Identify the role and place of Gender in the global economy. (200 words) (2013, 15 Marks)
The global economy, organised through states and transnational corporations, presents itself as gender-neutral, yet it runs on a gendered division of labour. Feminist political economy, from Marilyn Waring’s If Women Counted (1988) to V. Spike Peterson’s linked reproductive, productive and virtual economies, shows that women’s role is indispensable while their place is at the margins of reward and measurement.
Role: what women’s work does for the global economy
- Unwaged reproduction: cooking, caring and raising the next workforce sustain paid production. The ILO (2018) found women perform about three-quarters of unpaid care work, 3.2 times as much as men, outside the System of National Accounts production boundary.
- Feminised export labour: export-processing zones recruited young women, marketing stereotypes of docility as a cost advantage, the logic Diane Elson and Ruth Pearson exposed in “Nimble Fingers Make Cheap Workers” (1981). Guy Standing (1989) described a wider feminisation of labour: flexible, informal, low-paid work becoming the norm.
- Reserve army of labour: socialist feminists argue women are drawn in during expansion and shed first in downturns, as the pandemic “she-cession” confirmed.
- Global care chains: Arlie Russell Hochschild’s term for migrant women caring for families in rich states while poorer women care for theirs; their remittances support households and balance-of-payments accounts.
- Services: “pink-collar” jobs (nursing, teaching, clerical work) raised women’s paid employment without equalising its terms.
Place: where women stand in it
- Bottom of value chains: the Rana Plaza collapse in Bangladesh (2013) killed over 1,100 people, mostly women garment workers.
- Unequal reward: women earn about a fifth less than men, and only part of the gap is explained by hours or occupation; the residual reflects discrimination and the motherhood penalty.
- Slow parity: the 2026 Global Gender Gap Report finds only 61.7 per cent of the economic-participation gap closed worldwide, and 41.2 per cent in India.
- Assets: Bina Agarwal’s A Field of One’s Own (1994) argued that the gender gap in command over property, above all land, is the decisive economic factor in South Asian women’s position.
- Glass ceiling and digital gap: women remain a small minority of chief executives, and fewer women than men use the internet, limiting their share of digital trade.
- Triple burden: most women combine paid work, domestic labour and community work, Caroline Moser’s triple role.
- Structural adjustment and microfinance: cuts to public services shifted costs onto women’s time, and microcredit often made them conduits of loans controlled by men.
India
Female labour force participation was 40.0 per cent in 2025 against 79.1 per cent for men (PLFS, persons aged 15 and above), with care duties the main reason women stay out. Some 90 lakh self-help groups and the Lakhpati Didi scheme are the policy answer, though credit without assets, markets or time often yields subsistence enterprise rather than empowerment; India’s G20 presidency pushed “women-led development”.
Conclusion
Gender is not a side issue in the global economy but one of its organising principles: the market rests on uncounted care and cheap feminised labour. Recognising, reducing and redistributing unpaid work (SDG target 5.4) would also make the global economy more productive and more just.