role of women in globalization essay writing
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The Role of Women in Globalization
While globalization has brought an explosion in the jobs market, the benefits for women have been mixed. It has brought one major benefit to most women—more paid work. Since 1980 the growth in the labour force of women has been substantially higher than that of men in every region of the world except Africa.
In India too, the number of female workers was 7.2 crore in 2001, which is attributed to women’s increasing participation in activities outside home. Prof. Sand Choudury (Trent University, Canada) notes, ‘The economic independence that these jobs provide has for the first time given Third World women the ability to contribute to their families financially; the opportunity to delay marriages and child-bearing; even the means to end oppressive marital relationships.’ But, while more women may be working, they are still paid less than men. Even in the US, which is a highly developed country, women get less than men for the same work.
In 2000, on an average, women earned 73 per cent of men’s wages. Black and minority women fared even worse. In India, women labour earns about 50 per cent of the wages paid to their counterpart. Not only this, generally women are assigned to the worst paid, shortest contract, most monotonous jobs. They are the first to be dismissed from work in any economic crisis. While in developed countries, there are many part-time jobs for women in India such jobs are negligible.
Moreover, such jobs are also vulnerable and have little security. Although globalization has resulted in some women gaining employment in IT, service and manufacturing sector, the majority of Indian (Asian) women are still in the informal economy, rural farming and in the subsistence economic activities.
The World Bank’s 2000 report ‘Gender in Transition’ highlights differences between men and women by commenting that globalization has increased gender inequality, hampering socio-economic progress. In many Third world countries, including India, the average working woman earns just over half the income of the average man.
Girls are more malnourished than boys. Less than half as many girls as boys are enrolled in higher education. Nearly half the pregnant women do not receive any form of prenatal care, resulting in very high infant mortality rates.
Globalization has also increased migration across borders and this has provided women with new opportunities, financial independence and higher status in their home country. Many women are moving to other countries either for higher studies or in search of jobs.
There are regions, like Kerala from where women are working abroad in abundance. Women migrants often send remittance back home. At the same time, globalization has contributed to worldwide growth in the numbers of women and girls being trafficked for forced sexual services.
Globalization has changed the face of the world, making us all into global consumers and giving us access to instant information. This has deeply affected women’s lives. Women have become products for sale in the form of advertisements.
Women’s bodies are used to sell from men’s underwear, perfumes, and motorbikes to cars. Their bodies have become simply objects now as other objects. The ways that women have been marketed at, and used for marketing, have changed considerably in the last decade.
Trafficking has become one of the fastest growing criminal activities in the global economy. Widespread poverty in some regions of India forced parents to sell their young daughters (wife buying) to the men of foreign countries, particularly Middle East, where they are forced to work as prostitutes or concubines.
Young girls are lured by the promise of a good job or for marriage in another country. Traffickers exploit women’s desire to make a better life for themselves with promises of jobs as waitresses, dancers, models, maids and nannies.