ENGENDERING ECONOMICS
Some commentators on the current economic crisis have suggested that gender balance may be improved by this dire situation, in that most of the miscreant CEOs who will be fired or ‘retired’ are men, thus leaving a higher proportion of women in the labour market. If these survivors will be promoted to the gaps becoming available or will just stay crouched under the glass ceiling in the middle & junior ranks they now occupy is not so clear. In any case this hardly looks like a revolution in the making.
In developing countries the pursuit of macro-economic policies such as Structural Adjustment by organizations like the World Bank and the IMF (Note: Since the G20 Summit of April, 2009 the IMF is charged with dismantling the economic order it promoted) have not been favourable to women’ employment and economic empowerment. Typically the conditionality imposed on the governments has resulted in reductions in lower level civil service jobs traditionally occupied by women, and smaller government expenditures on health, education and social welfare affect women disproportionately as managers of their family’s well-being. The family still needs food and health care even if it is no longer provided by the government and normally that is women’s work. Furthermore the reduced resources available for education will often be considered to be better spent on boys.
What do we now know about the gendered effects of the current crisis in the developing world? An e-consultation conducted by UNDP confirms that some of the sectors first to be affected in countries such as Cambodia and Thailand are tourism and textiles, both of which employ many women. Women are traditionally the first to be laid off especially if they are pregnant.
Another negative impact for both men and women which has already been documented is the reduction in migrant labour & therefore of the remittances on which the family depends. Migrant labourers are usually the first to be laid off & return home to compete for scarce jobs on the labour market.
As under Structural Adjustment impoverished governments reduce the services to their citizens which increases the burden of care on women who are the primary and unpaid care providers in society. Some of the ‘coping’ strategies reported include removing children from school & taking on additional work, including prostitution. The link between increased poverty and increased vulnerability particularly of women and girls to trafficking is also well-recognized.
A number of factors then result in macro-economic factors impacting differently on women and men.
Overall is the widespread & sometimes justified belief that men are the bread-winners, and that women’s role in the monetary economy is secondary.
They can therefore be fired more easily, and thus become free to take on even more of their traditional caring role.
Cultural stereotypes also underlie the segregation of occupations by gender, not only assigning women to the lion’s share of family and domestic and community work in the so-called care or reproductive economy, but also determining where in the monetary economy they are most likely to be engaged. It is no accident that the garment and textile industries which have sprung up in Bangladesh, Cambodia and elsewhere are dominated by women. However this means that women are impacted harder when this sector experiences a down-turn.
The argument against gender-based occupational segregation which is a feature of many developing country economies is that it reduces individual’s choice and mobility and also the flexibility of the economy itself to respond to external factors such as a global economic crisis.
An activity which is assuming ever greater prominence in the field of gender and development is gender budgeting and cannot be ignored here.
The overall objectives of gender budgeting are to ensure that the budget formulation process includes the voices of women and men at all levels, on the assumption that their interests and experience may be different; and second to ensure that the content of the budget reflects gender equality goals in the ways that funds are allocated and revenue is generated.
Until relatively recently economists and politicians have assumed that national budgets were gender neutral in their effects but given the different economic roles, responsibilities and benefits of women and men in most societies which we have briefly touched on above that hardly seems a realistic expectation.
The arrival of gender budgeting marks the economists’ awareness that indeed the budget process is not gender neutral, and gives a fresh perspective on familiar data. It is no secret for example that in many societies more boys and girls are enrolled & retained in school, but it also means that the financial pie is not being share equally. This economic argument may be more powerful with some people than are arguments presented in terms of cultural stereotypes or human rights.
Gender budgeting has now acquired an impressive array of gender-mainstreamed tools (gender-disaggregated beneficiary assessments, gender-disaggregated public expenditure incidence analysis, gender-aware medium-terms economic policy framework etc) but a chief obstacle to implementing this approach at any level is the absence in many countries of good information as to the real economic contribution of men and women. In many societies the majority of women’s work is in and for the family typically on the family farm, or in the informal sector, and does not therefore appear in the national statistics. Until women’s current economic contribution can be effectively assessed through time-use and other surveys gender budgets at national or sub-national level will be partial at best.
Further reading:
Gender and Jobs: sex segregation of occupations in the world
by Richard Anker, ILO, Geneva
Gender Budgets Make Cents
by Debbie Budlender,Diane Elson, Guy Hewitt, Tanni Mukhopadhya
Commonwealth Secretariat/IDRC/UNIFEM)
Why So Slow: the advancement of women
by Virginia Valian
MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts