Women, trade and the care economy in Latin America
12 August 2025 17:00-18:30 CST
Trade and gender
The issue of gender equality has risen to the top of public debate in many countries. Women are paid less than men for equal work in every country; women are less represented in Parliaments and on most corporate boards; and women systematically do more unpaid work than men. Women are also less represented in trade. While much focus is on labour, social, and other domestic policies as first order tools to improve women’s economic empowerment, renewed attention is being paid to how trade can impact the economic opportunities available to both men and women.
Upcoming event
This side event at the XVI Regional Conference on Women in Latin America and the Caribbean will explore the links between gender and international trade, the importance of the care economy for women, and women’s engagement in care activities. Drawing on the OECD’s Trade and Gender Review of Latin America, it will provide evidence of gender gaps in trade—which is associated with better-paying jobs and more productive businesses—and how women’s unpaid care responsibilities impact those gaps.
Key messages
Trade lowers prices and increases consumers’ purchasing power. Women are more likely to be poor—due to the gender wage gap that is prevalent in every country, due to lower pensions secured by women compared to men, and women’s more limited access to credit and finance. Moreover, single parent households are more likely to be poor than dual-parent households and the vast majority of single parent households are headed by women. Lower income households, in which women are disproportionately represented, benefit even more from lower prices than higher income households because a greater share of their disposable income is spent, including on traded consumer goods. Lowering barriers to trade decreases prices and increases the variety of products available to households therefore particularly benefiting lower-income consumers, where women predominate.
The OECD has developed a framework to better understand the gender impacts of countries’ trade policies on women workers, consumers and business leaders, and for ensuring inclusive policymaking processes. This framework can assist governments in their design of trade provisions and policies and monitor their impacts. Once women’s participation in trade is mapped, policy makers can decide how to ensure that trade is supportive of women’s economic empowerment—through greater market access in products and sectors where women work and own businesses; by ensuring women workers and entrepreneurs can engage fully on international markets; through complementary domestic policies to offset negative impacts; or through complementary trade promotion policies that support women so they can fully reap the gains from trade.
Context
How can trade policy support gender equality?
Closing gender gaps makes good economic sense. Advancing the aim of women’s economic empowerment requires policy action across a wide range of areas, including increasing their participation in international trade. Although trade policies are not de jure discriminatory, they impact women and men differently due to initial conditions that are largely dissimilar.
Gender export gaps in online firms
Businesses owned and led by women trade less, thereby benefiting less from the economies of scale and productivity gains associated with exporting and the lower prices for inputs into their production processes that come from importing. Women-led firms trade less in part because they tend to be smaller whereas larger firms trade more, and they are more likely to produce services that are less traded.
