LABOUR: Women’s Job Prospects Increase Worldwide

By Thalif Deen Reprint | | Print |

Thalif Deen

UNITED NATIONS, Oct 22 1999 (IPS) - Women today have greater opportunities in the world job market, thanks to globalisation of the world economy, according to a new United Nations study.

With the exception of Africa, women’s employment has grown substantially faster than that of men in all regions of the world since 1980, the study found.

“Not only has it risen in almost all regions of the world but it has also spearheaded the overall employment growth in recent years,” said the 117-page study.

But despite this positive outcome, the report declared that globalisation had not relieved gender-based discriminatory practices nor minimised gender inequalities.

Published every five years by the UN’s Department of Economic and Social Affairs, the 1999 “World Survey on the Role of Women in Development” will be the basic document for a Special Session of the UN General Assembly in June next year.

The session – also known as “Beijing Plus Five” – will assess the results of the Fourth World Conference on Women held in the Chinese capital in 1995.

The study noted that women’s inroads into the work force had been most noticeable in countries such as the Netherlands and Spain, where women were less active in the labour force at the beginning of the 1980s.

In Canada, the United States and Scandinavian countries, women now made up nearly half of the active population, with activity rates of more than 70 percent in the core age groups.

In developing countries, women’s participation rate in the labour force also has risen to currently exceed 60 percent. In most Middle Eastern countries, however, female participation rates in economic activity still remained low.

The study also found that, in practice, paid employment need not always mean empowerment for women.

For instance, it was not unusual for young women, who form the majority of the work force in Export Processing Zones, not to have control over their earnings.

Many of them have to remit the greater part of their wages to their family households. There, the income is sometimes used to consolidate gender inequalities or to support advanced education of younger brothers.

Studies on female factory workers in Bangladesh and Pakistan showed that close to half of such women hand over their earnings to their husbands or to some other male member of their households.

In other instances, especially in a rural setting, women workers were recruited by male labour agents (their father or a third party) to whom wages were paid – a common practice in rural Indonesia and Tunisia.

Moreover, time allocation studies from a diverse group of countries around the world suggested that, in general, women’s burden of household work and primary responsibility for child care did not diminish with increased participation in paid work.

Thus, paid employment in many instances led to an onerous “double day”for most women.

The study also showed that, sometimes when women begin to earn income of their own, there might be offsetting reductions in the non-market sources of income which they receive from men, particularly from the father of their children.

Yet, according to the report, there also were signs that paid employment might be gradually weakening traditional gender values in many societies.

Meanwhile, the international demand for domestic workers had provided women with one of the few opportunities to migrate legally as workers to developed countries. But migrant women suffered multiple forms of discrimination and violence because of their migrant status as well as their gender, the report said.

Despite these problems, the study said, the export of female labour had become a major economic strategy of generating foreign exchange badly needed to address economic, social and political problems.

The majority of female migrant workers came from Indonesia, the Philippines, Sri Lanka and Thailand, and the main receiving countries were Brunei, Hong Kong, Japan, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Singapore and Taiwan.

The study noted that restrictions on admission of migrant labourers in many of the receiving countries had stimulated a marked increase in the number of undocumented migrants who were willing to undertake domestic work under illegal conditions.

Being subject to police harassment, raids and detention, undocumented migrants were particularly prone to abuse and violence, as they were unprotected and often persecuted in the host country.

The study revealed there was ample evidence to suggest that the number of women migrating through illegal, undocumented and clandestine channels had increased, with more than 700,000 illegal female migrants in Asia alone.