A lack of decent jobs and the gender wage gap are impoverishing female-headed households in Venezuela

A lack of decent jobs and the gender wage gap are impoverishing female-headed households in Venezuela

Venezuela’s ongoing humanitarian crisis coupled with the pandemic have exacerbated female poverty in the country.

(María de los Ángeles Graterol)

“Women are essential to our society. Simply put, it wouldn’t exist without them. We know that women have major tasks in life: carrying, giving birth to and raising children”. As Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro sees it, these are the primary responsibilities of Venezuelan women. He has even gone so far as to order them to “have six children” for “the good of the country”. But being a woman in the Caribbean nation comes at a very high cost that has only increased since 2015 due to Venezuela’s complex humanitarian emergency and the Covid-19 crisis.

In 2014, a year after the country entered into economic recession, some Venezuelan women who had previously been inactive in the labour market were forced to take on precarious jobs to put bread on the table. According to the National Survey of Living Conditions (ENCOVI) compiled by Venezuelan researchers at the Andrés Bello Catholic University (UCAB), overall poverty in Venezuela, which stood at around 50 per cent that year, had climbed to just over 94 per cent by 2021.

When the Covid lockdown began in 2020, 7.6 per cent of women in Venezuela (1.6 million) were unable to find work or had to leave the labour force to look after their children and support them through distance learning. Similar dynamics unfolded across South America.

According to the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), the surge in unpaid care work resulting from children being out of school has set back labour market participation for women in the region by a decade.

Between 2019 and 2020, in just one year, the number of Latin American women living in poverty increased by 23 million to a total of 118 million.

In its special report The Economic Autonomy of Women in a Sustainable Recovery with Equality, ECLAC recommends that governments “invest in the care economy and draw attention to its multiplier effects in terms of women’s labour market participation, population welfare, income and time redistribution, economic growth and increased tax revenues”.

In Venezuela in the late 1980s, the Programa de Hogares de Cuidado Diario, run by the then Ministry of the Family, was developed with the aim of setting up community day care centres for children of low-income parents. The centres were staffed by caregiving mothers who were paid by the state and provided services five days a week for between 6 and 12 hours a day, enough to allow mothers to have greater autonomy and work a full shift.

Set up in the first decade of the new millennium under the government of ex-president Hugo Chávez, the Simoncito Project guaranteed education, nutritional assistance and extracurricular activities to children. But as Estefanía Mendoza, coordinator of Venezuelan women’s rights NGO Mulier, tells Equal Times, “these care structures have been dismantled”. This has resulted, among other things, in women exiting the labour market en masse.

“Current state policy envisions women being forced into motherhood,” she says.

As Mendoza explains, the cost of women not working in order to care for children has yet to be calculated and she believes that doing so is vital.

“If we invest in care work, we will ensure that more women are able to participate in the labour market. These women will then have an income, will contribute to GDP, will consume and will pay the taxes that help to pay for these public services,” María Arteta, a gender and non-discrimination specialist at the International Labour Organization (ILO), told the EFE news agency in 2019.

According to Mendoza, increasing female employment in Venezuela would require creating care structures to give women the option of working and gaining economic independence. The most important thing, she explains, is developing cross-sectoral public policies focused on early childhood care, which will indirectly contribute to lowering the opportunity cost for women and making them competitive with men.

Mendoza also believes that maternity and paternity leave should be equalised, a policy that several countries in the region have been working on, and that contingency leave should be made more flexible for both men and women, which would help to better reconcile family arrangements with work.

As of late 2021, over four million women in Latin America and the Caribbean had not yet returned to work (after losing as many as 23.6 million jobs at the height of the pandemic). In the case of men on the other hand, the 26 million jobs lost at that time “had already been almost completely recovered”.

Which women workers were the most affected?

Leida Marcela León, secretary general of the Central de Trabajadores Alianza Sindical Independiente de Venezuela (ASI) and a specialist in labour law, tells Equal Times that women in the country’s care economy, hospitality, services and agriculture sectors were the worst affected, as these sectors were most impacted in terms of employment and income.

This is confirmed by the ECLAC reports, which indicate that lockdown measures in the Americas had the strongest impact in these areas, in addition to commerce and leisure activities, where the female labour force is most represented.

According to the report Latin America and the Caribbean: Gender equality and labour market policies during the pandemic, published by the ILO in March 2022: “In highly feminised economic sectors such as domestic work, where the female presence is 90 per cent and the rate of informality exceeds 70 per cent, the loss of jobs was 20.2 per cent and the recovery was only 1.7 per cent”.

According to León, female agricultural workers in Venezuela were hardest hit because in addition to dealing with the economic effects of lockdowns, they had to cope with petrol shortages, severe floods and droughts.

Carmen Segovia used to live off the crops she grew on her small plot of land in the northern Venezuelan state of Vargas. Before the pandemic, she distributed legumes, vegetables and other goods to a municipal market. After two years of heavy crop losses, she has not yet managed to recover and does not think she will be able to do so soon. According to HumVenezuela, which brings together 90 local NGOs, Segovia is one of the millions of Venezuelans who depend on government vouchers because they lost all or most of their sources of income during the pandemic.

The only food they are still able to sell are the crops that do not require the use of insecticides, fertiliser or agricultural chemicals. “I stopped harvesting because I ran out of money”. Segovia sells baskets of green bananas for US$1 and avocados when they are in season. She earns around US$20 a month, plus the income she receives from government subsidies, which amounts to no more than US$5.

That is not enough to cover the basic Venezuelan food basket, Latin America’s second most expensive in monetary terms, which the Venezuelan Workers’ Documentation and Analysis Centre (CENDAS) valued at US$352 in September 2022, an amount that only two out of every ten Venezuelans can afford.

“The only thing we eat are the bananas or avocados that grow on the plants I still have. If meat makes its way onto our plates, it’s because we killed a rabbit or one of the few chickens we have left or because our neighbours shared theirs with us. I sold the 12 pigs I used to raise because I couldn’t afford to feed them. Because of hunger or not being able to take care of them, I have had to get rid of almost all my animals,” says Segovia, who once considered herself to be a small agricultural producer.

Agriculture is also one of the sectors with the greatest gender disparity. According to estimates by the United Nations International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), if women had equal access to land resources and financing mechanisms, they could not only achieve better results with their work and get out of poverty, but also increase agricultural yields by 20-30 per cent and thus reduce the number of hungry people in the world by 100-150 million.

“Women farmers are not recognised in Venezuela. There are no official statistics on how many women work in the fields and how many are producing. They are essentially economically invisible. They are seen as working only for their families’ consumption when this is not the case,” says León.

“[Women] have helped to cope with this emergency by contributing to the rural economy, yet they live in poverty and are very unprotected, without access to credit or social security,” she adds.

Limited access to internet and mobile devices in Venezuela also “prevented women from doing their work,“ says León. Meanwhile, many who did have mobile devices were forced to sell them in order to eat. One in 10 women workers affiliated with the ASI trade union resorted to selling their devices as a means of subsistence during the pandemic.

This situation is widespread and affects women and men alike, with 65.5 per cent of Venezuelan households reporting that they have no internet connection. However, in Latin America there is a gender gap when it comes to internet access: according to the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), 63 per cent of men in the region have access to the internet compared to 57 per cent of women.

Impoverishment of female-headed households

Poverty in Venezuela is largely driven by female poverty. According to the NGO Centre for Justice and Peace (CEPAZ), more than 7 out of 10 Venezuelan women live in poverty and the female labour force participation rate stands at 32 per cent due to the lack of opportunities for decent work.

As a result, the poverty rate in Venezuelan households headed by women is four percentage points higher than the national poverty rate of 76.7 per cent. According to the Venezuelan consultancy ANOVA Policy Research, extreme poverty rates in female-headed households have increased by 10 per cent over the last eight years.

The gender wage gap means that these female-headed households earn 22.4 per cent less than those headed by men, who earn an average of US$1.23 per hour compared to US$1.05 per hour for women with the same experience, age and number of hours worked per week.

Venezuelan women continue to have a higher level of university education than men, though up to 10 per cent of young women between 17 and 24 years of age consider getting a paid job to be a higher priority than getting a degree, according to the study Mujeres al Límite (Women on the Edge).

According to the same study, the loss of schooling as a vehicle for social progress perpetuates female poverty and excludes Venezuelan women from the public and formal labour market.

Currently, one third of Venezuela’s female population is unable to generate enough income to be financially independent and 52 per cent engage in informal or precarious economic activities to survive. This in turn has resulted in women being overrepresented in lower paid sectors and jobs, with fewer possibilities of climbing to higher level positions and progressing in their professional careers.

According to ENCOVI reports, in 8 out of 10 Venezuelan households, one member of the household, usually an elderly woman, stops eating so that other members of the household have enough food. Venezuela continues to reinforce the poverty figures for Latin America, and the face of that poverty is female.

For every 100 men living in extreme poverty (globally, in the 25-34 age range), there are 125 women in the same condition, according to the United Nations.

Trade union leaders and local NGOs are calling for reforms and public policies aimed at fully reintegrating women into the labour market. This would mean designing government programmes that take into consideration the differentiated impact that the complex humanitarian crisis has had on women, adolescents and girls – who, according to HumVenezuela, account for 55 per cent (9.5 million) of the total of 18 million people with humanitarian needs in the nation.

“The possibilities of progress for an entire generation are being reduced, generating a spiral of poverty that is extremely serious for the country and which pushes back the clock […] . There are girls who are going to suffer irreparable damage, losing their childhood, taking on work and exposing themselves to labour exploitation,” says Mendoza of the women’s rights NGO Mulier.

This article has been translated from Spanish by Brandon Johnson