Valeria Esquivel

• PhD (Economics)
• Employment Policies and Gender Specialist/ Coordinator GENDER Group at EMPLAB at International Labour Organization

The COVID-19 crisis has laid bare the entrenched gender inequalities that, compounded with other inequalities, plague labour markets. Women were more heavily impacted by employment losses than men during the crisis, and there is a risk that the recovery might leave them behind. Patterns of growth – that is the sectors behind GDP contraction and rec...

Paid and unpaid care provision underlies gender inequalities in the distribution of employment opportunities, incomes, and access to welfare. Three quarters of all care work in households is provided by women and two thirds of all care workers are women. This chapter draws on the contributions of Latin American feminist scholars to challenge the “c...

Lectura crítica de Bohoslavsky, Juan Pablo y Rulli, Mariana (coords.) (2023). Deuda feminista ¿Utopía u oxímoron?

The apparel and footwear industries have played a central role in industrialization processes, providing a source of formal employment opportunities in developing countries, particularly for women, where formal jobs are limited (Bárcia de Mattos et al., 2022). In 2019, before the onset of the global pandemic, the textiles and garment sectors combin...

Framing public care services, basic infrastructure and social protection policies under the umbrella of care policies is a game changer. It promotes gender equality, allows for policy complementarity and coordination, improves the situation of care workers and has visible positive macroeconomic impacts. Transformative care policies emerge if a huma...

This publication is a report by the Joint Research Centre (JRC), the European Commission's science and knowledge service. It aims to provide evidence-based scientific support to the European policymaking process. The contents of this publication do not necessarily reflect the position or opinion of the European Commission. Neither the European Comm...

This paper is part of a research project on the effects of automation in the apparel and footwear sectors and their gender dimensions. The main goal has been to improve our understanding of how processes of technological upgrading, particularly automation, interact with local social structures and institutional systems in the apparel and footwear i...

This brief discusses the transitions of rural women in and out of employment since the start of the global pandemic in response to changes in the household due to the COVID-19 crisis. We postulate that these household changes, i.e. loss of employment by other household members, increase in household size, and increase in unpaid care work, affected...

https://ras.org.in/push_and_pull_factors_and_women_s_rural_employment_in_india_since_covid_19 The Covid-19 pandemic had a devastating impact on the world of work in India. It resulted in unprecedented job and income losses, reinforcing the adverse labour market situation of women. There was a significant contraction in demand as the crisis unfold...

The 2022 edition discusses the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on young people and their labour market prospects during the recovery and beyond. Youth have been disproportionately affected by the pandemic and youth labour markets are now being buffeted by the lingering impacts of the pandemic, geopolitical risks and macroeconomic risks such as the...

https://www.ids.ac.uk/opinions/why-covid-19-recovery-must-be-gender-responsive/

This short comment focuses on The Care Manifesto's vision “to think of care as the organizing principle of each and every scale of life”. It challenges the construction of care as a universal, all-ecompasing concept, on conceptual and political grounds: naming everything good care and everything evil uncaring leaves us with too simplistic a picture...

This paper highlights the importance of the apparel and footwear sector for women’s employment and the gendered nature of the industry; summarizes the literature on the effects of industrial automation and digitization on employment in the industry, in particular their gender dimensions; and presents a brief overview of the apparel and footwear sec...

https://www.themintmagazine.com/be-careful-running-on-empty

https://www.ilo.org/employment/Whatwedo/Publications/WCMS_824865/lang--en/index.htm

https://portal.produccion.gob.ar/novedades/revista-mujeres-produciendo-numero-2--133564006214-g

This annex consists of edited extracts from materials provided by Valeria Esquivel to ESCAP Statistics Division in 2018.

https://www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/---europe/---ro-geneva/---ilo-lisbon/documents/publication/wcms_767811.pdf

Feminist economics is a critical and well‐established economics subdiscipline. Over the last 25 years, feminist economists have critiqued the gender‐blindness of economic thinking and have developed new analytical frameworks and methodologies to examine gender relations in economic institutions and economic functioning. This chapter presents femini...

https://www.ilo.org/employment/Informationresources/covid-19/other/WCMS_753516/lang--en/index.htm

https://www.ilo.org/employment/Whatwedo/Publications/policy-briefs/WCMS_751785/lang--en/index.htm

The Beijing Platform for Action (BPfA), written 25 years ago, is remarkable in its economic diagnostics, analytical framework, and policy prescriptions, which remain fully relevant today. In this article, we revisit the main economic problems identified by the BPfA: GDP growth, employment, care, and poverty. In terms of GDP growth, the BPfA was cle...

This is the introductury article to the Gender & Development issue marking Beijing +25.

Structural transformation processes are not gender-neutral. They take place against a background of persistent gender segregation in sectoral employment. Drawing upon 10 country studies, this brief examines the gender impacts of structural transformation. It finds that for women to benefit from structural transformation processes engaging women in...

Este informe analiza detalladamente el trabajo de cuidados remunerado y no remunerado y su relación con el mundo de trabajo en transformación. Un punto central son las persistentes desigualdades de género en los hogares y en el mercado de trabajo, que están inextricablemente vinculadas con el trabajo de cuidados.

Ce rapport dresse un état des lieux complet sur les activités de soin à autrui, qu’il s’agisse de travail rémunéré ou non rémunéré, dans un monde du travail en mutation. Une attention particulière est portée aux inégalités persistantes entre hommes et femmes, dans les ménages et sur le marché du travail: ces inégalités sont inextricablement liées a...

Esquivel, Valeria (2018) "Género y macroeconomía", en FIDE Coyuntura y Desarrollo, Edición especial 40 años, No. 385, Buenos Aires: FIDE.

Care policies are public policies that assign resources to care in the form of money, services and time. They range from payments and subsidies to caregivers or to people who need care and the direct provision of care services, to complementary service provision, such as water and sanitation. They also include labour regulations, such as maternity...

The report analyses the ways in which unpaid care work is recognized and organized, the extent and quality of care jobs and their impact on the well-being of individuals and society. A key focus of this report is the persistent gender inequalities in households and the labour market, which are inextricably linked with care work. These gender inequa...

The working conditions, relative wages, and social standing of care occupations are the result of diverse causes that can worsen, improve, or neutralize the labor disadvantages usually found in care occupations. This article seeks to provide a perspective on the factors underlying care workers’ working conditions in Argentina. It presents a compara...

El Objetivo 5 de los Objetivos de Desarrollo Sostenible marca un avance sin pre-cedente en la agenda de cuidado dado que visibiliza el cuidado como un tema central del desarrollo sostenible. Hay nuevo compromiso internacional que busca el reconocimiento, reorganización y reducción del trabajo doméstico y de cuidado no remunerado mediante políticas...

ABSTRACT This article presents a general critique of win-win arguments that pair gender equality and economic growth. Reviewing the "growth is good for women" and "gender equality is good for growth" arguments, the article argues that the win-win conclusions are contingent on particular notions of gender equality, measurement of output, work, well-...

This chapter uses data from Buenos Aires, Argentina to estimate the Levy Institute Measure of Time and Income Poverty (LIMTIP). The LIMTIP integrates time poverty into the income poverty measure by recognizing that the economic welfare of households and persons depends on unpaid care and domestic work as well as paid work. Taking into account pover...

Sustainable Development Goal 5 — »Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls« — includes the mandate to »recognize and value unpaid care and domestic work«. Target 5.4 calls for »the provision of public services, infrastructure and social protection policies.« Together they offer a point of entry to advocate for care policies at the na...

¿Por qué estudiar a las trabajadoras y trabajadores del cuidado? La propia denominación de esta fuerza laboral constituye un término (relativamente) nuevo en la literatura académica. Antes de comenzar, conviene quizá definir a qué alude esta etiqueta que engloba a un conjunto heterogéneo de ocupaciones. Se trata de personas cuyo trabajo remunerado...

El análisis de las “ocupaciones del cuidado” ha cobrado creciente relevancia en la agenda feminista de los últimos años. Estas ocupaciones – mayormente concentradas en los sectores de la salud, la educación y el servicio doméstico – se encuentran altamente feminizadas y generan oportunidades de empleo para muchas mujeres. No obstante, las mismas pr...

La Declaración y la Plataforma de Acción de Beijing marcaron, en 1995, un momento singular para el avance de la igualdad de género. El balance de los logros obtenidos desde entonces no es todo lo positivo que debería, y algunos de estos logros se encuentran amenazados e incluso podrían revertirse. Esta es la conclusión inequívoca a la que llega la...

L a economía feminista en América Latina es tributaria de conceptos de-sarrollados en países centrales, tanto en economía como en economía fe-minista. Sin embargo, la agenda de la economía feminista latinoamericana ha extendido y algunas veces ha cuestionado esos mismos conceptos para producir conocimiento situado, relevante para nuestras realidade...

This article offers a power analysis of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) process and outcomes, from a feminist perspective. Many see, in the SDGs, several opportunities for progress on gender equality and women's rights, if not for transformation. Yet there are many reasons for scepticism, as the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development's vi...

We describe the production of estimates of the Levy Institute Measure of Time and Income Poverty (LIMTIP) for Buenos Aires, Argentina, and use it to analyze the incidence of time and income poverty. We find high numbers of hidden poor--those who are not poor according to the official measure but are found to be poor when using our time-adjusted pov...

El libro analiza el desarrollo de las políticas de seguridad social en la Argentina entre 2010-2014, a partir de lo que se denomina una "contra-reforma" de las políticas sociales llevadas adelante por el neoliberalismo. Son analizados principalmente el sistema de pensiones y de protección familiar (asignaciones familiares), su cobertura, su suficie...

Existe una amplia gama de conceptos y términos relacionados con el cuidado, que dependen de diversas corrientes teóricas y marcos disciplinares. Estos abordajes analíticos han dado paso, en los útimos años, a un debate político sobre la construcción de una agenda de cuidados feminista y transformadora. Transformar el cuidado como concepto con poten...

The meanings of care are contested – the approaches to care in the development and feminist literature have varied greatly. At the same time, care is a common word, loaded with moral meanings concerning notions of duty and love, and care is commonly associated with women. These associations are not innocent; they have concrete effects in shaping di...

El capítulo presenta un estudio sobre las condiciones de trabajo y de protección social de las trabajadoras del servicio doméstico, uno de los sectores laborales más relevantes a la hora de preguntarse sobre la capacidad de protección de instituciones y políticas, debido a que se combinan una larga historia de desprotección y una creciente importan...

Este documento tiene el objetivo de presentar los hallazgos resultantes de la aplicación de la medida de Pobreza de Ingreso y Tiempo LIMTIP (por su sigla en inglés) para el caso argentino, y en particular para la ciudad de Buenos Aires. Esta medida bidimensional responde a la necesidad de integrar la dimensión de tiempo en la medición oficial de la...

This chapter discusses the impact of the global economic crisis in Latin America, with particular emphasis on its gender implications. The negative impacts of the crisis, which began in late 2008 in United States and quickly spread worldwide, were heavily felt in Latin America, a region characterized by its external vulnerability, the limited diver...

Oxfam’s initiative ‘Innovations in Care’ aims to support development, humanitarian and advocacy practitioners to work more effectively on care issues. Care is understood as a major issue in promoting women’s human rights, empowerment and overcoming poverty and inequality. This paper clarifies the main conceptual issues, overlapping terms and debate...

La iniciativa “Innovations in Care” de Oxfam tiene por objetivo brindar apoyo a los pro-fesionales del desarrollo, ayuda humanitaria e incidencia de modo de trabajar más efi-cazmente en los temas relacionados con el cuidado. El cuidado se considera una cues-tión de suma importancia en la promoción de los derechos humanos de las mujeres, su empodera...

Las lógicas del cuidado infantil. Entre las familias, el Estado y el mercado, edited by Valeria Esquivel, Eleonor Faur, and Elizabeth Jelin. Buenos Aires: Instituto de Desarrollo Económico y Social - IDES; Fondo de Población de las Naciones Unidas - UNFPA; Fondo de Naciones Unidas para la Infancia – UNICEF, 2012. This book’s main premise is that c...

Feminist Economics from Latin America: Current Debates Valeria Esquivel (editor) GEM LAC – Gender, Economics and Macroeconomics in Latin America www.gemlac.org ONU-MUJERES, Santo Domingo, 2012 (Spanish) This book presents path-breaking research in Feminist Economics produced by Latin American scholars working in the region. All authors face the c...

With this second publication of the “Undoing knots, innovating for change” booklets, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) Regional Centre for Latin America and the Caribbean, through its Gender Practice Area, again provides Latin American governments and citizens with an innovative reflection that puts the themes of equality and care wor...

This study takes stock of how advocacy for time-use surveys (TUS) has been framed since the 1995 Beijing Platform for Action, which urged countries to regularly conduct TUS in order to quantify unpaid care work, and how conducive the call for action has been for the effective use of this data to inform gender-sensitive policy. Findings suggest that...

Resumen Una tercera parte de las mujeres ocupadas de la Argentina y sólo un 3 por ciento de los hombres ocupados son trabajadores del cuidado. Su remuneración relativa y sus condiciones de trabajo en general dependen de las normas laborales y de su cumplimiento efectivo. Pero también dependen, en gran medida, de cómo está organizada la prestación d...

Résumé En Argentine, le secteur des services à autrui emploie un tiers des femmes qui travaillent contre 3 pour cent seulement des hommes. Leur salaire et leurs conditions de travail ne dépendent pas seulement de la réglementation du marché du travail et de son application, mais aussi de l'organisation de ces services: engagement du secteur public;...

In Argentina, one third of all employed women, but only 3 per cent of all employed men, are care workers. Their relative pay and working conditions depend not only on applicable labour market regulations (and enforcement) but also, crucially, on the organization of care service provision, including the degree of public-sector engagement in the prov...

This paper interrogates the nature of the informal economy in Greater Buenos Aires. It takes advantage of the existence of a unique dataset, the Informal Labour Module (ILM), which was collected in 2005. The ILM characterized informal employment, particularly through tackling the extent and reasons of wage employment; understanding the various ways...

A healthy work-life balance has become increasingly important to people trying to cope with the pressures of contemporary society. This trend highlights the fallacy of assessing well-being in terms of finance alone; how much time we have matters just as much as how much money. The authors of this book have developed a novel way to measure 'discreti...

Supported by the women’s movement and in the spirit of the Beijing Platform for Action, the Buenos Aires legislature passed a law at the end of 2003 (Ley N° 1168, 4 December 2003) that mandated the Directorate-General of Statistics and Census of the city government (Direction General de Estadística y Censos, DGEyC) to collect information on the dis...

Este libro presenta la metodología y los resultados más salientes de la Encuesta de Uso del Tiempo de la Ciudad de Buenos Aires 2005, relevada por la Dirección General de Estadística y Censos del Gobierno de la Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires (DGEyC) en el marco de un acuerdo de cooperación con el Instituto de Ciencias de la Universidad Nacional de...

Time-use surveys show how individuals spend their time during the day or week, which provides evidence of the gendered division of labor within households and the interdependence of women's and men's paid and unpaid work. Time-use experts in the South face similar challenges to those working in other countries, but they also have to come to terms w...

Introducción Argentina atravesó durante 2002 una crisis económica y social de una magnitud inusitada. El PIB se redujo en más del 11%, el desempleo trepó al 21,5% y se llegó a que el 55% de la población viviese en hogares con ingresos inferiores a la línea de pobreza. Las importantes caídas del nivel de actividad, del empleo y de las remuneraciones...

This paper aims to sketch gender relations in Argentina at the awakening of devaluation in order to explore the effects of macroeconomic developments during 2002 on families and women. The paper argues that the devastating effects on welfare in the immediate post-devaluation period were neither restricted to monetary variables nor gender neutral. T...

¿Es el actual régimen macroeconómico compatible con mejoras sustanciales en los niveles de pobreza? Para aportar a esta problemática, las autoras presentan estimaciones para tres escenarios macroeconómicos. Los resultados del ejercicio de simulación resultan poco alentadores dadas las condiciones de partida tan adversas el proceso hacia una socieda...

The new economic regime emerging after devaluation in Argentina, based on a high real exchange rate, has contributed to the recovery of employment and to lower poverty and inequality indexes from the extremely high levels reached during the height of the crisis. Real wages have also recovered, though at a much lower rate. In spite of these improvem...

La Argentina atravesó durante 2002 una crisis económica y social de una magnitud inusitada, signada por el fuerte empeoramiento del nivel de actividad, del empleo y de las remuneraciones. Sin embargo, la temprana recuperación que comenzó hacia la segunda parte de ese año fue particularmente intensa, en especial en términos de generación de empleo....

Argentina went through an unpredented economic and social crisis at the beginning of 2002, when GDP, employment and wages plummeted. However deep, the crisis did not impede the rapid recovery that started as early as in the second semester of 2002, particularly in terms of employment creation. Even excluding Plan Jefes' jobs, net employment creatio...

En el marco de deterioro relativo y absoluto de las condiciones de inserción de las mujeres asalariadas en el mercado de trabajo, estas mujeres obtienen ingresos salariales horarios en promedio superiores a los varones, generando lo que denominamos una brecha de género inversa. Este resultado atípico se mantiene con independencia del período o de l...

A mediados de la década de los años setenta culminó un largo período de crecimiento relativamente sostenido y se inició otro de persistente inestabilidad macroeconómica, que se extendió hasta principios de los años noventa. El mismo estuvo acompañado de un empeoramiento en los indicadores del mercado de trabajo, evidente en la suba de la tasa de de...