To browse Academia. This chapter reviews recent research on the gender impacts of cash transfers and considers the lessons learned from the Latin American experience of poverty alleviation. Poverty in Latin America is highly influenced by gendered vulnerabilities. While signifi cant progress has been made towards gender equality in the region, including parity in education and increased levels of economic and political participation, more women than men live in poverty, gendered wage disparities persist, and women face higher burdens of domestic and caring responsibilities, as well as high levels of teenage pregnancy and domestic violence.
Social protection interventions have burgeoned across Latin America since the late s, emerging in part from a widespread dissatisfaction with the inefficiency and clientelism that plagued the older generation of social protection programmes in the region.
Targeted conditional cash transfers CCTs have been a popular social protection response to address inequality and break the intergenerational transmission of extreme poverty. The experience of CCTs has been well documented and analysed over the last two decades, but the extent Can poverty and gender relations be disentangled? Conditional cash transfer CCT programs have spread throughout Latin America and beyond based on the claim that they are an effective social policy tool to combat poverty.
While changing gender relations is not among CCTs' explicit objectives, gender relations are nonetheless shaped by these policies. Unfortunately, the debate concerning how CCTs shape gender relations has treated gender inequality as a one-dimensional matter. In this paper, we seek to overcome this limitation by offering a multidimensional analysis of programs in Chile, Costa Rica, and El Salvador.
On the basis of empirical evidence provided, we argue that patriarchal materialism is still at the core of Latin America's new social policies. At the same time, we recognize the potential for CCTs to transform gender relations should mechanisms allowing childcare facilities and encouraging male participation in domestic labor become an integral part of these programs.
