Secondly, women are very much excluded from the political process. Many governments lack any meaningful participation of women on issues outside those classified are ‘women’s issues’, reproductive health to name but one (CSIS, 2002). Women are not included in decision-making, they have no control over markets and worst of all there is nothing they can do about it because there is no capacity to offer resistance in the matter.
Finally, women are affected by the worldwide cultural standardisation which globalisation has promoted. Many women have suffered a complete loss of identity to a hegemonic global culture.
As outlined above women are affected by globalisation economically, politically and culturally. With reference to this, I would like to develop further the presence of women in the global economy paying particular attention to the relationship women have in connection to four main issues - labour, health, education and technology.
Women and Labour
Jaya Mehta has stated that the past two decades have seen the feminisation of the labour force, increasing women’s employment in most countries. While this may seem like a definite progression towards the empowerment of women, many are low-skilled, poor condition jobs.
‘Globalisation is viewed as a restructured process of capital accumulation in which women are recruited in preference to men because they are cheaper, more flexible, and are not expected to offer collective resistance.’ (Mehta, 1999)
Industrial Reserve Army
Mehta states that women workers have borne characteristics, which Marx mentioned for the industrial reserve army.
‘When there is a spurt in the labour demand in capitalist production, this labour can be drawn into it at low wages, thus preventing the natural wage-rate rise that would otherwise accompany increased demand. When demand shrinks, the additional labour can be laid off smoothly. Women can be sent back to their activities as domestic labourers without an increase in the unemployment statistics and without any threat to social and political stability.’ (Mehta, 1999)
The introduction of machinery into the textile industry saw women’s labour being reduced from spinning and weaving to the piecing together of broken threads. Not only was this new task monotonous and demeaning but also it was gender specific to women. Men were deemed unsuitable due to requirement of flexible nimble fingers. The alternation in the required skill to work in the textile industry enabled the capitalist to recruit the cheap labour of women and children. Such exploitation was seen one hundred years later in the production of microchips. Electronic companies required workers with nimble fingers to perform minute and repetitive jobs with intense concentration. Such companies primarily employed women (on a contact basis). As soon as the contract expired, the woman could rejoin the reserve army and engage in domestic labour without the classification of being ‘unemployed’. Mehta refers to women as ‘permanent members of the reserve army, they are permanently debarred from the privilege of entering killed employment.’ (Mehta, 1999)
Part-Time Employment
According to the World Employment Report in 1998, in Germany, the UK and Japan as much as 45 percent of women’s total employment was recorded to be part-time employment (Mehta, 1999). Part-time work facilitates reduction of labour costs to a minimum with no employment related benefits like maternity leave or paid leave. Employers also have the opportunity to dismiss part-time workers when not required. In Japan, part-time work is up to as much as 7 and half hours of work per day, which is only marginally less than a full-time job (Mehta, 1999).
Sex-Trafficking
Due to the loss of employment by many female workers in the informal or part-time sector, large numbers of these women have been pushed into the commercial sex industry. President Bush in an address to the United Nation in 2003 stated,
‘Each year, an estimated 800,000 to 900,000 human beings are bought, sold or forced across the world’s borders. Among them are hundreds of thousands of teenage girls and others as young as five, who fall victim to the sex trade.’(CSIS, 2002)
Globalisation has provided easier means for exploiting the poorest people in the world who are desperately in search of better lives. It also provides improvements in transportation and communications facilitating the physical processing of people.
Agriculture
In the developing countries of Asia, women carry out 50 percent of agriculture and food production (Guttal, 2000). Huge pressure is created on these women and their families to make local goods competitive with imported goods. This increases economic hardship for rural families. Women who stand as dual position workers (both domestic and wage worker) are placed under huge pressure to provide for their families during this hardship.
Many Asian agricultural producers rely on their traditional knowledge of local forests, plants, animals and fish to provide their food and income. However, commercial harvesting of natural resources, transference of land to private companies and the likes alienates local communities from the resource base they depend on. Reduced availability of local foods increases women’s workload of family maintenance.
‘Not only are women’s intellectual contributions to science technology and modern knowledge 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.’ (Guttal, 2000)
Women and Health
Poor working conditions and long hours of work lead to occupational diseases. 458 million women suffer from iron deficiency anaemia as against 238 million men. 450 million women are stunted by protein energy deficiency as against 400 million men (Mehta, 1999). The developing world seems to suffer when it comes to health such as lack of services, or lack of access to services and lack of education and information about health issues. Women have additional vulnerabilities- pregnancy complications, cervical and breast cancer and genital mutilation to name but a few.
HIV
Another problem that greatly affects women in the developing women (especially sub Saharan Africa and South East Asia) is that of the HIV virus. It is cited that women are at increase risk of contracting HIV due to economic reasons.
‘Financial or material dependence on men means that women cannot control when, with whom and in what circumstances they have sex; many women exchange sex for material favours, for daily survival.’ (CSIS, 2002)
‘Missing Women’
There are women born in this world who never appear in statistics. Sen estimates the number of missing women in the world stands at more than 100 million (Stark, 1999).
‘These are the abandoned infant girls in china, the brides who die in kitchen fires in India, the baby girls in Africa who are not taken to the clinic to be treated for diarrhoea as quickly as their brothers- the women and would-be women who have been unable to claim enough of the world’s resources to survive.’ (Stark, 1999)
Women and Education
Two thirds of the world’s children are not enrolled in school and two thirds of the world’s illiterate are female (CSIS, 2002). UNESCO quotes that female education has spill over effects for society, including improved fertility rates, household and child health and educational opportunities for the rest of the household (CSIS, 2002). Increased skill also allows more women to participate more in the economy thus increasing the economic prosperity of the family.
UN estimates that 63 million primary age girls are not enrolled in school (CSIS, 2002). Food security has been compromised because of the logic of global competitiveness forcing young girls to drop out of school to assist in income supplementing activities at home.
Women and Technology
Much of the world’s population remains completely unaffected by technology and globalisation. People in developing countries live on as little as $1 per day (Prentice, 2000). Education and mass communication are almost non-existent. The introduction of computer technology in countries as poor as this makes no sense as there is no opportunity for these people to obtain an education on how to use one in the first place. Bill Gates reflection on what would happen when a computer arrived in an African village simplifies this- ‘The mothers are going to walk right up to the computer and say, ‘My children are dying, what can you do?’ (Prentice, 2000)
Critique
The legal framework in many countries sees women as dependent or minor citizens. They cannot own or inherit property, seek a job or take out a bank loan without the consent of their husband or father. This marginalizes women to which they have no control over and it ties them to patriarchal structures.
Women tend to occupy a lower position on the occupational ladder in unskilled production jobs or overstaffed administrative positions. They have been given the label of ‘flexible’ workers and tend to be laid off first before men due to gender bias.
For as long as women are not part of the governing structures of their individual societies, their interests will not be met. They have everything to lose when power shifts away from the people that represent them as a race. A shift in power in favour of corporations and capital mobility distorts ideas, which are particularly sensitive to women such as freedom and equality.
‘Globalisation destabilizes existing social institutions and replaces them with impersonal market relationships and the ways in which it reduces the power of nations to regulate business, tax corporations and provide for the needs of people.’ (Griffin Cohen, 2000) The control of nation states over the mobility of multinational corporations has been seriously weakened by globalisation.
Poor countries simply cannot come up with any innovative ways to solve their problems because the process of globalisation and the presence of corporate capital have taken away any resources they may have had to do so. This relates specifically to the liberalisation of agriculture in Asia and the resulting oppression of women as discussed above.
When it comes to critically analysing globalisation and it’s affect on women, one question in particular must be addressed. Why are women greatly disadvantaged by globalisation and not men? Structural adjustment policies have a part to play in answering this question. Their aim is to balance budgets and increase competitiveness through trade and price liberalisation. These policies heighten the vulnerabilities of women with their social service decreases and the introduction and increase of ‘user fees’ in the areas of education and health care (Maghadam, 1999). Structural adjustment does not account for the fact that women’s occupational mobility is constrained by family and child rearing responsibilities.
What needs to be done?
‘If a wider range of people are to gain, globalisation must be reshaped so that it is more people centred instead of profit centred and more accountable to women’ (Sandrasagra, 2000).
• Women need to confront globalisation face on. They need to be collectively active in both local and international arenas. They need to unite in the demand for open trade negotiations so that nothing can be concluded with public intervention. The strengthening and expansion of women’s movements and organisations (i.e. the Asian Women Workers Centre in Japan or the Grassroots Women Workers Centre in Taiwan) needs to take place to greater enable them to contribute to rejecting this unjust system altogether.
• World conferences on Women (i.e. the Fourth World Conference on Women, Beijing 1995), regional preparatory meetings and the participation of many women’s non-governmental institutions (NGOs) need to continue in order to further raise questions on social and gender arrangements and making demands on employers, governments and international financial institutions.
• Nation states need to show more willingness to assert the kind of control over capital, which is necessary to minimize unemployment, protect the environment and defend citizen’s quality of life- especially of the highly disadvantaged women as discussed in this essay.
• Finally, capital must carefully be controlled and redistributed to work towards a more equitable share of the world’s wealth.
Bibliography
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Mehta, Jaya. 1999. Revolutionary Democracy: Vol. V, No.2, Sept 1999: Women and Globalisation. (Online) Available from:
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