Global Feminization Through Flexible Labor: A Theme Revisited

Since the 1970s the global economy has been in an era of market regulation and growing labor market flexibility, in which new technologies, new labor control systems and reformed forms of work organization have transformed patterns of labor force participation throughout the world. In the process, the turn of the century will mark the end of the century of the laboring man in a literal and real sense, in that women will account for almost as many of the “jobs” as men.

This paper is a “revisit” to ideas and data presented in a paper written in 1988.² The main hypothesis of that paper was that the changing character of labor markets around the world had been leading to a rise in female labor force participation and a relative if not absolute fall in men's employment, as well as a “feminization” of many jobs traditionally held by men.

The term “feminization” was intentionally ambiguous. Perhaps a better term could have been used. It was intended, however to capture the double meaning and the sense of irony that, after generations of efforts to integrate women into regular wage labor as equals, the convergence that was the essence of the original hypothesis has been toward the type of employment and labor force participation patterns associated with women. The era of flexibility is also an era of more generalized insecurity and precariousness, in which many more men as well as women have been pushed into precarious forms of labor.

Feminization arises because available employment and labor options tend increasingly to characterize activities associated, rightly or wrongly, with women and because the pattern of employment tends to result in an increasing proportion of women occupying the jobs. The term could be decomposed into its constituents. A type of job could be feminized, or men could find themselves in feminized positions. More women could find themselves in jobs traditionally taken by men, or certain jobs could be changed to have characteristics associated with women's historical pattern of labor force participation. The characteristics include the type of contract, the form of remuneration, the extent and forms of security provided, and the access to skill.

A further difficulty arises from the connotations. Most observers think that work patterns that are intermittent, casual and partial are bad, while those that are stable, continuous and full are good. If the surrounding conditions are appropriate, however there is nothing intrinsically bad about a pattern of work involving multiple statuses, multiple activities and varying intensity of involvement in different forms of work.

Gender outcomes in labor markets do not reflect natural or objective differences between men and women, but rather reflect the outcome of discrimination and disadvantage, and the behavioural reactions by workers and employers. This means that even if the thesis of feminization were supported empirically, a reversal of trend could still be possible. That stated, the following does no more than bring the original hypothesis up to date with a decade more of data used in the original paper, bearing in mind all the difficulties of making crossnational comparisons.

To reiterate, the contextual developments that have shaped the growing feminization of the labor market include:

(a) International trade in goods and services has grown enormously as a share of national incomes, as has the share of foreign or multinational investment in total investment in most countries.

(b) Trade and investment have been directed increasingly to economies in which labor costs have been relatively low (or where they have been expected to be relatively low), putting a premium on the level of wages, nonwage labor costs and labor productivity.

(c) In the postwar era up to the 1970s, trade between countries was predominantly in complementary goods (e.g., primary for nonprimary) or between countries with similar labor rights, and therefore roughly equivalent labor costs (balanced by differences between wages and productivity). From the 1970s onward, partly as a consequence of actual and incipient industrialization of some parts of the developing world, labor rights in industrialized countries became increasingly perceived as costs of production to be avoided in the interest of enhancing or maintaining “national competitiveness.”

(d) In the past few years, there has been a “technological revolution,” based on micro-electronics, which inter alia has permitted a wider range of technological-managerial options in working arrangements, which again means that cost considerations of alternatives have become more significant determinants of allocations and divisions of labor. This has affected patterns of employment in industrialized and industrializing economies, and the international division of labor, accentuating tendencies to allocate to where labor costs are lowest (which depends on wages, nonwage labor costs, productivity and supporting infrastructure).³ There is also the possibility that we have been in a phase of what some analysts have described as “technological stalemate,” in which process (cost-cutting) innovations predominate over product innovations.

(e) There has been a crystallization of a global economic strategy, under the banner of “structural adjustment,” “shock therapy” and other supply-side economic policies. This strategy has been associated with radical changes in labor market relations, involving erosion of protective and pro-collective labor regulations, decentralization of wage determination, erosion of employment security and a trend to market regulation rather than statutory regulation of the labor market.

(f) There has been an erosion in the legitimacy of the welfare systems of industrialized countries. In the era following WWII, for much of the world universal social protection within a “redistributive welfare state” was regarded as a long-term development goal and as the basis of well-functioning labor markets. The erosion of that model has been due to many factors, including the rising costs of achieving social protection in the context of high unemployment, the rejection of Keynesianism and its replacement by faith in supply-side economics, by which public spending is perceived (or presented) as “crowding out” private, productive investment, and a loss of faith among welfare state defenders in its ability to be redistributive. There has been growing privatization of social protection and an individualization of social security, whereby more workers have to depend on their own contributions and entitlements.

These contextual developments have both shaped the gender division of labor and have been influenced by the labor market developments themselves. In particular, they have increased the emphasis placed on labor costs. That has led to greater use of alternative forms of employment to the conventional one of regular, full-time wage labor, which has weakened the dualistic segmentation of employment in which men have been relatively protected “insiders”.