Feminist

Feminist



Feminist

Feminist theoretical frameworks and development frameworks have influenced thinking and policy. An historical context is important to understanding development and feminist thinking and to explaining when and why these frameworks emerge, how they influence one another, and how they change.

Current debates and critiques

Globalization

The changing world economic reality

The 1990s were considerably different from the postwar era, which spawned modernization and dependency theories, policy, and practice. Modernization and dependency theories were grounded in the economic realities of the 1950s, 1960s, and early 1970s. Tremendous worldwide economic restructuring occurred after the early 1970s(Amin, 2004). The symptoms of change included the rise of the newly industrializing countries (NICs) in Asia, the debt crisis in other parts of the South, and the end of the postwar boom in much of the industrialized North.

Restructuring became a buzzword for the changing world economy; this new reality was often characterized by the term globalization. Although the idea of a world economy is not new, this use of globalization highlights the more intense integration of the global economy in the 1990s. Companies and states increasingly thought in terms of global markets and competition. Attention was drawn to global capital and the tremendous power of transnational corporations (TNCs).

Capital mobility reached new heights, and TNCs began to plan worldwide production, investment, and distribution strategies across continents and nation-states. The North witnessed a loss of jobs as multinationals from the North moved production to the South, creating a “global assembly line.” (Amin, 2004)Technological change was rapid; improvements in communications and transportation eliminated economic barriers of distance and facilitated this globalization process. Computerization also altered production processes and enabled firms to move around the world in search of cheaper labor.

Implications for women

These new economic realities and the political reactions to them (that is, policies of structural adjustment, free trade, export-led industrialization, etc.) have had different implications for women and for men. For example, Guy Standing (1989) argued that there was a feminization of the labor force throughout the 1980s in industrializing countries. With the SAPs comes pressure on governments to deregulate. With employers seeking to improve their competitive position through flexible labor practices, more jobs have become “feminized”: they have taken on the characteristics of insecure, low-paying jobs with few prospects for advancement.

This accounts, in part, for the increase in female labor-force participation, as men are less willing to take these jobs. In many countries, female unemployment rates in the 1980s declined relative to male unemployment rates. Standing blamed this trend on the feminization of labour and the employers' desire to have a cheaper, more disposable or flexible labour supply.

Export-led industrialization has also contributed to the growth of low-wage female employment in developing countries, particularly in the export-processing zones (EPZs). During the 1960s and 1970s, corporations developed EPZs as part of a strategy to lower costs by reorganizing production on a global scale. TNCs decrease their production costs by transferring low-skill jobs to EPZs to take advantage of low-cost labour(Amadiume, 2007). Export processing is particularly suitable for highly competitive industries in ...