The LAC Gender Innovation Lab provides World Bank operational teams, policy makers, and development practitioners with knowledge to promote gender equality and drive change in Latin America and the Caribbean. To this end, the Lab generates evidence through impact evaluations and inferential studies to find out what works to close gender gaps in human capital, economic participation, social norms, and agency.
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HUMAN CAPITAL: Remove barriers to human capital investment and to the productive engagement of youth who are neither in school, nor employed, nor in training (NEET) |
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ECONOMIC PARTICIPATION: Remove barriers to participation and productivity of women in paid work and entrepreneurship. |
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SOCIAL NORMS: Identify social norms that perpetuate gender inequalities. |
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AGENCY: Understand the role of agency—the ability to make choices and to transform those choices into desired outcomes—in gender equity
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The LACGIL works in partnership with units across the World Bank, aid agencies and donors, governments, non-governmental organizations, private sector firms, and academic researchers.
This work has been funded in part by the World Bank Group's Umbrella Facility for Gender Equality (UFGE), a multi-donor trust fund administered by the World Bank to advance gender equality and women's empowerment through experimentation and knowledge creation to help governments and the private sector focus policy and programs on scalable solutions with sustainable outcomes. The UFGE is supported by generous contributions from Australia, Canada, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Iceland, Ireland, Latvia, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, United Kingdom, United States, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and the Wellspring Philanthropic Fund.
The evidence generated by LACGIL studies will be made available in working papers, reports, policy briefs, and blogs through our website.
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Improving Gender Wage Equality Reduces Intimate Partner Violence in Brazil: Policy Implications for Mothers Improved wage equality led to reduced violence against women in municipalities with women’s police stations. In municipalities without women’s police stations, the opposite occurred. Providing childcare services, maternity leave, and fatherhood programs may improve wage equality. Read more. |
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The Gendered Impacts of COVID-19 on the Labor Market in Latin America and the Caribbean At the onset of the pandemic, women were 44% more likely than men to lose their jobs temporarily or permanently (56% chance for women, 39% for men). Read more. |
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Diez Mensajes Sobre COVID-19 y Trabajo Femenino en Chile: Impactos y Desafíos (Spanish) The fall in female labor force participation carries a high cost: recent evidence indicates that, if the gender gaps in labor participation and schooling are maintained, Chile could lose an average of 11.4% of GDP per capita in the next few three decades. Read more and see our infographic. |
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Women Entrepreneurs in Mexico: Breaking Sectoral Segmentation and Increasing Profits Policy brief shows that women entrepreneurs who break sectoral barriers (crossovers) perform better, male mentors or male role models can help women to cross over, and women “opportunity” entrepreneurs are more likely than “necessity” entrepreneurs to cross over. Read more.
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Cashing in on Education: Women, Work and Child Care in Latin America and the Caribbean The summary reviews existing evidence and uses an integrated framework to answer questions on why and what policy-relevant instruments can increase female labor force participation. Read more. |
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Childcare is key to Chile's post-pandemic economic recovery: Policy considerations (Spanish) One year after the COVID-19 pandemic, 46% of women vs. 69% of men participate in the labor market. COVID-19 has reinforced gender inequalities in unpaid domestic and care tasks. This study finds that 40% of households with young children that don’t use formal childcare services could do so if they have access to conveniently located, affordable, and high-quality childcare services. Read more. |
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Does the Gender Wage Gap Influence Intimate Partner Violence in Brazil? Evidence from Administrative Health Data This working paper suggests that improving gender wage equality reduces violence against women: homicides of working-age women are lower when wages are more equal, and more wage equality is associated with fewer cases of non-fatal violence. Read more. |
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On April 21, 2021, LACGIL’s co-leads Lourdes Rodriguez-Chamussy and Jacobus De Hoop presented an ongoing LACGIL behavioral study in Uruguay examining how fathers can be encouraged to take parental leave. The session titled Childcare Solutions: Changing fathers’ attitudes and involvement in care and early childhood education also explored other behavioral approaches to include men in the co-responsibility for childcare. This event was part of the UFGE Childcare Solutions Miniseries. |
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On March 18, 2021, the World Bank office for Bolivia, Chile, Ecuador and Peru and the LAC Gender Innovation Lab co-organized a webinar on how to avoid reversing progress in women’s economic participation. LACGIL’s member Javier Romero presented key findings of the LACGIL’s Gendered impacts of COVID-19 on the Labor Markets in LAC, which he co-authored with LACGIL’s member Emilia Cucagna. |
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On December 10, 2020, LACGIL co-hosted a webinar with the EAP GIL in honor of the 16 Days of Activism Against Gender-Based Violence. The webinar, “What is the Impact of Women’s Economic Empowerment on Gender-Based Violence”, presented evidence on the relationship between gender wage gap and GBV in Brazil and results from an RCT of a public works program in Lao PDR. |
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On November 17, 2020, LACGIL’s member Javier Romero presented his and Emilia Cucagna’s work on the gendered impacts of COVID-19 in a UN Women and the World Bank joint webinar: “Learning from and Using Surveys to Assess the Gendered Socio-Economic Impacts of COVID-19”. Their analysis uses a panel dataset recently collected through high-Frequency phone surveys in LAC. |
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On August 8, 2019, senior economist and LACGIL’s co-lead Lourdes Rodriguez-Chamussy presented an updated summary of the book Cashing in on Education: Women, Childcare, and Prosperity in Latin America and the Caribbean in the seminar "Care work, a shared responsibility” that took place in Bolivia. The summary reviews existing evidence and uses an integrated framework to answer questions on why and what policy-relevant instruments can increase female labor force participation. |
