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

Introduction
their bargaining power within marriage. Already, although older
people in Bangladesh still consider employment to decrease a
woman’s marriageability, among younger people it is considered an
asset, indicating both a woman’s willingness to undertake hard work
and her ability to contribute to household expenses if this becomes
necessary.
III. Liberalization, restructuring and female
employment
The current emphasis on trade liberalization and economic
restructuring will affect many countries that have a large female
labour force in labour-intensive industries. There will be even more
emphasis on competitiveness; given the limits to productivity of lowskill
labour-intensive strategies, increasing competitiveness must
come in large part from technological upgrading and increasing labour
productivity. Such a strategy is likely to result in a workforce both
better trained and better compensated, although, at least in the short
term, it may also result in overall job losses. In addition, there is some
evidence to suggest that women will be the first to lose their jobs, and
the last to receive the education and training necessary for them to
compete in the new labour force.
Low-end, poorly paid jobs provide a pool of relatively accessible
first-entry employment opportunities which help integrate young
women migrants from rural areas in many countries. Women workers
occupy the lower rungs in both garment and electronics
manufacturing even though, in terms of education, they may not be
disadvantaged compared to their male counterparts. 4 Women are very
often recruited as unskilled workers (usually as apprentices to begin
with), given very little training and face limited promotion prospects.
As a result they often practice “job hopping” from one firm to another
as a way of improving their grade and earnings (Edgren, 1982; Kibria,
Bourqia, this volume).
The country studies in this volume reveal a certain amount of
disingenuousness among employers, who complain about the
instability of women workers and the high levels of labour turnover,
but who subscribe to a system of management and production
organization that finds a high level of instability functional and wish
to retain only a small group of stable workers at the centre. While
management in Morocco speak of the dire need for skilled and
educated workers, they are reluctant to hire workers with degrees
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