As the pandemic continues, Latin American women lose more ground | Coronavirus pandemic news

Bogota, Colombia- Elcy Gomez’s monthly rent check became a time bomb.

When the coronavirus pandemic, the mother of three had just started her herbal medicine business. As the COVID-19 lockdown in Bogotá continued, her job disappeared, leaving the family in debt.

Since his diabetic husband and children in his early 20s have just entered the labor market, Gomez’s financial burden has fallen on him. In a year and a half, the family put together a small amount of money, just enough to buy their small apartment in a remote city and food for the table.

Gomez’s pressure was engraved on her 55-year-old face, and as the pandemic spread, her condition did not improve.

When her latest rent check was due on August 4, she said she didn’t even have the first 100,000 pesos ($25) to pay. The apartment charges $200 per month.

When the pandemic hit Bogotá, Colombia, Elcy Gomez had just started her herbal medicine business. As the COVID-19 lockdown continued, she watched her work evaporate and her family fell into debt. [Megan Janetsky/Al Jazeera]

“We don’t have anything to pay the bills now,” Gomez told Al Jazeera. “Until now, we haven’t got anything.”

She begged the landlord to give her more time to pay, as she often did during the pandemic.

Before moving to this cheaper apartment, Gomez was eight months behind in the rent payment for her last apartment-but she was still trying to get the money together.

Gomez is not alone. The low coronavirus vaccination rate — coupled with some of the highest infection rates in the world — has the potential to prolong the economic crisis caused by the Latin American pandemic and push the region to the International Monetary Fund and other authorities warning that it may become “lost” “Area. ten years”.

Structural issues and new risks

Women who have been suffering from more precarious working conditions are among the groups most affected by the turmoil.

Experts worry that this epidemic has not only deepened local disparities, but also set back years of progress in areas where women have fallen behind in terms of gender equality.

“For professional women, the pandemic not only worsens the structural problems they are already facing; it also brings new risks,” said Maria Adelaida Palacio, head of Sisma Mujer, a feminist research organization based in Bogotá.

Adelaida explained that the root of the problem lies in the structural inequality that existed long before the health crisis.

During the pandemic in Bogota, Colombia, Elcy Gomez (left) and her daughter Mariela Alfaro Serna (right) are struggling to make ends meet through informal work [Megan Janetsky/Al Jazeera]

United Nations data shows that before the new crown pneumonia, the average wage gap between men and women in the region had reached 17%.

However, in the 30 years before the pandemic, the number of women entering the labor market in the region has increased exponentially.

Gomez was one of the women who felt they were making progress when they launched a new business and started social work projects in other parts of the country.

“US [women] As I like to say, it was the people who were going to lead the orchestra,” she recalled. “But we can’t because of the pandemic. This is like an illusion. It seems I thought I could do something, but in fact, no. “

This is a far cry from where she was a few decades ago, when she landed in Bogotá after she was forced to be displaced by armed group violence at her home in the Cesar region of northern Colombia.

But more than half of women in Latin America are engaged in informal jobs – such as selling food on the street or doing odd jobs without guaranteed working conditions or stable wages – and these jobs have a higher rate of work than men, according to data from the International Labour Organization. .

Women also work in departments such as hotels, restaurants, and housekeeping, and are affected more frequently by the pandemic than men.

Adelaida said that due to unemployment, many mothers were forced to “take on” the burden of parenting and housework, actually returning to the “traditional” roles they had just shed.

Widening gap

In Colombia, before the pandemic, the unemployment rate for women was higher than that for men. According to a report by Sisma Mujer citing data from the Colombian government, in January 2020, the number of unemployed men in Colombia was 10.4%, while the number of unemployed women was 16.5%.

After a year, this gap will only widen. The report found that the unemployment rate has risen across the board, but in January 2021 the male unemployment rate jumped to 13.4% and the female unemployment rate jumped to 22.7%.

Gomez’s 21-year-old daughter is one of the women feeling these effects. Before the pandemic, Mariela Alfaro Serna worked as a live-in nanny, earning 500,000 pesos ($125) a month and working at least 6 days a week.

Mariela Alfaro Serna is studying at her home on the fringe of Bogotá, Colombia, while her boyfriend is playing video games on his mobile phone [Megan Janetsky/Al Jazeera]

She didn’t like the job, and the salary was low, but it allowed her to make ends meet when she was studying to obtain a system engineering certificate.

She left work after obtaining the certificate at the end of 2019, hoping that this means she can enter the formal workforce.

When the pandemic hit, she lost her job in the department she studied or the housework she once relied on.

A year after she left, the family who hired her as a nanny called her again and asked her to help take care of the children because their restaurant reopened.

But there is a problem: they will only pay her what she considers to be a “slave”.

“I went back, but it was worse. I would only earn whatever they wanted to give me, 100,000 ($25) or 150,000 ($38) per month,” she described. “In the end I said’no’.”

She accepted the job to help her family because her mother struggled to find a small social work job to pay the rent and debts of her failed herbal business, while her brother regularly worked as a motorcycle taxi driver.

Now, she bake desserts and sell them to neighbors to help reduce bills.

“I try to earn more money every month so that I can give my mother at least half or more of the money,” she said.

Despite this, the family had to move to a lower-priced apartment, and the Internet and electricity would be shut down regularly, depending on the situation this month.

Cycle of violence

This phenomenon does not only occur in Colombia. Arussi Unda, a well-known leader of the Mexican feminist group Las Brujas del Mar, said that Mexican women face similar challenges.

She pointed out that her organization is located in Veracruz, Mexico, and has seen more women who cannot find a job turn to prostitution and sex. Unda is also worried that the economic blow will continue to encourage domestic violence, which has already Colombia increase -And globally-since the beginning of the pandemic.

“Women have fewer resources to escape the cycle of violence,” Unda explained.

Sisma Mujer and other women’s organizations in Colombia have raised similar concerns.

Sisma Mujer’s Adelaida warned that even if Colombia’s economy recovers, its consequences will pose long-term risks to women, noting that it can easily push women into more precarious working conditions, and that it will be affected as men return to work. Leave unemployed women behind.

“The risk is that the equality gap will only deepen, and our society will have women becoming poorer every day,” she said.

“Women have huge potential”?

At the same time, Adelaida also sees this as an opportunity.

She said that if regional and international entities intend to take action, economic recovery could “bring huge potential for women.”

“Now as the economy recovers, what we have to consider is:’How do we formalize women’s contracts? How do we ensure that women will not return to the same unstable working conditions?'” she said.

But Rosa Beltran, a 52-year-old house cleaner, thinks the situation is more complicated.

Rosa Beltran saw her house cleaning clients in Bogotá stop calling or ask her to work at a lower rate because she asked them to provide the protection she is legally entitled to under Colombian law [Megan Janetsky/Al Jazeera]

Beltran started working as a cleaner in Bogotá, Colombia in 2008, and because her husband left her, she had to take care of three children.

For many years, she applied for office work, but never received a call back, so she cleaned the house without a formal contract.

It wasn’t until all of Beltran’s work disappeared and the people who had worked with her for many years during the lockdown did not pay her salary, did she begin to realize that she had the legal rights to receive severance pay and social security.

When the lockdown ended and her six long-term clients called her again, she demanded these benefits.

Half of the families no longer call. Another person told her that she needed to reduce the weekly fee of 50,000 pesos ($13) to 30,000 pesos ($7.50) because they “found someone who could do this work at a lower cost.”

“This may be an opportunity, but at the same time, there are many women who are afraid to fight for themselves and say we have the right,” Beltran told Al Jazeera. “Sometimes I think society sees you as if you are under them.”