- _“It is a feeling - I could even say: of guilt. Because they tell you that it's not okay to leave him [in a center], but they also criticize you because you don't contribute financially to your home. It's a_

- _conflict.”_<sup>_4,5_</sup>

# 1. Introduction

There has been a significant rise in female labor force participation in the Latin America region over the past decades. Women’s participation in the region’s labor force rose by 25 percent between 1990 and 2018, in contrast with the global trend of a slight decline (Muller and Casabonne 2020). Access to education for women, the decline of fertility, and later marriage are drivers behind this increase in participation rates (Chioda 2016). Female labor force participation has had significant effects on poverty and inequality reduction in the Latin America region: The growth in female labor income in the region between 2000 and 2010 accounted for 28 percent of the reduction in inequality and 30 percent of the reduction in extreme poverty (World Bank 2012). Despite those gains, some countries in the region are still lagging behind in female labor force participation – Mexico is one of them. At 44.2 percent (women ages 15 and older, World Development Indicators, modeled ILO estimate, 2019) female labor force participation is particularly low in Mexico, among the lowest in the Latin America region and in the OECD.

Motherhood has an important impact on women's employment decisions. The disproportionate demand on women’s time associated with care is one of the key factors behind the significant gap in participation rates in the Latin America region (Mateo Díaz and Rodríguez-Chamussy 2013). That seems to be the case for Mexico as well: The likelihood of being employed declines among mothers with young children, increases when they enter pre-school, and then, decreases again as children start primary school (Inchauste et al. 2019). Among working age women 41 percent of low-skilled and 32 percent of high-skilled women report that their decision not to work is driven by the lack of reliable childcare (Inchauste et al. 2019).

Mateo Díaz and Rodriguez-Chamussy 2016 show that subsidizing childcare appears to increase child enrollment, which in turn increases female labor supply: The proportion of children 0–3 attending childcare and rates of female labor force participation are strongly correlated in Europe and Latin American countries, and interestingly, this relationship is stronger for children 0–3 than for children 3–5. However, use of formal childcare in the region is limited, and especially for younger children in Mexico: Only 5 percent of children below the age of 2 are in formal childcare, which is significantly below the OECD average of 35 percent (Inchauste et al. 2020 based on ENESS, 2017).

A large body of international evidence documents the positive impact of improved availability of childcare on women’s labor force participation (Blau & Currie 2004, Lokshin 1999 and Fong & Lokshin, 2000 for Russia). Paes de Barros et al. (2011) find that access to free publicly provided childcare services led to a considerable increase in mothers’ employment (from 36 to 46 percent) in Brazil. Medrano (2009) finds that the expansion of early childhood education in Chile increased female labor

> 4 Individual interviews with woman with higher education, with access to a childcare center, working full time, resident in the East Zone (I-W-HE-WE-FW-E).

> 5 <mark>The nomenclature used to identify the characteristics of research participants who will be cited throughout this paper can be found in the annex.</mark>

2