Gender and Globalization
“Globalization is a gendered phenomenon” (Hawkesworth, 2006:2). This means that globalization affects men and women differently and that the socio-economic changes it brought about also affects the power relations involved in masculine domination. In some areas, patriarchal domination is modified to accommodate global capital, whereas in others, we witness the process of depatriarchalization – the progressive dismantling of patriarchal mechanisms. In this section, we examine the different ways in which globalization is a gendered process.
Feminization of the Labor Force
In the past 20 years, as we have seen, more and more women have entered the paid workforce. This comes in addition to the informal work they do (small scale, home-based production) as well as the subsistence work they provide for free to their families. This increase in the number of women in paid employment is referred to as the feminization of the labor force. It simply means that, by and large, the proportion of female workers has increased in different sectors of the economy, beyond household-based production. This trend is directly related to globalization.
When industrializing countries, such as Mexico or Indonesia, sought to attract foreign capital and western corporations, they created export-processing zones (EPZs, such as the above-mentioned maquiladoras). EPZs are areas in a country that are exempt from taxations as well as unions and labor and environmental regulations. It is therefore profitable for foreign companies to establish plants there and to benefit from a cheap workforce available. Women constitute 70 to 90% of workers (around 200 million women) in EPZs, working in industries as diverse as textile, electronics or pharmaceuticals. Plant managers and owners deliberately seek out a feminized workforce as, in such countries, women are socialized to be obedient to males, to refrain from behaviors such as drinking and to work hard. Patriarchal cultures also entitle managers to pay women lower salaries than they would with a male workforce.
The feminization of the workforce is also part of a general shift toward a service economy which is divided into a well-paying and male-dominated sector (such as the law, financial services and information technology) and a low-paid, highly feminized sector (such as home-care, elder-care, child-care, retail or domestic labor and cleaning services). Because of the greater numbers of female professionals in the high-paying sector in core countries has immensely increased the demand for women from semi-peripheral and peripheral countries needed to do the housework and carework.
Finally, the feminization of the labor force also means the feminization of working conditions through the processes of informalization and flexibility of employment. Informalization refers to a process whereby workers are employed not directly by the company that will sell the products of their work but by a sub-contractor (or sometimes, several layers of sub-contractors). Sub-contracted workers may sometimes work from home for low pay and no benefits and no job security. Flexibility refers to a form of employment where workers work not a usual 8 hours a day, 40 hours a week (or a 9 to 5 job) but work on a flexible schedule as needed by the employer. Employment may then be full-time or part-time, with or without overtime pay, and work shifts are organized on a 24 hour cycle. Such employment used to be reserved to women whereas men enjoyed more stable, full-time employment, sometimes with benefits. More and more, even male workers are subjected to feminized working conditions. As Hawkesworth notes, in 1975, 80% of all active workers were eligible for unemployment compensation; by 1995, that number had dropped to 25%.
Feminization of Poverty
Globally, 70% of the poor are women. This phenomenon is called feminization of poverty, that is, the process through which women are disproportionately more likely to become and stay poor.
Feminization of poverty can occur as a result of brutal shift in the economy. When communist countries in Eastern Europe transitioned to a market economy, women were disproportionately affected: 80% of them lost their jobs, especially in highly skilled fields, such as medicine. These women were unable to find work at the same level than what they used to do. They had to settle for low-paying service jobs, including sex workers. As a result, the wage gap increased dramatically: before the fall of communism, Russian women made 70% of the average male wage; by 2005, they only made 40%.
Job loss and the resulting poverty are themselves the product of another aspect of globalization: privatization. Privatization occurs when former state-owned companies are sold to private investors and owners. As mentioned in chapter 3, privatization is often a required condition of structural adjustment programs imposed on countries from the Global South looking for debt relief from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.
When structural adjustment programs are implemented in a peripheral country, several things happen that affect women: (a) the state is required to considerably reduce the number of people it employs either directly or through state-provided services such as health care and education (which employed high numbers of women); (b) state-owned companies are sold to investors and this usually results in layoffs, mostly of women workers, (c) states are encouraged to open EPZs to generate foreign investments which, in turn, will provide lower-paying positions, largely filled by women. The end result is a global impoverishment of women.
As Mary Hawkesworth shows (2006: 20), the reduction in the number of state employees affects women disproportionately as they tend to be the ones working in social welfare agencies, schools and hospitals. At the same time, the parts of the state that are not negatively affected by privatization tend to be male dominated: police, military, commerce and finances. In this sense, structural adjustment policies contribute to a “regendering of the state” on the basis of male privilege. Additionally, the loss of jobs in the formal (formally contracted and paid) economy tends to push women in the informal sector (informalization) with low pay and no recognition.
Feminization of poverty also refers to the treatment of the poor as a feminized category of people. This means treating the poor as irrational, irresponsible, incapable of making the right decision for themselves and who needs direction from superior social actors (such as social workers, employers, law enforcement and court officers). This feminization was underlying the welfare reform in the United States in 1996, where the problem of poverty was defined as a moral problem: the poor don’t have the values, the work ethic, or the drive (all masculine traits) to get out of poverty. By pushing them into the workforce, mostly into low-paying service jobs, the new welfare programs would teach them self-reliance and responsibility (also masculine traits) in spite of themselves.
Moreover, the jobs now available to welfare recipients in the United States or to workers in the Global South share the feminized characteristic of being jobs that involve a subservient attitude. This subservience is directed at the employer (in the case of domestic work), at the manager (in the case of factory work), at the social welfare representative (in the case of welfare to work program), but it can also mean the subservience of entire countries to the world market and its dominant institutions (IMF and World Bank), that, like any patriarchal institutions, teach debt-ridden countries responsibility, austerity and strength. It is not surprising to find that the policies of these global institutions are perceived as a new form of colonialism – neocolonialism – since the early form of colonialism (see chapter 7) was itself a gendered process: western countries used military and economic power to subdue poorer and weaker countries and dominate them and treat their populations as feminized, that is, with a mix of paternalism and brutality under the ideological guise of doing so for these population’s own good (to civilize them).
In this sense, rather than destroy traditional culture, from a gender point of view, as Mary Hawkesworth summarizes, “feminization produces marked inequalities, which workers, rendered docile and subservient accept with resignation. (…) Feminization restores features of oppressive feudal relations, such as indentured servitude, servile relations, political disenfranchisement, and sexual slavery” (2006:24). This phenomenon is especially visible in the context of the feminization of transnational migration.
Feminization of Migration
According to Mary Hawkesworth (2006:14), “Some 60 million women, drawn predominantly from poor nations, constitute a mobile labor force criss-crossing the globe in search of livelihood. Certain migratory circuits have been well-mapped: South Asia to the Middle East, former Soviet states to Western Europe, Mexico and Central America to Canada and the United States, and Africa to Europe.” This mass migration has become essential to the economies of certain countries like the Philippines where remittances from overseas workers contribute the payment of the country’s debt. In addition, if these overseas workers were to try to find jobs in the Filipino labor market, the unemployment rate would go up 40%. Sending women overseas, in other words, has become essential to support the national economy.
When these women from the semi-periphery or periphery migrate to the core countries, they usually become employed as maids, nannies or sex workers. These women are often educated and sometimes help mid-level or professional positions but their insufficient salaries forced them to turn their children over to other female relatives and leave in order to increase their incomes by taking lower positions in core countries. In this sense, childcare, homemaking and sex have been globally commodified (where these activities become services that can be purchased). As Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Hochschild (2002) put it, “In an earlier phase of imperialism, northern countries extracted natural resources and agricultural products from lands they conquered and colonized. Today, while still relying on Third World countries for agricultural and industrial labor, the wealthy countries also seek to extract something harder to measure and quantify, something that can look very much like love” (4).
This situation has also been created by what Ehrenreich and Hochschild call the “care deficit.” With the increase of women in the workforce in core countries, someone else has to take on the care they can no longer perform. This care deficit is the pull factor that attracts migrant women to core countries. The push factor is the feminization of poverty. In other words, the care deficit in core countries has caused a care drain (the extraction of care work) from peripheral and semi-peripheral countries. At the same time, the care deficit exists because, as women took on jobs outside of the house, men have not increased their participation in housework. Arlie Hochschild (1989) described this phenomenon as the second shift. The second shift is the “job” (housework) that a woman still has to do once she is done with her first shift (paid employment). On an average, a woman spends 15 hours more than their male partners on housework, not counting childcare. In this sense, the availability of migrant women has not allowed women in wealthy countries to join the workforce (they have already done that for both personal and economic reasons), but it has allowed men to not take on their share of housework.
According to Hochschild (2002), the mainstream acceptance of having housework and childcare done by women from other countries is based on two mechanisms: naturalization and fetishization. It is often heard from employers that women from the periphery are “naturally” motherly and caring and therefore, the job they perform in the core countries is what they are “made for.” The care jobs match their nature. Fetishization is a concept that originated in Marxian theory as it applied to material objects: fetishization of a consumer good means to see that object completely detached from the mechanisms of its production, especially the economic exploitation involved. According to Hochschild, the same goes for the way nannies from the periphery are treated: as caring individuals without any consideration for the economic conditions that pushed them to leave their own families and children behind to care for wealthy households. On the one hand, these women are viewed as coming from “less developed” countries – that is, less detached from their nature – and on the other hand, the very socio-economic reality that makes these women magically appear on the labor market to pick up housework and childcare remains unexamined. The care they provide is fetishized. At the same time, in their own countries, migrant women are often stigmatized for not sticking to the “traditional” gender role assigned to them by a patriarchal culture. They are perceived as having abandoned their families and children for money at the very same time that these economies are strongly dependent upon the remittances these women provide.
The Future of Gender Issues: Militarization as Masculinization
What does gender have to do with the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 and their aftermath? At first glance, nothing. However, as Cynthia Enloe (2007) shows, using feminist curiosity, it becomes obvious that terrorism and state responses have highly gendered phenomena. Discussions of national and global security are often formulated in gendered terms. In many ways, Osama bin Laden’s plan of attack was to feminize the United States, make the country feel vulnerable, unprotected and wide open to assault. The United States’ government’s response was equally gendered: to restore the country’s masculine strength through militarization.
As Cynthia Enloe (2007:4) puts it, “to become militarized is to adopt militaristic values (e.g., a belief in hierarchy, obedience and the use of force) and priorities as one’s own, to see military solutions as particularly effective, to see the world as a dangerous place best approached with militaristic attitudes.” Militarization involves masculinization: focus on strength and authority, emphasis on demonstration of dominance through the use of military force. Conversely, diplomacy is seen in feminized terms: weak, soft and unable to provide the sense of security needed in these troubled times as well as incapable of establishing dominance over enemies. In this context, political actors will do anything to avoid being perceived as feminine, that is, lacking strength and determination for fear of being “soft on terrorism,” a problem that demands strong – i.e., masculine – leadership.
Another aspect of militarization and masculinization of national security is to divide society into two categories: protectors and protected. The government and the military – highly masculine institutions – “naturally” take the role of protectors, endowed with strategic and rational thinking and also perceived as “naturally” strong, acting for the good of the population in need of protection. For the protectors to exercise such public superiority there needs to be some in need of protection: women, children, American families, or the American society as a whole. In this logic, then, society as a whole becomes feminized. The protector, state or military, can then invoke secrecy as necessary for the protection of society as a whole in the face of such a dangerous world, full of dangers and sinister people (terrorists, illegal immigrants) who can find their way into society.
Similarly, who gets defined as masculine and who is feminized was obvious in the photographs taken at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. The whole process of degradation and humiliation to which the guards subjected their prisoners was through and through a process of feminization: to make prisoners adopt feminine postures for their highly masculine guards. In this case, feminization was designed to lower the status of the prisoners, threaten to show the photographs to their communities where such a humiliation would mean definite loss of honor, a central value in patriarchal societies. In a militarized and masculinized context, feminizing one’s opponent, for instance as weak on national security, attempts to lower one’s credibility.
Finally, the different dimensions of feminization we examined in the context of globalization have not escaped professionals at global institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. “Development and a way out of poverty will come thanks to women” seems to be the current motto. Therefore, their ideas are to push for business opportunities for women, sometimes through microcredit (see chapter 7 box on Grameen Bank). Let women enter the market and they will be able to generate and enjoy wealth as never before. Solutions to poverty for households, communities and nations are in women’s hands.
This recent mode of thinking is called “feminization of survival” – it places the responsibility for development on the already-burdened shoulders of women and imposes on them a triple shift: reproductive labor (birth and childcare), subsistence labor (local, small-scale agriculture) and productive labor (in paid employment or small business). The result of such triple shift is what Mary Hawkesworth (2006) call exhaustion crisis whereby the multiplication of responsibilities that become the exclusive responsibility of women is simply too much for individual women to bear (and be blamed for if things do not work out).
To conclude, gender is pervasive but it is neither natural nor fixed once and for all. In a later chapter, we will examine as the global feminist movements try to change the social construction of gender and also redefine the social, structural and cultural conditions that negatively affect women’s lives.
