramya Subrahmanian Table 13.8 Per student expenditure at elementary and secondary education levels, Uttar Pradesh, India Elementary education

Secondary education

Per student expenditure Year 1980/81 1990/91 1993/94 1994/95 1995/96 1996/97 1997/98 1998/99 1999/00 2000/01

Total expenditure

Total enrolment

Monetary

Reala

1 714.47 12 109.42 13 335.88 16 101.16 18 621.84 21 306.51 22 521.59 33 168.06 26 892.21 34 446.74

12 762 037 16 466 813 17 593 289 17 835 564 18 055 640 16 602 422 18 481 210 18 680 569 19 019 535 18 049 991

134.34 735.24 758.00 902.75 1 031.35 1 283.33 1 218.62 1 775.53 1 413.92 1 908.40

419.81 1 007.17 758.00 828.21 866.68 1 002.60 889.50 1 175.84 912.20 1 142.75

Per student expenditure Total Total expenditure enrolment 1 097.20 6 179.82 8 034.28 9 505.75 10 881.83 11 976.85 13 498.13 18 145.52 17 546.05 18 041.06

18 53 459 29 55 073 30 15 817 30 45 167 31 54 719 32 05 232 32 39 513 32 74 449 33 34 369 33 18 222

Monetary

Reala

591.97 2 081.11 2 664.04 3 071.11 3 449.38 3 736.65 4 166.71 5 541.54 5 262.18 5 436.97

1 849.90 2 850.83 2 664.04 2 817.53 2 898.63 2 919.25 3 041.39 3 669.89 3 394.95 3 255.67

a At 1993/94 prices (taken from Economic Survey, Government of India) Note: While total expenditure is given in terms of million rupees, per student expenditure is in terms of rupees.

Source: Table VII for total expenditure, Shikhsha Ki Pragiti (different years), Government of Uttar Pradesh for enrolment except for 1993/94 and 1994/95 and Education in India, MHRD, Government of India for 1993/94 and 1994/95.

Although it is difficult to surmise that the presence of externally funded projects led to diversion of funds from other sectors to elementary education, it is obvious that these projects forced the state government to maintain its own investment expenditure for the sub-sector. Once the project period came to an end, the state was also committed to maintain all the investments, raising the non-plan or the maintenance expenditure in the sub-sector. Though there cannot be two opinions about the need for increasing the level of investments in elementary education, doing so at the cost of other sub-sectors is questionable. In the absence of a clear policy focus and any direction from central government or an external agency, no such pressure existed for maintaining or enhancing expenditure for secondary education in UP. As discussed earlier, the external agencies, in this case the World Bank, emphasized increased investment in primary education, though not always explicitly so, even at the cost of other sectors, on the grounds of a higher rate of social and private return. The argument based on the rate-of-returns approach also ignores the point that the different sub-sectors of education are interdependent and lopsided investments could prove counter-productive in the long run. A number of studies on elementary school participation in India have indicated that the availability of schools teaching higher grades also encourages enrolment and completion at earlier stages.3 A comparison of statistics showing girls’ enrolment at primary stage in schools where only the primary stage is available, and in schools which provide education up to secondary level in UP, showed that the proportion of girls’ enrolment at primary stage is higher in the latter.4 However, these complications rarely


receive attention in the policy-making process because of a short-sighted subsectoral approach followed increasingly by Indian states especially since the early 1990s. There also exist other important linkages between different levels of education. For instance, the spread of higher education is associated with an increase in income levels and its distribution, which in turn is associated positively with increased demand for girls’ primary education. The quality of teachers available for primary education is directly dependent on the quality and spread of secondary education in any country. The availability of women teachers, which is considered critical for promoting girls’ participation and completion at primary level, cannot be ensured in rural primary schools without encouraging secondary education among rural girls. Women teachers constitute only about one-quarter of the total number of teachers in UP, their proportion being lower than that in rural areas.5 Therefore, it is difficult to achieve universalization of even the elementary stage without greater investments in other stages of education. The policy and management context The absence of a clearly outlined policy and comprehensive management framework in secondary education further highlights the neglect of secondary education in the state. The lack of any comprehensive policy and focus to guide resources and management of secondary education in the state makes it difficult to trace policy discourse as understanding is gained through reviewing reports of the committees, legal Acts, schemes and office orders.6 Although UP was one of the first Indian states to establish an autonomous board of secondary education,7 and appointed a Commission for Secondary Education immediately after independence,8 the issues of girls’ participation in secondary schooling and making education gendersensitive has received scant attention so far. The Secondary Education Commission (1952) dealt with a number of important aspects but did not include girls’ education as a separate issue in spite of large gender disparities existing in the schooling participation patterns. However, the report mentioned several measures including the building of separate sanitary facilities and retiring rooms, and hiring of women teachers in co-educational institutions to increase girls’ participation.9 One of the important features of secondary education in UP as in many other Indian states is the vast presence of privately managed educational institutions. Secondary schools in Uttar Pradesh can be put in three broad management categories: Government, aided and unaided private schools. Government schools are fully financed and managed by the state government. Aided schools are managed privately by individuals, trusts, societies or corporate bodies but funded almost entirely by the government. The government bears almost the entire recurrent costs of these schools by providing grants-in-aid for salaries. Unaided private schools are managed and financed privately but recognized by the government. While the government and aided schools charge no tuition fee and only nominal other charges, unaided schools are for-profit organizations and charge substantial tuition and other fees. The proportion of government schools remained almost static during the 1980s and 1990s while that of aided schools increased till 1986 after which no new


school was brought under the grants-in-aid scheme. The growth of private unaided secondary schools has been spectacular during the 1980s and 1990s. The number increased from a modest 845 in 1994/95 to 6,541 in 2001/02, registering a nearly eight-fold increase. The proportion of private schools, especially unaided ones, has gone up to more than half of total secondary schools in UP after the bifurcation of the state, reflecting the fact that the parts of UP that constituted the newly carved state, Uttaranchal, had a higher number of government and aided schools (Table 13.9). Near-stagnation in the number of government and aided schools which charge only nominal fees and expansion only through fee-charging private unaided schools reflects the state’s policy of promoting commercialization. This is despite the fact that there exists apparently a greater demand for admissions in government school as compared to private, including aided, schools because of a common perception that these are better-resourced and higherquality.10 The results of the terminal stages at grade X and XII of all schools affiliated to the UP board indicate that this perception is not ill-founded (Table 13.10). The increased focus on commercializing secondary stage of education has negative implications for girls’ participation. In a situation where girls’ education is not valued, the demand for a fee-charging school system is bound to be low as parents would not be willing to pay high charges for their daughters’ education. As mentioned earlier, the increase in schooling participation at primary level witnessed during the 1990s is largely on account of demand from poorer and disadvantaged sections, whose capacity to pay is also limited. The continuation of schooling for girls from these sections depends crucially on state support and increased commercialization

Table 13.9 Percentage distribution of secondary schools by management in Uttar Pradesh, India Secondary schools (Grades 9–12)

Year 1980/81 1990/91 1994/95 1995/96 1996/97 2001/02a

Government ⫹ local bodies Aided 16.04 17.79 23.00 22.96 22.87 4.70

N/A 73.86 64.85 64.41 64.61 38.50

Private Unaided

Total

N/A 8.34 12.25 12.15 12.45 56.80

83.95 82.20 77.0 77.04 77.13 95.20

a

2001/02 distribution denotes the position of schools that remained in UP after bifurcation of the state into UP and Uttaranchal. N/A: Not available Source: Education in India (1994–95, 1995–96 and 1996–97), MHRD, Government of India, 2001, 2002, 2003 for 1994/95, 1995/96 and 1996/97, and Directorate of Secondary Education, Uttar Pradesh for 2001/02.

Secondary Education in the Indian State of Uttar Pradesh 289 Table 13.10 Number of examinees and pass percentages in different types of schools (Grade X and Grade XII examinations – 2002), Uttar Pradesh, India Class X examinations Govt. schools Number of schools Number of examinees Students passed Pass percentages % schools with pass % 0–20%

Aided schools

Class XII examinations

Unaided schools

Others

Govt. Aided Unaided schools schools schools Others

464 4467 3 917 (5.09) (48.97) (42.94) 80 267 1 043 817 706 016 (4.16) (55.02) (37.21) 78 920 421 868 310 199 (4.47) (53.13) (39.07) 45.01 40.42 43.94

273 (2.99) 68 531 (3.61) 26 367 (3.32) 38.47

237 3506 1301 (4.56) (67.42) (25.02) 44 499 4 73 530 1 18 962 (6.87) (73.09) (18.36) 32 922 3 41 978 86 695 (7.0) (72.79) (18.45) 73.98 72.22 72.88

14.65

56.77

18.27

16.93

0.42

0.77

156 (3.0) 10 869 (1.68) 8 239 (1.75) 75.80

1.31

2.56

Note: Figures in parenthesis depict percentages for respective types of schools. Source: Based on data provided by Board for Secondary and Intermediate Education, Uttar Pradesh.

works against that. But ironically, the only two schemes started to support girls’ education during the late 1990s focused on promoting unaided, fee-charging schools. These two schemes were meant to direct private investments towards the opening of single-sex schools for girls, but even these were subverted with the outcome of further discouraging girls’ access to secondary schooling. How political considerations successfully subverted the policy goal is discussed in detail in the next section. The massive presence of privately managed, aided and unaided schools makes the role of the regulatory framework crucial. A regulatory framework is important for directing resources and provisioning, maintaining essential physical facilities and an adequate number of teachers, and improving the quality of teaching– learning processes, in order to establish a system of accountability. Perusal of the existing norms, guidelines and directives indicates a near-absence of accountability mechanisms not only for unaided schools but also for aided schools that survive on substantial grants from the state exchequer. Gender focus even in terms of ensuring facilities and creating an enabling environment for girls is entirely lacking. Successive committees and national policy statements have highlighted the need for an increase in the number of women teachers in the light of parental insecurity and the resultant restricted mobility of girls as well as to create an enabling environment by providing positive role models in an otherwise non-inspiring environment. This is especially true for rural areas. However, the state does not have any policy of reservation for hiring women teachers at secondary level either in government or aided schools. Though the government funds the entire salary bill for aided schools, making this item the single largest constituent of the


government’s expenditure on this sub-sector, and the teachers enjoy all the advantages of government service, no regulatory frame for their recruitment and conduct exists in the state. Teachers from government and aided schools enjoy substantial political clout and resist any effort to have accountability measures in place. Kingdon and Muzzamil’s (2003) research shows that UP is one among only four states that has an upper chamber of the state legislature, and teachers have guaranteed representation in this body. They note two kinds of political influence: Political influence has been of two types: one, from above which has been instrumental in shaping the education system; and two, the lobbying and pressure groups from within the system originating at the local levels (and uniting at the state-level) in the form of organizations of teachers. Education-related legislation in UP has often been framed under immense lobbying pressure from teachers, particularly at the primary and secondary levels. Teachers in school (as opposed to higher education) have been instrumental in determining the local base of political parties in the state. 2003:6, our emphasis Provisioning female secondary education: the politics of investment Since pre-independence days UP has followed the practice of providing single-sex schools at all stages of education. Considering the fact that the availability of a school within reach was more important for the participation of both girls and boys as compared to the school being single-sex for primary age-group children, the provision was discontinued at primary level during the 1970s. This measure was based, and perhaps rightly so, on the belief that girls in this age-group are young and parents do not mind sending their daughters to co-educational institutions provided the school is not situated very far from their habitation. However, the same logic does not apply to the secondary level as parents are reluctant to send their adolescent daughters to co-educational schools. The availability of single-sex schools, therefore, becomes critical at this level. Tables 13.11 and 13.12 show that the number of single-sex secondary schools has been increasing throughout the second half of the last century, the rate of growth being the highest during the first thirty years of independence, i.e., during the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. The annual rate of growth slowed down during the 1980s and early 1990s but again picked up during the late 1990s. Although disaggregated statistics by management are not available, it is obvious that the increase in the number of single-sex schools for girls during the late 1990s is largely on account of unaided schools. No new school was added in the grants-in-aid category, and the number of new schools upgraded to secondary level in the government sector has not been large. Increase in the number of unaided girls’ schools during the late 1990s can be attributed directly to two schemes introduced during this period, aimed at creating incentives for investment in secondary single-sex schools for girls.

Secondary Education in the Indian State of Uttar Pradesh 291 Table 13.11 Growth of schools in Uttar Pradesh, India Number of educational institutions

Primary education

Total 1950/51 1960/61 1970/71 1980/81 1985/86 1990/91 1991/92 1992/93a 1993/94 1994/95 1995/96a 1996/97 1997/98 1998/99 1999/00 2000/1b 2001/2

31 979 40 083 62 127 70 606 73 490 77 111 78 085 74 889 79 522 82 023 88 817 91 093 92 554 94 476 96 764 86 361 88 927

Girls (singlesex)

% of girls to total

2520 4927 11624

7.88 7.93 18.71

Upper primary level (Grades 6–8)

Total

Girls (singlesex)

% of girls to total

2 854 4 335 8 787 13 555 14 728 15 072 15 328 17 730 15 546 15 976 19 516 19 917 20 436 20 675 21 678 19 639 20 429

468 661 2 008 3 200 3 377 3 319 3 447 3 610 3 509 3 817 2 651 2 746 2 960 3 051 3 237 3 021 3 102

16.3 15.2 22.8 23.6 22.9 22.0 22.4 20.4 22.5 23.8 13.6 13.7 14.4 14.7 14.9 15.3 15.1

Secondary Level (Grades 9–12)

Total

Girls (singlesex)

% of girls to total

987 1 771 3 415 5 178 5 709 5 999 6 060 6 115 6 637 6 637 6 977 7 003 7 135 8 339 8 549 8 459 9 063

154 282 581 758 848 886 889 560 962 962 1 042 1 057 1 127 1 364 1 427 1 501 1 608

15.6 15.9 17.0 14.6 14.8 14.7 14.6 9.2 14.4 14.4 14.9 15.0 15.7 16.3 16.6 17.7 17.7

Notes: a The particular year issues of the Government of Uttar Pradesh publication were not available to the researchers. b The state was bifurcated in 2000 into Uttar Pradesh and Uttaranchal. Hence, the number of schools shown in 2000/01 and 2001/02 does not include schools located in Uttaranchal. For this reason all trend analysis is up to 1999/2000. Sources: (i) Shiksha kee Pragati (Education’s Progress) (Government of Uttar Pradesh), Directorate of Education, Allahabad, different years. (ii) Growth of Schools 1950–1992 (State-Wise), MHRD, Department of Education, 1997 for 1992/93 data. (iii) Education in India 1995–96, MHRD, Department of Education, 2002 for 1995/96 data.

The first of these two schemes was introduced by the state government of UP in 1997 making any new private single-sex school for girls opened in a hitherto uncovered block headquarter eligible for a one-time infrastructure grant of Rs.1 million.11 Once all the block headquarters were covered, a new scheme was brought to provide Rs.2 million to any new girls’ school being opened in an uncovered Nyaya Panchayat.12 The fact that a good number of unaided private girls’ secondary schools were opened reflects a positive response to these schemes. However, these are fee-charging schools with no aid from the government for paying salaries or incurring any other recurrent expenditure. This means these schools have to survive on their own revenue, the fees collected from parents being the

292 Jyotsna Jha and Ramya Subrahmanian Table 13.12 Annual growth rate for the number of institutions at different school levels in Uttar Pradesh, India Annual growth rate for the number of institutions Primary level (Grades 1–5)

Upper primary level (Grades 6–8)

Secondary level (Grades 9–12)

Year

Total

Total

Girls (single-sex)

Total

Girls (single-sex)

1950/51 to 1980/81 1980/81 to 1990/91 1990/91 to 1994/95 1994/95 to 1999/2000 1990/91 to 1999/2000

4.03 0.92 1.59 3.59 2.83

12.49 1.12 1.50 7.14 5.24

19.46 0.37 3.75 ⫺3.04 ⫺0.27

14.35 1.58 2.66 5.76 4.72

15.69 1.69 2.14 9.67 6.78

Source: calculated on the basis of Table XI.

main source. The demand for fee-charging private schools for girls in these interior areas did not seem to take off. As mentioned earlier, girls’ education not being highly valued and the paying capacity of poorer households being low together act to keep down demand for fee-charging schools for girls. The owners of the schools opened under these schemes demanded that they be allowed to admit boys as well. Initially, in 1999, all schools opened under these schemes were apparently allowed to admit boys by an executive office order, which was later revised after a gap of two years. Under the revised order, only those schools that are located in rural areas were allowed to admit boys along with girls.13 It implied that schools opened under this scheme and located in urban areas could not admit boys. Separate statistics for enrolment are not available in the public domain to indicate the proportion of boys and girls in these schools. This experience shows that girls’ schooling participation in rural areas cannot be promoted by the expansion of provisioning through fee-charging schools. It also reveals the role of political considerations in policy-making and their implementation. While the larger concern for girls’ education at the national and international levels made it a good political decision to have directed schemes to improve provisioning of girls’ schools, narrow political considerations at the local level demanded measures which subverted the very basis of allowing subsidy for a private enterprise. Most of these schools were opened by local politicians who first used the scheme to access public money for their private initiative and later exercised their political influence to get an order passed which allowed them to make their enterprise initially viable and later profitable. These facts are not easily traceable as the available aggregate statistics do not provide any pointers and only a deeper analysis of executive office orders and other such directives help reveal such subversive attempts. The rate of growth in enrolment slowed down during the 1990s, especially the later part of the decade, for all stages of education. The growth rate for girls’ enrolment, however, has been higher as compared to boys at all stages. This is natural


as girls constitute the vast majority of out-of-school children in all age-groups. Nonetheless, despite the higher growth rate for enrolment, girls constitute only about 36 to 39 per cent of total enrolment at primary and upper primary stages and only 26 per cent at secondary stage in 2001/02. The fact that a major expansion at secondary stages has taken place in fee-charging private unaided schools is certainly one of the factors for the slowing down of the enrolment growth rate for both boys and girls, especially the latter, in the 1990s. In an environment where girls’ education is not a highly valued choice, increased commercialization is bound to act against their schooling participation. The above analysis makes it clear that secondary education in UP is characterized by a resource gap in public funding with its implications for the expansion of provisioning at this stage. As a corollary to this there has been an increasing focus on promoting commercialization through direct and indirect measures. Commercialization has not been complemented by a suitable regulatory framework outlining directions and accountability mechanisms, which has allowed market forces and political considerations to play an unchecked role. The absence of concrete and fool proof interventions to enhance appropriate provisioning for girls’ education proves that there is more rhetoric than substance. The fact that the rate of growth for boys’ enrolment has been even slower than that for girls shows that increased privatization has hurt their participation as well. The socio-cultural context, gender stereotyping and the secondary curriculum The fact that despite very low enrolment ratios for girls at secondary level in UP, fee-charging single-sex schools for girls have failed to attract adequate numbers of girls in the state indicates lack of sufficient demand for secondary schooling of girls, at least in rural areas. It also shows that though provisioning plays an important role, provisioning alone, particularly through private profit-making institutions, is not the way to increase girls’ participation at the secondary stage of schooling. However, no policy initiative aimed to influence demand for education can be found at the secondary stage in UP. Some scholarship schemes exist for Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe students but they are not necessarily meant for girls. The coverage is also extremely small and they constitute less than 1 per cent of total expenditure on secondary education. However, it is important to recognize that several schemes exist, focusing on encouraging girls’ enrolment at primary and upper primary levels and these appear to have played their role in increasing participation at those stages and to some extent at secondary stage as well. These schemes include free textbooks and provision for scholarships for girls. Under UPBEP and DPEP, efforts were also made to review the textbooks for gender bias and train teachers for gender sensitivity. The scheme of studies, curriculum design and content at secondary and senior secondary stages could itself be important means for initiating a change in existing gender positions and could influence the constructs of masculinity and femininity in society. In this context, the 1968 national policy’s emphasis on undifferentiated curriculum till grade X assumes some significance. The role of


pressures to join ‘womanly’ courses, the non-availability of non-traditional courses for girls and women, gender stereotypes in both the official and the hidden curriculum, and the negative attitude of teachers have been recognized as constraints by the Ramamurti Committee report (1991) which formed the basis of the Programme of Action (POE), 1992. Although it is not possible to delve into all these aspects of the curriculum, the analysis undertaken shows that some of the existing practices in UP reinforce rather than question gender stereotyping. Apart from the fact that the curriculum design has no space for some critical skills, information and knowledge areas crucial for adolescent girls in their specific contexts, the existing scheme of studies also practises gender differentiation to the disadvantage of girls. With the adoption of the 10 ⫹ 2 ⫹ 3 system and a unified curricular approach, the state adopted a new scheme of studies in 1998. Under this scheme, all students are supposed to complete seven subjects successfully. These include five subjects where these is no or little choice: Science, Social Science, Hindi, another Indian language, and Mathematics. While Mathematics is compulsory for boys, it is not for girls. Girls have a choice of opting for Home Science in place of Mathematics. The state offers two types of courses in Mathematics – Mathematics and Elementary Mathematics. While boys have a choice between Mathematics and Elementary Mathematics, girls have an additional option available in Home Science. This practice not only goes against the very philosophy of an undifferentiated curriculum, it also strengthens the existing stereotype that girls are not capable of doing well in Mathematics. What makes the situation worse is that the majority of single-sex girls’ schools in rural areas do not offer the choice of Mathematics, the only available options being Elementary Mathematics and Home Science. In the case of two additional subjects where students have wider choices available, the single-sex girls’ schools usually offer limited options of ‘womanly’ subjects such as sewing, cooking, and so on. The scheme provides for a number of options including ‘non-womanly’ courses such as commerce, agriculture and accountancy, but most of these are not offered in the majority of girls’ schools and students are forced to opt for among whatever is available. The rationale for having the choice of Elementary Mathematics and Home Science, and ‘womanly’ optional subjects, stems from the need to respond to ‘demand’. The very presence of this option of Home Science in place of Mathematics for girls strengthens the existing notions of masculinity and femininity. It is rarely realized that the school is also responsible for creating ‘demand’, not only responding to it. In any case these are reflections of societal expectations of the feminine role and whether girls are also interested in these has rarely been investigated. Societal expectations and family pressures to opt for ‘womanly’ subjects find an expression in this choice. Moreover, schools strengthen the demand for stereotyped courses since the choice of opting for non-womanly subjects is only notional in most of the single-sex girls’ schools. The ‘practical’ problem of not finding enough teachers for Mathematics and other such subjects to teach in girls’ schools is often cited as a reason for not offering the course. It is not considered viable to have a teacher if only a few students are opting for the subject. What is not realized is that unless


more students including girls are encouraged to opt for those subjects the shortage of women teachers is going to continue. The fact that these practices have been retained in the latest curriculum changes reflects the lack of a guiding vision based on notions of gender equality to guide policy-planning. These practices perpetuate gender disadvantage and the school system becomes an agent of reinforcement rather than of change in the process.

Conclusion In this chapter we have argued that education policy initiatives remain divorced from broader visions of gender justice and social policy, partly on account of the continuing dominance of discourses of investment in female education, which rely on identifying thresholds for minimum public action. Although there are multiple discourses influenced by diverse actors in the education policy arena, these do not seem to translate into policies and practices that have an impact on female schooling in a way that reflects the reality of girls’ education today. We make three specific points. First, we argue that, at a symbolic level, the continuing sway of the idea of the ‘educated person’ purely in terms of human capital has resulted in mechanistic definitions of what it is people are assumed to gain from education. This, arguably, emphasizes elementary education investment over subsequent levels of education, reduces the focus on developing policies appropriate to girls and boys at different stages of the life cycle, and places issues of quality and equity at the fringes of policy action. Combined with institutional biases and the political challenges of promoting gender equality, claims for investment in women that continually emphasize women’s role in helping their families, communities and nations end up reinforcing the core messages of human capital. In our attempt to map the operation of discourses and practices in the secondary schooling arena, we found that at all levels the neglect of secondary education for girls was reinforced, thus appearing to be a direct translation of assumptions related to human capital. However, we also argue that ‘gender’ does not operate only in the symbolic arena and that symbolic discourses are not all-powerful. Discourses can and do get renegotiated in the realm of practice, driven by varied motivations and compulsions. State policies for equity, such as in the UP case, are often implemented through market-mediated processes. While we do not wish to suggest that this is the result of a linear process of translation of a particular (albeit hegemonic) policy discourse at different levels of policy decision-making and execution, our case study has shown how political actors at the local level can subvert policies enacted in favour of women, resulting in the dilution of state commitments to gender equality, even if these were weak at the outset. In the case of the policy enacted in UP to encourage female secondary schooling, we argue that this was weak to start with because it omitted to build up the demand-side of girls’ secondary schooling, resulting in a low uptake of the schools made available. The neglect of a focus on the demand for girls’ schooling also meant that when the policy was reversed, through the actions of


private providers, girls and parents affected by this move had barely any voice to challenge the change in policy. This leads us to argue strongly for the active role of states, even where private providers are in play, not just to subsidize the costs of schooling, but also to build up demand to ensure that education provision is seen as a matter of right, and not a privilege to be bestowed and then taken away. Our third and final point refers to the issue of the outcomes of policy. Given the emphasis on gender parity in secondary education as a Millennium Development Goal (MDG) and Education For All (EFA) target, as well as the emphasis on gender equality in the EFA goals, the issue of gender and education cannot rest at the level of grand policy pronouncements on the importance of investment in women. This point has global relevance, but here we speak to the Indian context. While elementary education is finally getting the impetus it has been promised for decades, care has to be taken that the policy directions followed for this subsector do not have negative implications for the sub-sector that follows. If all schools are not improved in terms of their quality, transition to secondary schools in terms of access of the poorest, and of girls, will continue to be difficult to achieve. This fact, combined with the neglect of the secondary sub-sector in terms of providing girl-friendly single-sex schools that are relatively cost-free, will mean that girls are pushed out of education at a time when they need resources to develop the capacities, skills and aptitudes that will support their transition to adulthood.

Notes 1 Notably, through a large USAID funded programme in the state, Innovations in Family Planning Services (IFPS). 2 Based on estimates provided in the Implementation Completion Reports (World Bank) of the two programmes. 3 See Vaidyanathan and Nair (2000) and Jha and Jhingran (2002) 4 These statistics have not been included in this chapter. 5 See Jha and Bhardwaj (2001) for detailed analysis on women teachers in rural India. 6 Office orders are executive measures often based on decisions taken by the bureaucracy, which do not require to be approved by elected legislative bodies. 7 The Board of High School and Intermediate Examinations was established as an autonomous body functioning under the Directorate of Secondary Education in 1922 in UP. 8 A special Secondary Education Commission (known as Acharya Narenda Dev Committee) was appointed in UP which submitted its report in 1952. 9 Based on Sharadindu (2001) 10 Based on personal interactions with people and functionaries belonging to government and private school systems. 11 Block is a sub-district administrative unit in India. It usually covers about 50 to 100 primary schools. 12 Nyaya panchayat is a smaller administrative unit covering several villages and about 15–20 primary schools. 13 The revised order of the state government (order number 2501–8-2001–3009 | 5 | / 94) is dated August 17, 2001. It revised the order issued on September 29, 1999 (order no. 15–8–99–3009 | 5 | / 94).


References In addition to the references cited below, a number of Acts, unpublished reports, internal analyses papers, handouts, office orders, etc. were referred to. Board of High School and Intermediate Examinations, Uttar Pradesh (different years), Analyses of Examination Results. Allahabad Board of High School and Intermediate Examinations. Council of Boards of School Education In India (COBSE) (2002). Sahodaya, Newsletter, Special Number, January 2002, Vol. XXXXI. New Delhi: COBSE. Dreze, J. and H. Gazdar (1996) ‘Uttar Pradesh: The Burden of Inertia’. In J. Dreze and A. Sen (eds) Indian Development: Selected Regional Perspectives. Oxford and New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Government of India, Ministry of Human Resource Development (different years). A Handbook of School Education and Allied Statistics (1996). New Delhi: Department of Education. Government of India, Ministry of Human Resource Development (different years). Annual Report. New Delhi: Department of Education. Government of India, Ministry of Human Resource Development (different years). Analysis of Budgeted Expenditure in Education. New Delhi: Department of Education. Government of India, Ministry of Human Resource Development (different years). Education in India. New Delhi: Department of Education. Government of India, Ministry of Human Resource Development (1996) Growth of Schools 1950–1992. New Delhi: State-Wise. Government of India, Ministry of Human Resource Development (1997) Growth of Enrolment in School Education 1950–51 to 1993–94. New Delhi: State-Wise. Government of India, Ministry of Human Resource Development (different years) Selected Educational Statistics. New Delhi: Department of Education. Government of Uttar Pradesh (2002) Vittiya Akhya, Mahyamik Shiksha (Financial Statement Secondary Education) (2002–03). Lucknow. Government of Uttar Pradesh (different years) Shiksha Ki Pragati (Progress of Education). Allahabad: Directorate of School Education. Jeffery, P., R. Jeffery and C. Jeffrey (2004) ‘Islamisation, Gentrification and Domestication: “A Girls’ Islamic Course” and Rural Muslims in Western Uttar Pradesh’. Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 38, No. 1: 1–53. Jha, Jyotsna and Dhir Jhingran (2005) Elementary Education for the Poorest and Most Deprived Groups: The Real Challenge of Universalisation. New Delhi: Manohar. Jha, Jyotsna and Meenakshi Bhardwaj (2001) Women Teachers in Rural India. New Delhi: UNESCO and Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD). Kingdon, G. M. Muzammil (2003) The Political Economy of Education in India: Teacher Politics in Uttar Pradesh. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD) (1997) Remodeling of School Education Board. Report of the Task Force on the Role and Status of Boards of Secondary Education. New Delhi: Department of Education, Government of India. Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD), Programme of Action 1992 (National Policy on Education 1986). New Delhi: Department of Education, Government of India. Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD), Report of the CABE Committee on Policy 1992. New Delhi: Department of Education, Government of India. Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD), Towards an Enlightened and Humane Society, NPE- A Review. Ramamurti Committee Report. New Delhi: Department of Education, Government of India. National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) (1998). Sixth All India Education Survey Report, New Delhi: Government of India. Planning Commission (2002) Tenth Five Year Plan 2002–2007. Volume II, Sectoral Profiles and Programmes. New Delhi: Government of India.

298 Jyotsna Jha and Ramya Subrahmanian Sharadindu. (2001) School Education in U.P., Status, Issues and Future Perspectives. State Council of Educational Research, Lucknow; mimeo of draft submitted to the National Council of Educational Research and Training, New Delhi. Stromquist, N. (1999) ‘The Impact of Structural Adjustment Programmes in Africa and Latin America’. In C. Heward and S. Bunwaree (eds) Gender, Education and Development: Beyond Access to Empowerment. London: Zed Books. Subrahmanian, R. (2002a) ‘Engendering Education: Prospects for a Rights-Based Approach to Female Education Deprivation in India’. In M. Molyneux and S. Razavi (eds) Gender, Justice and Development. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Subrahmanian, R. (2002b) ‘Gender and Education: Review of Issues for Social Policy’. Social Policy and Development, Paper No. 9. Geneva: UNRISD. Subrahmanian, R. (2003) ‘Gender Equality in Education: Definitions and Measurements’. Background paper for the Global Monitoring Report on Education for All 2003–04. Paris: UNESCO. Tyagi, R. S. and Sharadindu (1999) Educational Administration in Uttar Pradesh. National Institute of Educational Planning and Administration. New Delhi: Vikas Publishing House. United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) (2002) Education for All: Is the World on Track? Global Monitoring Report 2002/03. Paris: UNESCO. United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) (2003) The Leap to Equality: Gender and Education for All. Global Monitoring Report 2003/04, Paris: UNESCO. United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) (2003) The State of the World’s Children 2004: Girls, Education and Development. New York: UNICEF. United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) (2003) ‘Millennium Development Goals: A Compact among Nations to End Human Poverty’. Human Development Report 2003. New York: United Nations Development Programme. Unterhalter, E. (2003) Education, Capabilities and Social Justice. Paper prepared for the EFA Global Monitoring Report 2003/09. Paris: UNESCO. Unterhalter, E. and S. Dutt (2001) ‘Gender, Education and Women’s Power: Indian State and Civil Society Intersections in DPEP (District Primary Education Programme) and Mahila Samakhya’. Compare, Vol. 31, No. 1. Vaidyanathan, A. and P. R. Gopinathan Nair (eds) (2001) Elementary Education in Rural India. New Delhi: Sage. Verghese, N. V. (2003) ‘Universalisation of Higher Education and Equity Concerns’. Paper presented at the Oxford Conference on Education and Development, Oxford, UK. Wazir, Rekha (2000) ‘Profiling the Problem’. In Rekha Wazir (ed.) The Gender Gap in Basic Education: NGOs as Change Agents. New Delhi: Sage Publications. Woodhall, M. (1987) ‘Human Capital Concepts’. In G. Psacharapoulos (ed.) Human Capital Concepts. Page references relate to the reprint in A. H. Halsey et al. (eds) (1997) Education: Culture, Economy and Society. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. World Bank (2003a) Secondary Education in India. South Asia Human Development Sector Report No. 2, New Delhi. World Bank (2003b) Opening Doors: Education and the World Bank. Washington DC: World Bank. World Bank (2003c) A Policy Note on the Grant-in-Aid System in Indian Education. South Asia Human Development Sector Report No. 3, New Delhi.

Part IV Financing Social Provisioning and Counting in Women


14 Gendered Implications of Tax Reform in Latin America: Argentina, Chile, Costa Rica and Jamaica Evelyne Huber

In Latin American and Caribbean countries, poverty and inequality have been longstanding problems, and the momentous economic and social policy changes over the past two decades have done little to ameliorate them. The most effective means for reducing class- and gender-based poverty and inequality would be citizenship-based entitlements to basic (i.e. allowing basic subsistence) income support, healthcare, and education. In advanced industrial societies, public spending is an extremely important instrument for the alleviation of class- and genderbased poverty and inequality (Moller et al. 2003; Bradley et al. 2003; Huber and Stephens 2001), and it could potentially play a similar role in Latin America and the Caribbean. However, responsible, that is non-inflationary, financing of such programs requires a sound system of taxation, something that is scarce in developing countries, including in Latin America and the Caribbean. Systems of taxation on their part have important implications for class and gender equity. This chapter explores changes in the systems of taxation in four Latin American and Caribbean countries – Argentina, Chile, Costa Rica, and Jamaica – from the point of view of their gendered impact. The starting point of the argument is that effective tax collection is a necessary, though not sufficient, condition for the amelioration of gender-based poverty and inequality. Low-aggregate tax collection hurts women because it prevents the establishment of programmes that counteract market distribution of income, in which women are generally disadvantaged. They are disadvantaged in market income because they provide the bulk of the non-paid care work, because their paid work takes place in the informal sector to a greater extent than men’s paid work, and because – if they work in the formal sector – they tend to be employed in smaller enterprises and to earn less than men. Latin American countries as a whole have been undertaxing their populations, with an average tax burden of 14 per cent of GDP in the first half of the 1990s, compared to 17 per cent of GDP in a group of East and Southeast Asian countries (IADB 1996: 128). Direct taxes amount to about 25 per cent of tax revenue only, and of this amount some 60–80 per cent typically comes from corporate tax 301

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payments, while only 10–15 per cent comes from private individuals (ECLAC 1998: 72). Interestingly, the situation in the English-speaking Caribbean has been very different, with an average tax burden in the first half of the 1990s of 27–28 per cent of GDP, essentially double the rate of Latin America, and direct taxation on individuals and corporations accounting for some 40 per cent of tax revenue (ECLAC 1998: 66–72). This contrast suggests that the fundamental reasons for the poor tax collection performance in Latin America are poor policy choices, rather than low levels of economic development and technological capacity.

Changes in tax structures since the 1970s The dominant pattern of tax reforms over the past three decades in Latin America and the Caribbean, which – with some exceptions – holds true for our four cases, has consisted of reductions of marginal tax rates on corporate and individual incomes and attempts to broaden the tax base, but these have not succeeded in significantly increasing income-tax collection. At the same time, revenue from imports and exports and other international transactions declined significantly in many cases due to the lowering of tariff rates and other forms of deregulation. To make up for this decline and to facilitate tax collection, most countries have shifted more weight to value-added taxes (VAT). There has been more variation in the treatment of social-security taxes, corresponding to the different approaches with regards to social policy reforms.1 Advocates of this pattern of tax reform, prominent among them representatives of the World Bank, have argued that reduction of marginal tax rates reduces the incentive for tax evasion (not declaring income or transactions) and tax avoidance (manoeuvreing within the tax code to reduce tax liability) and that broadening of the tax base reduces non-neutral tax treatment that encourages resource shifts to relatively low tax activities and thus distorts resource allocation. Moreover, reducing the complexity of the tax structure makes tax collection less costly and more effective

Table 14.1 Tax categories Direct taxes

Indirect taxes on consumption

Trade taxes Social security taxes Other taxes

Income, individual Income, corporate Property, wealth and inheritance Value added (VAT) Sales Excise on selective products; ‘sin’ taxes, e.g. alcohol, tobacco Import duties Export duties Employees/ self-employed in formal sector Employer payroll in formal sector

Gendered Implications of Tax Reform in Latin America 303

(Thirsk 1997: 8–11). VAT in particular is supposed to be easy to collect and – if broadly based – not to have distorting effects on resource allocation. In all these countries, though, tax evasion and avoidance have remained fundamental problems. Both individuals and corporations continue regularly to engage in both. Despite administrative reforms to upgrade the status, equipment, and quality of personnel of the tax administration agencies, these agencies have fewer human resources and smaller budgets but higher collection costs than their counterparts in the more developed countries (ECLAC 1998: 83). Data and sources Tables 14.2 and 14.3 show the overall level and the composition of taxes in 1980/81, before the onset of the general Latin American debt crisis, and in 1999/2000, after a decade or more of economic reforms. A note of caution is in order here. These data

Table 14.2 Taxes as a percentage of GDP Argentina Tax category Income, profits, capital gains & property Goods and services International trade Social-security contributions Other Total

Chile

Costa Rica

Jamaica

1980–81 1999–2000 1980–81 1999–2000 1980–81 1999–2000 1980–81 1999–2000 0.0%a

2.7%

5.5%

3.8%

2.7%

2.9%

10.8%b

9.2%b

5.4% 0.9% 2.7%

5.9% 0.7% 3.4%

12.0% 1.5% 4.8%

10.0% 1.4% 1.4%

5.0% 4.1% 4.8%

8.0% 1.1% 6.2%

14.5% 1.3% 1.2%

9.3% 2.2% 0.0%

4.4%a 13.5%

0.0%

1.8%

0.8%

0.2%

0.0%

1.0%

2.0%

12.7%

25.7%

17.4%

16.8%

18.2%

28.8%

22.8%

a

Carciofi and Cetrángolo (1995) show a different figure in ‘Income, profits, capital gains & property’, and a lower in ‘Other’. b Includes some payroll taxes that are social policy schemes. Source: IMF Government Finance Statistics, and IMF International Financial Statistics.

Table 14.3 Taxes as a percentage of total revenue Argentina Tax category Income, profits, capital gains & property Goods and services International trade Social-security contributions Other Total

Chile

Costa Rica

Jamaica

1980–81 1999–2000 1980–81 1999–2000 1980–81 1999–2000 1980–81 1999–2000 0.0%a

41.1% 7.1% 19.6% 32.1%a 100.0%

20.9%

21.5%

21.8%

15.8%

15.8%

37.6%b

40.6%b

46.7% 5.8% 26.5%

46.8% 6.0% 18.7%

57.3% 8.8% 8.2%

29.8% 24.4% 28.7%

44.0% 5.9% 34.3%

50.3% 4.5% 4.1%

40.9% 9.7% 0.0%

0.1%

7.1%

4.7%

1.4%

0.0%

3.5%

8.9%

100.0%

100.0%

100.7%

100.0%

100.0%

100.0%

100.0%

a

Carciofi and Cetrángolo (1995) show a different figure in ‘Income, Profits, Capital Gains & Property’, and a lower in ‘Other’. b Includes some payroll taxes that are social policy schemes. Source: IMF Government Finance Statistics, and IMF International Financial Statistics.

304 Evelyne Huber

come from the IMF International Financial Statistics (1991, 1997, 2003) and Government Finance Statistics (1988, 1991, 1995, 2003). Other authors cite data that may vary quite considerably from those presented here. For instance, Tanzi (2000) cites ECLAC data that show significant discrepancies to our data for Chile and Costa Rica in the earlier period and for Argentina and Costa Rica in the later period. Carciofi and Centrángolo (1994), citing Tanzi (1987), present data for 1980–82 for Argentina that are much higher than ours, with total tax revenue accounting for 19.9 per cent of GDP, and Gómez Sabaini et al. (2002) present figures for Argentina for 1997 that show central government tax revenue as 19.7 per cent of GDP, provincial tax revenue as 3.7 per cent of GDP and municipal revenue as 1.2 per cent. Thus, one would have to add about 25 per cent to our total central government tax-revenue figures to arrive at the total tax burden. In addition, different authors and institutions may classify certain taxes differently. Having acknowledged these data problems, we can make three points to affirm the usefulness of the IMF data for the comparisons to be made here. First, our data all come from the same source and thus are more comparable than data pieced together from different sources. Second, IMF figures are important because they are used in setting targets for governments in the formulation of fiscal policy. Third, if we look at the pattern of change in composition of tax revenue over time, and if we are attentive to and correct for different classification decisions, the various sources and authors paint a similar picture: They show a decrease in reliance on foreigntrade taxes and an increase in reliance on indirect taxes, with the share of direct taxes remaining roughly constant. The important exception is Jamaica. The incidence of different categories of taxes In general, the following assumptions are made regarding the incidence of different kinds of taxes. Direct taxes on income, profits, and property tend to be universally progressive and indirect taxes generally regressive, though the degree to which they are regressive varies with the exemption of basic goods and services. If such exemptions are targeted narrowly on a basket of basic goods and services consumed by low-income earners, indirect taxes such as sales taxes or VAT become less regressive (Hossain 2003).2 Social-security taxes are ambiguous; the share paid by employees is generally a percentage of earnings and thus proportional, but since there are often caps on contributions, these taxes become regressive at the upper end. The share of socialsecurity taxes paid by the employer may be passed on to the final price of the product and thus at least partly shared by the consumer and work like an indirect tax. However, in the new open economic environment, possibilities for passing on these costs to the consumer are more limited, so we can assume that a larger share is carried by the employer and – even more likely – the employees (in the form of lower wages to absorb some of the employer’s share). The situation in the early 1980s In 1980/81, Chile and Jamaica were clearly at the upper end of Latin American countries in terms of total tax collection as a percentage of GDP, with central


government tax revenue accounting for 25.7 per cent of GDP and 28.8 per cent respectively, whereas Costa Rica with 16.8 per cent of GDP and Argentina with 13.5 per cent of GDP were closer to the mean. It is important to note that Chile had already undergone radical economic reforms and a tax reform by this point. Indeed, Chile already relied on indirect taxes for close to half of total tax revenue, with 47 per cent. Direct taxes, that is, income and capital-gains taxes on individuals and corporations, together with property taxes, amounted to between 16 per cent of total tax revenue (in Costa Rica) and 38 per cent (in Jamaica).3 The figure for Jamaica is inflated because some earmarked taxes for social policy are added to the income tax, which in other countries would be classified as social-security taxes. Chile and Argentina had already lowered taxes on foreign trade by the early 1980s, whereas they continued to play a very important role in Costa Rica, more important than income taxes. For Jamaica, we are dealing with a classification problem. Bahl (1989), for instance, shows 25.5 per cent of total government revenue in the early 1980s coming from export duties. In addition, he shows 20 per cent coming from import duties, so the total contribution of foreign-trade taxes to government revenue in his data is 45.5 per cent, as in Costa Rica clearly higher than income taxes. In the IMF data, stamp duties on imported goods must be classified under taxes on goods and services and thus greatly inflate that figure. If we count them as taxes on foreign trade, then Jamaica is in an intermediate position with regard to the relative share of foreign trade and domestic indirect taxes, compared to Chile and Argentina on the one hand and Costa Rica on the other. The former two countries have a low share of total taxes coming from foreign trade and a high share from domestic taxes on goods and services, and the latter has a comparatively higher share coming from foreign trade and a lower one from domestic taxes on goods and services. Tax reform in Argentina In Argentina, one really cannot speak of a particular episode of tax reform, but rather has to consider a protracted process of changes in the tax system, responding to fluctuations and shocks in the macroeconomic environment.4 In the 1980s, the crushing debt burden, runaway inflation and recession required efforts to increase tax revenue with a series of different measures. The successful stabilization programme of the early 1990s then opened the way for a more coherent tax-reform programme focused on increasing overall tax receipts and relying heavily on VAT. From the mid-1990s on, several minor tax changes were implemented in response to recessions and growing budget deficits, but they had generally little impact (Gaggero and Gómez Sabaini 2002: 38). The VAT rate rose from 16 per cent in 1980 to 21 per cent in 1995. In 1998 the base for VAT was expanded to include new services, but at the same time the rate was lowered for agricultural products and some others. As Table 14.3 shows, the most remarkable change in the tax structure between the early 1980s and 1999/ 2000 was indeed the increase in revenue from indirect taxes. However, expressed as a percentage of GDP, the increase in revenue from indirect taxes was only slight, because total tax revenue of the central government as a percentage of GDP declined

306 Evelyne Huber

slightly. Nevertheless, this category of taxes is by far the biggest source of tax revenue, bringing in more than twice the revenue from income taxes. As a reminder, we should add tax revenue at the provincial level and at the municipal level amounting to roughly 25 per cent of tax revenue of the central government, so that by the late 1990s total tax revenue for all levels of government reached roughly 16 per cent of GDP. This is still lower than tax revenue in Chile, Costa Rica and Jamaica. A study of the distributive impact of the tax system, based on the 1997 household survey in urban areas and a survey of the consumption structure, shows that it is slightly regressive (Gómez Sabaini et al. 2002). Since 88 per cent of the population reside in urban areas (World Bank 2003), these data characterize the tax system as it affects close to nine-tenths of the population. The GINI index for income distribution among deciles increases from 0.55 before taxes to 0.58 after taxes. This is mainly due to the VAT burden that weighs particularly heavily on the lowest decile and least on the highest. The structure of social-security contributions is equally regressive, though it has a somewhat lower weight on the lowest decile than VAT. The income-tax burden is progressive. However, since VAT has such a central role in the tax structure, the system as a whole is shaped by its incidence. Thus, looking at the growing role of VAT and of social-security contributions from the early 1980s to 1997, we can conclude that it has become more regressive. Indeed, the authors analysed data from 1986 with the same methodology as the 1997 study and found that the degree to which the tax system was regressive was more marked in the later period (Gómez Sabaini et al. 2002: 67). Tax reform in Chile In Chile, major reforms of the tax system began comparatively early, as part of the neoliberal restructuring of the Chilean economy under the Pinochet dictatorship. In 1975, Chile introduced VAT at a rate of 20 per cent, the highest rate in Latin America and the Caribbean at the time. As of the early 1980s, close to half of Chilean tax revenue came from domestic taxes on goods and services (see Table 14.3). VAT remained broadly based and there were very few exemptions; the rate fluctuated between 20 and 16 per cent. In 1984, the government lowered income tax, reducing the marginal tax rate and widening the tax brackets. Savings were exempt from the tax base and deductions for some financial investments were introduced, clearly reforms benefiting upper income earners. Tax reform and increases in social spending became a major issue in the elections of the first democratic government. In 1990, the newly elected government arrived at an agreement with business and the opposition that allowed it to raise taxes temporarily, for a period of four years, to finance an increase in social expenditures. The government raised the VAT rate from 16 to 18 per cent and reversed some of the more regressive changes in the income tax that had been implemented in 1984. It also closed some loopholes in corporate taxation and imposed taxes on all business profits, raising the rate for 1991–93 from 10 to 15 per cent. The increase in tax revenue resulting from this reform was estimated at 1.5 per cent of GDP, which in turn allowed an increase in social expenditures of 17.4 per cent


over the original budget for 1990, and an increase in real expenditures on social investment, mainly in healthcare, education and housing, of 12.2 per cent from 1990 to 1991 (Schkolnik 1992: 27–8). Tax revenue as a percentage of GDP increased from 14.5 per cent in 1990 to 18 per cent in 1993. Similar to Argentina, the tax structure in the second half of the 1990s emphasized indirect taxes, particularly VAT, and de-emphasized direct taxation, particularly individual income taxes (see Table 14.3). One of the main reasons for the small contribution made by personal income taxes is the fact that declared incomes are low, even in the top decile. Wealthy Chileans have the option of forming a company, transforming part of their personal incomes into business income, computing various expenses as costs, buying assets that are used in personal consumption, and paying the flat 15 per cent business tax on profits. This is a perfectly legal form of tax avoidance (Engel et al. 1998). It is no surprise, then, that the tax system as a whole is somewhat regressive, just like in Argentina. The Gini index before taxes in 1996 was 0.49, and after taxes 0.50 (Engel et al. 1998). Again, the income tax is clearly progressive and VAT clearly regressive, but since VAT accounts for a much larger share of taxes, the system as a whole is regressive. Gómez Sabaini et al. (2002) cite results from studies of tax incidence in Chile in 1969 (Foxley et al. 1980) and 1997 (Engel et al. 1998), which clearly show that the system was somewhat progressive in 1969 and became significantly more regressive with the series of reforms since the 1970s. What is important to note is that public expenditure in Chile in the 1990s did ameliorate inequality; Engel et al. (1998) estimate that the Gini index fell from 0.5 after taxes but before spending to 0.43 after taxes and spending. Tax reform in Costa Rica In Costa Rica, the same general pattern is visible as in Argentina and Chile, with a decline of reliance on international trade taxes and an increase in reliance on indirect taxes (see Table 14.2). It is interesting to note here that Costa Rica does not have a generalized VAT; it only exists in some industries. Most of the indirect tax revenue comes from sales and excise taxes. Tax reform was part of the three structural adjustment agreements that the country entered into with the World Bank covering the period 1985 to 1998 (Quesada et al. 1999: 109–12). The two motives for tax reform were stimulation of non-traditional exports and increases in tax revenue in order to reduce the budget deficit. Under the 1985 agreement with the World Bank, taxes on profits from non-traditional exports were eliminated, as were import taxes on inputs for export production, and customs duties in general were lowered. These efforts were continued under the following two agreements, with an emphasis on simplification of the tax system, broadening of the tax base, and efforts to strengthen tax administration. The top income-tax rate was lowered from 50 per cent to 25 per cent. In 1995, the rate of the sales tax was increased from 10 per cent to 15 per cent. In 2003, a new tax-reform project was accepted by a congressional committee, envisioning the introduction of a VAT with a rate of 13 per cent, and a uniform company tax with a rate of 18 per cent (www.nacion.com; accessed on 1 December 2003).

308 Evelyne Huber

In contrast to Chile and Jamaica, where total tax revenue as a percentage of GDP fell rather markedly between 1980/81 and 1999/2000, Costa Rica managed to increase revenue slightly in this period, from 16.8 per cent to 18.2 per cent of GDP, which put it second only to Jamaica among our four countries. What makes Costa Rica distinctive is the high share of total tax revenue accounted for by socialsecurity taxes. These increased their share from 29 per cent to 34 per cent of the total in this period, whereas they increased also, but at a lower level, from 20 per cent to 26 per cent in Argentina but declined from 19 per cent to 8 per cent in Chile. The large decline in Chile is heavily due to the fact that employer contributions were abolished when the pension system was privatized and employers contribute nothing for health insurance for their employees either.5 As noted above, the data for Jamaica are not comparable because taxes designated for social insurance and services are included under income taxes. As in Chile, direct taxes on income, profits and property retained a roughly constant share of the total in Costa Rica, with 16 per cent. I was not able to find any studies of the incidence of taxation in Costa Rica. However, if we look at the composition of taxation in Costa Rica and Argentina in 1999/2000, we find a remarkable similarity (see Table 14.3). Thus, we might assume that the distributive impact of the tax system is similar. However, this assumption would ignore the differences in the structure of indirect taxes in the two cases shaped by exemptions, as well as the differences in social-security taxes. In Costa Rica, a basket of basic goods, veterinary products and agricultural inputs are exempt from sales tax. In Argentina, a wide range of goods and services is exempted from VAT, but these exemptions tend to benefit all income groups, rather than being focused on low-income groups (CIPPEC 2002). Since the basket of basic goods and agricultural inputs absorbs a large part of the income of lowincome groups but not of high-income groups, these exemptions make the Costa Rican sales tax less regressive than the Argentine VAT. As noted, Gómez Sabaini et al. (2002) found social-security taxes to be regressive in Argentina. These are high and they have caps. Social-security taxes in Costa Rica are much lower and there are no caps (Social Security Administration 1995). Thus, these taxes are proportional to income. Given the similarity in weight but differences in the structure of indirect taxes and social-security taxes between Costa Rica and Argentina, with exemptions from the sales tax more focused on goods consumed by low-income groups and socialsecurity taxes proportional to income in Costa Rica, we would expect the Costa Rican tax system as a whole to be distributionally neutral or slightly progressive. In addition, we need to keep in mind that redistribution happens mostly on the expenditure side, and thus the fact that Costa Rica has the second highest level of total taxation, behind Jamaica, puts the country in a comparatively favourable position to effect redistribution. Indeed, in studies of household income, Costa Rica along with Uruguay consistently shows the lowest Gini indices for income distribution among 17 Latin American and Caribbean countries in the 1980s and 1990s (Morley 2001).


Tax reform in Jamaica In Jamaica, tax reform was also begun and shaped in the context of structural adjustment programmes negotiated with the IMF, the World Bank and USAID in the 1980s. Indeed, the US government provided the funding for the comprehensive tax-reform project (Bahl 1991: 9). Given the comparatively high level of taxation in Jamaica in the early 1980s, the primary motivation was not to increase revenue but rather to simplify the tax system and make it consistent with a more liberalized economy. Among other things, this meant reducing taxes on high-income earners and corporations who might be more likely to invest their money abroad in the more liberalized economic environment. The progressive rate structure of the personal income tax, with a top rate of 57.5 per cent, was replaced by a flat tax rate of 33 1/3 per cent in 1986, and in 1992 it was reduced to 25 per cent. A system of multiple tax credits was replaced by a standard deduction; the size of this deduction was increased in 1992, when the rate was lowered. In addition, before the reform Jamaican firms had offered their employees a number of nontaxable ‘allowances’, such as cars, to reduce both the firms’ and the employees’ payroll tax liability. Most of these ‘allowances’ were made taxable. Also, the tax reform included interest as taxable income and abolished the preferential treatment of overtime pay. The tax rate on corporations was lowered also, from 45 per cent to 33 –13 per cent. On the other hand, there was little change in various payroll tax schemes (for education, training, housing and social security), which generated revenue roughly equivalent to half of individual income-tax collection (Bahl 1991: 38). Thus, if we look at the total effect of the tax reforms in the 1980s and 1990s, the share of direct taxes, including the payroll taxes that in other countries would be considered social-security taxes, actually increased from 38 per cent to 41 per cent of total tax revenue. Jamaica’s system of indirect taxation before the reform was exceedingly complex, and indirect taxes accounted for a majority of tax revenue in the early 1980s already. In 1991, Jamaica introduced a general consumption tax with a rate of 10 per cent; by 1997 the rate had risen to 15 per cent. Before the reforms, 80 per cent of indirect taxes came from excise taxes, and the largest share came from alcohol, tobacco, and gasoline. The emphasis on these tax sources was maintained in the design of the tax reforms. The share of taxes on international trade in total tax revenue more than doubled over the two decades of the 1980s and 1990s (Bahl 1997). Compared to the other three countries, it had started at the lowest level but ended up at the highest, with close to 10 per cent, followed by Chile with 8 per cent. According to figures presented by Bahl (1997: 219), based on Wasylenko (1991) and Sjoquist and Green (1992), the tax system as a whole was already progressive before the reforms and was made slightly more progressive by the reforms, at least up to 1991 (when the data for these studies were collected). As to developments after 1991, we can outline several factors that had countervailing effects: the income tax rate was reduced to 25 per cent, which benefited higher-income earners, but at the same time the standard deduction was increased, which benefited lower-income earners; the general consumption tax rate was increased, but other

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indirect taxes were decreased; the exemption from the general consumption tax of food stuffs, health supplies, and books and materials for education, among other categories, cushioned the burden on lower-income earners. Looking at the composition of tax revenue as a whole at the end of the 1990s and comparing it with the composition in the early 1980s, we can venture the assessment that the tax system developed in a slightly more progressive direction, with direct taxes increasing their share and taxes on goods and services decreasing. These developments stand in contrast to the other three countries, where the share of taxes on goods and services increased, sometimes dramatically so, whereas the share of direct taxes remained stagnant. If we look at the sum of direct taxes and social-security taxes as a percentage of GDP, a pronounced difference emerges between Jamaica and Costa Rica on the one hand and Argentina and Chile on the other (see Table 14.1). In Jamaica they accounted for 9.2 per cent of GDP at the end of the 1990s and in Costa Rica for 9.1 per cent, compared to 5.2 per cent in Chile and 6.1 per cent in Argentina. Thus, the Jamaican and Costa Rican tax systems were clearly more effective in collecting direct and social security taxes.

Politics of tax reform and enforcement Despite the tax reforms, all four countries continue to suffer from widespread tax evasion and avoidance. The tax administrations all lack sufficient qualified personnel and equipment for effective monitoring of tax compliance and for auditing tax returns. There are many potential taxpayers, both individuals and corporations, who are not even registered. Of those who are registered, only a fraction actually file returns, and most of them under-report their income. For instance, Bahl (1997: 220) points out that in Jamaica in 1992 there were about 80,000 registered self-employed taxpayers, and of those only about 25 per cent filed returns. In a random sample of self-employed people from nine occupations, the per cent of income tax filers was 17 per cent in 1982 and 11 per cent in 1983 (Alm et al. 1991: 196). Among large enterprises, compliance with the general consumption tax was around 85 per cent but among all other enterprises it was in the low 60 per cent range (Bahl 1997). For Chile, Engel et al. (1998) estimate that around 23 per cent of the total tax base is not reported. In Costa Rica, a report issued by the Controller General’s Office found that sales tax evasion in 2002 amounted to 46 per cent of the total, or roughly 2 per cent of GDP (La Nación, 8 March 2004). The evasion rate for VAT on domestic transactions in Argentina in 1993 was estimated at 32 per cent, a huge improvement from the 62 per cent in 1989, but still a large gap (Rosenwurcel 2000: 45). An important part of the reason for continued tax evasion is the reluctance of governments to punish it, particularly among major taxpayers. The example of Jamaica shows that low to intermediate levels of development are not insurmountable barriers to tax collection due to insufficient technical capacity. In 1980/81, Jamaica collected 29 per cent of GDP in tax revenue, with GDP per capita at US$3,452 in 1980. In 1999/2000, Chile collected 17 per cent and its GDP per


capita in 1999 stood at US$9,568, and Argentina collected 13 per cent with a 1999 GDP per capita of US$11,181.6 It is clearly not technically feasible to enforce total compliance (this is true for any of the advanced industrial democracies also), but it is feasible in all four countries to improve tax collection capacity, if governments develop the political commitment and support to do it. If we look at the politics behind the tax changes, we find that these changes were for the most part treated as a necessary component of general economic reforms. In Costa Rica and Jamaica, they were explicitly and openly tied to donor conditionality. In Argentina and Chile, the influence of the IFIs was exerted more through technocratic networks of the sort analysed by Teichman (2001). She traces the establishment of networks among officials of IFIs, particularly the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank, and high-level government officials in Argentina, Chile and Mexico. Through regular interaction over long periods of time these networks became the carriers of neoliberal ideas and thus shaped reform designs in a neoliberal direction even in the absence of explicit conditionality. The fact that many of the high-level government officials shared educational backgrounds with the IFI officials, such as PhD degrees in economics from US universities, made them more susceptible to the transmissions and reinforcement of neoliberal ideas. There are two different paths to tax reform, exemplified by Argentina and Jamaica. In Argentina, tax changes were generally ad hoc reactions to economic changes, whereas in Jamaica they were part of a major coherent reform of the entire system of taxation. In all four countries, the debates about tax reform were generally confined to a relatively small circle of technocrats in the Ministry of Finance or Economics, with minimal public involvement. Parliamentary debates tended to be comparatively short also. Compared to other economic reforms, such as reduction of subsidies for basic goods, energy, and the like, or privatization of state-owned enterprises, tax reforms stimulated little popular protest. These other reforms had much more direct, sudden and visible impacts on the population than the tax reforms that were phased in more gradually. In some cases, such as the forced-savings scheme in Argentina introduced in 1985, there were protests, but mainly after the fact. Of course, one should also ask why Jamaica started from such a different pre-reform position and remained more concerned about protecting lower-income earners than Chile and Argentina. The key is the strength of the People’s National Party (PNP), a democratic socialist/social democratic party that alternated in office with the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP). The PNP has had a clear commitment to reduction of poverty and inequality and when in office oriented both tax and expenditure policies towards those goals (e.g. Manley 1982; Stephens and Stephens 1986).7 Moreover, both the PNP and the JLP had close links to labour unions, so the JLP governments were constrained in rolling back programmes that the PNP had established. Even the tax reform discussed here, under JLP Prime Minister Edward Seaga, had as one of its goals to avoid making the lower classes worse off (Bahl 1997: 186). The National Liberation Party (PLN) in Costa Rica used to play a similar role in promoting social programmes and a mode of financing these programmes that would protect lower-income earners.

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In Chile, in contrast, major reforms of social policy and the tax system were carried out under the dictatorship of Pinochet and were oriented towards stimulating economic growth in the private sector and reducing the responsibilities of the state for social welfare. Since unions and parties of the left were ruthlessly repressed, these reforms could be carried out without having to deal with real opposition. In Argentina, the major neoliberal reforms of economic and social policy were carried out by President Menem, ironically from the Peronist party, the traditional pro-labour party in the country. The party had, however, always been highly personalistic and had turned into a non-programmatic, clientelistic party. Major changes in the tax system towards increasing reliance on indirect taxes had already been effected by the military government, and the various steps going further in this direction with complicated packages did not evoke much public debate. Given the general absence of public debate about tax reform, it is little surprise that concerns about the gender-specific impacts of the changes were hardly raised at all. Effects of tax changes were not near the top of the agenda of women’s movements in these countries either. In Argentina and Chile, human rights, democratization and cooperative economic-survival strategies dominated the agenda. To the extent that women protested against economic policy in all of the four countries, it was mostly against the general austerity measures, visible in higher unemployment and higher prices. Deteriorating pensions and deteriorating healthcare were additional issues that elicited protests from women (as well as men). In short, there were so many policy decisions taken to transform these economies in a neoliberal direction, in addition to general austerity measures, that tax-reform decisions did not stand out in any major way in the public mind in general and in the mind of women activists in particular. This may be in part cause and in part effect of the lack of studies of the gender-specific effects of tax reforms in Latin America.

Gender-specific effects of tax reforms In the absence of disaggregated data, tracing the implications of changes in tax legislation for different groups by necessity has to be based on logical reasoning and educated guesses as to tax incidence. As ECLAC states, in its most authoritative publication on the issue, … the skepticism of the 1980s and early 1990s with respect to the redistributive capacity of taxation has resulted in an almost total lack of up-to-date, detailed empirical studies on the implications and distributional effects of various taxes or combinations thereof in countries of the region. After almost two decades of intensive and far-reaching reforms of the tax, tariff and social security systems, there is not enough data to permit an informed assessment of such issues ECLAC 1998: 96–7. The main results of the few studies that exist for our countries were discussed above. All of them looked at incidence on income groups, not a single one contained


any data on gender. Thus, the attempt to improve our understanding of the gender-specific implications of these changes is more speculative, based on a combination of theoretical and comparative knowledge and reasoning. Many analysts would argue that the most important issue for married women is whether the taxes of married couples have to be filed jointly or can be filed separately. Joint taxation in the presence of a progressive income tax works as a disincentive for married women to join the labour force.8 From that point of view, all four cases are gender-egalitarian. In Chile, the wage tax and general income tax are personal, levied on individuals and not on households (Engel et al. 1998). In Argentina and Costa Rica married couples are taxed separately on their income, but only one of them (in Argentina the husband) is taxed on property income and property, and only one of them can take deductions for dependants (in Costa Rica they can be claimed by either spouse). Where there is a flat-rate income tax, as in Jamaica, individual or joint filing does not matter. In order to assess the gendered implications of the changes in the tax structure, we have to begin by situating women in the occupational and earnings structure of their countries. In every one of our four countries, female labour-force participation is lower than male. Though female labour-force participation increased significantly between 1990 and 2000 in Chile and Costa Rica, from 35 per cent and 39 per cent to 42 per cent and 43 per cent, respectively, and in Argentina slightly from 44 per cent to 45 per cent, this rate remained clearly below the male rate, which varied from 73 per cent to 77 per cent (ECLAC 2002). The women who are in the labour force are more likely to work in the informal economy, that is, in small unregistered enterprises, own-account and non-remunerated labour, and as domestic workers (Table 14.4). Women who work in the formal sector are over-represented in the public sector, most probably as teachers and nurses. In the private sector, they have roughly equal representation in professional and technical jobs to men but are greatly under-represented in medium and large enterprises, that is, enterprises that employ more than five workers (ECLAC 2002: 179–82). Finally, open unemployment is higher among females than among males (ECLAC 2002: 207). Women earn less than men, and the differences are greater if we look at the entire employed population than if we consider just wage-earners. In 1999/2000, the ratio of average female to average male incomes among the entire employed population in urban areas was 61 in Chile, 65 in Argentina and 70 in Costa Rica (ECLAC 2002). Given the lower labour-force participation rates and lower earnings of employed women, the low share of revenue that comes from direct taxes clearly favours males, because they are higher-income earners and more likely to be owners of corporations or shares in corporations than women. Accordingly, men constitute a stronger tax base and would have to pay more if the rate structure was more progressive and exemptions lower, and – most of all – if the laws were enforced. The same is true for the low share of total taxes coming from property taxes. Social-security taxes are tied to earnings of employees and of those self-employed who are covered, so their incidence on males and females should be similar to the incidence of income taxes. However, to the extent that social-security taxes have a cap and men tend to be higher-income earners, the effect of social-security taxes is

314 Evelyne Huber Table 14.4 Population employed in the urban informal sector

Year

Total

Wage earners in businesses

Own-account and non-remunerateda

Domestic servants

Men Women Men Women Men Women Men Women Men Women

37.3 45.4 35.7 42.5 34.1 39.8 34.2 38.3 35.1 40.6

12.4 10.2 14.5 11.5 17.5 9.6 15.9 10.3 16.4 12

23.1 22.7 20.8 18.7 16.2 17.5 18.1 15.3 18.6 15.7

1.8 12.5 0.4 12.3 0.4 12.7 0.2 12.7 0.1 12.9


32.2 45.5 27.5 40.3 26.9 39 26.2 38.1 23.8 36.7

10 8.2 9.1 7.7 9.7 8.2 9.7 9.7 7.9 7.4

22 18.2 18.3 15.8 17 14.5 16.4 13.2 15.8 13.3

0.2 19.1 0.1 16.8 0.2 16.3 0.1 15.2 0.1 16

28.6 37.2 28.6 36.5 29.7 37.1 30.4 40.1 31.2 38

10.3 8.6 11.6 10.3 12.4 9.2 13.3 9.4 12.4 10.9

18.1 16.6 16.7 16.1 17.1 18.7 16.7 18.1 18.5 15.7

0.2 12 0.3 10.1 0.2 9.2 0.4 12.6 0.3 11.4

Country

Argentinab 1990 1994 1997 1999 2000 Chile 1990 1994 1996 1998 2000

Costa Rica 1990 1994 1997 1999 2000

a b


Does not include professional and technical jobs. Covers Greater Buenos Aires only.

Source: Tables 4.1 and 4.2 in Panorama Social de America Latina 2001/02 – ECLAC 2002.

likely to be more regressive on women than on men. Moreover, we need to keep in mind that social-security taxes also entitle the payers to benefits and that the relationship between social-security taxes and benefits is much closer than the relationship between general taxes and benefits from all government activities. This means that men will tend to benefit more from these taxes than women.


The implications of the changes in tax legislation regarding direct taxes are partly contradictory. Clearly, the reduction of marginal tax rates and of payroll taxes benefited mostly men, because they are the high-income earners and formalsector employers and employees. On the other hand, to the extent that exemptions and loopholes were closed, such as car allowances, these changes affected men more negatively than women, as men were more able to take advantage of those means before the reforms to reduce their tax payments. If we look at the overall picture, we can assume that the burdens of direct taxes on men and women remained roughly unchanged. If we introduce social-security taxes into the picture, we see an increase in the share of these taxes in Argentina and in Costa Rica, and a decrease in Chile. Accordingly, we would conclude that the total tax burden on men, from direct taxes and social security taxes, was increased in Argentina and in Costa Rica to a greater extent than on women, and that men experienced a greater decrease in their tax burden than women in Chile. We can begin an assessment of the gendered effects of the shift to greater reliance on indirect taxes with some general observations. To the extent that indirect taxes are regressive, which they clearly are in Argentina and Chile (Engel et al. 1998; Gómez Sabaini et al. 2002), we can assume that women as lower-income earners are more disadvantaged. Where the degree to which they are regressive is tempered through exclusions focused on basic goods and services in health and education, as in Costa Rica and Jamaica, the incidence is presumably more genderneutral. To the extent that a large share of indirect taxes comes from excise taxes on alcohol and tobacco, women as lower consumers of these goods would enjoy an advantage – assuming that expenses for alcohol and tobacco do not come out of the shared household budget. This forces us to think more about women’s position in the household and about the determination of household budgets, a topic to which I shall return in a moment. The final incidence of taxes on foreign trade depends on the share that is passed on to the consumer. In the case of import taxes on consumer goods, they simply increase the price of those goods in the domestic market, and the incidence depends on whether these goods are essential to the poor. Import taxes on intermediate and capital goods increase the price of goods manufactured with the imported ones, and the extent to which those increases are passed on to consumers depends on the competitiveness of markets. In more competitive markets, presumably a greater share of the import taxes for intermediate and capital goods would be absorbed by the manufacturers, and in less competitive markets a greater share would be passed on to consumers. In the latter case, we would again need to know whether those goods are part of the necessary consumption of poor households. Everything else being equal, a lowering of taxes on imports should have lowered prices to the consumer and thus partially offset an increase in VAT, sales or consumption taxes. In order to advance further in assessing the gendered impact of changes in the tax systems towards greater reliance on indirect taxes, we need to situate women not only in the occupational and earnings structure, but also in the structure of households. We can think of at least eight combinations of marital status (married/cohabiting in stable relationship or single/widowed/divorced), labour-force

316 Evelyne Huber

participation (working or not working), and children (with or without children). For all married/cohabiting women, working or not working, with or without children, it seems that the crucial distinction is between household budgets that are fixed by the husband/partner and those that are consensually decided upon. If a married woman is working, we can assume a greater probability that the household budget will be consensually decided upon, and this probability increases with the share of total income earned by the woman. In the case of consensual budgetmaking, one could assume that income and expenditures are shared and thus the final experienced incidence of taxation is the same for both spouses/partners, whether the woman works or not, and whether children are present or not. In real life, it is probable that the woman will be in charge of administering the commonlydecided-upon household budget and thus will experience price increases caused by rising indirect taxes more directly. Therefore she will spend more time and energy to compensate for these rising prices. In the case of unilateral budget-making, where the woman gets a certain amount of money to take care of the needs of the household and the husband/partner retains the rest for personal consumption and investments, we can distinguish gendered impacts of indirect taxes even more clearly. To the extent that the fixed household budget is small, women will be disproportionately affected by indirect taxes that increase the price of basic food items and health and education, and that effect will be magnified by the presence of children. Again, where these items are exempt from the VAT or sales or consumption taxes, as they largely are in Costa Rica and Jamaica, the negative impact of indirect taxes on women is mitigated. Excise taxes on gasoline affect bus fares and other transportation costs. Similar to other indirect taxes, women on low fixed household budgets will be more affected than their husbands/partners, given that they bear the responsibility for getting the children to where they need to go and for procuring household goods that may require considerable journeys. On the other hand, among middle- and upper-income earners, men/husbands are more likely to own and use cars and thus to carry the burden of taxes on gasoline.9 The gendered impact of excise taxes on alcohol and tobacco depends on one’s assumptions about their effect on the share of total household income designated by husbands/partners for household needs versus their personal consumption. In general, women are less likely to consume alcohol and tobacco than men, so they are less directly affected. For low-income earners, it seems reasonable to assume that higher excise taxes will shrink the share of the budget allocated by men for household needs and thus will affect women with fixed budgets negatively. However, in a study of the impact of indirect taxes on poor households in Jamaica, the authors found that excise taxes on alcohol and tobacco, which were comparatively high, did not have a major impact, as reported expenditures on alcohol and tobacco constituted only 2.2 per cent of total expenditures for the sample of low income households in 1983/84 (Bird and Miller 1989). Single working women without children are affected primarily by the greater probability of earning lower incomes than men and thus are disadvantaged by


regressive taxes of all kinds, social security and indirect. Single women with children are generally in the economically weakest positions; not only are they likely to be disadvantaged in the labour market but they also bear the responsibility of providing for their children. Thus, they tend to have low incomes and have to spend more time and energy to provide for the needs of their families if prices increase due to tax increases. Unless the exemptions from the indirect taxes are heavily directed towards basic foods, transportation, health and education services, single women with children will shoulder the greatest burden from increases in indirect taxes, that is, they will pay the largest percentage of their income for these tax increases.

Summary and policy lessons We could detect two clear tendencies as a result of the tax reforms effected in Argentina, Chile, Costa Rica and Jamaica, over the last two decades of the twentieth century. First, in three of the countries overall tax receipts as a percentage of GDP fell; the exception is Costa Rica. Second, three of them came to rely more heavily on indirect taxes levied on domestic goods and services; the exception here is Jamaica. Both of these developments are negative from the point of view of reduction of poverty, inequality and gender-based disadvantages through state intervention. Lower tax revenue means a reduced capacity of the state to correct market outcomes that disadvantage the poor and women by financing health and education services and anti-poverty programmes. Indirect taxes are generally regressive, though the extent to which they are regressive depends on exemptions of basic goods and services. Women as lower-income earners and as mothers responsible for the needs of the family, particularly if on fixed budgets, are more negatively affected than men by changes that increase regressive indirect taxes. In this light, Chile and Argentina have clearly done worse by their low-income earners and by women than Costa Rica and Jamaica. They both lowered their tax burden, which now is lower than in both Costa Rica and Jamaica, even though their GDP per capita is much higher. They both increased their reliance on indirect taxes on domestic goods and services, and their share from these taxes is higher than the shares in Costa Rica and Jamaica. Their structure of exemptions does not focus on basic goods and services to the same extent as that in Costa Rica and Jamaica. Accordingly, their tax systems are regressive, whereas the Jamaican tax system is progressive. Studies cited above have shown that they are regressive across income classes, and we can conclude that they are also regressive in gender terms. The lesser reliance on indirect taxes on domestic goods and services and the more focused exemptions from these taxes prevent the indirect taxes in Costa Rica and Jamaica from making the whole tax systems regressive, from both a class and gender point of view. Two major policy lessons emerge from this analysis. First, it is possible to construct overall progressive tax systems that are effective in raising at least moderate levels of tax revenue in Latin American and Caribbean countries, even at comparatively low levels of development, as demonstrated by the example of Jamaica.

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The keys are reliance on direct taxes with an adequate standard deduction and few special deductions for higher-income earners for an important share of the total, a structure of indirect taxes that exempts only basic goods and services, and socialsecurity taxes without a cap. In Argentina and Chile, income taxes are progressive but the tax systems on the whole are regressive, because of the heavy reliance on and the regressive structure of VAT. However, the extent of redistribution that can be achieved through the tax system in practice seems to be limited. In particular, the very top incomes are difficult to tax for political reasons. The wealthiest (potential) taxpayers are also investors who need to be cultivated by governments in order to generate economic growth, and they may also be donors to political campaigns who need to be cultivated by politicians to win elections. Moreover, in this era of liberalized capital markets and internationalized production it has become more difficult to tax corporations. Finally, powerful international actors oppose high tax rates. A World Bank study argues that, ‘most economists and policymakers consider that high tax rates not only significantly discourage and distort economic activity but are largely ineffective in redistributing income and wealth’ (World Bank 2004: 130). Second, it may be as important to enforce the tax laws that are already on the books as to spend energies and political capital on changing the tax systems in a major way, such as by introducing a VAT or increasing its importance on the grounds that VAT is easier to collect than other kinds of taxes. This by no means implies abandoning efforts to improve the distributive profile of tax systems, for instance by changing the structure of the VAT to focus exemptions on basic goods and services or by eliminating caps on social-security taxes, but it does mean to make enforcement a priority. Arguably, the low capacity to enforce tax legislation remains the key problem for Latin American tax systems, including those in our four countries. It is not a new problem, but the reforms since 1980 have not been able to solve it. Poor enforcement of legislation and consequent low tax collection clearly are detrimental to the poorer sectors and to women, because redistribution is in practice accomplished mostly on the expenditure side, and solid tax revenue is needed to finance expenditures on transfers and social services. The degree to which social expenditures in Latin America are redistributive depends on the category of expenditures. Expenditures on health and education tend to benefit lower income groups more than upper income groups in relation to their incomes, whereas social-security expenditures tend to favour middle and upper income groups (World Bank 2004, ch.4). The same argument can be made for women and men; if women on a fixed budget are predominantly responsible for providing for the health and education of their children (and for their own healthcare), better public health services and educational facilities will benefit them. In contrast, women are less likely to be covered by social-security schemes as they are constructed at present because they are more heavily represented in the informal sector. Since benefits are generally earnings-related, even those women who are covered are disadvantaged as lower-income earners. Thus, increased tax revenues devoted to high-quality and highly accessible education and health services and to anti-poverty policies such as non-contributory flat-rate pensions,


unemployment and disability schemes, and family allowances paid to mothers, are the most promising avenue for mitigating the class and gender inequalities so prevalent in Latin American and Caribbean societies.

Acknowledgement I would like to thank Inés Valdez for excellent research assistance, and Debbie Budlender, Shahra Razavi and John D. Stephens for comments on earlier drafts.

Notes 1 One should also note that most countries have introduced user fees for a variety of social services, most prominently health services. Strictly speaking, these user fees constitute a kind of tax, but they are not captured in any figures for tax burdens. To the extent that these user fees are flat rate, they are regressive. 2 In liberalized economies without price controls, it is possible that the benefits of such exemptions could partly be captured by producers or retailers rather than consumers, which requires vigilance and potentially corrective regulatory action on the part of the authorities. 3 In Table 14.1, property taxes are included in the category of direct taxes, along with individual and corporate income taxes. They are low everywhere, between 4 per cent of total tax revenue of the central government in Chile (Engel et al. 1998), 2 per cent in Jamaica (Bahl 1997: 212), and less than 1 per cent in Argentina. In addition, in Argentina provincial and municipal real-estate taxes amounted to 1 per cent of GDP (Gómez Sabaini et al. 2002). 4 This section relies heavily on information provided by Carciofi and Centrángolo (1994), Gaggero and Gómez Sabaini (1999), and Gómez Sabaini, Santieri, and Rossignolo (2002). 5 The Chilean pension system was completely privatized by the Pinochet dictatorship and turned into a compulsory private savings scheme where issues of redistribution are eliminated. 6 Data for GDP per capita are from the Penn World Tables, in constant dollars, adjusted for purchasing power parity. 7 We know from comparative studies of advanced industrial societies that incumbency of social democratic and Christian democratic parties is a strong predictor of generous welfare states (Huber and Stephens 2001). 8 One might argue that this factor is less important in countries where a relatively large proportion of lower-class women never marry even when they have children, which is the case in Jamaica. However, since most of the direct income taxes are paid by middle- and higher-income earners to begin with, who are also more likely to marry, this issue remains relevant. 9 This is important to point out from the point of view of policy lessons; it may be better to keep high excise taxes on gasoline and subsidize bus transport and transport of basic foodstuffs, both from a class and gender point of view. Again, we have to consider the expenditure side along with the tax side.

Bibliography Alm, James, Roy Bahl and Matthew Murray (1991) ‘Income Tax Evasion’. In Roy Bahl (ed.) The Jamaican Tax Reform. Cambridge MA: Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. Bahl, Roy (1989) ‘The Political Economy of the Jamaican Tax Reform’. In Malcolm Gillis (ed.) Tax Reform in Developing Countries. Durham NC: Duke University Press: 115–76.

320 Evelyne Huber Bahl, Roy (1991) ‘The Economics and Politics of the Jamaican Tax Reform’. In Roy Bahl (ed.) The Jamaican Tax Reform. Cambridge MA: Lincoln Institute of Land Policy: 1–62. Bahl, Roy (1997) ‘The Jamaican Tax Reform: Its Design and Performance.’ In Wayne Thirsk (ed.) Tax Reform in Developing Countries. Washington DC: World Bank: 167–232. Bird, Richard M. and Barbara Diane Miller (1989) ‘The Incidence of Indirect Taxes on Low Income Households in Jamaica’. Economic Development and Cultural Change 37(2) (January): 393–409. Bradley, David, Evelyne Huber, Stephanie Moller, Francois Nielson and John D. Stephens (2003) ‘Distribution and Redistribution in Post-Industrial Democracies’. World Politics, Vol. 55, No. 2, January: 193–228. Carciofi, Ricardo and Oscar Cetrángolo (1994) ‘Tax Reforms and Equity in Latin America: A Review of the 1980s and Proposals for the 1990s’. Innocenti Occasional Papers; Economic Policy Series, No. 39. Florence, Italy: UNICEF International Child Development Centre. Centro de Implementación de Políticas Públicas para la Equidad y el Crecimiento (CIPPEC). (2002) ‘Hacia un sistema tributario permanente para Argentina’. Buenos Aires: CIPPEC. Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) (1998) The Fiscal Covenant: Strengths, Weaknesses, Challenges. Santiago, Chile: ECLAC. Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) (2002) Social Panorama of Latin America 2001–2002. Santiago, Chile: ECLAC. Engel, Eduardo M.R.A., Alexander Galetovic and Claudio E. Raddatz (1998) ‘Taxes and Income Distribution in Chile: Some Unpleasant Redistributive Arithmetic’. Working Paper 6828. Cambridge MA: National Bureau of Economic Research. Foxley, Alejandro, Eduardo Aninat and Jose Pablo Arellano (1980) ‘Las Desigualdades Economicas y la Accion del Estado’. Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Economica. Gaggero, Jorge and Juan Carlos Gómez Sabaini (1999) ‘El Sistema Tributario Federal: Diagnóstico y Propuestas’. Unpublished manuscript, Universidad Nacional de Buenos Aires, Argentina. Gaggero, Jorge and Juan Carlos Gómez Sabaini (2002) ‘Argentina: Cuestiones Macrofiscales y Reforma Tributaria’. Buenos Aires: Fundación OSDE-CIEPP. Gómez Sabaini, Juan Carlos, Juan José Santieri and Darío Alejandro Rossignolo (2002) ‘La equidad distributiva y el sistema tributario: un análisis para el caso argentino.’ Serie Gestión Pública. Santiago de Chile: Comisión Económica para América Latina. Hossain, Shahabuddin M. (2003) ‘Poverty and Social Impact Analysis: A Suggested Framework’. IMF Working Paper WP/03/195, International Monetary Fund. Huber, Evelyne and John D. Stephens (2001) Development and Crisis of the Welfare State: Parties and Policies in Global Markets. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Huber, Evelyne, David Bradley, Stephanie Moller, Francois Nielsen and John D. Stephens (2001) ‘The Welfare State and Gender Equality’. Luxembourg Income Study Working Paper No. 279, September. Inter-American Development Bank (IADB) (1996) Economic and Social Progress in Latin America: 1996 Report. Washington DC: IADB. International Monetary Fund (IMF) (1988, 1991, 1995, 2003) Government Finance Statistics. Washington DC: IMF. International Monetary Fund (IMF) (1991, 1995, 2003) International Financial Statistics. Washington DC: IMF. La Nacion, at www.nacion.com, accessed 8 March 2004. La Nacion, at www.nacion.com, accessed 1 December 2003. Manley, Michael (1982) Struggle in the Periphery. London: Third World Media. Moller Stephanie, David Bradley, Evelyne Huber, Francois Nielsen and John D. Stephens (2003) ‘Determinants of Relative Poverty in Advanced Industrial Societies’. American Sociological Review, Vol. 68, No.1, February: 22–51. Morley, Samuel (2001) The Income Distribution Problem in Latin America and the Caribbean. Santiago, Chile: ECLAC.

Gendered Implications of Tax Reform in Latin America 321 Quesada Camacho, Juan Rafael, Danile Masís Iverson, Manuel Barahona Montero, Tobías Meza Ocampo, Rafael Cuevas Molina and Jorge Rhenán Segura (1999) Costa Rica Contemporánea: Raíces del Estado de la Nación. San José, Costa Rica: Editorial de la Universidad de Costa Rica. Rosenwurcel, Guillermo (2000) ‘Fiscal Reform and Macroeconomic Stabilization in Argentina’. In Guillermo Perry, John Whalley and Gary McMahon (eds) Fiscal Reform and Structural Change in Developing Countries, Vol. 1: 26–58. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Santiere, Juan J., Juan C. Gómez Sabaini and Darío A. Rossignolo (2000) ‘Impacto de los Impuestos sobre la Distribución del Ingreso en la Argentina en 1997’. Banco Mundial, Secretaría de Programación Económica y Regional. Schkolnik, Mariana (1992) ‘The Distributive Impact of Fiscal and Labour Market Policies: Chile’s 1990–1 Reforms’. Innocenti Occasional Papers; Economic Policy Series, No. 33. Florence, Italy: UNICEF International Child Development Centre. Sjoquist, David L. and David Green (1992) ‘Distribution of Tax Burdens’. Jamaica Tax Review Project, Report No. 3. Atlanta GA: Georgia State University, Policy Research Center, College of Business Administration. Social Security Administration (1995) Social Security Programs Throughout the World. Washington DC: SSA. Stephens, Evelyne Huber and John D. Stephens (1986) Democratic Socialism in Jamaica: The Political Movement and Social Transformation in Dependent Capitalism. London: Macmillan and Princeton: Princeton University Press. Tanzi, Vito (1987) ‘Quantitative Characteristics of Tax Systems in Developing Countries’. In Newbery and Stern (eds) The Theory of Taxation for Developing Countries. New York: Oxford University Press: 205–41. Tanzi, Vito (2000) ‘Taxation in Latin America in the Last Decade’. Paper prepared for the Conference on Fiscal and Financial Reforms in Latin America, Stanford University, 9–10 November. Teichman, Judith (2001) The Politics of Freeing Markets in Latin America: Chile, Argentina, and Mexico. Chapel Hill NC: University of North Carolina Press. Thirsk, Wayne (1997) ‘Overview: The Substance and Process of Tax Reform in Eight Developing Countries’. In Wayne Thirsk (ed.) Tax Reform in Developing Countries. Washington DC: World Bank: 1–32. Wasylenko, Michael (1991) ‘Tax Burden Before and After Reform’. In Roy Bahl (ed.) The Jamaican Tax Reform. Cambridge MA: Lincoln Institute of Land Policy: 751–92. World Bank (2003) World Development Indicators. Washington DC: World Bank. World Bank (2004) Inequality in Latin America and the Caribbean: Breaking with History? Washington DC: World Bank.

15 Expectations versus Realities in Gender-responsive Budget Initiatives Debbie Budlender

Introduction Analyzing the impact of government expenditure and revenue on women and girls, as compared to men and boys, is fast becoming a global movement to build accountability for national policy commitments to women. UNIFEM 2001 Annual Report: 17 The quote above and similar quotes from other reports give either implicit or explicit indications of the ambitious expectations that the gender-responsive-budgeting (GRB) idea evokes. The key question addressed in this chapter is: How does what GRB initiatives have done in practice compare with the claims and expectations about what they can achieve? In asking this question, the chapter does not aim to detract from what has been achieved. Instead, it attempts to bring some realism into the discussion, planning and assessment of these initiatives. The chapter also stresses that different initiatives have different objectives and different outcomes which depend on context, who is involved, and a host of other things. There is therefore no single ‘correct’ approach. The chapter does not explain in any detail what GRBs are. There is a range of other sources which provide such a description and discussion (see, for example, Reeves and Sever 2003; Budlender et al. 2002; Budlender and Hewitt 2003). The working definition of a GRB for this chapter is that it involves an analysis of the government budget in terms of its reach and impact on women and men, girls and boys. A GRB is thus, in effect, a form of policy analysis from a gender perspective. GRBs do not focus only on the numbers contained in the budget. They focus as much – if not more – on the policy and programmes underlying those numbers. Ideally, they also focus on what happens when the policies and programmes are implemented. The ‘added value’ of GRBs in terms of policy analysis is that they recognize that any other government policy or programme will not be effective unless adequate resources are allocated to implement it. The chapter is divided into three sections. The first section deals with issues related to budgets and their relationship to conceptualizations of the economy 322

Expectations versus Realities in Gender-responsive Budget Initiatives 323

and economic and social policy. The second deals with issues related to gender as a critical variable that structures the economy and society, alongside other axes of difference such as race, class and age. The third deals with issues related to policyand budget-making as a process. The different sets of issues are often related to each other, and there is thus some overlap between the sections.

Budgets and economic and social policy Macroeconomic policy GRB initiatives are often described as being about engagement with economic policy. This is true because the budget constitutes a major part of the fiscal macroeconomic policy of the country. However, the assertion can be misleading if it relies on too narrow a notion of the ‘economic’. First, while the budget is part of economic policy, the way it is distributed affects the effectiveness of the policies of all parts of government – economic, social and protective. The budget is, in effect, the monetary reflection of all the policies of a government. Second, talking about the budget as ‘economic’ policy can detract from the aim of using gender budget work to integrate social and economic considerations. Third, the understanding of budgets as part of economic policy highlights the very limited progress that has been made in addressing other parts of economic policy. Broad statements about the gender impacts of macroeconomic policy are common, and relatively easy to make. Translating these into concrete analysis and proposals is a harder nut to crack. If GRB initiatives are serious about influencing macroeconomic policy, they will need to engage with the Ministry of Finance beyond the budget division which is usually involved in GRB work. They might well discover at this stage that the divisions responsible for macroeconomic issues have limited power and that it is, instead, the international financial institutions (IFIs) who call the shots. The World Bank has shown its support for GRB work to the extent of attempting to establish initiatives in several countries. The International Monetary Fund has published a working paper (Sarraf 2003) on the topic. However, both institutions might balk at allowing GRB work to ‘interfere’ with macroeconomic strategies, policies and models. Mainstreaming of gender in social and other policies GRB work is often touted as a useful tool to support mainstreaming of gender in government policies. It does, indeed, have enormous potential to be used in this way. However, as discussed in more detail below, often those involved in GRBs end up focusing on targeted allocations for women rather than considering how to make all government policies and allocations gender-sensitive. Targeted allocations are sometimes necessary as a form of affirmative action or to cater for special needs. However, true mainstreaming requires changing of the ‘ordinary’ programmes and budgets which account for the bulk of government activity.

324 Debbie Budlender

Enhancing rights GRB is sometimes seen as a way of monitoring the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) and socioeconomic rights more generally. However, the area of rights, like that of macroeconomic policy beyond budgets, has proved one of the more difficult areas of GRB work. One challenge is that those who get involved in budget work usually have a different approach to those who get involved in rights work. In particular, those who work on budgets tend to have a more technicist approach, while the rights advocates adopt a more idealist approach. Stated crudely, the technicists tend to argue in terms of ‘prioritization’ and choices within a given budget ceiling, while the rights advocates are more inclined to argue for ‘more for everyone’. A related potential obstacle is that the rights discourse is sometimes not persuasive when talking to bureaucrats, especially those from technical ministries such as Finance. In addition, reference to international instruments will often have little sway with technocrats, especially where they already feel themselves under considerable other pressures from IFIs and donors who wield power over their policies and budgets. Impact GRBs are political interventions which aim to change the nature of budgets and the policies and programmes that underlie them so as to change the situation of (poor) women and men, girls and boys in a particular country. As such, the question naturally arises as to their impact – whether they have effected any of the intended changes. Unfortunately, impact is not easy to measure or to attribute to particular interventions, whether for GRBs or any other political and social interventions. Some initiatives can claim some budget changes. In Mexico, for example, the Commission on Gender Equality of the Chamber of Deputies succeeded, on the basis of GRB analysis conducted by civil society, in its arguments for increased allocations for reproductive health. Additional funding was also allocated for a programme to address maternal mortality and for programmes for women in agriculture and immigrant women. In the United Kingdom, the work of the Women’s Budget Group convinced the Treasury to redesign the Child Tax Credit so that it was payable to the main caregiver (likely to be a woman) rather than to the main breadwinner (likely to be a man). In South Africa, the GRB can claim some credit for the introduction of the child support grant which is given to the primary caregivers of young children from poor households. Some GRBs can point to statements by finance ministers and others in which they acknowledge the importance of gender. Some can point to budget documents which now more clearly report on gender issues. All these achievements are important, at least symbolically. Overall, however, the more than fifty GRB initiatives around the world have probably produced relatively few budget changes. One reason for the limited changes in budget figures is that policy does not usually change because of a single initiative, but rather because of the combination of a range of forces. It is thus difficult for a single group to claim credit for a


change in policy. Another reason for the limited claims that GRB initiatives can make in respect of budget changes is that policies seldom change simply because new and better ‘facts’ are presented, much as we would all like to believe in evidence-based policy-making. A third reason for the limited claims that can be made about changes is that those involved often do not have the power themselves to change budgets. This lack of power is clearly the case for civil-society actors. I argue below that it is also the case for most parliaments. And I argue further that it is often the case for civil servants. The limitations on the power of civil servants to change budgets is particularly acute if the GRB initiatives involve only gender focal points or gender ministries. Gender ministries should, in theory, have more power to influence others as their mandate is usually stated as being to ensure mainstreaming through all other ministries. However, the weakness of these ministries in most countries is well-known. Further, the staff involved often do not engage very energetically in GRBs. Often the officials fear the technical nature of the venture. Many feel more comfortable doing gender-awareness training within government and in civil society. Many feel more comfortable focusing on women’s projects which, while outside the real mandate of most gender ministries nowadays, continue to be funded by donors who want concrete ‘deliverables’.

Gender as a critical variable in budget and policy work Gender, women and special interests The growth and nature of civil-society budget work The worldwide interest in GRB work during the 1990s and since occurred alongside a more general interest in budget work within civil society. The interest has been encouraged by funders. However, the growth in interest in budget work is not simply donor-driven. The growth also reflects real interest on the part of civilsociety actors. And the environment has been conducive in many respects. First, the current focus of donors and the international financial institutions (IFIs) on governance often encompasses the need for participation and engagement with (at least parts of) civil society. Second, the increase in the use of performance-based budgeting approaches in many countries has increased the amount of information available, and made clearer the links between policy and budget. Third, ministries of finance and financial considerations have become increasingly dominant in all policy-making. Special-interest budget work Many of those involved in ‘general’ budget work see the GRB work as an example of ‘special interest’ budget work. For many of those involved in GRB work, however, the ‘special interest’ tag is inaccurate and misleading. The first objection is that, even if some GRBs focus on women rather than gender, it seems odd to see women (and girls) as a ‘special interest’ group when they constitute more than


half of the population in most countries of the world. The second objection is that if the GRB truly focuses on gender, it concerns every individual in that every individual is part of the gendered make-up of society. Thus while ‘special interest’ budget initiatives tend to argue for ‘more’ for children, people with disabilities, or whatever group is involved, theoretically GRBs should be advocating for ‘more equitable’ programmes and allocations – ones which address the different needs and interests of individual from different (overlapping) social groups. ‘More equitable’ is, of course, not a straightforward criterion to apply. Many would see a 50–50 allocation between male and female as ‘equal’, and therefore ‘equitable’. A more sophisticated – and more valid – conception sees ‘equitable’ as requiring recognition of the different situations of women and men, girls and boys, and other social groups which give rise to their potentially different needs and interests. I wrote above that ‘theoretically’ GRBs should be advocating for more equitable programmes and allocations. In practice, the situation is more complicated. Special allocations for women and gender On the one hand, many GRBs tend to focus primarily on allocations for women. This tendency is found in some of the analytical work on GRBs where the analysts are looking for categories with neat boundaries. It is found in some advocacy work that call for budget lines for an area such as education to allocate separate amounts for girls and boys, rather than asking for a single amount with monitoring of whom it reaches. The characteristic is also found in many local-level initiatives which record as a success the establishment of a special (and small) ‘women’s fund’. Only too often, the women councillors and other participants in these GRBs then focus all their energy on determining how this fund should be spent, leaving the men and bureaucrats to get on with spending the rest of the budget. The danger of focusing only on special-interest allocations was recognized in the 1980s, when Rhonda Sharp was assisting the government of South Australia in setting up their women’s budget. To avoid focusing all attention on these allocations, each agency was required to assign every single expenditure into one of three categories, namely: ● ●

●

Expenditures targeting women (the special-interest allocations); Expenditures promoting equal opportunity for women and men civil servants; and All other expenditures, assessed for their impact on women citizens.

Several later initiatives in other countries used similar categories. Ideally, the three-way categorization should highlight the necessity for focusing on the third category given that this accounts for the overwhelming majority of the funds allocated in the budget as a whole. In Philippines and Indonesia (women) politicians have, perhaps unwittingly, encouraged an approach of focusing on ‘special’ allocations for women or gender. In Philippines in 1995 Senator Shahani proposed and pushed through a law which


stipulated that every national agency should allocate 5 per cent of its budget for ‘gender and development’ (GAD). This allocation soon became known as the ‘GAD budget’. The ruling was later extended to all local government units. The position of the National Commission on the Role of Filipino Women (NCRFW), which is the Philippines’ national gender machinery, is that the 5 per cent GAD budget should be used to promote gender mainstreaming in the budget as a whole. It asks that every government agency and local government unit draw up a GAD plan, and use at least 5 per cent of the budget to implement this plan. Women activists in the Philippines defend the approach strongly. They and the NCRFW have put significant energy into training of officials and other activities to assist in the drawing up of GAD plans and budgets. The energy has not always paid off. The most notorious example of misallocation is the agency that included money for ballroom dancing lessons for female civil servants in its GAD allocation. One can understand the move to specify a percentage of the budget as a strategy to have something which is measurable and thus more easily monitored. One wonders, too, to what extent the percentage approach was influenced by the quota debate in respect of representation of women. Unpaid labour A key aspect that distinguishes (or should distinguish) gender budget work from other budget work is the focus on unpaid labour. Both government and non-government budget work is often dominated by economists. And in virtually all schools and all countries, economists are trained to analyse markets and production that goes through the market. Feminist economists have taken the lead in pointing out the blindness of an approach which ignores the non-market production which occurs in all economies and societies, and which is necessary to ensure the ‘production’ and ‘maintenance’ of the people who do the monetary production. While unpaid labour is unseen in traditional economics, in my experience it is very easily and quickly grasped by diverse audiences. Ordinary women tend to understand the issue immediately, as they have daily experience of what it entails. Middle-class women – and civil servants in particular – sometimes do not ‘feel’ the issue in the same way because they have the resources to employ other women to carry some of the burden of unpaid labour for them. However, they will have usually experienced the difference in expectations of male and female when children, as well as when adult in respect of childbearing and childrearing. In addition, most men will – after initial puzzlement – start nodding their heads in agreement when the issue is discussed. The inclusion of unpaid labour in one’s approach to economics is in many ways revolutionary. However, as one senior economist in a Ministry of Finance remarked after a short presentation on the topic, it is ‘completely logical’ that unpaid labour should be included in macroeconomic and other models. However, despite its importance, and the fact that it is ‘obvious’ once pointed out, the unpaid-labour aspect is not present in all GRB work. And when it is present, it is often not strongly developed.


One obstacle is the lack of available data. Relatively few countries in the world have undertaken the time-use studies which provide estimates which can be converted into monetary equivalents. Detailed data are, however, not necessary for unpaid labour to be considered in GRB initiatives. If – as is usually the case – everyone acknowledges that women bear the main burden of most types of unpaid labour, exact data strengthen the case and make it appear more scientific, but are not required for appropriate policy-making. Unpaid labour is completely absent from some GRB initiatives. In others, it is mentioned as part of the situation analysis, but not necessarily taken further when it comes to discussing policy and associated budgets. Given the importance of unpaid labour as a basis for gender inequality, there are surprisingly few concrete suggestions as to how it should be recognized in policy- and budget-making beyond broad calls for increased provision of safe water, electricity and childcare. The unpaid-labour focus probably emerges most strongly in the work of the United Kingdom’s Women’s Budget Group around tax credits. The UK example is, however, not immediately useful to developing countries because few have revenue/benefits systems. Unpaid labour should, in theory, be even more of an issue in developing countries than in developed because there is less public provision of relevant services by the state or by the market. The HIV/Aids pandemic and its attendant need for additional (unpaid) care should increase the importance of the issue. Pro-poorness The World Bank has suggested that GRBs can ‘engage in a process of transformation to take into account the needs of the poorest and the powerless’ (Blackden and Bhanu 1999: 64–5). However, GRBs do not all necessarily have a pro-poor agenda. Some groups get involved in GRB work out of a concern with disadvantage and, in particular, the disadvantage that female people usually experience when compared with male people. These groups will usually also be concerned about other aspects of disadvantage. Other groups have a narrower focus on ‘gender equality’. This often translates, in practice, into the promotion of women’s interests. These groups would be as interested in promoting the interests of women entrepreneurs as promoting the interests of poor women (and men). There are several examples from gender analysis of revenue which illustrate the tension between a pro-women and an equity approach. The first example comes from the South African GRB’s second attempt to analyse taxation from a gender perspective. During the apartheid years, the South African personal tax system provided separate schedules for ‘married persons’ (actually married men), married women and unmarried people. ‘Married persons’ were taxed at a lower rate on the assumption that they would be supporting others. Married women were taxed at a higher rate on the assumption that theirs was a second income in a household. In subsequent years this was changed so that personal tax is now determined on an individual basis, irrespective of the sex or marital status of the person concerned. However, Smith (2002) points out that while the change has done away with formal discrimination, it has probably left – and perhaps introduced – substantive


discrimination. This anomaly arises because while tax is now determined on an individual basis, income is consumed by a household. The new system discriminates, in particular, against households with only one income earner – households in which only too often that income-earner will be a woman. Smith illustrates the discrimination by comparing the situation of two households comprising two adults and two children. In the first household, the husband earns R2,000 per month and the wife earns R1,000 per month. Together they provide for their two children. In the second household, the only paid worker earns R3,000 per month, and supports her mother and her two children. Both these households have the same total income and must support the same number of adults and children. In 1994/95, before the change which allegedly did away with discrimination, the first household would have paid R3,435 in tax annually and the second would have paid R5,055. In 1999/2000, under the new system, the first household would pay R850 while the second would pay R3,460 – over four times as much as the first household. The example has been described at some length because it illustrates one of the more important contentions made in this chapter. The example suggests that a simplistic approach which treats all ‘units’ in an identical way irrespective of the social and other differences, results in inequitable outcomes. Such an approach might produce formal equality, but it does not result in substantive equality or equity. The example also, implicitly, raises questions about intra- and interhousehold equality. These need to be considered in GRBs, but are not discussed further here. Smith (2002) acknowledges that there is no easy solution to this problem. In particular, it is not possible to draw on tax-benefit solutions used in developed countries such as the UK because such a small proportion of the South African population – and not the most needy – pay tax in the first place. Smith’s example illustrates the point that simplistic elimination of sex discrimination does not necessarily bring equity if we are interested in looking beyond a simple male– female divide. However, calculation of tax on the basis of a household raises a wide range of difficulties as to how one defines such a household, and what assumptions one makes about marriage and other social arrangements. In a developed-economy context, it is exactly these questions that have been the focus of the Women’s Budget Group in the United Kingdom. The situation is further complicated by the fact that women tend to have less power and control than men over household income. The previous South African system exacerbated the likely power imbalances by taking the extra tax off the women’s income. TGNP’s experience on the revenue side provides a further example of the difficulty of addressing equity, even in an initiative that is very serious about addressing all aspects of inequality. In late 2002, TGNP convinced those in charge of the annual public expenditure review (PER) process that they should commission a paper on gender and revenue to supplement the general review of revenue that they were planning. The two gender researchers went into a lot of detail in examining different aspects of revenue rather than simply focusing on direct taxation (Meena and Mhamba 2003). However, many of their recommendations


focused on the interests of middle-class women rather than the poorest women (and men). They raised, for example, the high taxes placed on imported khangas and kitenge, baby food and sanitary pads. None of these are goods which are likely to be of concern to poorer women. Similarly, their call for the increase of the amount at which people start paying tax would benefit more men than women, while simultaneously decreasing the amount of money available to government to provide services to those who earn too little to pay direct tax with the current cut-offs. In contrast, the UK Women’s Budget Group has consistently argued against tax cuts or raising tax thresholds even at the very bottom of the income scale on these grounds.

The politics of policy-making Many commentators talk about the potential of GRBs in promoting women’s political participation. Some also suggest that GRBs have a role to play in promoting women’s leadership in the economic as well as political sphere. Participation There is often slippage in discussions of ‘progressive’ budget work in that GRB work is assumed, by definition, to involve a more participatory approach. The slippage can be partly explained by the fact that GRB work is often taken up by organizations and actors with an interest in women’s political participation. The slippage is, however, unfortunate. First, greater political participation by women does not, in itself, always result in greater attention to gender issues or women’s interests, although – overall – it is likely to do so. Second, there is a chicken-and-egg question – does greater political participation by women result in GRBs, or does GRB work tend to result in greater political participation by women? Third, we need to be clear whether we are talking about participation in the bureaucracy, in parliament, or within civil society. Finally, we need to avoid the limited understanding of some governments who seem to feel that participation should be by invitation and that any participation by non-governmental actors is sufficient, no matter who the actors are. In these cases, participation is often restricted to academics, think-tanks and/or government-aligned organizations who are not necessarily those who might raise the issues which should be at the heart of a GRB approach. Increased political participation and GRB work Uganda and South Africa are examples of countries where GRB initiatives emerged subsequent to a significant increase in women’s political representation in the national parliament. And in both countries the women parliamentarians played a significant role in establishing and leading the GRBs. Uganda’s GRB is housed in the Forum for Women in Democracy (FOWODE), an NGO established by a group of women parliamentarians, and led by the powerful and dynamic MP Winnie Byanyima. FOWODE draws on the support of the wider women’s caucus within parliament. Uganda has a system of special representation


in parliament for women and other ‘marginalized groups’ (the military, workers, youth and people with disabilities). At the time FOWODE established the GRB in the late 1990s, the women’s caucus had more power and impact than similar bodies in many other countries because of the absence of parties. Indeed, by uniting with representatives of other ‘marginalized’ groups, the women’s caucus was, in effect, the single largest caucus in the Ugandan parliament. The GRB thus had an immediate audience and advocate. In the first years, FOWODE’s GRB activities focused on the national-level budget. FOWODE later extended activities to the local level as a direct result of its concerns about participation, as well as out of concern as to what decentralization might mean in terms of gender equality. The GRB initiative was established around the time of the Constituent Assembly, which drew up a new constitution for the country. The women parliamentarians put a lot of effort into the Constituent Assembly and managed to win a quota for women at the local level. FOWODE followed up on this victory by providing support and training to women to stand for and win local elections. They then went a step further by providing training to the successful women to ensure that the victory went ‘beyond numbers’ to bring gender-sensitive policy into local government. FOWODE’s local-level GRB was part of the training and other activities intended to take the local-level quota a step further. In South Africa, the GRB initiative was established one year after the first democratic elections which brought an end to apartheid. Over a quarter (27 per cent) of the membership of the national parliament in the first post-apartheid parliament were women – a significant increase from the 3 per cent of the final apartheid years. Most of the new women representatives had been part of the struggle against apartheid. Many had participated in the Women’s National Coalition (WNC), a cross-party and cross-race grouping which, among others, ensured that the interim constitution of the country included strong clauses on gender equity. The WNC had also drawn up a Charter on Effective Equality for presentation to the Constitutional Assembly. This Charter was drawn up through a fairly extensive process of consultation around the country and represented a wish-list of what women wanted to see in the ‘new South Africa’. Pregs Govender, previously the national organizer of the WNC, was one of the new parliamentarians. She recognized that women parliamentarians would need some way to ensure and monitor that the demands of the Charter were being met, and that the budget could be a powerful tool to do so. She therefore met with two policy-oriented research NGOs to discuss how this could be done. This saw the birth of South Africa’s GRB. In both the Ugandan and South African cases, then, the establishment of the GRB resulted fairly directly from increased participation of women in parliament. GRBs have, however, not been established in all countries with high levels of participation. Some quota systems might, in fact, discourage the establishment of a GRB. This could happen if the GRB is seen as a too effective means of oversight, and if the women elected through a quota system feel beholden to government and fear losing their seats if they are too critical. The Ugandan and South African GRBs were established at a time when women representatives were largely supportive of government policy. In both countries,


the executive, on its side, had a strong commitment to gender equality. Thus while both GRBs styled themselves as exercising oversight over government, they were largely advocating what the executive itself was committed to doing, but was perhaps not doing forcefully enough, or with enough resources. In both countries the leaders of government had no problems with the GRB initiatives, and sometimes openly supported them. Indeed, Pregs Govender was rewarded by being made chairperson of a new Parliamentary Committee on the Improvement of the Status and Quality of Life of Women. In Uganda, FOWODE was invited to participate in the sector committees which meet with the Ministry of Finance in the early months of the budget cycle each year. In later years the leaders of the GRB initiatives in both countries increasingly criticized government policy. In Uganda, the situation was complicated by the fact that Winnie Byanyima’s husband stood for the presidency (and lost) against Yoweri Museveni. In South Africa, tensions developed when Pregs Govender started criticizing the stance of the government on issues such as large-scale military expenditure and HIV/Aids policies, and took many of the members of her committee along with her. Both women leaders were prepared to stand up to government and pay the consequences. Winnie Byanyima suffered ongoing harassment. For Pregs Govender, the consequences were leaving parliament. Many other women parliamentarians might not be prepared to take this strong a stand. GRBs in situations where women’s representation is lower In Philippines, the non-governmental GRB at the local level had direct links with action around increasing political participation for women although there were not, as in South Africa and Uganda, significant numbers of elected women leaders in the cities involved. The non-governmental GRB was initiated by the Asia Foundation (TAF), a USAID-funded organization with offices in more than ten Asian countries. In the Philippines, TAF had previously provided funding to the Development through Active Women Networking (DAWN) Foundation, a local-level NGO in Bacolod City which supported women to stand for local elections, and which was led by Celia Flor, a city councillor. For the initial years of the GRB, TAF provided funding and technical support to DAWN, as well as to a similar councillorled women’s organization in Angeles City, and a mixed people’s organization working in Surallah in the Mindanao region. DAWN’s work was the most successful and sustained of the three pilot cities. Towards the end of the research period, Celia Flor’s party won control of the city council. Andrea Si, one of the other leaders of DAWN, became the city administrator and was thus in a position, as they put it, to ‘implement what they had learnt’ in the research and advocacy of the previous period. DAWN also disseminated the idea of GRBs to other cities in Negros Occidental where it was active in encouraging and supporting women to run for elections. While it is dangerous to generalize from a few examples, the cases of Uganda, South Africa and the Philippines suggest that high levels of political representation of women might provide a conducive environment for GRBs, but by no means guarantee it. Rather, it is the presence of strong women leaders who recognize the


potential of GRB work, and are prepared to put in the effort needed to sustain it, that are crucial. Further, all three countries are ones where there has been a recent transition away from authoritarian government, and where women’s groups have been very active and mobilized within this transition. One must therefore be wary of generalizing from these examples. Nevertheless, what the cases suggest is that GRB work can be an important supplement to work around increasing women’s political participation. In particular, GRB initiatives can help to ensure that women’s participation means more than a change in the profile of political decision-makers. It can do so by increasing the representatives’ understanding of what gender-sensitive policy means and helping them focus on a key policy without which any other policy will not be effective, namely the budget. Engagement of (women) parliamentarians with GRBs Despite the seeming potential, in practice there are relatively few countries where (women) politicians have shown much interest in gender budget work. One reason for this might be that in many countries parliamentarians have very little effective power over the budget. In all countries the budget is a law which must be passed by parliament. However, in many countries there are serious constraints on the extent to which parliaments can change the budget proposals tabled by the bureaucracy. In countries like South Africa, parliament must either accept or reject the budget as a whole – it cannot make any amendments (Krafchik and Wehner 1999). Outright rejection is very unlikely, as it effectively constitutes a vote of no confidence in the government. In some other countries, parliament may have greater powers to increase or decrease particular votes, or particular sources of revenue. However, in virtually all countries parliament cannot alter the overall level of spending, or the balance between expenditure and revenue. A further constraint on the power of many parliaments is that the budget is often tabled only a short time before the end of the financial year. As a result, much of the budget debate occurs after spending of the new financial year has already begun. The debates provide an opportunity for parliamentarians, including women, to raise issues. But their comments have no real impact on the allocations. Parliamentarians’ conception of their role in respect of budgets can also be an obstacle. Many parliamentarians see their primary role as one of oversight. In effect, they see their role as checking that the budget is spent as allocated, rather than ensuring that the allocations themselves, and the policies that underlie them, are correct. Performance budgeting, with its emphasis on the need for budgets to reflect policy, should help to change this perception. However, in most countries parliamentarians have not yet seized the potential of performance budgeting. Parliamentarians have also often not taken advantage of other opportunities offered by budget reforms. In particular, many countries have introduced mediumterm expenditure frameworks (MTEFs) in recent years. These involve the provision


of definite figures for the following year, with indicative figures for the following two or four years. This approach to budgeting should provide greater opportunities for parliamentarians and other players to have an impact on the actual budget figures, as there is a longer time in which to advocate for or against government plans. In practice, the opportunities do not seem to have been utilized, either by GRB players or others. Finally, parliaments in developing countries usually have little, if any, research capacity. At first glance this provides an obstacle to GRBs. However, it can also provide opportunities as parliamentarians who lack their own research resources might be more prepared to receive input from outside and, in particular, from NGOs and other gender advocates. Several non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have taken advantage of this gap. Perhaps the most surprising of these is Zimbabwe, where, despite the political turmoil, the Zimbabwe Women’s Resource Centre Network (ZWRCN) has on several occasions been invited by cross-party parliamentary committees to provide input based on its GRB research into key ministries. Participation in GRBs at the local level GRBs have been initiated at national, provincial/state and local level in different countries. The local-level GRB work has often had participation as one of the main foci. The Philippines and Uganda examples cited above constitute two cases of a GRB located at the local level. In both these cases, the GRB was seen as a way of strengthening women’s political participation. Many other countries have also done GRB work at the local level, often with an explicit focus on participation. However, while many of the initiatives describe themselves as focusing on the ‘grassroots’, some who do so target their activities at local leaders rather than ‘ordinary’ citizens. Some purposefully make little distinction between ‘grassroots’ and ‘leaders’ in the local context. In Uganda, for example, FOWODE explicitly argued that the local level provided greater opportunities for ‘ordinary’ women to engage in GRBs and in political leadership. First, local-level politics often involves the basic, dayto-day issues which concern women and their families, rather than ‘bigger’ issues about which they feel less competent to speak. Second, because of domestic and other ties, women often find it easier to engage at the local than at national level. Decentralization has dangers as well as potential benefits if we are interested in enhancing equality in gender and other terms. In particular, if devolution of responsibility is not accompanied by the necessary funds, decentralization tends to decrease the possibility of national redistribution as each area becomes responsible for providing for itself. In terms of gender, actors are often more conservative and power relations cruder at the local than at the national level. Nevertheless, if we are interested in GRB work out of a concern with all forms of inequality, locallevel activity has the advantage that local councillors are more likely than those at national level to be aware of the poorest and most disadvantaged women. Many national parliaments have regulations in terms of educational level, or money required to stand, that result in national parliamentarians being an elite.


While some might be concerned about people who are poorer and more disadvantaged than themselves, they are less likely than leaders from less advantaged backgrounds to have an understanding of the real needs of those involved. Similar regulations about who can stand for election are less common at the local level. A focus on the local level is also important when – as is often the case – key services such as basic health and education services are decentralized. In these cases the national level’s responsibility is usually restricted primarily to policymaking. It is at the local level that the impact of the implementation – or non-implementation – of the policies will be felt. It is thus at the local level that citizens – and particularly women – will often be most open to mobilization around the needs of their children and other family members. Women bureaucrats and GRBs The above discussion in this section has focused on political representatives. In several other cases, the presence of women in decision-making positions has led to the establishment of GRBs within the bureaucracy. South Africa is again an example. The post-apartheid government moved quickly to ensure that the bureaucracy was more representative in terms of both race and gender. Within a few years the public service had almost equal numbers of women and men. Men still dominated the decision-making positions. However, there were significant numbers of women among the Cabinet ministers and deputy ministers who ‘instruct’ the bureaucrats as well as among high-level officials within the ministries (called departments in South Africa). The presence and support of these women facilitated South Africa’s becoming the African pilot for the Commonwealth Secretariat’s GRB within bureaucracies. While the initiative within the national treasury lasted only for the two years of Commonwealth support, highly-placed (mainly female) officials in some of the provinces and in some line ministries have ensured that gender budgeting continues to live within the bureaucracy. Demystification of budgets The section on participation above focuses on participation at the official decisionmaking level. Many donors are primarily interested in initiatives which focus on official decision-makers, whether in the bureaucracy or parliament. However, some GRB initiatives (for example, South Africa, Philippines, Indonesia, India) have also been interested in extending participation among civil society, and in demystifying budgets. Who does the work The Philippines initiative is interesting in illustrating the opportunities when activists are prepared to take the plunge and confront the technicalities. As noted above, the TAF GRB initiative involved three case studies. While all adopted a common framework and covered similar topics, the way in which they conducted the research differed. In Surallah, the work was led by a left-wing political organization that put much of its energy into bringing together citizens and local decision-makers to discuss gender in planning and budgets. In Angeles City,


the lead organization contracted researchers from the university to do the bulk of the research. In Bacolod City, in contrast, after initial hesitation on the basis that they were not researchers, DAWN itself conducted the research. DAWN’s approach was the most effective both in terms of producing a genderanalysis of the city’s budget and in terms of providing a conducive environment for implementation of recommendations. What was particularly interesting was the extent to which the GRB research exposed Celia Flor, an energetic councillor of several years’ standing, to new information and understanding of how the council worked both in gender terms and more generally. Flor and her co-researchers were also visibly empowered and proud of what they had achieved in doing the research themselves. And the fact that they had done so facilitated the subsequent dissemination of the approach to other cities in Negros Occidental. In South Africa, the non-governmental Women’s Budget Initiative (WBI) was conceived from the outset as a multi-stakeholder exercise. The core group was made up of parliamentarians and two policy-research NGOs. From the start, this core group involved people outside the core as central players. In the first three years, the initiative produced research chapters on each of the departments (equivalent to ministries in other countries) of the national government, as well as on several other topics such as public-service employment, taxation, the budget process, and intergovernmental fiscal relations (the allocation of money raised at one level of government to other levels for spending). Members of the core group coordinated the research and provided back-up to the researchers, but did very little of the research and writing themselves. Instead, they drew on people from other NGOs as well as academics to do the research in their areas of expertise. In addition, they set up a reference group consisting of at least one government or non-government person knowledgeable about each sector being researched. These were generally people who were too busy to do the research themselves, but who were considered important sources of knowledge or access to information, as well as key people to whom the WBI wanted to spread its new approach to understanding budgets. There were several reasons why the inclusive approach was adopted by the WBI. First, the initiators recognized that analysis of budgets from a gender perspective requires a multidisciplinary approach and knowledge of several different fields. They felt that it would be easier for people who already understood the gender issues in a particular area to acquire the necessary skills to analyse budgets than for people with budget analysis skills to acquire adequate knowledge of gender issues in each sector. Second, and related, the initiators hoped to spread the relatively uncommon skill of budget analysis so that NGO workers in different areas would have this extra ‘tool’ to strengthen their advocacy and engagement with government. Third, the approach had the by-product of generating relatively widespread knowledge of, interest in, and buy-in to the project. The interest and buy-in was increased by a large public launch of the first year’s research which was opened by the then Deputy Minister of Finance. Fourth, the two core NGOs did not see themselves primarily as advocacy organizations. Instead, they saw themselves as assisting others to obtain budget-related skills and information which they could


use in advocacy. The parliamentary partners were the first target for such skills and information. The researchers and their organizations were a second target which could increase spin-offs. The inclusive approach was successful in spreading awareness and buy-in. It also resulted in more spin-off work than in most other countries. Many of those who acted as researchers commented on how empowered they felt in having been able to do the budget analysis. A few continued to do similar work outside of the WBI. Several other NGOs which had not been involved themselves took up the idea of GRBs. Some of these came back to the core WBI and asked them to do the research. A few took the work forward themselves, perhaps with back-up from the core WBI. Most successful among these was an NGO which had previously engaged in extensive research and advocacy on gender violence, and saw the potential of the GRB approach as an additional tool. Still others both inside and outside government spoke about the importance of looking at budgets, although this often did not go beyond talk. Several universities included GRB in their gender and development studies courses. In South Africa the composition of the core group, which included researchers in the NGOs and advocates in the parliamentarians, appeared to provide an ideal mix in that the researchers could provide the parliamentarians with information to strengthen their advocacy. In practice, however, the parliamentarians did not use the research to the extent hoped for. The Tanzanian initiative provides further lessons about the dangers in separating the research and advocacy roles. TGNP is the central GRB organization in Tanzania. When TGNP initiated their gender budget initiative (GBI) they did so in collaboration with the broader Feminist Activism grouping of which they form part. Nevertheless, they played the main role from the very start. TGNP’s approach mimicked that of South Africa in many respects in the first year. In particular, one of the first activities was to commission research into the budgets of key ministries, as well as into the budget process. For each of the papers TGNP commissioned a team of at least two people. Typically, one was an academic, while the second was someone from inside the relevant ministry. Instead of coordinating and editing the work themselves, TGNP commissioned a feminist political scientist at the university to do so. TGNP’s choices reflected its own perception of itself – as an activist organization rather than a research or academic one. The choice of academics reflected the smaller number of other civil-society organizations and individuals who might be persuaded to do this work. One weakness of the approach was that TGNP had less knowledge of the detail of the research. This is an important weakness in advocacy with ‘opponents’ such as government technocrats as the latter use technicalities as one of their key weapons. In subsequent research and related work, TGNP has increasingly tried to participate more in the research process. Economists and non-economists Where GRBs contract researchers, there is often a tendency to think that the researchers should be economists. In truth, budget analysis requires non-economics


as much as it requires economics skills – it requires a multidisciplinary approach. It is also necessary that the economists who become involved are able to see the pitfalls of some of the standard economic paradigms because traditional economics training often militates against a researcher being able to see some of the important gender issues – in particular, unpaid labour. The tendency to think that economists must be the main – or only – players occurs in GRBs both inside and outside government. In inside-government initiatives, this is often understood as meaning that the financial or budget officers should be the main players. The problem here is that financial officers often have limited knowledge of policies, let alone of gender issues in the society and possible gendered aspects of policies. At the least, GRB initiatives need to involve planners as well as budget officers. Exactly who to involve depends on the way planning and budgeting happen in a particular country. In outside-government initiatives, non-economists might require more support initially in understanding terms and concepts and in overcoming a fear of (large) numbers. However, an interdisciplinary approach has many benefits both in terms of the breadth of the resultant work, and in terms of the power it gives to the noneconomists to use budget arguments in their advocacy. Involvement of less technically oriented and more organizationally based people will also usually result in different, and potentially useful, outputs. For example, the more technically oriented organizations tend to produce detailed documents which require a reader with relatively high levels of numeracy, literacy and knowledge of technical terms. If they move beyond written dissemination, they are likely to do so through a lecture-style format. In contrast, more activist organizations will usually attempt to disseminate knowledge in much simpler terms, even if they thereby lose some nuance. They will also utilize more participatory and ‘democratic’ methods in workshops and other activities. These are more likely to enable participants to use what they learn in their organizational activities. Demystification and ‘popularization’ force those involved in GRB initiatives to face the tension between proving to the economic planners in government that they understand the intricacies and complications of budgets, and not confusing the people who need to do the advocacy around the issues with unnecessary technicalities. It involves an understanding that different audiences require different products. But the products aimed at the advocates also need to provide them with sufficient understanding that they can confront the technicians. One challenge in achieving greater participation is getting people to confront their fear of numbers. Another challenge arises from the fact that budgets are, at heart, about prioritization. Some civil-society groups may resist work that requires them to prioritize and advocate less than the ideal on the grounds that it is reformist.

Conclusion The rapid growth in the number of GRB initiatives over the last few years testifies to the potential which many see in these ventures. Yet the discussion above


suggests that often the initiatives do not fulfil all the roles which are attributed to them. The chapter has tried to illustrate that one of the reasons for this apparent failure is the great diversity in GRB initiatives. As a corollary, it implies that non-fulfilment of each and every goal should not be seen as a failure. Whether an initiative can play a particular role depends on the actors, their goals, their understanding, and the activities they undertake, as well as the political and social context in a particular country. Those promoting GRB work would be more helpful if they promoted it as a tool that can be used at many different stages in the policymaking process, by many different players in many different ways to advance many different causes in addition to the broad cause of gender equality. A single initiative cannot, and should not, aim to be all things to all people. GRB work is not a panacea for anything.

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Index abortion, 77, 78, 79–80, 83n20 Adato, M., 57, 63n28 Adjustment with a Human Face (Cornia et al. 1987), 47 adult literacy, 2, 4, 121 adult-worker family model, 173–87, 219 in EU policy-making, 174, 175–8, 180 Africa, 19, 28, 30, 33, 245, 247 health sector reform, 237, 238–9 see also sub-Saharan Africa; and individual states AIDS pandemic, 26, 116, 121, 218, 229, 249 care implications, 218, 224, 230, 250–1, 328 orphans, in Africa, 251 and social protection, 230 in sub-Saharan Africa, 249 in women, 121, 249 Albertyn, C., 127n6 alimony benefit, 70, 73, 76, 80, 83n12 All China Women’s Federation (ACWF), 270 Alma Ata declaration, 1977, 249 Angeles City, Philippines, 332, 335–6 An-Naim, 101 anti-poverty programmes, 58–62, 198, 213 and gender, 58–60 see also poverty alleviation; and individual programmes Antonopoulos, R., 206, 211 Arat, Y., 106 Argentina, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 43, 44, 62n8, 224, 312 neoliberal reforms, 312 taxation (reform), 304, 305–6, 307, 308, 310, 311, 313, 315, 317 Asia, 8, 28 1997 economic crisis, 14, 132, 144 see also East Asia; and individual Asian states Asia Foundation (TAF), 332, 335 asset pawning, 211, 212 Australia, 11, 326 Austria, 11

Basic Income Grant (BIG), 116, 120–6 impacts, 123–4 Bates, R., 28 Baude, Annika, 168n5 Beijing, China, 275 Beijing Platform for Action (PFA), 32, 53 benefits see social benefits Berer, M., 249 biological determinism, 159 see also maternalism Bojer, H., 186 Bolivia, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 11, 45, 194, 196, 207 1980s economic crisis, 200 kin networks, 209–10 labour informalization, 200, 201, 202–4, 212 poverty, 201 structural adjustment, 200, 201 tin mining, 200 unemployment, 200 urban, 201, 209–10, 211 Bradshaw, S., 59 Brazil, 8, 44, 45, 51 1988 constitution, 51 Ceará province, 53 Bremer, Fredrika, 155 Britain see United Kingdom Brock, K., 48–9 brokering, 153, 162–4 boundary-making, 153, 155, 156–8 budgeting, 29–30, 316, 323, 333–4 analysis, 337–8 demystification, 335–6, 338 and economists, 337–8 gender-responsive see gender-responsive budgeting medium-term expenditure frameworks (MTEFs), 333–4 performance-based, 325, 333 policy changes, 324 research, 334 Byanyima, Winnie, 330, 332

Bacolod City, Philippines, 336 Bahl, R., 310 Balbo, L., 179 Bangkok, Thailand, 206 Bangladesh, 247

Canada, 11 capabilities approach, 152, 174–5, 180–4 and gender equality, 181–3 and individual freedom, 183–4 and interdependency, 183–5 340

Index 341 Carciofi, R., 304 care(work), 1, 2, 7, 22, 26, 35–6, 37n7, 186 affective nature of, 178–9, 184, 186 as a choice, 174–5, 177, 179, 180–1, 182, 183 commodification, 173, 177, 178–9, 180, 239: see also defamilialization; privatization community, 224 devaluation, 181–2 familial responsibility, 21, 23, 26, 35, 69, 174, 224 formal, 223 full-time, 223–4 informal, 179 by men, 173, 184, 186: see also under men shared, 184–5 unpaid, by women 2, 7, 10, 11, 22, 26, 31, 35, 61, 70, 77, 78, 116, 165, 173, 218, 224, 250–2, 301 Caribbean countries, 23, 301, 302 see also individual states Carnegie Commission of Enquiry, 1929, 111 casual work, 202: see also labour informalization; migrant workers Catholicism, 46, 77–8 Central America, 8 see also individual states Central Asia, 9 see also individual states Central Europe, 9, 68–84, 102 Communist parties, 69 see also individual states Centrángolo, O., 304 Chatterjee, M., 225, 229 child allowances see family benefits childcare, 31, 35, 71, 83n21, 120, 126, 144, 146, 147n11, 177 formal, 179, 222: see also nurseries gendered, 161, 162, 165, 173, 221 subsidized, 161, 179, 180 see also care(work); parental leave child mortality, 97 children, 20, 22 AIDS orphans, 251 as care givers, 116, 250 childcare see childcare in poverty, 119 provision for, 44, 54–5, 58, 117, 119: see also family benefits sick benefits, 70, 71, 83n11 see also under women

Chile, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 43, 44, 62n4 democratization, 306, 312 Pinochet regime, 312, 319n5 taxation, 304–5, 306–7, 308, 309, 310–11, 312, 313, 315, 317 China, People’s Republic of, 3, 5, 17, 275 All China Women’s Federation, 269–70 constitution, 258 gender wage gap, 264–5, 266 health care insurance, 259–76: funding, 263; Gongfei scheme, 259, 260, 261, 262, 263, 266, 269, 271, 274; for government officers, 271; Hezuo Yiliao, 259; Laobao scheme, 259–60, 262, 263, 266, 269, 274; for migrant workers, 270–1, 274 health sector reform, 258–75 Liangjiang health care model, 262 life expectancy, 265 market economy, 260 maternity insurance, 270 medical service, 260 migrants, 259, 269, 270–1, 273, 274–5 retirement age, 265 retired workers (pensioners), 273 rural areas, 259, 274 savings, 263 social security, 258, 274–5 state ownership, 260: restructuring, 260 unemployment insurance, 263 urban areas, 259–60, 26, 274: see also Shanghai region of China Zhenjiang province, 264 see also Shanghai region of China civil servants, 97, 98, 325, 327 collectivist strategies, 27 Colombia, 62n4 colonial legacy, 8 commercialization, 2, 12, 15–16, 18 of social services see under social services commodification, 16, 173, 177, 178–9, 180, 239 Commonwealth, 335 community importance of, 27 responsibilities of, 55 Confucian principles, 22, 132 contraception see family planning Convention on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR), 90, 93 and Islamic family law, 93 Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), 92, 324

342 Index cooperatives, 17, 225 core values in public policy, 1 Cornia, G., 47 Costa Rica, 43, 62n5 demographic changes, 6, 227 informalization, 9, 12, 227 maternal mortality rates, 5 National Liberation Party (PLN), 311 pensions, 227 school enrolment data, 3, 4 social security ‘umbrella’ scheme, 225, 226–8, 229–30, 308 taxation, 23, 304, 305, 307–08, 310, 311, 313, 315, 316, 317 urbanization, 227 wages, 227 women MPs, 5 crèches see nurseries credit access to, 211 kin loans, 209–10 micro-, 20, 48, 210 see also debt Czechoslovakia, 70–1, 74, 83n7 see also Czech Republic Czech Republic, 6, 68, 69, 72–80, 83n6, 83n7 Department for Equality of Men and Women, 76, 80 economic reform, 26, 73–4 education enrolment data, 3, 4 family benefits, 22, 72–5: compared with Poland, 75–82 maternal mortality rates, 5 women MPs, 5 see also Czechoslovakia Cuba, 43, 62n4 Daly, M., 178–9 data problems, 11–12 debt, 27, 72, 200, 208 crisis, 48, 52, 303 interest rates, 210 pressures, 212 servicing, 208–9, 212 see also credit decentralization, 49, 52–4, 146, 247, 334 decision-making in households, 207–8, 315, 316 decommodification, 24 defamilialization, 24, 35, 134, 145, 152, 177 see also family democracy, 36 democratization, 2, 27, 28–9, 30, 31, 33, 51

demographic changes, 6, 131, 133–5, 141, 227 ageing, 134, 141 divorce rates, 31, 134, 135, 136 fertility rates, 134, 141 in Japan see under Japan in Korea see under Korea Denmark, 11 development models, 27–8, 44 policy, 48–9, 50 and social welfare, 114–15, 133 see also under social policy Development through Active Networking (DAWN) Foundation, 332, 336 division of labour, 197 gendered, 251 household, 207 see also care(work); labour markets; workfamily balance divorce, 90, 96, 98, 100, 101, 136, 141, 166, 219 rates, 31, 134, 135, 136 see also alimony benefit domestic workers, 223, 224, 271 dual-earner model, 7, 158–62 earnings variability, 205, 212 index, 205 East Asia, 21, 22, 29, 31, 87, 301 welfare states, 131, 132–3: comparison of, 132–3 see also individual states Eastern Europe, 9, 25 Communist parties, 69, 71 see also Central Europe; and individual states Ebadi, Shirin, 103 ECLA(C), 44, 62, 198, 304, 312 economic activity, 6, 196 see also work Ecuador, 3, 4, 5, 6, 11, 25, 45, 194, 196, 208 credit, 209–10 dollarization, 199 industrialization, 199 informal economy, 199, 202–3, 212 labour code, 199 social services provision, 199–200, 211 education, 2, 17–18 access to, 8, 54, 221, 248 for all, 296 benefits of, 18 curriculum design, 293–4 drop-outs, 281–2

Index 343 education – continued elementary/primary, 2, 3, 18, 281, 282, 283–4, 286, 292, 296 enrolment, 2–6, 17–18, 123, 280–1, 282, 283, 286–7, 292–3 expenditure on, 17, 280, 283–7, 292–3, 318 as filter for social policies, 1–2 and gender, 2–6, 278–96: ‘feminine subjects’, 280, 294–5; performance, 281–2; single-sex schools, 18, 279, 280, 290–1, 294, 296 government, 287, 289 higher, 287 management, 285, 287, 288 physical infrastructure, 285 private, 18, 280, 288–9, 291–2, 293 research, 279 resources, 283 secondary, 2, 3, 17–18, 278–96: participation rates, 280, 281 scholarships, 293 and social policy, 278, 279–80 teachers, 285, 290: of mathematics, 294–5; women, 287, 289 in Uttar Pradesh, India, 278–96 Egypt, 12, 13, 93 elderly care, 22, 31, 35, 142, 144, 145, 161 see also care(work) elderly people, 221, 250 as care givers, 250–1 care of see elderly care in Shanghai, China, 268–9 and health, 250, 265 as pensioners, 273 poverty, 251 social protection, 252 El Salvador, 11, 12, 13 Elson, D., 22 employment see work Eriksson, Nancy, 160 Escobar, L., 57, 58, 63n20 Esping-Anderson, G., 24, 87, 109 Ethiopia, 242 eugenics, 44 Europe, 93, 193 see also Central Europe; Eastern Europe; European Union; Western Europe; and individual European countries European Commission, 175, 177 social policy agenda, 175–7, 180 see also European Union European Union (EU), 21, 22, 72, 80, 164, adult-worker-model family, 174, 175–8, 180

Belgian Presidency, 2001, 176 governance, 176 Portuguese Presidency, 2000, 176 see also individual states export processing zones (EPZs), 221 fair-trade initiatives, 231 family benefits see family benefits definition of, 119–20 gender (power) relations, 26, 77, 87, 127n8, 131, 146, 184, 334 importance of, 24–5, 26, 34, 76–7, 116–17 income pooling, 208, 243 law, 88, 89–94, 98: see also Islamic law life, 179 models, 90: adult-worker, 173–87; familial welfare, 30–1; see also maleworker/female-carer model planning see family planning policies, 102, 152 poverty, 76–7, 117: see also poverty networks, 77, 252: see also social networks structures, 119–20, 135, 173 see also care(work); children; defamilialization family benefits, 69–73, 74, 75–80, 112, 117, 137 see also maternity benefits family planning, 99, 106n17, 106n21, 136, 248 Federation of South African Women (FSAW), 111 feminism, 12, 25, 36, 53, 59, 88, 157, 153 advocacy, 20, 53 analysis/criticism, 7, 10, 23–4, 58, 80, 87, 91, 182, 240 of difference, 157 institutionalized, 167 interventions, 33–4, 47, 53, 153: femocrats, 158 journals, 156 Marxist, 88–9 networks, 167 research, 25, 53, 124 rights work, 152, 324 in South Africa see under South Africa in Sweden see under Sweden theories, 69 Filgueira, C. and F., 62n7 Finch, J., 179 Finland, 11 Floor, W., 94 Flor, Celia, 332, 336

344 Index Floro, M. S., 206, 208, 211 Folbre, N., 178 Fox, Vicente, 54 Fraser-Moleketi, G. J., 120 Fredriksson, Gunnar, 159, 161 G7, 14 Ge, S., 259 Social Security Economics, 258 Gelb, S. 122, 123 gender analysis, 12, 58, 69, 83n2, 237: see also under feminism bias, in employment see gender discrimination and budgeting see gender-responsive budgeting (GRB) development index (GDI) see under United Nations and education see under education equality see gender equality hierarchies, 237, 245–6, 252 identity, 197: see also capabilities approach justice, 184–5: see also gender equality lens, 240, 252 mainstreaming, 323–4 patriarchal contract, 88, 93: see also patriarchal societies relations, 32, 36, 57, 89, 124, 132, 196–7, 252: see also under family roles and stereotypes, 7, 10, 20, 27, 59, 61, 70, 77, 79, 89, 91, 132, 159: assumptions on, 2, 43, 45, 113; changes, 132, 196, 197; in education, 293–5; skills/work, 6 sensitivity, 56–7, 113, 333: see also gender-responsive budgeting (GRB) see also care(work); decision-making in households; division of labour; women gender discrimination, 98, 165, 168n8, 238, 329 gender equality, 10, 76, 79, 80, 82, 125–7, 152, 326, 328 of capabilities, 183–5: see also capabilities approach and care, 175, 183–4: see also care(work) constitutional, 109–10 models, 161, 181 indices, 130, 199 institutionalization, 138 pay, 6, 7, 12, 13, 72, 164, 176, 197, 266: see also inequalities

policies, 78–9, 83n6, 130 see also capabilities approach; see also care(work); inequalities gender lens, 240 gender-responsive budgeting (GRB), 29–30, 322–39 analysis, 326 definition, 322 initiatives, 323, 324–5 at local level, 334–5 special-interest allocations, 325–7 Germany, 11, 222–3 Ghana, 13, 242, 246 Gini coefficient (index), 199, 201, 306, 307, 308 globalization, 14, 168, 195, 201, 222 Goldblatt, B., 124, 127n4 Gómez Sabaini, J. C., 304, 308 González de la Rocha, M., 57, 58, 63n20 Govender, Pregs, 331, 332 government budgets, 123 see also budgeting; gender-responsive budgeting (GRB) Grindle, M., 29 gross domestic products (GDP), 2, 72, 319n6 and taxation, 301, 303, 304–5, 306, 308, 310, 317 Guatemala, 45 Gutmann, M., 197 Haggard, S., 19 Hakim, C., 174 Hansson, Albin, 154, 156 Harman, E., 124 health care, 2 access to, 4, 8: see also health insurance in Africa, 245–6 in China, 263–4 for the elderly, 142 expenditure on, 318 financing, 241–2, 252 hierarchy, 237 insurance schemes see health insurance management, 247 migration of staff, 246 mother and child (MCH), 237–8, 241 preventative, 245, 249 primary, 249 private, 245, 246, 249: expansion, 245 reform, 16, 22, 237: see also health sector reform (HSR) reproductive, 241, 248–50, 253, 275 systems, 1, 4, 240–1

Index 345 health care – continued workers, 244–5, 246, 247, 252: women as, 244 see also social spending health insurance, 7, 16–17, 242–3 in China, 259–76 community-based (MHI), 242–4 in Tanzania, 242, 243, 244 in Thailand, 230, 230–1 see also health sector reform (HSR); social insurance health sector reform (HSR), 16, 17, 237, 238–9, 243, 238–53 and care giving, 250–2 in China, 258–76 gender implications, 250–2, 264–6 models, 247 recommendations, 252–3 and reproductive health, 248–9, 253, 275 in sub-Saharan Africa, 239–53 in the UK, 247 see also health insurance Hernes, H., 151–2 Hertha, 155 Hesselgren, Kerstin, 157, 158 hierarchical societies, 9 HIV/AIDS see AIDS pandemic Holland see Netherlands Holliday, I., 132 home-based work, 195, 198–9, 202–3, 205–6, 222 combined with care, 206 full-time care, 223–4, 266 gendered, 217: see also gender lack of social protection, 213 homosexuals, 117, 118, 167 Hoodfar, H., 101 housing, 8 human capital, 44, 278, 295 human development indicators, 12, 45, 130 see also social indicators ICESCR see Convention on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights immigrants, 163, 166 see also migrant workers immunization, 102 income tax see under taxation income volatility, 204–5, 219–21 India, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 17, 225 Gujarat earthquake, 2001, 225 informal economy, 230 NGOs, 247: Self Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) see SEWA

social policy, 232 welfare system, 230 widows, 221 see also Uttar Pradesh individualism, 177, 183–4 Indonesia, 326 inequalities, 2, 25, 33, 58, 127n6, 152 access to social benefits, 17, 25, 70 education enrolment, 2: see also education gender, 127n7, 197: see also gender equality income, 6, 7, 12, 13, 72, 164, 176, 197, 265, 266, 268: see also wage levels type of work, 10–11, 197 urban–rural, 8, 201 see also women inflation in Argentina, 307 in Bolivia, 200, 213n5 in Ecuador, 199 informal economic sector, 9, 16, 36n5, 54, 193–4, 217, 231 contribution of, 217 dynamism, 194 employment in, 11–12, 36n5, 46, 193, 202, 314 and gender, 195, 217: see also gender growth of, 9, 217–19 home-workers see home-based work street vendors, 222 welfare arrangements, 230, 275 working conditions, 195 women in, 250 see also domestic workers; labour informalization; migrant workers insurance schemes, 16–17 see also health insurance; social insurance International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD), Cairo 1994, 248–9 international financial institutions (IFIs), 311, 323, 325 see also individual institutions International Labour Organization (ILO), 11, 83n6, 83n9, 94, 158, 194, 211, 218, 226, 245 International Monetary Fund (IMF), 144, 304, 309, 323 Iran, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 26, 27, 32, 34, 87, 88–106 1960s/1970s, 96–7, 99 and CEDAW, 92, 103 Centre for Women’s Participation, 103, 105

346 Index Iran – continued Civil Code: Article 1117, 98; Article 1176, 99–100 Civil Pension Fund (1923), 94 civil service, 97, 98 constitution, 97 development indicators, 95, 102 family law, 87–93, 95, 97, 103, 104–5: Family Protection Act (1967 and 1975), 96, 99; ojrat-ol-mesl, 100–1, 106n19; reform of, 104 family planning, 99, 106n17, 106n21 family-friendly policies, 101–2 feminists, 103 health care, 102–3 Islamic era, 97–104: Khomeini regime, 99 Islamic revolution, 88, 91, 97: effect on women, 97 labour force, 96, 104: women in, 96, 97–8 labour legislation, 102 literacy, 95, 97 mahr (mehrieh), 99, 100, 105n12 maternalism, 89, 90–2, 99–105 neoliberalism, 92 NGOs, 98–9 oil industry, 94, 95–7: reliance on, 97 pensions, 96 postwar, 95–6 publishing, 98 Qajar period, 94 Rafsanjani government, 101 Reza Shah, 94–5 wage levels, 95 war with Iraq, 97 and Women in Development, 101 see also Women’s Organization of Iran Ireland, 36n3 Islamic law, 87, 90, 92 and clothing, 98 enforcement of, 88, 92, 98: see also Islamic societies/states family, 87, 88, 89–94, 98, 103, 104 inheritance, 93, 98 marriage contract, 90, 93–4 schools, 105n11 Islamic societies/states, 26, 32, 37n8, 87 see also Iran; Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region Italy, 11 Jamaica, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 23, 319n8 Jamaica Labour Party (JLP), 311 People’s National Party (PNP), 311 structural adjustment, 309

taxation, 304, 305, 308, 309, 310, 315, 316: reform, 309–10, 311, 317 Japan, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 31, 33, 130, 131 Basic Law for Gender Equal Society (1999), 137–8 civil society groups and non-profit organizations, 142–3, 146 Council of Gender Equality, 137, 138 democratization models, 29 demographic changes, 133–6, 141, 142 informalization of work, 136, 147 political parties, 141–2: Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ), 142; Japan New Party, 143; Komeito, 142; Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), 140, 141; Sakigake, 143; Social Democratic Party of Japan (SDPJ), 142 regime shift, 1993, 141–3 social policy reforms, 132, 133, 136–8, 141, 142, 143: Angel Plan, 136, 137, 142; Gold Plan, 136, 137, 147n9; Long-term Care Insurance (LTCI) scheme, 137, 138, 142; Non-Profit Organization law, 143 welfare provision, 131, 132–3, 148n14 women-friendly policies, 136–7 women politicians, 138, 143, 145 Women’s Committee for the Improvement of the Ageing Society (WCIAS), 142, 143 Jbabdi, Latifa, 106 Kaar, Mehrangiz, 100, 103, 106n23 Karshenas, M., 95 Kaufman, R. R., 19 Kenya, 242 Kerber, L., 90 Kessler-Harris, A., 89 Key, Ellen, 157 Kim Dae-Jung, 144 Kim Yong Sam, 143 kin networks see social networks Kittay, E., 183 Koivusalo, M., 15 Koven, S., 91, 101, 104 Korea, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 31, 130 childcare, 140, 144, 145, 147n11 civil society groups, 144, 146 democratization, 132, 143 demographic changes, 133–6, 144 economic crisis, 144, 145, 147n5 family planning, 136 gender equality, 140, 147: Ministry of Gender and Family, 140

Index 347 Korea – continued informalization of work, 147 Kim Dae-Jung administration, 144 Kim Yong Sam administration, 143–4 military rule, 143–4 NGOs, 140 political parties, 144 social insurance schemes, 138–9 social policy reforms, 136–7, 138–40: implications for women, 145–7; Long-term Care Insurance (LTCI), 145; welfare provision, 132–3, 138–40: reform, 143–5 woman-friendly policies, 136–7 women politicians, 145–6 Korpi, W., 19 labour force see workforce labour legislation, 9, 89, 102 labour informalization, 9, 109, 136, 147, 193–5, 199–200, 211–12 degrees of, 193, 202–3, 212 home-based work see home-based work piece-work, 11, 202, 206, 222 subcontracting, 202, 206, 212 see also informal economic sector; and individual states labour markets, 2, 69 gender and, 2, 9–13, 69, 72, 131, 152, 173: see also women incentives to enter, 152 inflexibility, 9 informalization see labour informalization risks, 6 structure of, 2 Latin America, 8, 28, 29, 32, 43–53, 54, 197 CEPALISTA developmentalism, 44, 45 collectivization, 31 debt crisis, 303 informalization, 9, 54, 194, New Social Policy (NSP), 50–3, 54, 61 poverty, 198, 301 social policy provision, 8, 43, 44–5, 49, 198 taxation reform, 23, 43–4, 301–19 women’s roles, 197, 207 work and employment, 197–9 see also individual states lesbians see homosexuals liberalization, 1, 7 Liebenberg, S., 118 life expectancy, 19, 45, 265

life stages, 219, 220 loans see debt Loewe, M., 93 lone parents, 44, 70, 134, 135, 136, 151, 166, 173, 187, 219, 266, 316–17 Lund, Francie, 110, 111, 114, 116, 123, 124, 125, 127n2 Lund Committee see under South Africa Mackintosh, M., 15 macroeconomic stabilization see structural adjustment male-breadwinner model see maleworker/female-carer model male-worker/female-carer model, 7, 9, 12, 34, 45, 89, 90, 102, 119, 141, 146, 160, 173, 186, 219 marginalization of groups, 153 marketization, 198 marriage contracts, 93–4 dower, 94, 99 Islamic see under Islamic law and pensions, 162 polygamous, 98 and right to work, 155–6 temporary, 98, 106n15 Marshall, T. H., 87, 105n4 Maslow’s hierarchy of needs theory, 268 Mason, J., 179 maternal mortality rates, 2, 4, 5, 97, 102, 121, 248 maternalism, 9, 32, 45–6, 57, 58, 77, 78, 87, 90, 91, 101, 105n10 and religion, 91, 99, 104, 106n23: see also Catholicism; Islamic societies/states maternity benefits, 70, 71, 83n10, 83n14, 112, 221, 269 see also maternity leave maternity leave, 6, 7, 70, 71, 73, 79, 83n9, 83n19, 102, 112, 140 means-testing, 56, 72, 74, 76, 77, 78, 110, 112, 118, 119, 227, 228 see also targeted social benefits men caring role, 161, 165, 173, 252 as nurses, 245 parental leave, 10, 35, 79, 162 working hours, 165 see also gender; male-worker/female carer model Menem, Carlos, 312 Mensah, K., 246 Messier, J., 208, 209, 213n1

348 Index Mexico, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 53 1917 constitution, 46 Commission on Gender Equality, 324 corporatism, 46–7 civil codes, 46 Fox administration, 54, 56 informal sector, 53–4 one-party rule, 54 Oportunidades programme see PROGRESA/Oportunidades Pártido Accíon Nactional (PAN), 54, 63n17 Pártido Revolucionario Institutional (PRI), 54 social and political rights, 46, 47, 54 Mexico City, 197 Michel, S., 91, 101, 104 micro-credit, 20, 48, 210 Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, 26, 87–8, 90, 91, 103, 105n5 use of Sharia, 88–92 see also Iran migrant workers, 8, 117, 222–3 in China see under China female, 275 gender inequalities, 271 remittances by, 124–5 self-employed, 271 social security, 222–3, 259, 269, 270–1, 275 Millennium Development Goals (MDG), 15, 49, 296 Mkandawire, T., 20, 133 Moberg, Eva, 160 Moghadam, V. M., 26 Molyneux, M., 23–4, 25 Morocco, 106n23 Mozambique, 242, 245 motherism see maternalism Museveni, Yoweri, 32, 332 Muslim family law see under Islamic law Myrdal, Alva, 157, 158 Myrdal, Gunnar, 157 Naidoo, Ravi, 116 Nairobi, Kenya, 241 National Commission on the Role of Filipino Women (NCRFW), 327 National Iranian Oil Company, 96 Nelson, J. A., 178, 183 neoliberalism, 36, 52, 193, 198, 213 economic model, 1, 48, 68 policies, 217–18, 311, 312 Netherlands, 11 Netshitenzhe, Joel, 122

New Economic Model, 48, 51 see also neoliberalism New Poverty Agenda see under World Bank Nicaragua, 45 Nigeria, 241 non-governmental organizations (NGOs), 92, 116, 118, 142, 247, 332, 334, 336–7 and women, 92, 98–9, 140, 330–1, 336–7 see also individual NGOs Nordic countries, 21, 35, welfare states, 87, 133, 158, 159 see also individual states North, the (global), 1, 21, 27 compared with the South, 9, 36 nurses, 245–6 importance of, 246 private practice, 246, 253n2 recruitment by rich countries, 246 training, 246 nurseries, 83n19, 96, 102, 106n20, 137, 140 Nussbaum, Martha, 174–5, 180, 182, 184, 186 O’Connor, J., 176 OECD countries, 10, 11 see also individual states oil-rich states, 89, 91 see also Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region; rentier economies Oliff, M., 249 Open Door International, 156 Orloff, A. S., 24, 89, 90, 127n8 outsourcing, 206, 222 see also subcontracting Palme, J., 19 Palme, Olof, 161 parental leave, 7, 10, 31, 71, 79, 83n19, 137, 146, 161, 162, 176 ‘daddy leave’, 10, 35, 79, 162, 186, 221 for women see maternity leave see also family Patel, L., 114 Pateman, C., 93 paternalism, 46 patriarchal societies, 26–7, 33, 89–91 ideology, 248 see also male-worker/female-carer model pensions, 18–19, 22, 102, 125, 139, 319 crisis, 221 earnings-related, 159 and female dependency, 7, 46 and life expectancy, 19 pooling, 124 privatization, 18–19

Index 349 pensions – continued racialization, 113 reforms, 18–19, 227 widow’s, 161–2 see also social benefits; and individual states Personal Status Code in North Africa and the Levant, 92 see also Islamic law Peru, 45 Peter, F., 184 Philippines, 97, 232, 326–7, 332, 335 Development through Active Women Networking (DAWN) Foundation, 332, 336 piece-work, 11, 202, 206, 222 Pichetpongsa, A., 206 Poland, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 22, 26, 30, 34, 68–9, 70–1, 73–80, 83n6 economic reform post-socialism, 71–2 family benefits, 70–2, 73: compared with Czech Republic, 75–82 Plenipotentiary for the Equal Status of Women and Men, 80 Solidarity movement, 71, 78 Polanyi, K., 1 political liberalization, 30 see also democratization political participation, 2, 5, 6, 31, 32–4, 36, 80, 90 by women, 2, 5, 31, 32–4, 36, 80, 99, 110, 145–6, 152–3, 155, 167, 168n12, 244, 332–7: as MPs, 110, 130, 143, 145–6, 244, 326, 330, 331 political parties, 32–4, 36, 311 see also under individual states population growth, 44 postcolonial states, 28 post-socialist countries, 68–82, 83n1, 160 see also Central Europe; Eastern Europe poverty, 33, 45, 198, 199 alleviation see poverty alleviation children in, 119 coping strategies, 208 definitions, 213n4 discourse on, 1, 15, 26–7 as enduring phenomenon, 48 extent of, 62n15 family, 76–7: see also under family and gender, 33, 121 increase, 10 of single parents, 166 urban, 208–9 variable see earnings variability see also inequalities

poverty alleviation, 1, 15, 19, 21, 28, 48, 50, 52, 54–5, 117, 123, 198, 218, 311, 317 Attacking Poverty (World Development Report 2000/1), 50 see also anti-poverty programmes poverty line, 45, 72, 119, 123, 201, 205, 213n4 Povey, E. R., 98 privatization, 2, 15, 72 of education, 288–9, 291–3 of health care, 245 of pensions, 18–19 of social services, 2, 48, 113–14, 119, 198 PROGRESA/Oportunidades programme, Mexico, 20, 25, 53–8, 61–4 accountability, 56 concept of co-responsibility, 55, 56 evaluations of, 57–8 gender impacts, 56–7 success of, 55 targeted benefits, 54–6 public expenditure, 29, 322, 329 see also social spending public sector Africa, 245–6 as care provider, 249: see also care(work) in China, 260 employment, 19, 29, 92, 165, 200, 245: decline, 194, 246; low morale, 246; preferred by women, 165–6, 315 funding, 29, 246 gendered hierarchy, 245–6 institutions, 2, 29, 252–3 public works, 115, 120, 121, 133 Qavam, Ahmad, 95 Quirós Viquez, A., 59 Quito, Ecuador, 210 racism, 111–12 apartheid regime see under South Africa Ranson, M. K., 225, 230 recession, 1980s, 47 religion Islam see Islam Roman Catholicism see Catholicism and the state, 92 ultra-conservative, 249 rentier economies, 89–90 reproductive health see under healthcare reproductive rights, 78, 79, 248, 249 see also abortion rights, social and political, 32, 44, 46–7, 51, 87, 100, 110, 117 legislation, 43, 46

350 Index Robeyns, I., 182, 183 Roh Tae Woo, 143 Rothschild, D., 28 Rubery, J., 176–7 rural–urban migration, 201 Santa Cruz, Bolivia, 207 Saudi Arabia, 90 Seaga, Edward, 313 Sector-Wide Approaches (SWAps), 247 self-employment, 193, 202, 209, 217, 269 and taxation, 310, 313 see also informal economic sector self-help, 50 Sen, Amartya, 174–5, 180, 182–3, 184 co-operative–conflict bargaining, 184 Development as Freedom (1999), 181 Seong, K.-R., 144 SEWA, India, 17, 198–9, 225–6 Academy, 226 Bank, 225 credit, 225 grant from GTZ, 226 health care, 225, 230 influence of, 232 literacy training, 226 social insurance (IIS), 225–6, 229, 230, 243 as trade union, 225, 229 sexual harassment, 185–6 sexual rights see reproductive rights sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) clinics 241–2 see also AIDS pandemic sex workers, 223 Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi of Iran, 95 Shanghai region of China, 259–76 elderly people, 268–9 ‘green card’ residence permits, 263, 276n2 health insurance, 262–76: contributions, 267; exclusions, 266, 270, 275, 276; gender equality, 271–2, 276; individual accounts, 266–7, 268; maternity, 270; reforms, 262–4; shared responsibility, 267–8; supplementary, 271–2, 276 life expectancy, 265 migrant population, 261, 262–3, 271, 274–5, 276 retired workers (pensioners), 263 Trade Union, 262, 269 see also China Sharia see Islamic law

Sharp, Rhonda, 326 Si, Andrea, 332 Singapore, 266 single people, 141, 148n13 as household heads, 173, 318, 331 as parents see lone parents Skocpol, T., 91, 105n9 Skweyiya, Zola, 123 Smith, T., 328, 329 social benefits, 8 family see family benefits maternity see maternity benefits means-testing see means-testing and moral judgements, 119–20, 124 racially discriminated, 112, 117: see also racism targeted see targeted social benefits work-related, 2, 6–7, 8, 9, 159 see also social spending social capital, 49, 60 social contract, 7 ‘social hygiene’ movements, 44, 50 social indicators, 2, 3, 11–12, 198 Gender Development Index see under United Nations see also under individual states social institutions, 1–2, 31, 152, 240 see also family social insurance, 7, 12, 16, 34, 73, 113, 225–6 see also social spending; welfare state; and individual states Social Investment Funds, 51 social networks, 24–5, 35, 179, 209–11 and financial support, 243–4 and loans, 209, 210 and migrant workers, 222 and social provision, 210–11 social policy, 15, 323 as electoral issue, 33, 36, 78, 141–2, 306 in Iran, 87–106: see also Iran in Japan and Korea, 130–48: see also Korea; Japan making, 2, 7, 48, 68–9, 78, 89, 114, 117, 146, 174, 276, 279, 295: women in, 152–3; see also brokering neoliberal, 48, 88 as political struggle, 30–2, 44, 152, 159 and poverty relief, 48 reform, 33, 44, 48, 72, 78 role in development, 14, 15, 21, 28, 133 targeting see targeted social benefits universal redistributive model, 15, 19–21, 69, 78, 133 see also social spending

Index 351 social protection see social security social provisioning see social spending social rights see rights, social and political social risk management (SRM), 15, 50 social-sector restructuring, 2, 12, 44, 47–8, 49 and gender, 14–23 see also health sector reform social security, 2, 218, 219, 224, 225, 231, 258 innovations, 225–31 and taxation, 306, 308 see also health care; pensions; social benefits; social insurance; social services; social welfare social services, 15, 22, 34 access to, 12 commercialization of, 2, 12, 15–16, 18, 319n1: see also under privatization delivery by NGOs, 92 see also education; health care social spending, 1, 8, 14, 28, 52, 75, 88 on education see under education inequalities in, 8 and macroeconomics, 1, 14, 115, 198, 323 oil-financed, 88 reduced, 217–18 targeted see targeted social benefits and taxation, 306–7, 318–19 see also social benefits social welfare, 19–20, 258 familialization of, 15, 23, 68–9 privatization of, 113–14, 198 see also social services; social spending; welfare state; welfare-to-work policies; and individual states socialist economies, 19, 152 see also state socialism South Africa, 3, 4, 5, 6, 13, 21, 31, 33, 109–27, 228–9 Afrikaner nationalist movement, 111 African National Congress, 109, 111, 115, 122: women MPs, 120 AIDS, 229, 251 Alliance for Children’s Entitlement to Social Security (ACESS), 119 apartheid regime, 110–13, 120, 228 budget arrangements, 123, 244, 333 bureaucracy, 335 childcare grants, 324 civil rights, 111, 112, 117, 125 commitment to gender equality, 109–10 Community Agency for Social Enquiry, 119

Community Based Public Works Programme, 115, 120, 121 corruption, 118–19 Democratic Party, 127n5 democratization, 109, 110–11, 331: and citizenship, 115 development indicators, 110, 121 Directorate of Social Planning, 112–13 disability assistance, 229 family structures, 228 feminism, 114, 125 gender-responsive budgeting (GRB), 330, 331 health care staff, 246 legislation, 114 Lund Committee, 22, 117–18, 119, 120 migrant remittances, 124–5 National Party, 113 NGOs, 118, 336–7 pensions, 110, 111, 113, 120, 225, 228–9, 230 racial groups, 228 rural households, 124–5, 228 Taylor Committee, 122 trade unions, 121: Congress of South African Trade Unions, 121–2; PATAMABA, 232; Self Employed Women’s Union, 232 taxation, 331 traditional leadership, 118 unemployment, 121, 224 urbanization, 111 welfare provision, 126–7, 224, 244: Basic Income Grant (BIG), 120–6; child support grant, 119–20, 123; Department of Welfare, 117, 118, 119; devolution, 113; institutions, 110, 111; racial bias in, 112–13, 117–18; 1996 White Paper, 114, 115–17 Women’s Budget Initiative (WBI), 328, 336–7 Women’s Charter of Demands, 112 Women’s Charter for Effective Equality, 125, 331 Women’s National Coalition (WNC), 331 women’s organizations, 109, 111, 125, 328 women parliamentarians, 331, 335 South Korea see Korea South, the (global), 1 compared with the North, 9, 36 Spain, 265 stabilization see structural adjustment

352 Index state, role of the, 1, 14–15, 28–9, 48, 51, 52 state institutions, 28–30 state socialism, 7, 30, 33–4, 79, 81, 83n1 Standing, H., 240, 241, 249 Stephens, J., 159 structural adjustment, 9, 14, 48, 305, 309 impact of, 14, 28, 47, 53, 198, 201 subcontracting, 202, 206 Subrahmanya, R. K. A., 230 sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), 10–11, 224, 248 AIDS, 224, 248, 251 democratization, 29 health sector reform, 16, 248 see also individual states subsidies, 47, 112, 125, 127n2, 319n9 Sweden, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 10, 34 Commission on Family and Marriage, 162 feminism, 152–3, 154, 155, 156–8, 167 folkhemmet, 154–5 gender equality, 152, 161, 164, 168n8 Group 222, 159–60 immigrants, 163, 166 marginalization, 153 Morgonbris journal, 154, 156 parent-worker-citizen model, 161–2 political history, 153–64: Cossack Election, 154; Slatsjöbaden agreement, 158 political participation by women, 155, 167, 168n12 political parties, 160, 167–8: Centre Party, 162; Conservative Party, 156; Farmers’ Party, 156; Liberal Party, 156, 157, 160, 162; Social Democratic Party, 153–5, 156, 160, 161, 163 social policies, 152–3: Women’s Life and Work, 161 trade unions, 156, 163–4 unemployment, 155–6, 166 wage structures, 151 welfare state, 151–68: expansion, 153, 159–60; retrenchment, 168 as women-friendly state, 151–3, 163, 164 women’s organizations, 154, 156, 162, 167: Fogelstad Group, 155; Fredrika Bremer Society, 168n1; National Association for Housewives, 156, 168n1; Professional Women’s Organization, 157; Redstockings, 167; Social Democratic Women’s Organization, 168n1 women’s right to work, 155–7 worker state, 156

Tanzania, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 239, 246, 251 feminist organizations, 337 health care, 239, 241, 245: AIDS, 249, 251 poverty, 239, 251: reduction, 244 public expenditure review, 244 public-sector workers, 246: low morale, 246 social health insurance, 242, 243, 244: community-based, 16, 242, 243 women politicians, 244 Tanzania Gender Networking Programme (TGNP), 329, 337 Tanzi, V., 304, 305 targeted social benefits, 14, 15, 19–21, 50, 54, 200, 244, 249 effectiveness, 19 as a means of redistribution, 47 for women, 20, 53, 325 taxation, 23, 54, 138, 160, 199, 301, 329 avoidance/evasion, 302–3, 307, 310 and development, 310–11 direct, 301–2, 304, 307, 308, 313, 315, 318, 319n3 domestic, 305 enforcement, 310–11, 318 and gender, 312–17, 329 on incomes, 307–8, 309, 313 indirect, 304, 305, 307, 308, 309, 310, 315, 316, 317–18: see also valueadded tax (VAT) legislation, 315, 318 for married couples, 313 progressive, 317–18 rates, 309, 315 reform, 301, 305–19 regressive, 317 social security, 304, 308, 310, 313–15, 318–19 structures, 302–5 tax credits, 324, 329 and total revenue, 302, 303, 305, 306, 307 on trade, 305, 309, 315 under-, 301–2 Taylor, Viviene, 122 teenage pregnancy, 248 Teichman, J., 311 Tendler, J., 30, 53 Thailand, 3, 4, 5, 6, 194, 205–6, 211 ‘30 baht’ health insurance scheme, 230, 231–2 Homenet Thailand, 231 trade unions, 9, 33, 46, 95, 121 health workers, 247 industrial action, 199

Index 353 trade unions – continued and informal workers, 9, 17 links with political parties, 311 providing welfare, 269 and women, 46, 156, 163 see also SEWA, India Tsikata, D., 33 Turkey, 106n18 Uganda, 32, 242, 244, 249, 251, 330 Forum for Women in Democracy (FOWODE), 330–1, 332, 334 new constitution, 331 unemployment, 6, 17, 72, 113, 200 benefits, 83, 263 in the Depression era, 156 gendered, 74, 98, 126, 218, 273, 313 racialized, 113 rates, 72, 73–4, 98, 199, 200, 274 UNICEF, 47 United Kingdom (UK), 11, 36n3, 247, 324 Women’s Budget Group, 324, 328, 329, 330 United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean see ECLA(C) Gender Empowerment Measure (GEM), 130 Gender-related Development Index (GDI), 110, 121, 130, 147n1 United States (USA), 11, 89, 91, 105n9, 193 see also USAID Urban Poor Home-based Worker Survey (UPHWS), 203, 205, 207, 208, 209, 211, 213n1, 213n6 urbanization, 44, 111 Uruguay, 8, 43, 62n8, 308 USAID, 309, 332 Uttar Pradesh, India, 18, 278–96 education, 279, 280–96: single-sex schools, 18, 279, 280, 290–1, 294 fertility decline, 279 gender politics, 279, 280–1, 292 political structure, 290 public expenditure, 283–7, 289–90 Secondary Education Commission (Acharya Narenda Dev Committee), 296n8 Uttaranchal, 288 value-added tax (VAT), 303, 305, 306, 307, 308, 315, 317 van der Berg, S., 122 Vietnam, 97 Vimo SEWA see SEWA, India

voluntary sector, 26, 45 see also care(work) wage levels, 95, 199, 264, 265–6, 272 Washington consensus, 217 welfare models, 36, 175 see also individual models welfare state(s), 7, 21, 22, 36n2, 131 in developing countries, 7, 22, 87, 279: see also individual states development, 7, 8–9, 36n22, 43–4, 90, 109 exclusions and inequalities, 7, 8, 20: see also inequalities institutionalized, 159 Islamic arrangements, 94 literature, 109 models, 24, 87–8 restructuring, 140, 168 in Sweden, 151–68 woman-friendly, 89, 151–68 welfare-to-work policies, 175 Westerberg, Bengt, 162 Western Europe, 7 White, G., 28–9 women, 26 access to benefits, 6–7, 253 access to labour markets, 126: see also labour markets access to training, 57, 60, 221, 246 breastfeeding, 221, 227 bureaucrats, 335 with children, 10, 20–1, 33, 54–5, 91, 102, 116, 152, 160, 316–17: see also maternalism; work-family balance citizenship, 87, 110, 112, 114, 124, 127n8: economic, 89, 92 cooperatives, 17 domestic work, 251: see also domestic workers dual role, 68, 77, 159, 173, 250: see also home-based work; work-family balance economic dependence, 106n18, 124, 207–8: see also male-worker/femalecarer model; patriarchal societies economic vulnerability, 60, 61, 198 educated, 197, 295 employment patterns, 8, 69, 72, 176–7, 203, 274, 313 empowerment, 49–50, 57: index, 130 as focus of GRB initiatives, 325–6: see also gender-responsive budgeting (GRB)

354 Index women – continued freedom of choice, 184–6: see also capabilities approach; care(work) health, 250, 252; see also healthcare as household heads, 329: see also under single people and HIV/AIDS, 121: see also AIDS pandemic and marriage, 46–7, 221, 316, 319n8: see also marriage MPs, 6, 110, 130, 143, 145–6, 244, 326, 330, 331, 333 in paid work, 60, 97–8, 121, 160, 165: access to, 6–7, 98; balance with caring see work-family balance; casual workers, 121, 202; health workers, 245, 247; increased participation, 2, 9–11, 34, 141, 160, 165, 197; informal sector, 250; part-time see under work; rights, 157 pregnant, 102, 221, 238, 275 political participation see under political participation reproductive role, 89: see also reproductive rights social indicators see social indicators social and political rights see rights, social and political in social-sector employment, 9, 245 reproductive health, 241, 248–50, 253, 275: see also AIDS pandemic, family planning; health care; sexually transmitted diseases roles and stereotypes see under gender in traditional societies, 26–7, 32, 34, 58–9, 77: see also Islamic societies/states and unpaid care(work) see under care(work) urban areas, 8 violence against, 63n28, 124, 126: legislation, 138, 167 widowed, 221 see also inequalities; social benefits; women’s organizations; work-family balance; women-friendly policies Women and Development approaches, 53 see also Women in Development (WID) Women in Development (WID), 101–2 women-friendly policies, 136–7, 151–68 Women’s Committee for the Improvement of the Ageing Society (WCIAS), Japan, 142 Women’s Environment and Development Organization (WEDO), 32

Women’s National Coalition, South Africa, 109–10, 331 Women’s Organization of Iran (WOI), 96 women’s organizations, 31, 33, 36, 47, 52, 79–80, 83n22, 142, 146, 153, 162, 332 see also individual organizations women’s rights see feminism Wong, J., 143 work and benefits, 2, 6–7, 16, 17, 34, 54, 56, 70, 82, 175, 230, 264, 269–70, 318 care see care(work) flexible practices, 175 force see workforce gendered, 2, 6, 313: see also gender home-based see home-based work paid, 2, 6, 21: combined with unpaid, 206; and poverty, 21; see also wage levels part-time, 10, 36n4, 147n7, 173, 193, 217, 273 and social inclusion, 175, 176 unpaid, 2, 21, 104, 327–28: see also care(work) as welfare, 182: see also welfare-to-work policies women’s see under women see also labour markets; self-employment work-family balance, 76, 79, 82, 109, 141, 173, 174, 177, 195, 232 see also women workforce, 7 feminization, 9, 10 flexible, 199 gendered, 242, 244–5, 313 restructuring, 17 rural, 17 women in see under women see also labour; work working conditions, 195 hazardous, 221–2, 245 for health workers, 245 improvement, 252 World Bank, 14, 29, 36n1, 48, 50, 227, 286, 309 advocating tax reform, 302 Implementation Completion Reports, 296n3 and gender-responsive budgeting, 328 and neoliberalism, 311 New Poverty Agenda, 43, 49, 53 support for MHI, 243 World Development Reports, 50, 237–8

Index 355 World Conference on Women, Beijing 1995, 270 World Health Organization, World Health Reports, 238 World War II, 89 Wóycicka, I., 76 young people, 63n30, 74, 141, 248

Zambia, 8, 242 Zanan, Iranian women’s magazine, 100, 103 Zhenjiang City, Jiangsu Province, China, 262, 264, 273 Zimbabwe, 241, 242, 246, 251, 334 Zimbabwe Women’s Resource Centre Network (ZWRCN), 334, 335

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