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Social Politics 2012 Volume 19 Number 3
S I L K E STA A B
Maternalism, Male-
Breadwinner Bias, and Market
Reform: Historical Legacies
and Current Reforms in Chilean
Social Policy
Abstract
Through an analysis of recent reforms in three policy areas in
Chilepensions, childcare services, and maternity/parental
leavethe paper seeks to explore how equity-oriented reforms
deal with the triple legacy of maternalism, male-breadwinner bias,
and market reform. Recent studies of new social policies in
Latin America have underlined the persistent strength of maternal-
ist assumptions. Feminist research on new cash transfer programs,
in particular, has tended to see more continuity than change in the
gendered underpinnings of social policy. This paper suggests that
once we broaden our field of vision to include other social pro-
grams and reforms, the ways in which contemporary social policy
(re)defines womens productive and reproductive roles, social
rights, and obligations are more complex and contradictory.
Indeed, while some policies take unpaid care by women for
granted, others point to an increasing awareness of inequalities
Pension Reform
Chile was not only the first country in Latin America to privatize
its pension system, but also stands out for the radicalism with
which market reform was carried through. In 1980, the public
pay-as-you-go system was replaced by individual capital accounts.
Henceforth, mandatory contributions were to be covered by the
worker alone rather than through tripartite financing. Account man-
agement was handed over to private insurance companies that invest
contributions in stocks and bonds against (sizeable) commission
fees. Rather than relying on fixed replacement rates (defined-benefit),
retirement incomes were now directly linked to the amount contrib-
uted by the worker and the rate of return on investments made by
the commercial insurer (defined-contribution). With its early and
radical pension restructuring, Chile was the laboratory for a model
that its advocates like to refer to as a prime export product.
A series of studies have documented the detrimental effects of
market reform on womens old-age security (e.g. Arenas de Mesa
and Montecinos 1999; Bertranou and Arenas de Mesa 2003; Marco
2004; Gimenez 2005; Dion 2008). Lower labor force participation
rates, more frequent career breaks, higher unemployment rates, over-
representation in informal or part-time employment, and lower earn-
ings translate into lower levels of affiliation among women as well
as lower and less regular contribution patterns among those who are
affiliated. While these are problems in virtually all contribution-
based social protection schemes, and hence also apply to the pre-
reform pension system in Chile, gender inequalities were exacerbated
by structural reforms that tied pension benefits more strongly to indi-
vidual risk and contribution history and eliminated existing risk-
pooling mechanisms from the contributory pillar (Arenas de Mesa
and Montecinos 1999).
One particularly problematic feature was the introduction of
gender-differentiated actuarial tables for the calculation of pension
benefits. According to this formula women receive lower pensions
than men due to their greater average longevity, even if their
Maternalism, Male-Breadwinner Bias, and Market Reform V 309
and older who have contributed to the system but accumulated very
low pension entitlements, in turn, will benefit from a new govern-
ment subsidy (Aporte Previsional Solidario) that stocks their pen-
sions up to a fixed maximum. Together these components replace
pre-existing minimum and social assistance pensions, increasing
both the level and reach of state-financed and subsidized pensions.
Evidence of the malfunctioning of the existing pension system and
possible reform scenarios had been created over decades by interna-
tional organizations and actors within the Chilean state itself. Key
actors in the Ministrys of Finance Budget Office in particular
played a role in fostering political commitment to reform (Arenas de
Mesa 2010). Throughout the process, the Budget Office was also
firmly in charge of negotiating key components of the reform, both
within the governing coalition and with representatives of the
right-wing opposition in Congress. From the very beginning, its fun-
damental concern was to strengthen the social assistance pillar rather
than to restructure the model of individual capital accounts. As Ewig
and Kay (2011) argue, this approach can be explained by three main
factors. First, the institutional lock-in produced by Chiles integra-
tion into the global capital markets and the importance of private
pensions to the countrys financial system 11 meant that any funda-
mental reform of the basic structure of the pension system was
simply not on the agenda (82). Second, private pension fund admin-
istratorsfirmly supported by the political rightsuccessfully resisted
the introduction of regulatory provisions that would change the rules
of the game, such as the creation of a state-owned pension fund. In
contrast, neither the business sector nor the political right seriously
opposed the expansion of the state-sponsored solidarity pillar. Third,
key policy actors within the government were convinced of the bene-
fits of a market-based model. The Budget Office thus proceeded to
ignore more radical demands articulated by labor unions and
to appease dissident voices from within the governing coalition,
privileging a broad political consensus with the right-wing opposi-
tion in Congress.12
While these factors help to explain the overall orientation of the
reform, they cannot account for the high visibility and specific treat-
ment of gender-related issues. Four aspects of the reform are particu-
larly relevant for womens pension entitlements. First, since women
are over-represented among non-contributors and low-density con-
tributors, they will benefit from the restructured solidarity pillar.
They are estimated to represent 60 percent of potential claimants
(MTPS 2008). The removal of the twenty-year vesting period, in turn,
eliminates an important obstacle for women to claim a minimum
Maternalism, Male-Breadwinner Bias, and Market Reform V 311
Childcare
Although ECEC gradually acquired prominence on Chiles social
policy agenda, up until 2006 services that responded to the needs of
both children and working parents were scarce and fragmented. On
the one hand, the educational system concentrated on getting four-
and five-year-old children school-ready, offering largely part-time
programs and providing few services for younger children. On the
other hand, workplace-based childcarelegally mandated for com-
panies with more than twenty female employeesfailed to cover a
significant share of women workers given the characteristics of the
Chilean labor market, such as the importance of small and microen-
terprises15 and of less protected contractual arrangements (fixed-
term, piece-work, or contract-work), especially among women. It
also fuelled employer complaints about the costs associated with
hiring women and was thus claimed to represent a barrier to their
employability. A third set of childcare services targeted vulnerable
groups such as beneficiaries of the female heads of household
program (Programa Mujeres Jefas de Hogar) and agricultural
workers (temporeras).
The Bachelet administration (20062010) made ECEC one of its
policy priorities and set out to develop a more comprehensive strat-
egy for service expansion. With Chile Crece Contigo (Chile Grows
with You), an integrated child protection strategy launched in
2006, the government committed to significantly expand public
creches (zero to two years) and kindergartens (two to four years),
particularly for children from low-income families (Mideplan 2007).
By 2009, the program had become institutionalized by law, granting
children from low-income families the right to a full-time creche and
kindergarten place if their mothers are working, studying, or
looking for work; and the right to a part-time kindergarten place
with no further requirements regarding parents activities. Similar to
the case of pensions, the new program applies a rather broad target-
ing mechanism, covering children from the first three income quin-
tiles (60 percent of the lowest-income households) from 2011
onwards. Families who meet the above requirements will not be
charged for their use of childcare facilities.
Official data sources point to the rapid roll-out of childcare facili-
ties, with the number of public creches increasing from around seven
hundred in 2006 to more than four thousand in 2009 (Ortiz 2009).
The number of available places for children up to two years more
than quintupled from around fourteen thousand in 2005 to
314 V Staab
looms large in Chiles broader educational system. The fact that cov-
erage of children under the age of four was extremely low before the
reforms arguably increased the governments room for maneuver in
shaping the institutional design.
Despite its markedly child-centered rhetoric, childcare service
expansion did not completely lose sight of the needs of working
mothers. Indeed, there seems to be some agreement about the
economic necessity and desirability of womens labor force partici-
pation 18 and the roll-out of ECEC services can be seen as an official
recognition of family responsibilities as an obstacle for achieving
this goal. Consequently, the newly created creches and kindergartens
are supposed to offer full-day programs for working mothers (and,
under exceptional circumstances, fathers) and increase efforts to
offer extended schedules.
Somewhat ironically, the child-centered thrust of the program is
likely to represent a better option for women than the alternative of
extending or enforcing their right to workplace-based childcare.
There are two reasons for this. First, these services benefit a larger
share of mothersboth in and outside of the labor force: While
workplace-based childcare is available only to mothers who are
already in the (formal) workforce and in specific types of workpla-
ces, the new program offers full-time care to mothers who are study-
ing and looking for work, and at least part-time kindergarten
services to full-time stay-at-home mothers. Second, by de-linking
childcare services from the workplace, the program escapes allega-
tions of increasing the costs of hiring women. Of course, making
workplace-based childcare a gender-neutral benefit would also miti-
gate the latter problem, but attempts to extend the right to work-
placed childcare to fathers have been of little avail so far.19
Overall, the roll-out of childcare under the Bachelet administra-
tion is a powerful example of how childcare can be implemented
rapidly with sufficient political will. The relatively broad targeting
mechanism (60 percent of households) and the broadening of other
eligibility rules expanded the role of the state in ECEC vis-a-vis pre-
vious (workplace-based and targeted) interventions. The initiative is
also notable in a country where conservative social norms regarding
womens role in the family remain widespread. Indeed, the roll-out
of ECEC services could be described as market concerns trumping
maternalism: the ideal of maternal care outweighed by the desire to
increase female labor force participation and develop the human
capital of future workers. However, things are less straightforward.
While the expansion of childcare increases the ability of women to
combine paid employment and motherhood, there is no generalized
farewell to maternalism (Orloff 2006).
316 V Staab
Maternity Leave
As in other countries in the region, regulations surrounding
maternity protection in Chile date back to the first half of the twen-
tieth century when policy makers were driven by the concern to
safeguard the reproductive functions of working mothers
(Molyneux 2000; Gimenez 2005). Thus, the 1931 Labor code
(Codigo de Trabajo) prohibited womens work in heavy industry
and underground mining as well as night shifts and first introduced
maternity leave. The obligation to provide creches in factories that
employed more than fifty women and the right (and indeed obliga-
tion) of working mothers to breastfeed young children had already
been established in 1917 (Hutchison 2001).
From its inception in the early twentieth century, this maternalist
body of legislation par excellence endured major tectonic shifts in
the countrys political, economic, and social policy landscape.20 In
fact, the only modification under authoritarian rule was related to
the financing mechanism of leaves and was carried out en passant in
the context of health reform. Similar to pensions, leaves had been
financed through tripartite contributions by employers, workers, and
the state. The 1985 reforms, in turn, shifted the financial burden
onto the state (to be financed out of general revenue). Thus, neither
employers nor private health insurers are currently involved in
financing maternity leave in any way.
In its current form, the Labor code includes, among others, pro-
tection from dismissal from the start of the pregnancy until one year
after the end of the leave period; maternity leave six weeks before
and twelve weeks after childbirth as well as a 100 percent replace-
ment of the previous salary with a ceiling of sixty-six UF21 per
month for the duration of the leave;22 and a (paid) medical leave to
Maternalism, Male-Breadwinner Bias, and Market Reform V 317
care for seriously ill children under the age of one claimable by the
mother or (since 1993) the father. In 2005, a mandatory five-day
paternity leave was introduced.
Debates over the extension of the length of maternity leave first
surfaced as a cost-efficient solution to the rapidly increasing
number of leaves claimed to care for a sick child under one year of
age. Given that the increase in these leaves could not be explained
by epidemiological patterns, it was interpreted as the (fraudulent)
attempt (by mothers and pediatricians) to artificially extend the
post-partum leave period. Subsequently, doctors suggested that a
longer maternity leave could reduce the incidence of sickness in
young infants and hence reduce healthcare spending (La Nacion
2004), an argument that was further pushed in a much publicized
study conducted by a private consultancy firm with strong ties to the
private health insurance industry, and emphatically taken up by
Christian-Democratic MPs (La Nacion 2007a,b; Cooperativa 2008).
Policy change, however, did not come easily, partly due to signifi-
cant disagreement on its usefulness on both sides of the political
spectrum. Although maternity leave reform appeared as a policy rec-
ommendation and/or political demand in several occasions under
the Lagos and Bachelet administrations, there was no consensus on
the issue within Concertacion.23 While doctorsstrongly represented
at the legislative level supported an extension to six months, the
proposal failed to obtain the backing of economic advisors linked to
the Ministry of Finance who considered the measure to be not only
costly, but also potentially damaging to womens employability.
This view was largely shared by economic advisors of the right-wing
opposition. One option, discussed during the Lagos and Bachelet
governments, was to extend the leave period to six months while
maintaining the amount of the three month subsidy and spreading it
evenly across the prolonged six months period. This attempt to
contain the fiscal impact of the reform was categorically rejected by
the Womens Ministry and MPs of the governing coalition as a
measure that would effectively curtail womens rights by halving
maternity pay.
During the presidential elections in 2009, a debate that had previ-
ously centered on cost containment evolved to include discussions
of childcare arrangements, maternal and child health, womens
employability, and coverage. In the heat of the campaigns, all candi-
dates committed to extend the post-partum leave period from three
to six months. In the case of the two most promising candidates,
Eduardo Frei (Concertacion) and his Alianza contender Sebastian
Pinera, this meant turning a blind eye to the recommendations of
their technical advisors, who were concerned with potential fiscal
318 V Staab
Conclusion
In the context of debates about a return of the state and the
implications for gender equality, it is worth asking, as a recent
report by the Economic Commission for Latin America and the
Caribbean (ECLAC 2010) does: What kind of state? What kind of
equality? Rather than addressing the normative dimension of this
question, this paper has taken an empirical look on the recent devel-
opments in Chile where, I would argue, renewed state engagement
in social policy has opened up opportunities for addressing some of
the gender imbalances resulting from the triple legacy of marketiza-
tion, maternalism, and male-breadwinner bias. However gradual,
modest, and incomplete the changes, they are more than the mere
reproduction of neoliberal and maternalist policy frameworks.
With regards to marketization, the recent reforms in Chilean social
policy show that there is some leeway for changing and improving
equity and social protection even in the face of strong neoliberal lega-
cies. Across policy areas, reforms have moved beyond the neoliberal
orthodoxy of minimalist safety nets: There is a renewed emphasis on
legally inscribed social rights and entitlementsa trend that was first
probed in the health sector (Dannreuther and Gideon 2008); and
although the measures retain an important needs-based element (i.e.,
are not based on citizenship alone), they reach out to middle-income
segments rather than narrowly targeting particularly vulnerable
groups. As such, the reforms are likely to usher in significant material
improvements. Poor labor market opportunities will translate less
directly into exclusion from old-age security among lower-income
households; free childcare services may enable lower-income house-
holds to bring home additional income by increasing their labor force
participation or access more stable jobs; and a longer and more
broadly accessible maternity leave will ease the pressure on families,
and women in particular, to leave paid employment when they
have children.
While the state has taken on a greater role in social provision, it
has managed to do so in quite market- and business-friendly ways.
Despite recent reforms, markets continue to play an important role
in social provision and labor market concerns have shaped reform
debates around ECEC and maternity/parental leave. In pensions,
increased coverage and benefits are entirely financed by the state and
Maternalism, Male-Breadwinner Bias, and Market Reform V 321
NOTES
Department of Politics, University of Sheffield, Northumberland Road,
S10 2TU, UK. Tel: 56 9 7624 3439; Fax: 44 0 114 222 1717. E-mail:
s.staab@sheffield.ac.uk. Silke Staab is a PhD candidate at the Politics
Department, University of Sheffield. Her research project examines patterns
of continuity and change in Latin American social policy from a gender
perspective, seeking to assess in how far recent social policy reforms repre-
sent a shift away from the tenets of high-tide neoliberalism as well as the
324 V Staab
implications of this shift for gendered rights and responsibilities. Over the
past six years, she has been working for different U.N. agencies and non-
governmental organizations on issues related to gender, care, social policy
and migration. Her recent publications include: (2010) Social investment
policies in Chile and Latin America: Towards Equal Opportunities for
Women and Children? Journal of Social Policy 39(4); (2011) Putting
two and two together? Early Childhood Education, Mothers Employment
and Childcare Service Expansion in Chile and Mexico, Development and
Change 42(4) [with Roberto Gerhard]; (2010) Underpaid and over-
worked: A cross-national perspective on care workers. International
Labour Review 149(4) [with Shahra Razavi]; (2010) Democracy in the
country but not in the home? Religion, politics and womens rights in
Chile. Third World Quarterly 31(6) [with Virginia Guzman and Ute
Seibert].
1. This is the case, for example, in the area of pensions, where
second-generation reforms of different reach and depth have recently been
implemented in Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, and Uruguay. The latter three
reforms introduced child-rearing credits for mothers.
2. Early childhood education and care has been significantly expanded
in Argentina, Chile, Mexico, and Uruguay (for example Faur 2011;
Filgueira et al. 2011; Staab and Gerhard 2011).
3. In practice, the pace, depth, and breadth of structural reforms varied
and neoliberal reform processes unfolded in contextually specific and con-
tested ways, leading to a variety of actually existing neoliberalism[s]
(Brenner and Theodore 2002).
4. Male-breadwinner bias is defined here as a way of constructing the
ownership of rights to make claims on the state for social benefits (. . .)
around a norm of full-time, life-long working-age participation in the
market-based labor force. Those whose participation does not fit this norm
typically have lesser rights, which they can frequently only exercise as
dependents on those who do fit the norm (Elson and Cagatay 2000).
5. While maternalism is often used as a historical concept, referring to
womens welfare activism in the formative period of welfare states (Koven
and Michel 1993). As concept in policy analysis, it is useful to distinguish
between public maternalism where the state actively supports women in
their role as mothers and private maternalism where maternal care
becomes a kind of default position in the face of state inaction (Glass and
Fodor 2007). Both assign responsibility for childcare to mothers (rather
than both parents).
6. A 2002 opinion poll revealed that 83 percent of Chileans believed
that preschool-aged children suffer if their mother works (cited in
Franceschet 2006).
7. Since 2007, for example, the family allowance is automatically guar-
anteed to all households who fulfill eligibility criteria. Before this, there was
only a limited allotment depending on the availability of public funding,
leaving many families who would have been entitled to the subsidy uncov-
ered (BCN 2007).
Maternalism, Male-Breadwinner Bias, and Market Reform V 325
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