By Dr. Jessica Espinoza Espinoza, 

Member of UN Women-Ecuador

Gender is a critical perspective that analyses the situation of men and women in the field of human rights. In this sphere, care is an issue that has been analysed in the development agenda for Latin America for the last 50 years.

We are currently in what the UN has declared the decade of care, which runs from 2021 to 2030 as the period to have a strategy to build a fair society. Currently, everything that is done based on human rights is around caregivers. Thanks to this declaration, this decade is key to formulating a global strategy that allows us to build a society where all ages are part of an equal society and without discrimination or any type of violence due to being young or old.

Since 1948, after the post-war period, there has been a profusion of international instruments that have declared human rights. One of them is the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948. We also have the declaration of rights in legal instruments at the universal and inter-American level. However, something is happening with the facts and the social reality of people. Faced with an older adult population that has increased, in the case of Mexico it has doubled in less than 100 years, it implies greater effort on the part of the State, families and society to provide support, care and attention to people who require care for different reasons.

But what is happening in the face of this crisis? There is a shortage of caregivers, not only because the population of people has doubled, but because of all the people who care for and bear the social welfare of the population of Mexico and all of Latin America, not to mention the entire world, it is women. Of the 1,001 TP3T of people who receive care within the family, 751 TP3T are cared for by women at the expense of their time and even their professional careers.

It is worth mentioning that the State has not yet fully assumed its responsibility as the main guarantor of rights to share and alleviate the burden that has weighed on women. This burden on women in relation to men has been so because women spend more than twice as many hours per week caring within the family environment not only for the elderly, but also for children and adolescents and also for their partners.

So, in this sense, there is a care deficit due to the increase in the population, but in addition, the National Institute of Statistics and Geography (INEGI) of Mexico published in 2022 that in Mexico there are 13.2 million people over 60 years of age who are not cared for by their families or by anyone else. Of this total, 51% live alone and indicated that they want someone to keep them company. In addition to this data on the situation of the elderly, about 47% live in poverty and 32.1% suffer some type of abuse, mainly by their sons, daughters, partners or relatives. Between 20% and 30% suffer psychological or economic violence or abandonment. The highest prevalence of elder abuse in Mexico was 32.1%, with the most frequent being psychologists, since the combination of physical, emotional and patrimonial violence towards older adults increased by 46% after the COVID 19 pandemic.

Under this reality and context, care work has been the subject of analysis in the last 50 years, especially in Latin America, under what ECLAC has called the regional conferences on women and development, the first in Havana in 1977 and until the last one held in Buenos Aires in 2022. It has been concluded that care work is essential tasks, since these tasks for life occur initially around families, around the home, where practically all of us require daily care that goes through different levels such as the economic and moral ones that involve direct tasks such as administration, shelter, education, health and accompaniment.

These care tasks include precisely the daily activities that all people need for comprehensive development, hence the importance of care work for our life cycle for sustainability and for our development as people.

Unfortunately, care work is in a situation of inequality, which has not been alien to inequality between men and women. That is why it is important that the task of care is analyzed from a gender and rights perspective. Above all, because when we talk about a gender perspective we identify that power relations lead to inequality, discrimination and violence against women, since they are based on the sex-gender system applied in this case to care relationships from which not only the elderly benefit but also others related to the family, including the spouse, society and the social state of law. It is a relationship of inequality and a distribution of obligations in which women are the ones who practically face the task of care.

The above situation is related to the sexual division of labor, which is based on a sex-gender system that assigns mandates, roles and gender stereotypes, where women have been assigned care as “natural tasks” and men have been assigned tasks other than care. Traditionally, in the field of labor economics policy, women are in situations of inequality and vulnerability.

Thus, the gender approach allows us to critically analyse this situation of inequality that occurs when carrying out these basic and necessary tasks.

Fortunately, in recent years, especially since 2020, care is no longer conceptualized as tasks that are exclusively performed by women or that are only assigned to them. In line with the advances in Latin American constitutional jurisprudence, the first chamber of the Supreme Court of Justice of Mexico has ruled on the definition of care with a gender approach. It is a relevant step towards having an egalitarian society in terms of care that guarantees this right not only to children, but to all people as a universal human right.

At the constitutional level, we must not overlook the Political Constitution of Mexico City, which in Article 9, within the framework of the Ciudad Solidaria, defines care as a right. While it is true that there has been significant progress in terms of care, in all Latin American states there is still much to be done. In Mexico, in 2020, a constitutional reform of Articles 4 and 73 was attempted, but unfortunately it was not approved in the end.

This is most likely because the most orthodox economic theory has considered that care work should not be remunerated because it does not have that connotation or economic exchange as a commodity has. They have not been given the social and political economic value that they really have, so it is important to recognize them as fundamental work that should be remunerated.

Returning to the UN postulate that in 2020 set out and established the decade of care focused on human rights and that the State assumes its responsibility in coordination and co-responsibility with the whole of society, in order to build a more just strategy and society, it is necessary to change the mentality around the current situation of care. A collective construction of the human rights of men and women is important. To do so, it is also important that we move from theory to practice. We have a robust legal framework. Now, it is essential that States guarantee what the law establishes in this regard, since there is an important legal advance that must be translated into reality through the will of the State and through the guarantees of active public policies and jurisdictional guarantees, where sufficient measures and actions are also offered so that the subjects of law can see the rights enshrined in the conventions and Constitutions realized in practice.