Women's Employment - United Nations Research Institute for Social ...

Introduction
1 Introduction 1
Shahra Razavi and Jessica Vivian
The United Nations Research Institute for Social Development
(UNRISD), in co-operation with the United Nations Development
Programme (UNDP), carried out an action research programme on
Technical Co-operation and Women’s Lives from 1992 to 1998. This
programme was meant to facilitate co-operation between gender
researchers, economists and policy makers, and to encourage the
involvement of national research teams and civil society organizations
in national policy debates. For each country involved in the
programme, national-level workshops were held to establish priorities
for empirical investigation. In Bangladesh and Morocco, the research
focused on the feminization of the labour force in the context of
increasing export manufacturing and trade liberalization.
This is an important topic for many countries facing liberalized
trade regimes as they are seeking to build their export manufacturing
sector. It has been argued — most emphatically by neoclassical
economists but also in a range of other development writing — that
trade liberalization can facilitate labour-intensive, pro-poor growth
capable of “including” hitherto “excluded” social groups. The
tendency for many newly established export-oriented manufacturing
activities to rely heavily on female labour has been cited in support
of this contention. That this employment benefits women is a view
that is widely shared across the political spectrum, including among
many feminists. However, the subject remains controversial: within
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