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Gender is poorly understood in rural Amazonia. There remains limited understanding of how livelihoods are gendered or how labour is divided within the household. In this paper, I offer a conceptual framework for understanding gendered division of labour and gendered livelihoods in rural Amazonia. I draw on ethnographic data collected in two riverine mestizo villages located on the floodplains of the Ucayali River, Peru. I disaggregate riverine agro-fishing livelihoods by introducing the gendered and seasonal divisions of livelihood activities, highlighting how gender roles and livelihood seasonality need to be understood as co-produced. I suggest that rather than the annual flood being a 'miserable' period as previously suggested in the literature, the flood season and flood recession represent two socially distinct periods, with livelihoods rotationally focused within and beyond the household respectively. Gendered livelihoods are further complicated by household composition and life-stage, with single-headed households, particularly female-headed households, often over-burdened with productive and reproductive labour. This paper begins a necessary conversation of gender and social difference in Peruvian Amazonia, while questioning the relationship between gendered livelihoods and seasonality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article proposes a historical-sociological lens to approach coercive and violent relations within remunerated household labor. Drawing from Orlando Patterson, these relations are understood as interpersonal relations of domination with the concept of domestic servitude. They are analyzed in a qualitative empirical case study on socioculturally isolated domestic workers in Lima, Peru. While the paper attends to scholars concerning migration and domestic work, its main sociological contribution is to empirically and theoretically enrich debates on "unfreedom" beyond economic exploitation. It argues for a reflective and differentiated elaboration on sociocultural dimensions of coercion and violence that are embedded in colonial and patriarchal power structures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the intrahousehold allocation of housework and paid work in five Latin American countries. Prior work has consistently shown that income plays a major role in the region’s large gender gaps in the distribution of unpaid work at the aggregate level. However, the extent to which earnings shape intrahousehold decisions regarding the allocation of unpaid work remains unexplored. Using harmonized time-use surveys for Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Peru, and Uruguay, we analyze the relationship between earnings and housework drawing on the framework of the dependency, gender deviance neutralization, and autonomy. We find that in Latin America, increases in women’s absolute earnings are related to decreases in the hours women devote to housework. At the same time, the allocation of men’s time into housework does not seem to be related to their own or their partners’ earnings. Against our expectations, differences in contextual gender inequality across countries does not seem to be relevant. These findings help us assess how well existing theories, formulated to account for phenomena of the developed world, apply to more unequal contexts that have higher levels of gender inequality and where a high proportion of women are excluded from paid work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Across many countries, girls perform more unpaid work than boys. This article shows how the time young women and girls spend in unpaid household work contributes to the gender pay gap that is already evident by age 22. The study analyzes employment participation, type of employment, and wages using five waves of the Young Lives longitudinal survey for Ethiopia, India, Peru, and Vietnam. Spending longer hours in unpaid household work in adolescence positively predicts later employment participation but has a scarring effect in negatively predicting job quality (that is a job with a private or public organization) and hourly earnings, particularly for women. Blinder–Oaxaca decompositions of the gender wage gap show young women's penalty for past household work is due to longer hours of such work rather than a higher penalty for women for a given amount of unpaid work. HIGHLIGHTS Participation in unpaid household work and paid work is gendered from a young age. Time in unpaid household work as children impacts young adults' employment. Time in household work in adolescence is linked to lower job quality in adulthood. Girls' longer hours in household work contribute to the gender wage gap. Girls spend less time than boys in play or leisure at all ages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Poorly paid – sometimes unpaid – domestic workers represent one of the few viable options for household and care support in Peru, where the state is weak in its provision of services and protection. I argue that social hierarchies established through the coloniality of power and the coloniality of gender add a layer of complexity to workers´ lived intersectionality of gender, indigeneity, rurality and migration status. It ends up positioning them as inferior in relation to their employers and co-citizens, a situation that is tantamount to social authoritarianism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When adult males are temporarily away from the household, observational evidence suggests cross-cultural and intra-cultural variation in the effects of their absence on the labor of other household members. In subsistence-based economies, we predict that other adolescent or older members will work more in essential production activities that otherwise would be performed by the missing men. We test this hypothesis using spot-check time allocation datasets from rural Nicaragua and Peru and the methodology of mixed-effects statistical models. In Nicaragua, we find that the absence of male household heads rarely necessitates substitute labor by household co-residents, apparently because men typically time their absences to coincide with the non-peak agricultural season. In Peru, the absence of male household heads results in increased men's work by co-residents only under unusual circumstances, as households apparently rely on other strategies to mitigate for the loss of labor. In addition to the comparative empirical analysis of the two cases, we show how mixed-effects models allow for individual heterogeneity and data structures that confound more familiar statistical techniques and occasionally produce spurious results. Mixed-effects modeling techniques will be necessary if we are to realize the analytic potential of the extensive, standardized time allocation datasets gathered by anthropologists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]