CSR and Instrumental Freedoms for Gender Equality at Work 1 ENHANCING CAPABILITIES FOR GENDER EQUITY AT WORK: LINKING CORPORATE SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY (CSR) AND INSTRUMENTAL FREEDOMS

This paper explores the impact of corporate social responsibility (CSR), or the commitment of business to contribute to sustainable development, on gender equality in a sample of Latin American companies using the capability approach as a framework. By applying this approach, CSR is defined as a social conversion factor which has the potential of enabling people’s capabilities and functionings by impacting specific instrumental freedoms within and beyond the organisational boundaries. It is then proposed that in order to study gender equality at work these specific instrumental freedoms needed to go beyond the original Sen’s proposal and explore the phenomena of gender in organisations. By doing so, five specific instruments for equality were identified in the literature and their impacts on the actual female worker’s achievement in organisations were explored. Consequently, we used partial least squares path analysis to study the relationships between CSR, gender instrumental freedoms, and women’s achievement at work in a sample of 130 companies in Latin America. Results show that CSR has a good predictive impact on each of the five proposed instrumental freedoms for gender equality at work. However, only one of the five instrumental freedoms, training guarantees for women, showed a significant effect on the measure of female achievement. Implications for public policy and organisational practices are discussed.