“Girls get married and lose their engagement”, “Do you have plans to be a mother?”, “Who do you leave your children with?”, “Are you going to order a little brother”? These are not only frequent questions but also massive ones. The project presented a week ago, on the expansion of licenses, It implies a package of public policies that can generate a high impact on society and on the outstanding debt that exists regarding reproductive rights and the worldview of motherhood and fatherhood, as well as in the so-called “care economy”. We are one of the Latin American countries with the most deficiencies in this matter, especially in paternity leave, where we only have 2 days.
One of the key points of the bill called “Integral System of Care Policies of Argentina” (SINCA), is that the origin of where the costs come from is changed, since they are collected through the ANSES, and they will not be be the responsibility of the employer. In other words, the cost associated with the increase in licenses will be assumed by the social security funds. It is very important to highlight this change since today, the increase in “license” costs is one of the main arguments of employers for not hiring women.
This point is something that has always affected us women, because it is common that within the labor market we are evaluated not only for our abilities but also for being within the reproductive age group, for being mothers or for having children in charge. children. Currently, this continues to be a frequent question in interviews and a factor of exclusion from job opportunities.
Within the legal framework, currently, only workers in a dependency relationship have paid leave, of which 90 days correspond to women and 2 days to men, except for those companies that grant licenses outside the regulations.
The bill includes the extension of licenses to monotributistas, social monotributistas and autonomous. Expanding this right is being able to guarantee the care of boys and girls in an equitable way. Currently, as maternity leave is longer, it generates inequality and a burden on women regarding care tasks and marked discrimination in the workplace due to gender.
Although Argentina is a pioneer in the world, and at the forefront in Latin America in relation to acquired rights regarding gender and equality issues, there is currently a very important debt in relation to this issue, because we are the last country in the ranking regarding paternity leave, having only 2 days, positioning us below the recommendations of the ILO (International Labor Organization). In recent years there has been a variety of bills related to reducing these gaps, but they have never been implemented. This project is a great step towards being able to reconcile work, reproductive and family life, equalizing the rights and opportunities between women and men, because it promotes a paradigm shift and a moment of social maturation in the face of changes in the perspective of the new generations.
Another of the positive impacts of the project is that it contemplates the care of a large part of the population that is left out of current legislation, such as people with disabilities, older adults and also adoptions, non-binary people, fertility treatments or neonatal care. Finally, a large part of the economy of people who are dedicated to care and domestic tasks are in the informal sector, that is, they are not registered. In this sense, the project also promotes the registration of jobs, which, of course, benefits the most vulnerable strata in the first place. Normally, people who are dedicated to care in general, have a low economic income. To put it simply, still many women, who bear 3 times more the weight of these tasks than men, when evaluating taking a job, measure whether it is worth “changing the money” by hiring someone who does it, because many Sometimes this is not beneficial, so they prefer to stay at home as it is cheaper for them and, finally, this has a direct impact on our labor insertion rates.
CEO of Bridge de Gap and D+I professor at the University of San Andrés
Source: Ambito
