Contribution short abstract:

The paper examines strategies through which men and women in Medellin, Colombia have negotiated, contested, or resisted change in gender norms in the context of rising female employment, to shed light on contributing factors to slow progress in domestic equality.

Contribution long abstract:

Since the 1980s, Colombian women have undergone a rapid catch-up in their labour force participation, while men’s participation in unpaid work has been slow to change. Women’s negotiations to participate in paid work often rest on compromises that promise to uphold their domestic responsibilities or adapt their work arrangements and aspirations around housekeeping and caregiving. How, then, do men and women negotiate resilient gender norms around the division of unpaid work?

The paper investigates how gender norms are themselves subject to negotiation in intra-household bargaining processes (Agarwal, 1997) in Medellin’s urban periphery. It is based on a mixed-methods study of households in Medellin’s popular sectors between 2020 and early 2021, in a context of crisis during the COVID-19 pandemic. It identifies diverse practices through which men and women negotiate, contest, or resist change in gender norms in Medellin households. These include practices of withholding, deflection, engagement, and reframing. It differentiates between strategies that directly contest norms and those that occur within normative boundaries and their likelihood of changing the division of labour. The most successful strategies appeared to draw on values of responsibility, a new sense of belonging, companionship, and reinterpretations of masculine identity that acknowledge the positive benefits of men’s involvement in the family. Research findings also suggest that in the Colombian context, because of the cultural significance of the family, persuasions and negotiations between generations emerge as a critical pathway through which norms change or are reproduced, in addition to interactions between cohabitating partners.