The Feminist Tide and Everyday Gender in Latin America

My dissertation examines the rise and impact of a decade of massive feminist mobilizations, media debate, policy change, and cultural transformation so sudden that some refer to it as a “tsunami” rather than “tide.” While not the first feminist uprising in the region, it was the first to achieve such breadth and diversity of participation. Scholars attribute its rise to frustration with male-dominated politics and the shortcomings of earlier gender-violence policies. Others highlight its intersectional diagnosis of gender violence, which connects it to racial, colonial, and environmental oppressions. Yet we still know little about how individuals came to participate in the Feminist Tide, whether and how it transformed them, and we lack systematic data on how diverse participation truly was. 

Through a mixed-methods approach, that integrates 69 life-history interviews with women and gender non-conforming individuals (each lasting 2 to 3.5 hours) and a survey of women’s protest participation in Uruguay, I introduce chain identification as a novel framework to understand feminist mobilization and everyday gender politics in Latin America. Chain identification, I propose, is a two-way process of making sense of sexist violence that connects “exceptional” feminicides to everyday sexist violence, which in turn, triggers identification between movement participants and victims of feminicide. I believe that the concept of chain identification can help make sense of mobilization processes in other contexts as well as feminist mobilization in Latin America.

Equality Takes Work

In my solo-authored article titled, “Equality Takes Work: A Process to Understand Why Women Still Do Most of the Household Labor,” published at Social Forces, I consider why women in different-sex relationships continue to do more household labor than men, even when they have egalitarian goals and few structural constrains. Specifically, I examine how couples attempt to reach egalitarian households, and why these attempts so often fail. Using data from 40 in-depth individual interviews of 20 cisgender, different-sex, college-educated couples in the U.S., I conduct a micro-level analysis of household labor processes. I theorize about and provide evidence for a process that I call “equality work,” the distinctive work that creating an egalitarian household division of labor entails, which often falls to women. This suggests that doing less household labor, paradoxically, requires more work from women. My research deepens our understanding of how women navigate their egalitarian goals and unequal realities, showing the impact of egalitarian ideals on their behavior and agency, and the fact that they are not passively accepting unequal household arrangements. This year, the paper won the Jocher Paper Award at UNC-Chapel Hill, and the James W. Prothro Student Paper Competition by the Southern Association for Public Opinion Research (SAPOR) and the Odum Institute.

Beyond Equality

In a working paper, “Beyond ‘Equality’: Work and Family Preferences in Contemporary U.S.,” co-authored with Joanna Pepin at the University of Toronto, I further investigate why household gender inequality persists despite a growing endorsement of egalitarian relationship preferences. We hypothesize that there has been an overestimation of the desire for equal partnerships, especially as defined by evenly shared household and financial responsibilities. Our analysis uses original survey data from a U.S. representative sample of 1,000 respondents that I designed and collected myself. Findings indicate that only a quarter of respondents considered evenly sharing paid and unpaid labor their ideal. Additionally, rejecting gender essentialism – the belief that men and women are inherently different – was associated with a greater likelihood of endorsing the even-sharing ideal. We argue that overlooking the variety of work-family arrangements seen as egalitarian by many Americans leads to an erroneous disregard of gender beliefs as barriers to equal partnerships.

Reducing Gender Biases in Pay Decisions

In another working paper, “Does Pay Information Reduce or Reinforce Gender Biases in Pay Decisions? Gender Attitudes as a Moderating Factor,” co-authored with Katherine Weisshaar (Northwestern University) and Esra Burak Ho, we examine whether pay information can reduce inequality in pay-setting decisions. Using two original nationally representative survey experiments in the U.S., we test competing theories: that pay information enables evaluators to correct biases and reduce inequality, or that it entrenches beliefs about women’s lower status. We find that evaluators perceive gender pay gaps in rival organizations as unfair and adjust their own decisions, narrowing the gender gap in pay. However, these effects are found among respondents with egalitarian gender attitudes, suggesting that the potential of pay information to reduce inequality depends on underlying beliefs. This paper contributes theoretically and empirically to understanding when and how external pay transparency can address gender inequality in the labor market.