1999 WORLD SURVEY ON THE ROLE OF WOMEN IN DEVELOPMENT: GLOBALIZATION, GENDER AND WORK PUBLISHED

20 October 1999

Press Release
DEV/2220
PI/1189

1999 WORLD SURVEY ON THE ROLE OF WOMEN IN DEVELOPMENT: GLOBALIZATION, GENDER AND WORK PUBLISHED

19991020 ADVANCE TEXT

New UN Study Cites Gender as Indispensable Factor in Economic Policy Design and Implementation

NEW YORK, 21 October –- A new United Nations publication addresses the changing world of work in the context of globalization from a gender perspective.

The 1999 World Survey on the Role of Women in Development: Globalization, Gender and Work, a flagship publication of the Department of Economic and Social Affairs issued every five years, constitutes a basic document for the special session of the General Assembly, “Women 2000: Gender Equality, Development and Peace for the Twenty-First Century” to be convened at United Nations Headquarters in New York from 5 to 9 June 2000. Focusing on developing countries, the 76-page report (document ST/ESA/269) gives a detailed overview of employment and displacement effects of economic trends associated with globalization from a gender point of view. It further discusses the importance of these effects in terms of their influence on women’s relative position within the household and the labour markets around the world.

It describes the three economic trends that are commonly associated with the economic dimension of globalization: (a) trade liberalization and expansion; (b) the spread of production capacity around the world through foreign direct investment by multinational corporations; and (c) financial liberalization and the increased international mobility of financial capital.

The report points out the global reality of increased participation of women in paid work. “Not only has it risen in almost all regions of the world, but it has also spearheaded the overall employment growth in recent years”, the report states. “In fact, with the sole exception of Africa, women’s employment has grown substantially faster than men’s since 1980.”

The report concludes that, around the world:

-- Women have been incorporated into paid employment in greater numbers in the last two decades -- usually under conditions inferior to those associated with men’s employment.

-- The proliferation of precarious forms of employment in the last two decades, such as part-time, informal sector and home-based work, appear

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to have quickened the process of women’s incorporation into paid employment.

-- Costs of economic adjustment have been borne disproportionately by women living in poverty; and

-- With an emerging social protection gap, the welfare demands placed on the family, particularly women, appear to have increased, especially in developing countries.

According to the report, forces unleashed by globalization have given rise to new opportunities that can potentially be empowering to women, on the one hand, and economic conditions which are inimical to gender equality, including increased economic volatility, job insecurity and loss of livelihood, on the other hand.

It cites the steady increase in the female share of paid employment. For instance, in 1978, Bangladesh had only four garment factories; and by 1995, it had 2,400, employing 1.2 million workers. Ninety per cent of them were women under the age of 25. The report points out that although Bangladesh is perhaps an extreme case, many other countries, for example the Dominican Republic, Indonesia, Mauritius, Philippines, Republic of Korea, Taiwan Province of China and Tunisia have also seen dramatic increases both in export manufacturing capacity and in the number and share of women in the manufacturing labour force.

Among other issues addressed in the Survey are the adverse effects of the Asian economic crisis on women, which the report says are amplified because of gender inequalities in labour markets and in the household. Within labour markets in the region, women have in general been first to be fired after the outbreak of the crisis, even in large firms, reflecting an effort to protect the jobs of male "breadwinners". "Women's jobs were not considered as important as men's, and thus were more dispensable", states the report.

Among these adverse effects:

In the Republic of Korea, women have lost jobs at twice the rate of men, despite the fact that before the crisis, they had been the preferred labour supply with an unemployment rate half that of men.

-- Rising unemployment and poverty in urban areas in Asia have reverberated in the countryside, as many extended family members in rural areas depend on remittances from relatives working in the cities.

-- This has also been the case with the large number of migrant workers in the countries affected by the crisis. By mid-1997, there were an estimated 2,500,000 foreign workers in Malaysia, 1,354,000 in Japan, 1,260,000 in Thailand, 450,000 in Singapore and 210,000 in the Republic of Korea, of which a large proportion had an irregular status and were illegal. As the crisis reduced the demand for labour, many migrants found themselves unemployed and encouraged to leave.

-- As the stream of remittances has dried up, many rural families have become completely destitute. Recent newspaper reports from Indonesia,

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Philippines and Thailand document an increasing number of cases of families in desperation who have sold their daughters into prostitution.

-- Psychological stress, heightened during times of economic crisis, places additional burdens particularly on women. Given the shallow social safety nets in Asia, job losses and poverty have led to increased reliance on the family, and that has, by all indications, caused household distress. Suicide rates, substance abuse and domestic violence against women and children are all reported to have gone up in the region.

-- Evidence of severe malnutrition has begun to show up in Java, related to the financial crisis.

-- According to the Thai Education Ministry, almost 6 per cent of school students or about 500,000 primary and secondary children had been forced to drop out of school. Estimates for Indonesia are even higher. A disproportionate number of drop-outs are likely to be girls.

The Survey also examines how the reorganization of production has led to changes in the structure of output and increases in more flexible forms of employment such as part-time, informal sector and home-based work that have proliferated in the last two decades. For example, in sub- Saharan Africa, the share of informal-sector employment in total employment ranges from less than 15 to more than 60 per cent, with highest percentages reported in the urban informal-sector in Senegal (77 per cent) and Benin (80 per cent). The figures are higher for the share of the informal-sector employment in non-agricultural employment: 77 per cent in Burkina Faso, 79 per cent in Mali and 93 per cent in Benin. In much of Africa, more than one-third of women in non-agricultural activities work in the informal sector and rates reach as high as 72 per cent in Zambia and 65 in the Gambia. Elsewhere, the proportion of women active in the informal sector totals more than 80 per cent in Lima, Peru, 65 per cent in Indonesia and 41 per cent in the Republic of Korea.

The report emphasizes the changing patterns of international labour mobility and the increase in numbers of female migrant labour as yet another source of flexible labour. For example, it cites a study of Sri Lanka where 60 per cent of female workers in the free trade zone came from landless rural families of casual agricultural labourers and 20 per cent belonged to subsistence farmer families. They migrated because of the extreme poverty of their families and because they had no employment options where they came from except agricultural labour and selling food.

Taking into consideration the mixed effects of globalization, the Survey provides some suggestions for the development of gender-aware policies at both the national and international level, such as:

-- Equal opportunity policies and programmes aimed at reducing occupational segregation by sex;

-- Policies allowing women workers to consolidate the benefits of increased paid employment through access to basic workers rights;

-- Policies addressing the needs of women who form the bulk of the informal sector;

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-- Policies encouraging firms to raise productivity by investing in upgrading workers' skills and improving their working conditions rather than relying on cost-cutting to increase the firms' competitiveness; and

-- Policies promoting equal access to training and retraining among women and men.

The report is being launched at a 21 October press conference at 11:30 a.m. (New York time) in Room S-226 of United Nations Headquarters.

Presenting the report are Nitin Desai, Under-Secretary-General for Economic and Social Affairs; Angela E.V. King, Special Adviser to the Secretary-General on Gender Issues and Advancement of Women; and Yakin Ertürk, Director, United Nations Division for the Advancement of Women.

For more information on the report, or to arrange an interview, contact Elisabeth Ruzicka-Dempsey, Development and Human Rights Section, United Nations Department of Public Information, at 212-963-1742, e-mail: ruzicka-dempsey@un.org.

The 1999 World Survey on the Role of Women in Development: Globalization, Gender and Work (Sales No. E.99.IV.8, ISBN 92-1-130200-5) is available from United Nations Publications, Two UN Plaza, Room DC2-853, Dept. PRES, New York, NY 10017, USA, tel.: 800-253-9646 or 212-963-8302, fax: 212-963-3489, e-mail: publications@un.org; or Palais des Nations, CH-1211 Geneva 10, Switzerland, tel. 41-22-917-0027, e-mail: unpubli@unog.ch; Internet: http://www.un.org/publications.

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