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

Women’s employment in the textile manufacturing sectors of Bangladesh and Morocco
writers agree that discriminatory forces underpin women’s emergence
as the preferred labour force in a significant portion of the labourintensive
manufacturing sector, there is not a clear consensus as to
whether the discriminatory forces which characterize women’s
employment here need to be assessed in relative (national) or absolute
(universal) terms, and what weight should be given to the accounts
and views of women workers themselves.
Both Lim (1990) and Joekes (1995), for example, take a relativist
position and criticize some strands of the feminist literature for
assessing the terms of women’s employment in export-oriented
manufacturing from an absolutist perspective. The evidence they and
others cite with regard to women’s earnings in factory jobs indicates
that, compared to alternative low-skilled female occupations — such
as farm labour, domestic work, small-scale local industry and service
sector activities — these factory jobs often offer better working
conditions and are certainly better paid. The picture that emerges from
most of the studies in this volume certainly supports this position.
Women employed in the manufacturing sector in Morocco and
Bangladesh prefer this work to the other employment options
available to them, and in many cases, especially in Bangladesh, choose
to work in manufacturing even when they are not obliged to seek
employment by economic necessity.
But a full assessment of the question of whether export-oriented
manufacturing provides better opportunities for workers than does
the traditional domestic manufacturing sector, Joekes (1995) adds,
would also have to include some comparison of wage rates in exportoriented
manufacturing with wages in the rest of the manufacturing
sector — and the data necessary for such comparisons are seldom
available. Taking the export processing zones (EPZs) and transnational
corporations (TNCs) — for which there is more evidence — as a proxy
for export-oriented manufacturing, Joekes is able to sketch a picture
that is very mixed both across countries and over time: in many cases
EPZs pay higher wages than in the surrounding national economy,
but in others (e.g. India and Mauritius) the wages they pay are
definitely lower (Joekes, 1995:27). Assessing the linkages between
export-oriented manufacturing and gender discrimination in wages
is even more problematic. The availability, reliability and
interpretability of the data on pay relativity by gender pose major
problems, especially if a comparison between export and non-export
sectors is attempted. In some cases the gender gap in wages appears
to be smaller in export-oriented industries, while in other cases the
opposite seems to hold.
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