Women and Globalisation—Some Key Issues
(Presentation at the Conference: Strategies of the Thai Women's Movement in the 21st. Century,Bangkok, March 28-29, 2000)
* Shalmali Guttal, Focus on the Global South, Thailand
Today, there are many ways to define globalisation, all the way from the "cyber" revolution to a world wide homogenisation of consumer goods and tastes. I would like to raise a few issues particularly about economic globalisation, i.e., the integration of local and national economies into an increasingly interlinked world economy—the global economy;
This world/global economy is one that both serves and promotes free and unregulated markets as primary arenas of exchange for goods, services and more recently, of money itself. This market is dominated by economic, financial and political institutions such as multi- and transnational corporations, financial speculators, investment firms, and governments of countries such as the United States, Canada, Great Britain, Australia and Japan, who have long benefited from the opportunities for political and economic gain that free market capitalism provides and therefore, have also systematically supported it.
The roots of economic globalisation as we know it today go back many years, to the period immediately after World War 2. Since then, this integration and inter-linking of diverse economies into a huge global one has been brought about by a number of different processes and mechanisms. For example:
Economic globalisation intensified at the end of the Cold War, when the collapse of the centrally planned economies of the Soviet Union and its allies no longer offered a counterweight to the free market economies of the West.
Two particularly notable characteristics of globalisation are how widespread it is, and the speed with which it has become the dominant international economic, political and cultural force. Globalisation is no longer just an economic phenomenon: it is accompanied by cultural, social and political changes and processes, and it is often difficult to say whether the economic, or the cultural or the political changes come first.
Economic globalisation is manifested today through three main neo-liberal policy prescriptions:
Distinguishing features of these neoliberal reforms are: an overall withdrawal of the state from its roles of sovereign economic decision making, providing essential public services, developing and implementing policies aimed at promoting equity, and ensuring adequate public protection for economically, socially and politically vulnerable populations. These trends are accompanied by an increase in the role and power of the private sector, and a surrender of most economic transactions to the market in the belief that free and unfettered markets will somehow lead to the most efficient allocation of resources and eventually result in economic equality.
Globalisation has not affected all countries or regions in the same way, and a country’s internal "preparedness" is critical in how it can take advantage of or be completely overrun by economic globalisation. Because of differing levels of modernisation, industrialisation and technological capacity, regions, countries and even areas within the same country have felt the impacts of globalisation quite differently. For example, in Southeast Asia, the experiences of South Korea, Thailand, Vietnam and Indonesia in terms of how they have been able to benefit from economic globalisation and what they have lost in the process are all very different.
Within countries and societies, the economic class, political privilege and other advantages that a social group may have are significant factors in whether and how people have been able to benefit from economic globalisation. By and large, those who are already wealthy, socially and politically privileged and have access to capital, higher education, productive assets (such as land) and other resources (such as technical know-how and hardware) are usually able to benefit from the economic changes brought about by globalisation. But those who are already cash poor, and socially and politically disadvantaged often face tremendous difficulties, and find themselves much worse off than before since they are compelled to operate in a more aggressive competitive economic environment but without the government/public supports that they once relied on.
In fact the latest Human Development Report shows that over the last ten years, despite more wealth in the world than ever before, there are many more poor people than ever before, and also the gap between the rich and poor is wider than ever before. By the end of the 1990s, the share in global income of the richest fifth of the world's people was 74 times the share of the poorest fifth of the world's people.
Differential Impacts on Women
The impact of economic globalisation on women needs to be assessed in light of women’s multiple roles as productive and reproductive labour in their families, as well as their contributions towards overall community cohesion and welfare, and maintaining the social fabric. Because of deep-rooted differences in gender roles and socio-cultural expectations, the impacts of economic globalisation are felt quite differently by women and men. While economic class, race and culture are also extremely important factors in determining the nature and extent of impacts, by and large, the very same policies and trends are likely to have quite different implications for women and men. I will restrict my observations to Asia.
Research in the 1980s and 1990s showed that structural adjustment policies promoted by the World Bank and IMF affected women much more deeply than men. The elimination of public subsidies for health, education and other social services resulted in a transference of the "welfare" function of the state onto families, and by extension onto girls and women. This trend became entrenched as governments continued to cut back on social spending, thus increasing the burden of caring for vulnerable community members (such as children, the aging, disabled persons or those with illness) on families. Because of women’s traditional roles in most societies in Asia as care-givers, this burden has been disproportionately borne by women than men.
In many countries, when public hospitals are privatised or the cost of professional health care goes up, middle to low income families rely more on informal or traditional forms of care. This is usually provided by the female members of households and communities because of women’s traditional roles as service providers in the home.
If basic education is privatised or if families cannot afford the rising costs of education, it is more often girls who drop out of school than boys because of beliefs that boys need formal education more than girls to prepare them for their future social roles. This has further implications for the type of employment that women are able to find when they move into the wage labour market. With lower levels of education, women will tend to be concentrated in the lower rungs of the labour market and in jobs that require less formal training or education. The replacement of manual labour with machines and new technology usually displaces more women than men since women have a larger education gap to cross compared with men (in the same class) in order to learn how to use new technologies.
Similarly, increases in the prices of food, fuel and essential services such as water and electricity place extra burdens on females in low income households since women are usually responsible for managing domestic food and water consumption, as well as ensuring the overall health of their families. Female children are generally expected to perform more housework than male children and in poor families, the labour of girls in cooking, cleaning, child care, and caring for the elderly or sick family members is essential for household maintenance, and also to free up the time of older women who need to find wage labour.
Trade liberalisation has also been shown to have differential impacts on women and men. An essential aspect of trade liberalisation is export competitiveness and much of this competitiveness in Asian countries has come from the labour of women. The development of export processing zones in the 1980s and 1990s in developing countries eager to industrialise was premised on the availability of cheap, docile, unskilled labour that would be willing to work at low wages for long hours. Given a longer history of men’s involvement in industrialised production, union organising and political negotiations in the labour market, these export processing zones targeted women as the primary work-force, relying on local cultural and social values as domesticating forces.
Research shows that no country in Asia has been able to expand its manufacturing capacity without pulling an increasing proportion of women into industrial waged employment. In the early 1990s, women accounted for more than 43 percent of the manufacturing work force in Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore and Thailand. The manufacturing sector in itself accounted for more than 20 percent of GDP in these countries. In the Thai export sector, women accounted for 90 per cent of the workforce in the canned seafood industry and 85 percent in the garment and accessory industry.
In the transition countries of Cambodia, Lao PDR and Vietnam, women’s labour is considered a significant element of their "comparative advantage" in export oriented manufacturing, as gvernments invite investors to establish manufacturing bases in their countries in an order to integrate with regional and global economies. While export industries offer women opportunities for employment and income, the unregulated and competitive nature of these trade regimes also means that women’s labour is often unprotected and dispensable. Few governments have, or are willing to enforce legislation that ensures women workers in this sector with fair living wages, benefits, occupational safety and opportunities for upgrading skills.
Another area where women have made significant contributions to local and national economies is through the informal sector. A significant portion of economic activity in Asian countries is not fully counted and does not show up in national census or survey figures, since it is conducted by women in their homes or in small community level production units. These activities range from the sale of vegetables, locally processed food and other goods (artificial flowers, accessories, etc.) to piece work for factories, and the provision of services such as cleaning, cooking, caring for the elderly, childcare, etc. It is important to note that in many Asian countries (e.g., Thailand, Lao PDR, Phillipines, Sri Lanka, India and Pakistan), a large portion of informal sector activities are commercialised or "marketised" versions of women’s traditional skills of maintaining and reproducing the family and community spheres.
While some of these activities are self-owned or self-regulated (i.e., women have reasonable control over production conditions), many are under sub-contract arrangements in which women are at the mercy of brokers who determine production and compensation rules. This is particularly the case in sub-contracted production for the manufacturing sector, which is generally organised around contracting agents who receive production contracts from larger agents and then sub-contract the work to the women workers. These workers would then perform the work in their homes, or in small production units set up by the principle contractor. A distinguishing feature of such work is that for both cultural and economic reasons, workers cannot and do not organise themselves in unions or associations to protect their rights as workers. Principle contractors are often people known and respected in the community, and take on the persona of "patrons" who bestow favours on community members through economic opportunities, etc. On the other hand, contractors may be from outside the neigbourhood or community, and will simply go elsewhere if workers decide to organise and negotiate as a group.
Many researchers argue that there is a growing "informalisation" of labour in the export manufacturing sector, and that this informalisation taps into women’s needs to balance their productive and reproductive responsibilities. Economic opportunism and profits are served by local culture and tradition, which serve as domesticating forces and ensure a supply of cheap and manageable labour. Further, the expansion of this type of sub-contracted production has increased with the globalisation of production, and trade and investment liberalisation. On one hand, the informal sector has provided women with much needed income, which in some instances also enhances their status in their families and communities. But at the same time, the inability to organise as a group in such employment makes it extremely difficult for women to negotiate better compensation, working conditions and labour protection for themselves.
The liberalisation of the agriculture sector has also affected women in a variety of ways, from losing access to local markets for their products to dislocation from traditional forms of livelihood, outward migration and re-settlement. Under trade liberalisation agreements (such as in the WTO) developing countries are bound to import a percentage of agriculture and food products for domestic consumption. The developing countries of Asia are primarily rural economies where at least 50 percent of agriculture and food production is done by women. Local and national food security is dependant on domestic production, which in turn ensures livelihood security for rural families. Obligatory imports of agricultural (especially food) products, accompanied by reduction in tariffs on imported goods and the removal of price controls creates pressure on making local goods "competitive" with imported goods (which are often subsidised in their countries of origin). This has negative impacts on food and livelihood security for domestic producers, leading to increased economic hardship for rural families and a gradual weakening of rural, self-reliant economic structures. Again, because of women’s dual roles as productive and reproductive labour, this burden is borne more heavily by women than men.
Another crucial area that is affected by trade liberalisation and privatisation regimes is natural resources, particularly in relation to bio-diversity and traditional knowledge. A huge proportion of rural communities in Asia are subsistence producers who live off common lands and resources, and rely on traditional knowledge of local forests, plants, animals and fish for food and income. In these communities, women are usually responsible for meeting the family’s daily food and livelihood needs, and are veritable storehouses of knowledge about local bio-diversity and traditional extraction practices. But with commercial harvesting of natural resources for value added production, increase in plantation and mono-cropping for export markets, and transference of land, water and resource rights to private companies, both bio-diversity and environmental quality are seriously threatened, and local communities are alienated from the resource base they depend upon..
The loss of local plant and animal species is a serious blow to women since they rely on seasonal diversity and variation to ensure food, income and health for their families. When communities are displaced or relocated from traditional lands to make way for commercial enterprises, women are particularly disempowered since their sphere of activity is usually limited to local forests, rivers and common lands. Reduced access to these lands and resources, and reduced availability of local foods increases women’s work-load of family maintenance. The introduction of new resource tenure systems often marginalises women from access to and control over all types of resources—natural, economic and political.
Bio-piracy and the patenting of women’ traditional knowledge of biodiversity and production processes by private corporations also disempowers women in very particular ways. Not only are women’s intellectual contributions to science, technology and modern know-how not recognised, but also, they are compelled to pay for the very resources that they have nurtured and protected for generations as these resources enter markets in the form of medicines and processed foods.
While women in such situations face the danger of losing ownership and control over their indigenous resources through trade liberalisation, they do not necessarily gain access to new resources. Patents on products derived from local bio-diversity do not involve royalty payments to women and their communities who have stewarded and built a store of knowledge about these resources. Nor are women compensated for the "opportunity" costs of losing access to their primary sources of food and livelihood. The introduction of new, valued adding production technologies does not necessarily benefit rural women since they usually have neither the required capital nor the base of education and skills required to take advantage of these changes. Unless accompanied by deliberate measures to transfer new technologies and know how to women, the introduction of new technologies often displaces them from traditional areas of autonomy and control
The above are just some examples of how women are affected by economic globalisation. The range of impacts is both vast and complex, and these impacts vary across countries, social and economic status, culture, and also across time. What were considered opportunities ten years ago may be considered threats today, as in the case of some types of export processing zones, commercial agricultural production practices, etc. Further, it can be argued that the forces of economic globalisation impact women at two broad levels. First, at the immediate experiential level such as lowered wages, reduced access to land and resources, less food, greater workload, etc. And second, at a more "structural" or strategic level, where impacts are not necessarily visible today, but which lead to a longer-term disempowerment of women.
Gaps in Knowledge
One of the biggest challenges of tracing and fully understanding the ways in which globalisation affects women is the absence of sex-disaggregated indicators and data in key sectors such as agricultural production and employment, services, and the informal sector. While independent researchers and institutions such as UNIFEM are gathering information and showing how women are affected by current economic trends, many of the indicators and methods used to monitor these trends are in and of themselves not gender sensitive. For example, internationally accepted indicators of income-related poverty do not provide information on the particular incidence of poverty among women (what is called the "feminisation of poverty"). While household surveys on consumption or spending can provide sex-disaggregated data, they cannot measure or take into consideration gender inequality within households, which is usually a significant factor in the manner and the degree to which women are affected by new opportunities and trends.
The above gaps in information also have serious consequences for the development of women-friendly national and global economic and social policies, and in transforming the forces of economic globalisation to be beneficial rather than hostile to women. While there is plenty of "evidence" that liberalisation, privatisation and deregulation have disproportionately affected women negatively (particularly in lower income groups), this evidence is not accepted as valid by policy makers since it does not fit into their accepted frameworks and analytical practices. At the same time, the knowledge base that informs national and global policy making is blind not only to gender differences, but also to the political disadvantages that result from differences in race, class, culture and ethnicity.
The full measure of impacts of economic globalisation on women, and the development of progressive policy measures to counter these measures will not receive the attention it deserves until this dominant knowledge base is challenged and reconstructed.
References (further details available on request):
Beneria, Lourdes: Gender and the Construction of Global Markets, New York, March 1999.
Elson, Diane: Gender Budget Initiative: Background Papers, June, 1999
Ghosh, Jayathi: Women and Trade in the Asia-Pacific Region, New Delhi, May 1998
Shiva, Vandhana: Food security, women, and rural communities in South and Southeast Asia: implications of the post-Uruguay Round, Bangkok, 1996.
UNDP: Human Development Report 1999
UNIFEM: Targets and Indicators, Selections from Progress of the World’s Women, 2000
Wee, Vivienne: Trade liberalisation and women: an overview, Singapore, 1998