Gender, Informality and Employment Adjustment in Latin American

1
Gender, Informality and Employment Adjustment in
Latin American

• Rossana Galli and David Kucera

2
Overview

• Introduction Competing hypotheses regarding the
  cyclic movement of formal vs. informal employment
  and mens vs. womens employment, and the
  intersection of the two
• Defining formality and informality in the data
• Overall trends and patterns
• Gender differences in trends and patterns
• Informal employment and womens employment as
  cyclic buffers
• Conclusions

3
Informal Employment Shares, Enterprise and Social
Security Coverage Definitions
4
Informal Employment Shares, Enterprise and Social
Security Coverage Definitions
5
Female Propensity of Informal Employment, With
and Without Domestic Services, Enterprise
Definition
6
Female Propensity of Informal Employmentby
Employment Category
7
Female Propensity of Informal Employment,Social
Security Coverage Definition
8
Percentage of Workers with Social Security
Coverageby Employment Category
9
Conclusion

• With the exception of Brazil, no clearcut trend
  increases trends in informality
• Womens overrepresentation in informality a
  result of their concentration in domestic
  services
• Roughly equal gender representation within
  self-employment, but women have much lower social
  security coverage within self-employment
• No strong evidence of informality as a buffer A
  result of stronger unemployment insurance system
  and/or predominance of procyclical forms of
  informal employment (independent or types of
  subordinate)?
• Some evidence of womens employment as a buffer
  within informality (total informality definition)
• Informality and female propensity of informality
  higher in rural (non-agricultural) areas
• Data problems, particularly problematic for
  econometric analysis