As a region, Latin America has been at the forefront of recent global trends to improve women’s rights and gender equality. Yet we lack a comprehensive framework or approach to make sense of these trends, and, in particular, to investigate the politics that produce them and shape future policy processes. To that end, this paper engages with a series of questions to orient future research by building typologies and a conceptual framework for studying gender equality policies in Latin America in comparative perspective. By incorporating concepts, typologies, and theories developed from existing cross-national research in a conceptual framework applicable to Latin American cases, the paper bridges the divide between existing comparative research on gender equality policy and Latin American research, often based on single case studies. It argues that categorizing gender policies for comparative purposes should include more explicit acknowledgment of the aims of the policy in question from a feminist perspective (ie., equality and autonomy for women must be central) and demonstrates the utility of this approach using the cases of Argentina, Chile, and Mexico.
