Rather than keeping women in the home, training programs helped them enter the workforce and sparked long-lasting changes in gender roles.
Dictators often aim to spread their ideology to boost popularity, and social organizations offer an effective way to reach many people. From past authoritarian regimes in Europe to modern ones in Latin America, many autocrats have tried to indoctrinate their populations. In a recent study, we examine the case of female social organizations under Chile’s Pinochet dictatorship (1973-1990).
Augusto Pinochet promoted conservative gender roles, encouraging women to embrace motherhood and domesticity through large-scale training programs targeting female social organizations. The regime provided millions of programs to 10% of working-age women, mainly adult married mothers, teaching them domestic skills to be used at home. This effort was intended to reinforce traditional values, suppress female labor force participation, and shape political preferences in favor of the dictatorship’s ideology.
Our study analyzes the impact of these programs on female labor participation, conservative values, and political preferences, using new data on the geographic locations of the training facilities. We use proximity to these facilities to measure exposure to the programs and track trends in marriage rates, fertility, and labor force participation across genders in Chile over a 60-year period. Additionally, we examine gender-specific political support for the dictatorship in the 1988 referendum that paved the way for Chile’s democratic transition, drawing from gender-segregated polling booth data.
We find two key results. First, contrary to the regime’s expectations, the training programs led to an immediate increase in female labor force participation. Women’s political support for the dictatorship, religious identities, and men’s labor force participation were not significantly affected by the presence of training facilities. The training programs may have encouraged women to enter the labor market by providing them with marketable skills, helping them gain work experience, and facilitating networking opportunities within their communities, where they could exchange job information with other women.
Second, the increase in female labor force participation proved to be persistent. Even 30 years after the dictatorship ended, the effect was still evident, suggesting that the programs permanently altered societal views on gender roles. Motivated by this observation, we studied the next generation and found that daughters of women who were exposed to the training programs also exhibited higher labor force participation in 2017.
Ultimately, the Pinochet regime’s attempt to indoctrinate women and reinforce conservative gender roles backfired. Rather than keeping women in the home, the training programs helped them enter the workforce and sparked long-lasting changes in gender roles. This case demonstrates that autocrats can struggle to impose their ideology, and their policies can have unintended and lasting economic and social consequences. The rise in female labor force participation contrasts sharply with the regime’s goal of promoting traditional domestic roles for women.
© Felipe González, Mounu Prem, Cristine von Dessauer
Felipe González is Reader in Economics at Queen Mary, University of London and Visiting Professor at Pontifica Universidad Catolica der Chile
Mounu Prem is Associate professor at the Einaudi Institute for Economics and Finance and IZA Research Fellow
Cristine von Dessauer is PhD student at MIT
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