Question:

What were the reasons for the expansion of female employment in export production since the 1980s?

Answer:

Reasons for the expansion of female employment in export production since the 1980s

 

Introduction

Female employment in export production has expanded dramatically since the 1980s. Export-oriented production, particularly in manufacturing and agriculture, has led to the emergence of open economic policies. This type of production takes place in the context of economic globalization, which  is expected to continue accelerating economic integration. These changes have brought about numerous opportunities for women to improve their position in society.

According to Bhattacharya (1999), export growth, which has been greatly contributed to by economic liberalization, has created more demand for female labor compared to male labor. This has led to a faster rise in female wages than in male wages. It is widely expected that this trend will in the near future eliminate rigidities in the labor market as well as the institutional foundations upon which gender-based discrimination is based within labor markets.

Globalization continues to contribute to a greater volume of export production. In this way, globalization is seen to improve women’s condition through the creation of many employment opportunities in export production. Through such opportunities, women appear to be overcoming the problem of gender discrimination within the global labor market. This paper explores the reasons for the expansion of female employment in export production since the 1980s, mainly through various concepts and theories. Through careful analysis, the paper provides examples to illustrate these reasons. It also examines the extent to which the work is empowering for women.

Literature Review

Since the 1980s, many countries have succeeded in improving the level of export production. This has been largely because of the creation of permissive policies and relaxed investment regulations that attract foreign investments. With such policies in place, the countries have been able to embark on a process of sustained economic recovery. Recent developments in the realm of international trade have been generally favorable to the development of export production. The World Trade Organization (WTO) has made significant efforts in strengthening the international trade regime, thereby creating the right environment for export production.

According to the United Nations (1999), female employment in the emerging economies has been increasing at a higher rate than male employment. Moreover, export-oriented industries are increasingly being feminized (United Nations, 1999). However, the United Nations report also noted that since the mid-1980s, the demand for female labor within the manufacturing industry in middle-income countries appeared to be weakening. This was largely because export production was becoming increasingly capital- and skill-intensive (United Nations, 1999).

It remains unclear why de-feminization tends to follow from greater capital or skill intensity. Bhattacharya (1999) gives the examples of Taiwan, Singapore, and South Korea in his analysis of trends in female employment in export production. In South Korea, Bhattacharya (1999) points out that the workforce composition in the electronics industry continues to change in favor of the male workforce. This change occurred at a time when production in the electronics industry was shifting towards more sophisticated computing and communication products. According to Bhattacharya (1999), a similar trend has been observed in Mexico.

Nevertheless, during the early years of labor-intensive industrialization, the percentage of women working in the industrial and manufacturing industries continued to rise significantly. This increase was reflected in the rapidly rising proportion of female employees in industry and manufacturing. When newly industrialized economies in different parts of the world achieved full employment, the labor market started being tightened, thereby triggering a rise in wages as well as other labor costs. This encouraged more far-reaching structural changes in which employers increasingly shifted from the predominantly female employment in labor-intensive manufacturing.

According to Kuruvilla (1996), women employment since the 1980s was at the highest level in labor-intensive, low-skill, and export-oriented manufacturing sub-sectors. It is also worth noting that during this time, manufacturing employment grew rapidly in different economies and at different times before finally beginning to decline in the industrialized economies.

According to Kuruvilla (1996), majority of the women entered into the labor force in the manufacturing sector in Thailand did so between 1986 and 1994. On the other hand, there was a brief female workforce majority in Malaysia between 1990 and 1992. A similar positive trend in the female employment in export production was recorded in Indonesia, where the proportion of female workers surpassed the 45-percent mark during the early 1990s (Arizpe, 1999). This shows a trend of expansion of female employment in export production in newly industrialized economies in East Asia since the 1980s.

A crucial question at this point is on whether this expansion is empowering women in any way. To answer this question, it is imperative to explore female wages as a share of their male counterparts since the 1980s. Unfortunately, the wage gap between female and male workers has not yet been closed in spite of rapid expansion in female employment. This undesirable scenario is evident in many countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America.

At some point, the intensity of expansion as far as female employment in export production is concerned has not been uniform in all countries. In many cases, expansion of female employment has suffered major setbacks because of the unavailability of women with the requisite technical qualifications. Whenever only a small number of women apply for job positions that require technical knowhow, the impression normally created is that major setbacks are being encountered in the goal of female empowerment in export production.

Barrientos (2010) observes that over the last two decades, major transformations have occurred with regard to gender aspects of globalization. According to Barrientos (2010), this is reflected in various levels, particularly relations in export production and employment. Forms of production have changed in response to the emergence of new consumption patterns at the global level. The global world is now more fast-moving than ever before. Large numbers of workers in export production are being linked to consumers in both the developing and developed world. Barrientos (2010) observes that in such an environment, the existing balance as far as male and female employment is concerned is set to change. Barrientos (2010) agrees that since the 1980s, women have increasingly gained access to more employment opportunities in many areas including export production.

According to Barrientos (2010), one of the main aspects of empowerment for women manifested itself in their ability to earn an income, to become independent, and to participate in more influential ways in social life. However, the opportunities have also been accompanied by some new challenges. For instance, in some cases, the employment tends to be informal, with working conditions being poor and labor rights non-existent. Moreover, many women have had to work while at the same tending numerous family responsibilities.

The traditional model in which there is gender division as far as labor is concerned has been offset by the globalization of export production (Brandt, 1999). Global value chains have become highly integrated, such that direct links between production, distribution, and retail services can be easily discerned (Brinton, 1995). In the export market, a high level of flexibility in supply is called for, thereby leading to the creation of new job opportunities. A high rate of capital and finance mobility greatly contributed to the just-in-time delivery systems that operate in today’s globalized world. In this context, women are playing an increasingly important role. Women are particularly keen to exploit the existing opportunities for flexible employment. In fact, this is a major reason why women participation in export production has been increasing since the 1980s.

In addition to the aspect of flexibility, most of the employment opportunities available for women in global export production are flexible. In other words, they are based on temporary, part-time, and casual engagements. In some cases, no employment contract is needed. However, this situation gives the producers opportunities for shifting the risks and costs of production onto workers. This is unlike in the traditional setting where there was a clear distinction between informal and formal forms of work. In the context of global export production, such a rigid classification is no longer tenable because the boundary between informal and formal work continues to be blurred. Instead of rigid classifications, there are two ends of a continuum: formal work and informal work.

However, there are uncertainties regarding the extent to which women can be empowered through informal work that is fraught with many challenges and risks, particularly in export production. Those who work in informal employment lack job security and their employment rights are not safeguarded. Moreover, inadequate employment benefits are provided. No trade union organization or social protection is provided either.

The formal-informal work continuum plays out within the global value chain, whereby formal employment dominates the value chain. As fragmentation increases, particularly at the supply end, employment tends to be more informal. A case in point is the use of home-workers and contract labor. According to Barrientos (2010), gender inequality manifests itself in the fact that there is a higher likelihood of most men dominating most of the available formal jobs while women are more likely to be concentrated at the informal end of the continuum.

It is important to assess the impact of export production work on women’s productive role. This approach is necessary in determining whether women are being sufficiently empowered through this type of work. For many women, the reality is that it is better to work in exports than the various alternatives of being employed within the domestic economy. The main area of victory for women is that work in export production is normally organized in such a way that it fits into other tasks that women have to perform in the course of their lives.

The magnitude of change in women employment in export production is evident in virtually all parts of the world, including the Sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, East Asia, and the Arab world. Moreover, whereas the female labor force has been increasing more rapidly than that of men, male labor force has in some cases been decreasing. This has led to the shrinking of labor force participation differences in many regions.

A major reason why the female labor force participation has been on the rise is the changing culture within the global economy, characterized by a transition from closed trade regimes to open ones as well as from market regulation to market deregulation. For instance, women have benefited more from “flexible” labor than men. This is particularly the case in lower value-added, labor added areas of export production.

Another major aspect of change is on the way female labor force is distributed in various sectors. In this regard, the trends are partly a reflection of the way labor is distributed globally. For instance, in most regions of the world, female labor force has either remained static or declined in agriculture. However, during the 1990s, it still accounted for a huge proportion of female employment and it remained the most crucial source of employment opportunities for women in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. In manufacturing, women have been getting an increasingly huge share of labor workforce, particularly in South Asia and East Asia. However, globally, activity rates for women have been highest in retail, clerical, and service employment. On the overall, the increased labor force participation by women is a reflection of a rise in participation in the “traded” sectors within the global economy by women.

Concepts and theories         

The main concept worth discussing in this section is that of “women empowerment”. According to Aithal (2011), the term “empowerment” has been used since the 1980s to describe the phenomenon of heightened activism by women, particularly in the third world. The term became a concept in a manner that is different from that of other concepts such as “participation” and “gender”. to begin with, the term emerged from practice before being turned into a key concept in theory (Aithal (2011).

In today’s hegemonic tradition,  most concepts are being developed from an abstract perspective before subjected to a verification process at the practical level. Alternatively, scholars simply check if reality properly fits into a specific theoretical concept. However, with regard to the concept of empowerment, things have been different. This is because processes and initiatives that were started at the grassroots level somehow found their way into academic and development discourse. This is how “empowerment” emerged as a theoretical concept.

Aithal (2011) observes that over the last 15 years, the concept of empowerment ahs appeared in many disciplines, including development studies, psychology, special education, political theory, gender studies, sociology, theology, adult education, and many other related fields. In terms of the grassroots settings where the concept first emerged, most of the credit goes to non-governmental organizations and social action groups, which persistently used the term to influence the policies of politicians. Another crucial constituency that contributed to the concept is the women’s movement. At first, the women’s movement used the term strategically but it soon permeated into the core of the development discourse.

The concept of empowerment has also evolved in the context of the larger process of spelling out differences in the priorities of the feminist debates that are characteristic of hegemonic feminism in the North and the desire for women of the South to simply change the lives of their fellow women. This interpretation made international feminism to start to be viewed in a new light. This was achieved mainly by inspiring women from all over the world to refer to the concept when advocating for transformation of the life of women.

Empowerment continues to be a very useful concept in the sustainable development debate. According to Mehra (1999), there are certain conditions that should be present for empowerment to exist. Some of these conditions include local self-reliance, direct participatory democracy, autonomy in the process of making decisions, availability of space for experiential social learning, and access to education for change (Mehra, 1999). Others include access to  problem solving techniques and skills training as well as participation in decision-making procedures (Mehra, 1999).

Some researchers such as Shetty (1991) have attempted to provide an analytical framework for examining the concept of empowerment. Shetty (1991), developed a generalized understanding of empowerment in which he articulated a number of non-hierarchical elements. It comprises the holistic and processional nature of empowerment, which is situated in cultural, economic, social, and political context. This makes empowerment to be a particularistic as opposed to universalistic concept. However, regardless of context, it is possible to generalize the stakeholders that constitute marginalized groups, for example, rural and urban poor, migrants, women, landless, disabled, and AIDS victims (Shetty, 1991). An alternative approach to the analysis of the concept of empowerment is the one that looks at strategic interests that whose aim is to create structural changes from below (Shetty, 1991).

In terms of critique, most of the focus is on the definitions of empowerment. In this regard, the term appears to be understood in different ways by different people. The abstract nature of the term enables it to give space to multiple interpretations. For instance, feminist critiques are opposed to the so-called “inflationary” use of the term (Barrientos, 2003). They are critical of all the approaches whose aim is to improve the living conditions of the marginalized in the context of the existing systems. Moreover, they are critical of these approaches because of their failure to address the issue of power. The feminist critics lament that the term is sometimes used by those who are in fact contributing actively to the disempowerment of women.

From a feminist perspective, women are viewed as agents and not as clients, participants, and beneficiaries of empowerment. They also argue that empowerment addresses the question of power. The power in this case entails control over something, generative and productive power, the power that generates the feeling of the whole being greater than the sum of its parts, as well as the one that creates the sense that strength comes from within each individual. In the context of the present paper, one may assume that the most relevant aspect of power is the productive power, which creates new actions and possibilities without any form of domination. This is what appears to be the most direct and readily achievable outcome of women employment in export production in the contemporary world.

Incidentally, productive power may result from or lead to other forms of power. For instance, a woman may gain self-respect and self-acceptance after getting a job. The position of employment may prepare her for a new world view, where she accepts others as equals. However, in literature, most definitions of the concept of empowerment, particularly in the context of women employment in export production, imply the “power over” dimension, which incorporates aspects such as access to various decision-making instruments. According to Shetty (1991), many NGO and social action groups in the Global South are interested in aspects of collective power, whereby the changes pursued are aimed at facilitative the achievement of goals “together with others”.

Analysis and examples

It is evident that in countries where export oriented production strategies, the proportion of women in employment has been increasing at a higher rate than that of men. In some countries, particularly in Asia, nearly half of women have been gainfully employed. This phenomenon has been contributed to significantly by the introduction of export-oriented production strategies as well as permissive and conducive employment policies.

In some instances, the empowerment of women may be attributed to the decisions of multinationals from the North to outsource production to companies operating in the developing world (Faulknera, 1991). In this regard, the aim of the multinationals is normally to take advantage of the lower labor costs and lack of labor unionization in the global south. From this perspective, one may argue that instead of being empowered, women who are employed in such companies have been disempowered. This is because they do not get value for their efforts and that there is a high likelihood for labor unionization efforts to be opposed. The temporary and part-time nature of this work further diminishes the vision of empowerment.

In today’s age of globalization, competitive pressures have increased. Many companies are compelled to pursue lower labor costs, shorter lead times and product lines that are increasingly differentiated (Barrientos, 2002). From this perspective, women participation in export production exposes them to new employment challenges, which may make the goal of empowerment seem like a mirage. The so-called advantage of “flexibility” raises new challenges relating to the ability by the employees to have access to opportunities for empowerment. For example, flexibility in an environment where wages are increasingly pegged on the elusive goal of shorter production may not bring about any empowerment to women (Chant, 1995). On the contrary, it may breed new opportunities for the emergence of “slave wages”.

Women empowerment is not just about the number of women joining the global labor force. It is about the opportunities that they are able to access while engaged in gainful employment. It is also about enhancing the power of women to undertake tasks that have traditionally been the reserve of male employees. For example, in many countries, majority of women working in export production are largely concentrated in assembly line work, which is always highly repetitive.  This work is available in various “light industry” subsectors such as textiles, shoes, garments, and electronics. Such type of work is reminiscent of the “heavy industry” capital-intensive work soon after the World War II in Europe and America.

In the capital-intensive work provided by heavy industries soon after the World War II, employees could expect to get life-long job security within a tight labor market as well as the right to belong in a labor union. Moreover, there was a firm-based or statutory provision for some form of social protection in addition to a guaranteed “family wage”. In this context, women were assumed generally assigned to full-time housework. However, Barrientos (2010) notes that in the world of today, the typical worker in a manufacturing setting is most likely a young Asian woman. The woman works in low value-added, labor-intensive, stages of export production, and her wages are too low con cover all her basic household costs. Moreover she is likely to have little or no social protection. Such work is highly likely to be available not inside a factory within the formal economy, but in home-based setting or a small workshop positioned in the informal extreme of the formal-informal work continuum (Barrientos, 2010). According to Barrientos (2010), this is one of the main ways in which export production work has been “feminized”. In this regard, it is evident that not much may be said to have been achieved by way of empowerment.

Chant (1995) provides an example of women disempowerment through export-oriented production work in Philippines. Upon a careful analysis of the employment practices at the Mactan Export Processing Zone in Philippines, Chant concludes that the context of women employment in export production brings them disempowerment, particularly with regard to their personal, working, and home lives.

Conclusion

In summary, there is abundant evident in literature showing that female employment in export production has continued to expand since the 1980s. However, there is no corresponding abundance in literature showing that this expansion in employment is empowering for women. Scholars disagree on what constitutes empowerment in export-production employment settings. The priorities of action groups in the developed countries are different from those of the developing world. In conclusion, export production employment is not empowering for women simply because of its flexibility. Rather, this form of employment presents them with new challenges of lack of social protection and low wages. This brings them disempowerment, particularly with regard to their personal, working, and home lives.

 

References

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