Women, Motherhood, and Structural Transformation: Insights from Rural Latin America

Abstract

Structural transformation—the shift from agriculture toward industry and services—is a defining feature of economic development, with the potential to reshape gender gaps in labor markets. Yet little is known about how this process has unfolded in rural Latin America, where women face a double disadvantage stemming from both gender and rurality. In this paper, we document the evolution of rural women’s labor market outcomes in 14 Latin American countries between 2000 and 2023, drawing on harmonized household surveys that provide comparable indicators across time and space. We complement this analysis with a pseudo-event study around the birth of the first child to estimate motherhood effects, and with time-use data from Mexico to explore household mechanisms that constrain women’s labor supply. Our results show that despite important educational progress, rural women continue to lag behind rural men and urban women in employment, hours worked, and earnings. Structural transformation has contributed to declining informality and rising participation in services and formal salaried jobs, but it has not closed rural-urban or gender gaps: unpaid family labor and other precarious forms of employment remain widespread. Motherhood further exacerbates these disadvantages. While rural mothers experience smaller short-term employment drops than urban mothers and show some recovery over time, they are increasingly pushed into unpaid work and low-skilled self-employment, reinforcing long-term income gaps. Evidence from Mexico suggests that this disadvantage is not primarily driven by childcare demands—similar across rural and urban mothers— but rather by heavier burdens of household chores, home production for own consumption, and lower access to labor-saving technologies. By providing the first systematic evidence on how structural transformation interacts with motherhood in rural Latin America, our paper makes two contributions. First, it fills a gap in the literature by offering a detailed, cross-country account of rural women’s labor market outcomes over two decades in a region where evidence has been scarce. Second, it brings together insights from the literature on structural change and child penalties, showing that structural transformation alone is insufficient to generate inclusive labor market opportunities for rural women when unpaid work and caregiving responsibilities remain unequally distributed.