Lisa Baldez
In the past, Latin America was not known as a global leader in terms of the status of women, but that is no longer the case. In the past two decades, women have been elected to the highest political office in seven countries in the region. Nicaraguans voted for Violeta Chamorro in 1990, Guyanans elected Janet Jagan in 1997, and Panamanians chose Mireya Moscoso as president in 1999. In 2006, Chile elected Michelle Bachelet, and, in 2007, Argentines voted in Cristina Fernández de Kirchner. In 2010, Laura Chinchilla was elected president of Costa Rica, and Dilma Rousseff became president of Brazil. In Jamaica, Portia Simpson-Miller held the post of Prime Minister from 2006 to 2007. These women have achieved what is widely considered to be the most important marker of political power and of gender equality, two goals that remain beyond women’s grasp in most of the countries of the world. Women’s accomplishments stand out even more when we consider the strength of the executive in Latin America; throughout the region, presidents are not mere figureheads but wield considerable constitutional power, legislative initiative, and budgetary authority.
The large number of women presidents is but one indicator of the considerable advances that Latin American women have made in attaining political power and strengthening women’s rights. Dramatic changes in the status of women have occurred throughout the region. Expansion of women’s rights is a priority among political parties and political officials at every level of government. Dense networks of women have mobilized to protest against gender inequality and to demand policy change. International institutions have forced domestic governments to make stronger commitments to women’s rights. Latin America as a whole has emerged as a world leader in the fight against domestic violence with the Inter-American Convention on the Prevention, Punishment and Eradication of Violence Against Women, also known as the Convention of Belém Do Pará (Inter-American Commission on Human Rights 1994). These successes challenge assumptions about the prevalence of traditional gender stereotypes that portray Latin American women as submissive, subordinated by men, and relegated to the private sphere. At the same time, advances in women’s rights are unevenly distributed and we do not yet know how enduring they will prove to be over time. Electing women to political office has not yet brought about the end of gender discrimination. Many women continue to face significant obstacles to living safe and productive lives.
This chapter examines some of the changes that have led Latin America to become a global leader in the status of women and evaluates the scope of those changes for women outside the presidential palace. It begins with an overview of broad demographic trends that have affected men and women. The expansion of women’s rights makes sense when we see that women are approaching men in terms of their share of the labor force, and surpassing men in education. It then explores the rise of feminism in the region in the late twentieth century, a phenomenon caused largely by women’s rejection of two hypermasculine forms of political engagement: leftist revolutionary movements and military authoritarian governments. The next section looks at efforts to promote women’s rights policy in the context of democracy and the strategic challenges that women’s movements face. The chapter then shifts focus to the institutional arena to examine how women and women’s rights have fared in legislatures, the executive branch, and the courts.
Each of these areas, particularly public policy, gender-based movements, and political institutions, has generated a wealth of research within political science. My vision for future work in this field is to make it more comparative and more gendered. Political scientists who conduct research on Latin America are also comparativists, and most of us are by now familiar with debates about the comparative method (for example Brady and Collier 2010; King, Keohane, and Verba 1994). In the conclusion to this chapter, I identify some of the ways in which gender research might engage in more expansive and more frequent comparisons. I would also like to see more research that attends more closely to gender than solely to women. Most of the existing research in this subfield presumes that “women” is a meaningful category of analysis that rests on characteristics shared by all women. As this chapter reflects, much of the research in this subfield evaluates women’s political activity in terms of its support for women’s rights and gender equality. Research that acknowledges the myriad differences among women and that addresses the significance of masculinity is less well developed in political science. Research that acknowledges the matices in terms of how gender is defined will provide a more comprehensive view of the ways in which gender is relevant to Latin American politics.
Recent changes in women’s rights have occurred against a backdrop of long-term improvements in women’s access to education and employment in the formal labor force. Theories of modernization predict that gender equality will come about with economic and political development. Demographic data show that the status of women in Latin America generally conforms to these expectations in terms of childbearing and labor force participation; as the region has developed, women are having fewer children and more women are working. About half of working-age women are employed, which represents a 3 percentage point increase since 2000. By comparison, 83% of working-age men are employed, and this figure has remained steady since 2000. The fertility rate for women has declined since the middle of the twentieth century and has continued to drop in the twenty-first century, from an already low median of 2.7 children per woman in 2000 to 2.4 in 2008. The rate of teen pregnancy has also declined, registering a drop of more than 10% since 2000, from a median of 85 live births per 1000 teen-aged women, to 71.5 per 1000 in 2008. Women have achieved parity with men in basic literacy region-wide, with only small differences in the rates of literacy for men and women in most countries (all data from World Bank 2010).
The data on gender ratios in education tell a different story from what modernization theory would predict, however; in Latin America as in other regions of the world, women have surpassed men at higher levels of educational attainment. The higher the level of schooling, the more women outnumber men. At the level of primary education, gender parity has been nearly achieved: the ratio of girls to boys is 97:100. At the secondary and tertiary levels, girls achieved parity with boys some time ago and then began to outnumber boys. Region-wide, the median female to male ratio for secondary enrollment is 104.1. At the university level, gender inequities have become very pronounced: the median ratio of female to male university enrollments is 141.9. The ratio is close to 2:1 in a handful of countries; in Belize, Jamaica, St. Lucia, and Uruguay, close to two women attend university for every man (World Bank 2010). Gender inequality persists in education—but at the expense of boys, not girls.
One explanation for higher levels of education for women in Latin America points to the Catholic Church’s historical commitment to educating women. This hypothesis became evident to me once I thought about the region comparatively, relative to other developing areas. Spanish colonial rulers cared deeply about education and built universities in the colonies beginning in the 1500s. The Catholic Church sought to educate women for many reasons: to prepare them for their future roles as wives, nuns, mothers, and servants to the poor; to train them to be good mothers; to espouse strong moral, aesthetic, and religious values; and to steel them for the hardships of colonial life. In the post-independence era, conflicts between clerical forces defending the Catholic Church and secular, liberal forces opposing the Church led to the expansion of education for women. Liberal reforms in the mid-1800s created public schools and normales that trained women as teachers. In other regions of the world, by contrast, conflicts between secular and clerical forces often reduced women’s access to education. Conservative political parties supported women’s suff rage early on, consistent with their belief that women supported the Catholic Church and would vote for Catholic candidates. The Catholic Church is usually considered to exert a conservative force when it comes to women, but it has been at least somewhat progressive when it comes to women’s education.
Political scientists tend to use demographic data as independent or explanatory variables to explain political outcomes, such as changes in public policy. The data presented here reveal intriguing patterns that warrant investigation in their own right. Teen pregnancy rates vary by country, for example, from a high of 112 in Nicaragua and 108 in the Dominican Republic, to lows of 45 in Cuba and Haiti. What explains the variation across countries? Despite a pattern of overall parity, the educational data reveal some alarming declines; girls’ enrollments have dropped an average of 2 points relative to boys’ enrollments in 13 countries over the past ten years. What accounts for declines in women’s status where they have occurred? These research puzzles have yet to be explored within political science.
Women have mobilized along gender lines in a number of contexts. Following the lead established by Maxine Molyneux (1985), scholars frequently categorize women’s movements according to two groups, one that reflects the interests that flow from women’s traditional or conventional gender roles and the other than challenges gender hierarchy. Molyneux coined these two categories “practical” and “strategic”; others have used the terms “feminine” and “feminist” (Alvarez 1990). The initial idea behind conceiving of women’s interests according to these two types was to challenge the idea that all women share interests in feminism and explicit challenges to the gender status quo. Prior to Molyneux, feminists often resorted to the Marxist concept of false consciousness to understand and explain the actions of women who did not explicitly espouse feminist interests; from this perspective, women who did not support feminism did not properly understand their own gender interests. Molyneux sought to explain the actions of politically active women who do not support women’s rights per se, as well as those who do (for a critique of this perspective, see Baldez 2011).
Participation in leftist revolutionary movements in the 1960s and 1970s led many women to develop feminist consciousness. Leftist ideology privileged socio-economic class over all other forms of identity, which theoretically made gender differences invisible and politically irrelevant. This afforded women unprecedented opportunities to participate in public life. Women joined parties and movements of all kinds, and made up as much as 40% of the armed combatants who waged guerrilla warfare in Cuba, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Chiapas (Kampwirth 2002).
Despite the prominent role of women in revolutionary movements and the prevalence of ideologies focused on liberation and radical equality, male leaders remained ambivalent at best about women’s status. Revolutionary policies challenged the subordinate role of women within Catholic-dominated culture, but did not transform it. Few women assumed positions of power within the revolutionary leadership. Government efforts to legislate gender equality met with limited success. In Cuba, the Family Code of 1975, which required men to share equally in housework, was widely flouted and proved unenforceable. In Nicaragua, the Sandinistas explicitly supported gender equality in their original platform, but weak commitment on the part of the Sandinista leadership once in power, and the civil war of the 1980s meant that very few of its provisions were ever implemented. Both governments created mass organizations for women (the Federation of Cuban Women and AMNLAE in Nicaragua), but they served more to mobilize women on behalf of the revolution, rather than to represent women’s interests. Women’s participation often led them to question contradictions between their own experiences and radical ideals; this questioning in turn sparked the creation of feminist consciousness.
The status of women also became a battleground between revolutionaries and reactionaries. Literacy campaigns in Cuba and Nicaragua sent hundreds of young people into the countryside to teach peasants how to read, but many families opposed sending young women unescorted into the countryside. Shutting down Catholic schools constituted a particularly keen threat to daughters in protective middle- and upper-class families. Right-wing women mobilized against leftist regimes in Chile and elsewhere (Baldez 2002; Power 2002).
When authoritarian rulers seized power in coups across the region during the late 1960s to the 1980s, women began to mobilize on the basis of their gender identity to oppose military governments and support of women’s rights. The emergence of progressive women’s movements reflected not only opposition to authoritarianism, but a response to the limitations of the left that had led to its violent demise. Authoritarian governments thus had the unanticipated consequence of precipitating the emergence of women’s movements, particularly in the Southern Cone countries of Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Uruguay. The overblown machismo exemplified by military rule made feminism more appealing than it otherwise may have been, for men and women alike. Widespread human rights violations and economic crisis prompted women to take a public stand too dangerous for men, who were detained, tortured, killed or disappeared at higher rates than women. The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo in Argentina are perhaps the most well-known example, but women organized everywhere to protest against the military’s violation of the private spaces of the home and family. Feminists coined the slogan “democracy in the country and in the home” to highlight the link between military rule and patriarchal culture. The emergence of women’s movements amidst authoritarian regimes beginning in the 1970s defied the idea that feminism was a privilege of white, middle-class women in the developed world.
Activism at the regional level has long been central to feminism in Latin America. In the first half of the twentieth century, Latin American women organized the world’s strongest networks of suffrage organizations. Starting in 1983, feminist groups have held regional encuentros every three years. The encuentros have provided a forum to share ideas, debate, network, air their grievances, and recharge the batteries drained by working in often-hostile domestic environments. From a scholarly perspective, the feminist encuentros serve as a barometer by which to assess the status of feminism at particular points of time. Teams of scholars have written two insightful essays that provide detailed accounts of these gatherings (Alvarez et al. 2002; Sternbach et al. 1992). I hope future scholars will continue to publish birds-eye descriptions of future encuentros as well as other instances of gender-based mobilization. Articles like these are undervalued relative to more abstract, theoretically-motivated research, but they serve the important purpose of documenting events for the historical record and constitute valuable primary sources.
At the transnational level, the United Nations World Conferences on Women (WCW) legitimized incipient feminist movements and forced women’s rights policy onto domestic political agendas. The first WCW, held in Mexico City in 1975, increased awareness of feminism in the region and introduced Latin American feminism to the world. Participation at the subsequent conferences—in Copenhagen in 1980, Nairobi in 1985, and Beijing in 1995—provided leverage for domestic activists in their efforts to advance women’s rights. Many countries had never previously gathered data on gender inequality and presumed, incorrectly in many cases, that “their” women had already achieved equality. This deceptively simple step of data collection, a prerequisite for attending the conferences, proved sufficiently embarrassing to governments to prompt them to take action to improve women’s status relative to men. Interaction between government officials and activists at the parallel NGO forums further strengthened the struggle for women’s rights. Government officials found they needed advocates in civil society to provide information about women’s status, and advocates in NGOs and grassroots organizations learned more about the constraints under which state officials operate.
In the fifteen years since Beijing, Latin American feminists have moved away from the UN as a crucible of resistance. Virginia Vargas, one of the region’s founding feminists, recently critiqued the UN as being captured by forces of “neoliberalism, militarization and fundamentalisms of various kinds” (Vargas 2009, 150). The struggle for women’s rights has shifted ground, to alternative venues such as the World Social Forum that allow activists in a wide range of struggles to debate issues and to develop new ways to mobilize against global political oppression and economic crisis.
Democratization gave women’s rights advocates opportunities to create a “space in the state” to promote policy change, but also introduced fissures into feminist movements. Embrace of policy development and lobbying required organizations to become more professionalized and to rely more heavily on external financing, in a pattern has been called the “NGO-ization” of feminism. Relatively low levels of GDP per capita make reliance on member donations unfeasible for most organizations, and tax laws do not provide incentives for philanthropic giving among those who might afford it. NGOs that opt to navigate the transnational arena and conduct contract work for domestic governments do so at the expense of mobilizing individual supporters and engaging in strategies that might strengthen a movement at the grassroots level. The NGOs that thrive in this context are those whose staff have the skills to navigate the transnational arena: advanced degrees, fluency in English, and connections to political officials and bureaucrats who have the power to dispense often limited funds for contract work.
Feminist groups that identify themselves as “autonomous,” on the other hand, tend to reject engagement with the state altogether. In the contemporary political context, in which many governments embrace neoliberal economic policy, to be autonomous means to be independent from the state and from political parties that have a stake in sustaining the neoliberal system. Autonomous feminists have criticized gender activists who work within the state as necessarily promoting policies that benefit middle-class women at the expense of poor and working class women.
Conflicts between “institutionalized” and “autonomous” feminists may reflect a discrete phase of democratic consolidation. Over time in Chile, for example, women’s organizations have learned how to lobby and press for their demands more effectively than they did in the first few years after the democratic transition. Research conducted at various points of time can provide snapshots of the learning curve that feminist activists face and depict how they learn to navigate democratic institutions (see, for example, Haas 2010).
What would it mean for research on movements to become more comparative and more gendered? More comparative work might seek to understand the conditions under which women or men will mobilize on the basis of shared gender identity, or sexuality, as exemplified by new work on GLBT movements in Latin America (Corrales and Pecheny 2010; de la Dehesa 2010). What specific constituencies decide to frame collective action in gendered terms, and why? Framing demands in certain ways and not others may facilitate success. Women were able to assert themselves as leaders and work effectively in a drug- and crime-ridden area of Rio when they framed their activities in terms of their status as mothers, which de Mello e Souza (2008) suggests did not reinforce traditional gender norms, but rather transformed the meaning of motherhood. Why do groups of women decide to mobilize as women rather than along other bases of shared identity, and what are the consequences of doing so (and vice-versa)? Whom do women’s movements represent, and whom do they exclude?
What kinds of strategies prove most effective for organizations that promote women’s rights? Scholars disagree about the conditions that will best allow women to succeed in pursuing their agendas. Avenues of feminist activism have multiplied in the wake of transitions to democracy around the region. Some applaud this as a positive development while others are less sanguine about the fragmentation of feminist activity and insist that unity is essential to influence policy. Those who work within political institutions find themselves in a weak position when it comes to pressing for policy change if they cannot mobilize grassroots support.
With transitions to democracy across the region in the 1980s and 1990s, feminist activists continued the effort to bring private issues into the public sphere by demanding the adoption and implementation of government policy on a range of issues, including violence against women, reproductive health, poverty reduction, women’s participation in public life, and marriage and family law. Democratization shifted the attention of scholars and activists from movement-based politics to the formal policy arena. The bulk of current research on women in Latin America in political science addresses the degree to which governments have adopted and implemented legislation that promotes women’s rights and evaluates policy in terms of progress and limitations. Scholars have identified a number of concrete indicators of government commitment to women’s rights, including rhetorical commitment to women’s issues; the introduction, adoption and implementation of legislation; budgetary allocations for gender-related programs; the degree of women’s involvement in the policy process; and the allocation of resources to ensure equitable access to policy benefits. Descriptive research tends to juxtapose accomplishments and limitations and employs the language of a “track record.” More theoretically motivated research aims to explain variation across countries, among issues and over time.
Criminalization of violence against women is one of the great successes of policy toward women in Latin America, and yet remains one of the most significant challenges. The murders of hundreds of women in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, illustrates this horrible dilemma: the cases of hundreds of women brutally murdered and left for dead remain unsolved to this day, but they have garnered world attention and awareness of impunity in cases of violence against women. The Juarez murders have also given rise to the term femicidio, which is now used widely throughout the Spanish-speaking world to denounce the murder of women through domestic and other forms of sexualized violence.
The issue of violence against women has seen dramatic changes by virtue of framing it in terms of human rights. Recognition of sexual violence as a human rights violation has given female victims the space to denounce publicly crimes they would not have acknowledged in the past, thus promoting healing and reconciliation for women (Falcón 2009). In some cases, Brazil and Chile, for example, legislators have gradually strengthened existing domestic violence laws by increasing penalties for perpetrators and addressing the needs of victims. At the same time, rates of domestic violence remain high, government funding for shelters to house victims of domestic violence is extremely limited, and prosecutions are rare.
Abortion remains a central issue for feminists in Latin America, who “tend to see the right to have an abortion as the strongest expression of the struggle to broaden the margins of choice women have in their lives” (Vargas 2009, 162). Abortion is illegal almost everywhere in the region, yet criminal penalties for women and their doctors have failed to prevent nearly 4 million abortions a year from being performed. Abortion is legal only in Cuba and in Mexico City. Democracy and more competitive political systems have increased conflicts over reproductive rights. When the Mexico City legislature legalized abortion for all women in the first trimester in 2007, the ruling prompted 17 states in Mexico to adopt constitutional amendments declaring that life begins at conception. Being on the left is no guarantee of support for reproductive rights. Former revolutionary leaders have swerved in their views on abortion: in Nicaragua, President Daniel Ortega outlawed therapeutic abortion and, in Uruguay, President Tabaré Vasquez threatened to overturn legislation liberalizing abortion (Gago 2007).
Support for women’s rights and equality has not necessarily translated into, or led to, equal levels of support for rights for gays and lesbians, despite the presence of often well-organized coalitions of gay and lesbian activists (Friedman 2009a). Nonetheless, dramatic advances have rocked the region (Corrales and Pecheny 2010). In 2010, for example, Argentina passed same-sex marriage legislation that extends to gay couples the same rights and legal protections that heterosexual couples enjoy.
Most current research on public policy assumes a democratic institutional context, but regime type can affect the prospects for expansion of women’s rights. Despite women’s opposition, authoritarian rule had mixed effects on the status of women. Adoption of market-based economic policies fueled demand for female workers, but those same policies eliminated welfare programs and government jobs in healthcare and education, sectors traditionally dominated by women. Massive unemployment thrust many families into poverty and forced women into the informal sector. At the same time, as Mala Htun (2003) demonstrates, an ideological commitment to modernization led some authoritarian leaders to update marriage and family law. Military governments in Argentina, Brazil, and Chile thus brought about some limited advances in women’s rights policies.
Scholars disagree about the extent to which populist regimes in Venezuela, Bolivia, and Ecuador have affected the progress of women’s rights agendas. Venezuela passed a “gender inclusive” constitution in 1999 and Article 15 of the Bolivia’s new constitution guarantees equal rights for women, but these promises of constitutional equality have yet to be borne out in terms of educating citizens about those rights or creating programs to implement them (Monasterios 2007) Critics maintain that political polarization has forced feminist concerns off the agenda: under Hugo Chávez, the three-time president of Venezuela, the gender quota law was suspended, progress on GLBT issues has stalled, and women’s issues in general have taken a back seat to more immediate political concerns (Espina 2009). At the same time, the overall focus on poverty alleviation of these and other leftist governments benefits women, even if it does not challenge gender inequality explicitly.
Shifts in economic policy have also affected policy outcomes for women. Economic changes that occurred over the course of the twentieth century, specifically the transition from policies that emphasize state-led growth to those that foster market-based, export-led growth, led to transformations in the nature of political representation and the status of women. Authoritarian and populist regimes sought to develop domestic industry and to reduce reliance on foreign markets; to do so, they fostered strong ties with organized economic sectors (such as workers, business, and government). Political parties relied heavily on male-dominated labor unions as a source of popular support. When statist models of development failed to generate economic growth, governments imposed neoliberal models that promoted exports and reduced government spending. This shift led political parties to seek out new bases of political representation. Economic transition led to the decline of the working class and organized labor as the primary constituents of the left. As governments have done away with protectionist policy, men’s share of the labor force has declined and the percentage of women in the workforce has increased. Gendered shifts in the economy contributed to the rise of feminism and lent support to women’s demands for greater inclusion in public life. Political parties have responded to these demands by mobilizing female voters, nominating women to candidate spots, and espousing support for women’s rights policy.
As the result of these efforts, Latin American women have made significant gains in legislative politics. At this writing, four Latin American countries rank among the top 20 countries with highest percentages of women in congress. Women are over one-third of legislators in Argentina (38.5%), Cuba (43.2%), and Costa Rica (38.6%), and Ecuador comes close with 32.3%. The regional average for the Americas has risen 8 percentage points in the last 10 years alone. By contrast, the percentage of women in the U.S. Congress is an anemic 16.9%. The United States ranks #72 on the list of women in legislative office, falling between Greece and Turkmenistan (Inter-Parliamentary Union 2010).
Research on gender and legislative politics in Latin America addresses two basic questions:(1) what factors determine the percentage of women vs. men elected to legislative office, and (2) what difference does gender make in explaining legislator behavior? The main factor contributing to the election of more women to Congress in Latin America is a reform to electoral laws requiring gender equity in the selection of legislative candidates, known as gender quotas. Twelve countries in Latin America have adopted gender quota laws: Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Guyana, Honduras, Mexico, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, and Uruguay (for specific details, see International IDEA 2006). These laws require either that women constitute a minimum percentage of candidates, or that neither sex may surpass a determined ceiling for candidate slots. Unlike gender quotas in other regions of the world, quotas in Latin America tend to be legislative or statutory quotas that apply to all political parties operating within the political system. They differ in this regard from voluntary quotas that political parties adopt on their own initiative, and from reserved seats, in which countries set aside a certain number of legislative seats (rather than candidate spots) for women.
According to Argentina’s Ley de Cupos, adopted in 1991, women must occupy at least 30% of candidate slots for all parties and there must be at most a 2:1 ratio of men to women in the first 10 spots of each list. Party lists that fail to comply with this law will be not be approved by the electoral tribunal. The Argentine law is arguably one of the most eff ective: prior to the adoption of the Ley de Cupos, women seldom won more than 3–4% of legislative seats; now women consistently win more than a third of seats in the Argentine Chamber of Deputies.
The effectiveness of gender quotas hinges on the way they interact with a country’s electoral system. Quotas tend to be most effective in closed-list proportional representation systems with medium- to large-sized electoral districts. The logic behind district size is obvious: if a district has more seats, women are more likely to get some of them. This is especially true if the law has a placement mandate that prevents all the members of one sex from being clustered in unwinnable seats at the bottom of a list. The advantage of a closed-list system is that it puts the onus on party leaders to achieve gender balance on a list. An open-list system allows voters to select candidates from a list, so the potential advantage for women depends on a more woman-friendly electorate. Quotas can be effective in open-list systems, especially if advocates mobilize voters to select female candidates. In Peru, activists encouraged people to give one of their two votes to a woman, with the slogan “dale uno a la mujer ” (Schmidt and Saunders 2004). Finally, the effectiveness of a quota depends on the strength of enforcement mechanisms written into the law itself, and on the willingness of courts to enforce them. If these conditions hold, the percentage of women elected can increase as much as 20% over systems with no quotas or where enforcement of quotas is weak (Jones 2004).
Once in office, to what extent do female legislators differ from men, in terms of their backgrounds, policy agendas, and ability to represent their constituencies? Research conducted by political scientist Elsa Chaney in Chile and Peru in the 1970s characterized female legislators as supermadres, who extended their identities as mothers into the political arena and prioritized issues relevant to children and families (Chaney 1979). This characterization is no longer as apt as it once was. On the one hand, female legislators continue to place a higher priority on issues that pertain to women, children and families than do men, while men prioritize agriculture and employment. But on the other hand, male and female legislators do not diff er significantly in their views on education, health or economic policy, despite the perception of these issues as typically feminine (Schwindt-Bayer 2006). Women introduce more women’s rights bills than do men, but institutional rules hamper legislators’ ability to translate their preferences into legislative outcomes (Htun and Power 2006; Schwindt-Bayer 2006). The more women who serve as legislators, the more responsive legislatures are to policy on women’s rights and the more confidence people (men and women alike) have in the legislature as an institution (Schwindt-Bayer and Mishler 2005).
Research is mixed about the degree to which gender quotas have an impact beyond the legislative arena. Teresa Sacchet (2008) argues that debates surrounding the introduction of gender quotas increased the visibility and political salience of all women’s rights issues, fostering opportunities for collective action that did not exist before. Pär Zetterberg (2009) suggests the impact of quotas has been more limited. In a quantitative study that compares data from 17 countries, Zetterberg finds no evidence that quotas “foster women’s political engagement.”
One limitation within existing work on gender and legislative behavior centers on a disproportionate amount of research on legislatures relative to research on the executive branch. This limitation is not unique to work on gender, or even to work on legislatures in Latin America, but it does reflect a research agenda that has sought to export scholarship on the U.S. Congress into the comparative arena. The effort to test claims about the U.S. Congress and state legislatures against data from other countries has advanced our understanding of how legislatures operate, but it makes sense to consider the impact of various branches of government in relation to one another. Theoretically, given the predominance of presidential systems with strong executive powers in Latin America, progress on women’s rights should rest on the willingness of the president to exert political capital to prioritize women’s demands and to implement existing policies. This theoretical expectation has not always been borne out; strong presidents often have a difficult time getting their legislative agenda passed by congress. The discrepancy between theory and reality off ers another rich vein for future research.
Women’s election to the presidency raises many interesting questions, but as a relatively new phenomenon, few scholars have written about it. Let me pose just two of the most obvious ones from a gender politics perspective: first, what explains women’s success, and second, to what extent have female presidents used their power to advance women’s rights more generally? Chilean President Michelle Bachelet invoked her status as a woman often and selfconsciously throughout her campaign and her entire term in office. She eff ected tremendous changes in reproductive rights policy, passing legislation that legalized the morning-after pill by framing sex education and contraception as public health issues and by emphasizing her role as a medical doctor (Borzutzky and Weeks 2010; Ríos Tobar 2009). The number of women elected opens up the prospects for new research on female executives.
The pool of women leaders is deep and wide. Female candidates have come close to winning the presidency in several countries in the region. Both Bachelet and Fernandez triumphed over female competitors. Soledad Alvear was Bachelet’s main competitor until she pulled out of a primary race in 2005. Elisa Carrió came in second to Argentina’s Fernandez, garnering 22% of the vote in the 2007 election. In Peru, Lourdes Flores Nano won 24% of the vote in 2001 and 2006. In the 2008 presidential election in Paraguay, Blanca Ovelar finished second with 31% of the vote against little more than 40% for the male winner. Balbina Herrera won 38% of the vote for president of Panama in 2009. Research on gender and cabinet appointments also reveals promising patterns of gender recruitment in the executive branch more broadly, with women holding more positions in non-traditional portfolios (Escobar-Lemmon and Taylor-Robinson 2005, 2009; Friedman 2009a).
Does the election of women represent an enduring shift in the status of women, or does it reflect a temporary electoral mood? In part, political parties have nominated women candidates in an effort to appeal to voters disenchanted by traditional political parties and traditional (male) politicians: women’s long-time exclusion from politics allows voters to continue to see women as political outsiders, giving them an advantage over corrupt and mostly male political insiders.
We do not yet know to what extent high numbers of candidates who have come close to winning mean that women are likely to repeat these successes again in future elections. One clue lies in the background of female candidates. How do women’s career paths diff er from those of male political leaders? Many of the women political leaders today, like many of the men, got their start in politics at the height of power for the revolutionary left. Chilean President Michelle Bachelet was a member of a radical wing of the Socialist Party, Argentine President Cristina Fernandez belonged to the Peronist Youth, and Brazilian Presidential hopeful Dilma Roussef was a guerrilla in a revolutionary movement. Many of them are traditional politicians whose gender allows them to be perceived by voters as something new.
Most of the research on the executive branch has focused on state agencies for women. State machinery for women, such as Brazil’s Special Secretariat on Policy for Women and Chile’s National Women’s Service (SERNAM), seek to mainstream gender policy and to coordinate efforts to address women’s rights across various government agencies and ministries. Most governments have created a special agency for women or gender, but these agencies remain weak and underfunded. Their ability to incorporate gender perspectives into mainstream public policy depends on strong relations with civil society organizations (Franceschet 2003).
Research on gender and courts is a growth area, reflecting recent changes in the strength of the judiciary throughout the region. As courts in the region have undergone reforms to strengthen and rationalize them, social conflict has become increasingly “judicialized.” Feminist advocates in Latin America are turning to the courts to promote the struggle for gender equality. The judicial path represents a potentially effective way to circumvent other political arenas that may be clogged by corruption. Nonetheless, using the courts requires a level of legal capacity that only a tiny minority of women’s organizations possesses. Women must know what their rights are and what laws protect them, they need access to aff ordable and competent lawyers, and they need the resources to file cases. As courts get stronger and more autonomous as the result of judicial reform, it is reasonable to predict that they should uphold claims to defend, protect, and expand women’s rights. The extent to which this prediction holds true will foster interesting and important new research.
Domestic political institutions operate in a global arena in which international institutions have come to play critical roles in shaping feminism and public policy. Unable to eff ect change at home, either because of weak institutions or discrimination, activists have turned to international institutions in the hopes of exerting external pressure (Friedman 2009b). A wide array of international instruments aim to protect women’s rights, including UN treaties (especially the Convention to End All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, or CEDAW), regional treaties, resolutions taken by the UN General Assembly, and statements agreed upon by UN members at international conferences, such as the 1995 Beijing Platform for Action. The most important of these are CEDAW and the Treaty of Belém do Pará, which are binding treaties that obligate governments to take action to protect women’s rights. The Belém do Pará Treaty has been influential in part because it focuses specifically (and solely) on the relatively noncontroversial issue of violence against women; it protects women from violence in public and private spaces and allows women to file petitions with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) in cases of rights violations. The first Belém case heard by the IAHCR in 1998 involved a woman who had been given the death penalty for murdering her husband, despite years of prolonged violence she had suff ered at his hands. The IACHR succeeded in reducing her sentence (Meyersfield 2010).
I would like to see future research on gender in Latin America embrace two things: first, more expansive and more frequent comparisons, and second, greater attention to masculinity and gendered perspectives on the role of men (for a similar argument, see Baldez 2010). Single-country case studies and cross-national comparisons are central to research on gender in Latin America. We can increase the scope of comparison within this literature by doing more comparisons across localities, regions, movements and issue areas. Research on policy adoption and implementation at the local level can tell us more about the impact of policy on women’s lives as well as shed light on our understanding of the development of state capacity. To what extent can states guarantee the protection of rights of women evenly throughout the entire territory? To what extent do sub-national variations in policy delivery affect women from various identity-based groups, such as Afro-Latin women and indigenous women? Research that compares Latin America to other regions can help us understand variation in the meaning and salience of specific issues. While feminists in Latin America care deeply about abortion, the terrain of reproductive rights is different for women in other regions of the world. Cross-regional comparisons may illuminate innovative ways of framing issues to facilitate consensus and coalition building. Comparing instances of gender-based mobilization may also prove fruitful. Scholarship continues to over-represent feminist movements to the exclusion of conservative or right-wing women’s movements that may or may not support women’s rights (but see Baldez 2002).
One of the most important insights from research on gender-oriented public policy in Latin America is that not all gender issues are alike (Htun 2003). The factors that lead to improvements in women’s health may differ from those that result in publicly-funded childcare. More research that compares across issues, such as Franceschet and Krook’s (2006) comparison of progress on gender quotas and state feminist agencies, will strengthen the effort to explain policy outcomes. Research that compares gender-based policy to non-gender public policy would test feminist assumptions that limited gains in women’s rights policy inevitably reflect gender discrimination or sexist cultural patterns. Much of the research on policy implementation tends to describe the pros and cons of policy changes for women’s status. Descriptive studies play an essential role in the construction of knowledge about public policy, but theory-driven research can facilitate more rigorous explanations.
Men are largely missing from research on gender and Latin American politics. Theoretically, research on gender looks at the ways in which conceptions of masculinity and femininity frame and shape political events. Gender analysis looks at the implications that conceptions of women’s roles have for men, and vice versa. It examines the extent to which certain assumptions about men and women underpin politics, often with regard to issues that do not center on women’s rights. Despite a culture in which machismo is a constant topic of conversation, male behavior in the political arena continues to be considered gender neutral, and expressions of masculinity continue to be seen as politically normal and unproblematic. Research on gender could devote more explicit attention to the significance of masculinity in the Latin American political arena.
Alvarez, Sonia E. 1990. Engendering Democracy in Brazil: Women’s Movements in Transition Politics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Alvarez, Sonia E., Elisabeth J. Friedman, Ericka Beckman, and Maylei Blackwell . 2002. “Encountering Latin American and Caribbean Feminisms.” Signs28 (2): 537 –579.
Baldez, Lisa. 2002. Why Women Protest: Women’s Movements in Chile. New York: Cambridge University Press.
_____. 2010. “The Gender Lacuna in Comparative Politics.” Perspectives on Politics 8 (1): 199 –205.
_____. 2011. “The UN Convention to Eliminate All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW): A New Way to Measure Women’s Interests.” Politics & Gender 7: 1 –6.
Borzutzky, Silvia, and Gregory B. Weeks, eds. 2010. The Bachelet Government: Conflict and Consensus in Post-Pinochet Chile. Gainesville: University Press of Florida.
Brady, Henry E., and David Collier. 2010. Rethinking Social Inquiry: Diverse Tools, Shared Standards. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
Chaney, Elsa. 1979. Supermadre: Women in Politics in Latin America. Austin: Institute of Latin American Studies by University of Texas Press.
Corrales, Javier, and Mario Pecheny. 2010. The Politics of Sexuality in Latin America: A Reader on Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Rights. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press.
de la Dehesa, Rafael. 2010. Queering the Public Sphere in Mexico and Brazil: Sexual Rights Movements in Emerging Democracies. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
de Mello e Souza, Cecilia. 2008. “Grassroots Leadership in the Network of Healthy Communities in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil: A Gender Perspective.” Gender & Development 16 (3): 481 –494.
Escobar-Lemmon, Maria,and Michelle M. Taylor-Robinson. 2005. “Women Ministers in Latin American Government: When, Where, and Why? ” American Journal of Political Science 49 (4): 829 –844.
____. 2009. “Getting to the Top.” Political Research Quarterly 62 (4): 685 –699.
Espina, Gioconda. 2009. “Feminist Activism in a Changing Political Context.” In Feminist Agendas and Democracy in Latin America, ed. Jane S. Jaquette. Durham, NC: Duke University Press 65 –82.
Falcón, Julissa Mantilla. 2009. “Gender and Human Rights: Lessons from the Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission.” In Feminist Agendas and Democracy in Latin America, ed. Jane S. Jaquette. Durham, NC: Duke University Press 129 –144.
Franceschet, Susan. 2003. “ ‘State Feminism’ and Women’s Movements: The Impact of Chile’s Servicio Nacional de la Mujer on Women’s Activism.” Latin American Research Review 38 (1): 9 –40.
Franceschet, Susan, and Krook, Mona Lena. 2006. “State Feminism and Gender Quotas in the ‘North’ and ‘South’: Comparative Lessons from Western Europe and Latin America.” Paper presented at the annual meeting of the International Studies Association, Town & Country Resort and Convention Center, San Diego, California, March 14, 2011. Available at http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p100195_index.html
Friedman, Elisabeth J.. 2009a. “Gender, Sexuality and the Latin American Left: Testing the Transformation.” Third World Quarterly 30 (2): 415 –433.
____. 2009b. “Re(gion)alizing Women’s Human Rights in Latin America.” Politics & Gender 5: 349 –375.
Gago, Veronica. 2007. “Dangerous Liaisons: Latin American Feminists and the Left.” NACLA Report on the Americas 40 (2): 17 –19.
Haas, Liesl. 2010. Feminist Policymaking in Chile. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press.
Htun, Mala. 2003. Sex and the State: Abortion, Divorce, and the Family under Latin American Dictatorships and Democracies. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Htun, Mala, and Timothy J. Power. 2006. “Gender, Parties and Support for Equal Rights in the Brazilian Congress.” Latin American Politics and Society 48 (4): 83 –104.
Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. 1994. Inter-American Convention on the Prevention, Punishment and Eradication of Violence Against Women.
Inter-Parliamentary Union. 2010. “Women in National Parliaments.” http://www.ipu.org/wmn-e/classif.htm (January 2, 2011).
International IDEA. 2006. “Global Database of Quotas for Women.” www.quotaproject.org (April 26, 2006).
Jones, Mark P. 2004. “Quota Legislation and the Election of Women: Learning from the Costa Rican Experience.” Journal of Politics 66 (4): 1203 –1223.
Kampwirth, Karen. 2002. Women & Guerrilla Movements: Nicaragua, El Salvador, Chiapas, Cuba. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press.
King, Gary, Robert O. Keohane, and Sidney Verba. 1994. Designing Social Inquiry. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Meyersfield, Bonita. 2010. Domestic Violence and International Law. Oxford: Hart Publishing.
Molyneux, Maxine. 1985. “Mobilization Without Emancipation? Women’s Interests, the State, and Revolution in Nicaragua.” Feminist Studies 11 (2): 227 –254.
Monasterios, Karin. 2007. “Bolivian Women’s Organizations in the MAS Era.” NACLA Report on the Americas 40 (2): 33 –37.
Power, Margaret. 2002. Right-Wing Women in Chile: Feminine Power and the Struggle Against Allende, 1964–1973. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press.
Ríos Tobar, Marcela. 2009. “Feminist Policymaking in Contemporary Chile: From the Democratic Transition to Bachelet.” In Feminist Agendas and Democracy in Latin America, ed. Jane S. Jaquette. Durham, NC: Duke University Press 21 –44.
Sacchet, Teresa. 2008. “Beyond Numbers.” International Feminist Journal of Politics 10 (3): 369 –386.
Schmidt, Gregory D., and Kyle L. Saunders. 2004. “Effective Quotas, Relative Party Magnitude, and the Success of Female Candidates: Peruvian Municipal Elections in Comparative Perspective.” Comparative Political Studies 37 (6): 704 –734.
Schwindt-Bayer, Leslie A. 2006. “Still Supermadres? Gender and the Policy Priorities of Latin American Legislators.” American Journal of Political Science 50 (3): 570 –585.
Schwindt-Bayer, Leslie A., and William Mishler. 2005. “An Integrated Model of Women’s Representation.” The Journal of Politics 67 (2): 407 –428.
Sternbach, Nancy Saporta, Marysa Navarro-Aranguren, Patricia Chuchryk, and Sonia E. Alvarez. 1992. “Feminisms in Latin America: From Bogota to Taxco.” Signs 17 (2): 393 –434.
Vargas, Virginia. 2009. “International Feminisms: The World Social Forum.” In Feminist Agendas and Democracy in Latin America, ed. Jane S. Jaquette. Durham, NC: Duke University Press 145 –164.
World Bank. 2010. “GenderStats.” http://go.worldbank.org/YMPEGXASH0 (accesed January 2, 2011).
Zetterberg, Pär. 2009. “Do Gender Quotas Foster Women’s Political Engagement?: Lessons from Latin America.” Political Research Quarterly 62 (4): 715 –730.