Gender equality in the labor market remains a difficult challenge in Latin America and recent literature shows that child penalties play an important role in explaining these gaps. While policies to address gaps related to parenthood were introduced in recent decades, evidence of its effects is still scarce. This paper presents comparable evidence on the adoption of family leaves legislation in 15 Latin American countries and discusses its relationship with the evolution of the gender gaps in the labor market and the prevailing gender norms. We document that from 2000 to 2019 almost all countries increased the weeks covered by maternity, paternity, or parental leaves. Following a similar approach to that of Olivetti and Petrongolo (2017), we exploit the variations over time and control for country and year-fixed effects to study the relationship between the extension of family leaves and women’s outcomes. We find that these policies are successful in increasing female employment and reducing employment gaps in countries departing from a worse situation in terms of leave coverage or with more traditional perceptions of gender roles. On the other hand, for countries with more egalitarian gender perceptions, our results suggest that the extension of family leaves contributes to reduce the income gaps.

劳动力市场中的性别平等仍然是拉丁美洲的一项艰巨挑战，最近的文献表明，儿童处罚在解释这些差距方面发挥着重要作用。尽管近几十年来出台了解决与生育相关的差距的政策，但其影响的证据仍然很少。本文提供了 15 个拉丁美洲国家采用家事假立法的可比证据，并讨论了其与劳动力市场性别差距演变和现行性别规范的关系。我们记录到，从 2000 年到 2019 年，几乎所有国家都增加了产假、陪产假或育儿假的周数。采用与 Olivetti 和 Petrongolo (2017) 类似的方法，我们利用随时间的变化以及对国家和年份固定效应的控制来研究家庭假延长与妇女成果之间的关系。我们发现，这些政策成功地增加了女性就业并缩小了在休假覆盖率方面情况较差或对性别角色有更传统观念的国家的就业差距。另一方面，对于性别观念更加平等的国家，我们的研究结果表明，延长探亲假有助于缩小收入差距。