For Men Life is Hard, for Women Life is Harder: Gender Roles in Central America

The lives of women and men living in the Central American countries of Belize, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Panama are diverse with respect to gender roles, attitudes, and ideologies. However, there is evidence that gender plays out in the domains of development, work and home lives, health, violence, and sexuality. Disparities in men’s and women’s conditions are bolstered by the ideologies of machismo, an exaggerated masculinity associated with hypersexuality and violence, and marianismo, the notion that women should be pure, spiritual, subordinate, and self-effacing. In this chapter we describe the evidence for gender disparities in many domains of life and present a Central American derived process for social change, liberation psychology.