Care, Inequalities, and Conviviality. The Impacts of the COVID-19 Pandemic in Berlin, Buenos Aires and Mexico City
By Raquel Rojas, Juan I. Piovani, Laura Flamand, Sérgio Costa, and Carlos Alba
This article is a shortened version of the eponymous MECILA Working Paper, which was originally published by the Maria Sibylla Merian Centre Conviviality-Inequality in Latin America in 2025 and can be read here.
1. Introduction
Care activities are essential for the reproduction of society and the maintenance of life. When the capacity to raise and educate children, cook meals, care for the sick, or maintain clean homes, healthy environments and strong communities is diminished, the entire social order crumbles. Feminist scholars and activists have long advocated for the valorization of these activities and the recognition of care as a crucial component of the economy. And while discussions of the crisis of care are not new in feminist literature, it was in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic that care seemed to become one of the most urgent issues of our time.
In this text, we approach the COVID-19 pandemic as a magnifying glass to analyse the distribution of care and its impact on both social inequalities and the patterns of living together that we refer to as “conviviality”. Our empirical analysis focuses on the cases of Argentina, Mexico, and Germany, drawing on a comparative survey conducted in the largest city of each country: Buenos Aires, Mexico City, and Berlin.
The theoretical starting point of our discussion is the research program of the Maria Sibylla Merian Centre Conviviality-Inequality in Latin America (Costa 2019; Mecila 2018). Accordingly, conviviality and inequality are reciprocally constituted insofar as inequalities shape social interactions but only acquire meaning and produce social impacts in concrete social interactions. Following this logic, we understand conviviality in this paper not as a normative category, e.g. as a synonym for peaceful cohabitation, but in a strictly analytical sense: a situational category that refers to the interactional moment of social relations. The co-constitutive link between conviviality and inequality appears abstract at first glance but becomes tangible in concrete webs of interactions referred to in this article as convivial configurations. These can refer to both social microspheres (e.g. families) and macrospheres (a city, a country), as well as to the connections between these different levels.
There is a dynamic relationship between care, inequalities and conviviality. In this sense, the social organization of care – the ways in which societies organize the provision of, and access to, care – is a central constitutive element of convivial constellations, that is, the way how people live together in a certain society. This can be observed at the level of the household, where there is a gendered division of care work that disproportionately burdens women and girls, with implications for roles and relationships within the family and beyond.
However, depending on their position in the social structure, some households have sufficient resources to pay for care services, thus commodifying care and transferring at least part of the burden to others, and freeing up time for (female) family members to participate in the labour market. This process exacerbates inequalities between households, not only because some are able to outsource care responsibilities and free time for their members to generate income, while others are not, but also because those who provide care to the former group tend to belong to the latter and receive significantly lower wages for their work, as in the case of domestic workers.
Moreover, depending on the context, domestic workers tend to be of different ethnicity, class or citizenship than their employers. In Latin America, for example, they are disproportionately black and indigenous, while their employers are mostly white or creole elites (Valenzuela et al. 2020). Accordingly, in contexts where their employment is common, this practice generates complex convivial configurations (Rojas 2022), both at the micro level of the household and throughout the social structure. For example, a wealthy family that hires someone to do domestic work in Brazil or Mexico may have a more equitable gendered distribution of care within the employer couple, but at the expense of more intersectional inequalities, as the likely Afro-descendant or indigenous woman they hire accumulates care responsibilities in her own household and that of her employers.
At the macro level, these imbalances reinforce existing inequalities, as the children of domestic workers face care deficits that may limit their life chances. Care inequalities, i.e. the hierarchical distribution of both care responsibilities and care benefits, show not only a strong gender bias, but also a bias in terms of ethnicity, race, region and class. In sum, care inequalities are intersectional.
In this paper, we aim to examine how the COVID-19 pandemic has affected care inequalities and, consequently, convivial configurations in different care provision models. There is a large body of literature on the impact of the pandemic on the (already inequitable) distribution of care responsibilities (Batthyány and Sanchez 2020; ECLAC and UN Women 2020; Stefanović 2023; Rojas et al. 2024; Strevano et al. 2021). We want to go one step further: our goal is to comparatively analyse the effects of the pandemic on the restructuring of convivial configurations at the micro and macro levels, comparing not only diverse social groups but also societies in which care is organized in different ways. In short, we want to examine how the pandemic has affected the relationship between conviviality and inequality within different modes of care provision.
[…]
3. Care Provision Models in Argentina, Mexico and Germany
Care encompasses the different activities and practices that are essential to meet people’s basic needs and provide them with the physical, emotional, and symbolic elements necessary to live in society (Rodríguez Enríquez 2015: 36). Care is thus an inherently broad concept, allowing for rich analysis but making it difficult to operationalize. This means that we must make some choices when constructing a typology of care provision, as we cannot include all aspects. Given our focus on the COVID-19 pandemic, we will concentrate on two dimensions: childcare and health services.[1] Childcare is not only a dimension typically considered when classifying care regimes (Giordano 2022), but also became a critical point during the lockdown mandates that dictated school closures for almost two years, and an important vector in the reproduction of inequalities. Health services also emerge as a key aspect in the context of the global spread of an infectious disease and is thus important for our typology.
To answer the questions that will help us build our typology of care provision as described in section 2, we have selected several indicators for each dimension (early childhood care and health services) and for each actor in the care diamond, as shown in Table 1 and described below.
Table 1. Selected indicators for classifications into types of care provision and their sources

So, who cares, who pays, and where is care provided in the three cases we analyse in this paper? In Mexico and Argentina, the state has a rather small presence in the provision of care. Argentina does not have a statutory system of childcare services for children between the ages of 0 and 2 (ILO 2023a), and even if such a service exists in Mexico, it does not seem to be very effective, considering that 96% of children in this age group are not enrolled in public or private childcare and early education centres (OECD 2023). That falls disproportionately on the shoulders of women, who are much more likely than men to be outside the labour market precisely because of their care responsibilities. Not only is the gender gap in labour market participation much wider in these countries – 30.2 percentage points in Mexico and 19.6 in Argentina, compared with 10.5 in Germany, according to ILO (ILO 2023b) – but, in the case of Mexico, 67.3% of women cite care responsibilities as the main reason for not participating in the labour market, compared with only 9.4% of men. In Argentina, the figures are 30.4% for women and 4.5% for men (ILO 2018).
In addition, households in these countries are forced to spend a high proportion of their income on health care. While 9.57% of households in Argentina and 4.44% in Mexico reported spending more than 10% of their budget on health, this was the case for only 1.53% of households in Germany. In a more difficult situation, 3% of households in Argentina and 1% in Mexico reported spending more than 25% of their total budget on health. No household in Germany reported such a level of expenditure (WHO 2024).
Maternity, paternity, and parental leaves are rights mediated by the labour market. According to ILO data (ILO 2023a), only Germany guarantees the 14 weeks of maternity leave established by the ILO Maternity Protection Convention 183, while Argentina and Mexico do not recognize this “maternalist floor” (Blofield and Franzoni 2015), granting new mothers 13 and 12 weeks of leave, respectively. Paternity leave provisions are far more limited: fathers receive 5 days in Mexico and only 2 days in Argentina, reflecting the absence of policies that actively promote paternal involvement in childcare. Germany, by contrast, grants up to 312 weeks of job-protected parental leave per child, shared between both parents and inclusive of the 14 weeks of maternity leave.[2]
It is also important to ask what the eligibility criteria are for access to these benefits. For example, while self-employed workers in Germany and Argentina are covered by mandatory maternity leave cash benefits, this is not the case in Mexico, where only wage earners are guaranteed this right. In addition, self-employed workers in Germany also have access to parental cash benefits. Moreover, if we consider that informality in the labour market is 4.2% in Germany, 51.2% in Argentina and 56.3% in Mexico (ILO 2023b), we can also conclude that the proportion of the population with access to maternity and paternity/parental leave varies widely, as it is well known that those who work informally – disproportionately women and the lower classes – are excluded from these benefits.
Another indicator of market participation in childcare, and one that is particularly relevant for Latin American societies, is the percentage of the female population in the labour market that reports working as a domestic employee. The figures are 17.8% in Argentina, 10.1% in Mexico and 1.1% in Germany (ILO 2021). Although household workers may not be hired (exclusively) to care for children, we use this figure as a proxy for this service, since it is well known that in highly unequal societies, “the hiring of mostly female personnel for work in familial settings is an alternative to public provision [of care] in institutional settings” (Blofield and Franzoni 2015: 45).
Now, when access to the market is not an option due to low income, government services are not available, and family members cannot take on the responsibility of caregiving, community care practices meet the need. This is the case for many families living in impoverished areas of Latin America. In Argentina, for example, many communitarian organizations have emerged in response to the hyperinflation of the late 1980s, the high unemployment of the 1990s, and the crisis of 2001 (Sanchís 2020). Despite the great heterogeneity among them – some are linked to religious groups, others to social movements or political associations, some receive some government funding, and all have varying degrees of institutionalization – there are common features: the key role played by women, the importance of territorial inscription, and the relevance of these services to social groups from the lower income brackets (Sanchís 2020; Zibecchi 2020).
Among the many experiences in Buenos Aires and its metropolitan area – the area to which we applied our survey – a wide variety of heterogeneous projects and interventions have been analysed by scholars, such as those that focus on the health of children and pregnant women, on nutritional aspects, on the situation of the population with drug problems, on the prevention of gender violence, on school assistance, and also on community care services for preschool children (Fournier 2017; Rosas and Araujo 2021; Rosas 2018; Zibecchi 2015).
In Mexico, too, communitarian practices that had been in place for decades (Lomnitz 1973) became much more visible during the COVID-19 pandemic. Challenging the idea that communal care practices are something to be found predominantly in rural and indigenous communities, a variety of groups organized in Mexico City to provide food, childcare, and even emotional support and physical activity (Villanueva Gutiérrez 2023). In a context where state support was perceived as inadequate and needs were growing; community solutions were a means of alleviating hunger and despair.
With this constellation and considering the ideal types described above, we classify the cases of Argentina and Mexico as familialized/commodified: the family is the main provider of care[3], and the market also plays an important role for those who can pay for care services. At the same time, the lower presence of the state makes the model more fragmented, since access to (quality) care services is strongly mediated by family resources.
In Germany, on the other hand, the state is much more present: there is a universal and free system of childcare services for children between the ages of 1 and 2, and a national system of preschool education for children between the ages of 3 and 5 (ILO 2023a). In addition, virtually all women with children under 1 have access to cash benefits, which reach only 10.4% of mothers with newborns in Mexico, and 31.7% in Argentina (ILO 2020). In terms of health services, Germany scores 88 on the Universal Health Coverage Index (WHO 2024), meaning that most of the population receives the health services they need without incurring catastrophic health expenditures. Mexico’s score is 75 and Argentina’s is 79.
Nevertheless, the family is still a key player in Germany, especially female family members (Eggers et al. 2023). This is even more evident when we look at the situation in other European countries: while 46.4% of women in Germany who are not in the labour market say that care responsibilities are the main reason, the average in high- income countries is 19.6% (ILO 2018). And the fact that 61% of children up to the age of 2 are not enrolled in childcare or early education services in Germany (OECD 2023) underscores the importance of the family in caring for young children.
The market, on the other hand, is not a key player in this case: childcare services are largely financed or subsidized by the state, and the participation of household workers is significantly low, considering that only 1.1% of the female population in the labour market reports working as a domestic employee (ILO 2021). According to the typology developed in section 2, with a strong family and state presence, Germany is then classified as a familialized/de-commodified model of care provision.
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Notes
[1] However, we recognize that there are many other elements to consider when discussing care services and policies. For a more comprehensive overview, see Bango and Cossani (2021).
[2] Under the Bundeselterngeld- und Elternzeitgesetz (BEEG, Federal Parental Allowance and Parental Leave Act), each parent is entitled to up to 3 years (156 weeks) of job-protected parental leave per child. These entitlements are independent, so in principle both parents could take leave simultaneously, amounting to a combined total of 312 weeks.
[3] The fact that, during his presidential mandate in México, Manuel López Obrador declared that families are the main social security institution, illustrates this quite clearly (Yahoo News 2020).
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About the Authors:
Raquel Rojas, a former Postdoctoral Investigator at Mecila, is a Teaching Associate in Gender and Reproduction at the University of Cambridge.
Juan Ignacio Piovani is a full Professor at the Faculty of Humanities, UNLP, and a Principal Investigator at Mecila.
Laura Flamand is a Professor-Researcher at the Center for International Studies, a coordinator of the Network on Inequality Studies at El Colegio de México, and a Principal Investigator at Mecila.
Sérgio Costa, Professor of Sociology at the Freie Universität Berlin, is a spokesperson for and a Principal Investigator at Mecila. He also is a member of the board of the Forum Transregionale Studien.
Carlos Alba Vega is the coordinator of the Seminar on Work and Inequalities at El Colegio de México and a Principal Investigator at Mecila.
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Citation: Raquel Rojas, Juan I. Piovani, Laura Flamand, Sérgio Costa, and Carlos Alba, Care, Inequalities, and Conviviality. The Impacts of the COVID-19 Pandemic in Berlin, Buenos Aires and Mexico City, in: TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research, 25.08.2025, https://trafo.hypotheses.org/61630
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Forum Transregionale Studien (September 25, 2025). Care, Inequalities, and Conviviality. The Impacts of the COVID-19 Pandemic in Berlin, Buenos Aires and Mexico City. TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research. Retrieved February 12, 2026 from https://doi.org/10.58079/14qsj




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