Las personas mayores y la igualdad de género en las propuestas de sistemas nacionales de cuidado en América Latina y el Caribe: Una discusión necesaria

Abstract

For more than a decade, care has integrated the public agendas of governments in the Latin American and Caribbean region. States have begun to recognize that the care model focused on family and feminized provision is unfair and inefficient. They also assume that care represents a structural node of social and gender inequalities.

Different countries are designing and debating the implementation of national care systems, which seek to reorganize the provision of care under the rights and gender equality approach in terms of services and benefits, but also with respect to the conditions in which carers provide care, both paid and unpaid. Older people who require care are one of the target populations of these systems under construction. For them, the social organization of care is practically family-oriented for most of the population. This article reflects on the approach to care for older people in the current debate on national care systems in the Latin American region from a gender and rights approach. To do this, it analyses the public policy instruments created and implemented, as well as those designed in the proposals under discussion, their conceptions of the elderly and their policies regarding defamiliarization and defeminization of care.