Unit 2: Gender issues in the world of work
Emerging gender issues in the Asia Pacific region
Women’s increased labour force participation, but persistent gender-based inequalities
More than half (54.2 percent in 1993) of the world’s women in the labour force live in the Asia-Pacific region. In recent decades, women in the Asia Pacific region have experienced improvements in their absolute position in terms of:
Recent job creation has, in fact, tended to favour women more than men, especially if their participation in the informal sector and overseas contract labour markets is also taken into account.
However, serious gender-based inequalities persist. Data show women lagging behind men in all areas. The terms on which women have been employed have rested widely on an implicit elasticity of their labour supply and an explicit inferiority of treatment of female relative to male labour.
As of June 1997, only 20 of the 37 ILO member countries in the region had ratified Convention No. 100 on Equal Remuneration and 19 had ratified Convention No. 111 on Discrimination (Employment and Occupation).
Professional and managerial occupations
Education and training have not broken down sex segregation in occupations and stratification of employment. Women, relative to men, occupy the low status, low paying jobs with generally poor working conditions and little prospects of occupational mobility.
There are proportionately more men than women in professional and managerial occupations in Hong Kong, China (including Hong Kong), Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam. In the Philippines, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Western Samoa and Fiji, these male-female gaps are reversed. However, more detailed examination of the data reveal that the higher proportions of women are accounted for by their concentration in "feminized" professions, such as teaching. Their numbers in managerial or decisionmaking positions remain much lower than those of men. The Philippines outperforms most countries in the region in terms of women’s participation in government bureaucracy and administration. However, women accounted for only 0.6 percent of top administrative, executive and managerial posts in 1982-83, a figure which rose marginally to 1 percent by 1992.
The ready and seemingly endless supply of cheap, young, female labour was (and still is) the cornerstone of successful export-oriented industrialisation in East and South-East Asia. The share of women in the manufacturing sector often exceeded 80 percent in Hong Kong, the Republic of Korea, Malaysia, Singapore, Taiwan and Thailand. This has undoubtedly generated unprecedented employment opportunities for women, saving them from the prospect of unemployment or low-paid work in the informal sector. Wage employment has given women access to independent incomes and enabled them to contribute significantly to family incomes, helping enhance their status and value within the family. The remittances they regularly send home often play an indispensable role in sustaining poor rural and urban families adversely affected by austerity measures adopted by many governments who cannot depend solely on agriculture or the informal sector for their survival.
However, the increasing employment of women in the manufacturing sector has been confined to a limited range of export-oriented, labour-intensive industries. Within these industries women have been bunched into menial dead-end jobs that are ill-paid, repetitive and have poor career prospects.
In 1990-91, the average wage of women workers in manufacturing relative to the wage earned by males was 69.5% in Hong Kong, 42.9 percent in Japan, 50.8 percent in Korea, 55.7 percent in Singapore and 87.8 percent in Sri Lanka.
Industrial work has often exposed women to poor and sometimes exploitative working conditions and occupational safety and health problems. These problems are related to:
A recent survey of over 11,000 workers in non-unionised industrial factories in Indonesia found that working conditions are generally poor for both sexes. However:
The employment opportunities that women in the region have gained have also tended to be unstable. Labour shedding has been a common practice: enterprises often do not want to keep women workers after a few years when their wages have risen, or if there is a likelihood of trade union organisation, and because the experience of workers is not valued. This is particularly the case when industries find cheaper sources of labour and relocate. Multinational companies have recently shifted operations from Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand to countries such as Bangladesh, China, Indonesia and Sri Lanka, where labour may be cheaper and labour laws less stringent or more poorly enforced.
In the service sector, women have been disproportionately concentrated in community services. Their participation as nurses, teachers, and social workers¾ or what have been termed the "feminized occupations"¾ has often been explained as an extension of women’s nurturing role into the public domain.
The majority of women workers, especially in the less developed countries and the countries in transition, still rely on agricultural employment. But they remain largely invisible in the data, because they work mainly in subsistence agriculture, where unpaid labour on their own land alternates with wage or exchange labour on another’s, and where homebased trade, crafts, and small industrial production combine with seasonal agricultural activities.
In agriculture, women have poorer access than men to:
Agricultural development policies have tended to emphasise productivity and poverty alleviation over employment creation. They have promoted a masculinisation of opportunities and tended to displace women’s labour, increasingly pushing women into marginal production.
In many Asian countries, new agricultural technology and mechanisation has reduced the demand for women’s labour which was previously responsible for labour-intensive tasks. It has been estimated, for example, that innovations in seeding, planting, and weeding¾ all women-predominated activities¾ will reduce labour hours per hectare from 1,460 to 625 per year in Java over the next few years.
Women all over the region also work longer hours than men. In many countries hit by the economic ravages of the 1980s, women, especially very poor women, are now working 60-90 hours a week just to try to maintain their meagre living standards.
[This note was prepared from Briefing Note 3.2, "Women at work in Asia and the Pacific - Recent trends and future challenges", in the Briefing Kit on Gender Issues in the World of Work, ILO, Geneva, 1995; and Module 1, "Women at Work in Asia and the Pacific: Situation, Issues and Concerns" in Promotion of Equality of Opportunity and Treatment for Women Workers: an ILO Manual for Asia and the Pacific, ILO/EASMAT, Bangkok, 1994.]
Bullock, Susan. 1994. Women and Work. Women and World Development Series, UN-NGO Group on Women and Development. London and New Jersey: Zed Books Ltd.
This book draws together research on gender, work and development, emphasising that the concept of work should include not only paid labour but all those activities which contribute to production and development. It discusses the invisibility, low status and insecurity of women’s work, documents gender-based constraints in the labour market, and presents efforts and measures to eliminate gender discrimination and promote equality of treatment and opportunity.
Dickens L. 1994. "Business Case for Women’s Equality: Is the Carrot Better than the Stick?" In Employee Relations (Bradford), 16(8), 1994, 5-18.
ILO Library: 94P43578
LABORDOC: 258014
This article discusses the limitations of the legal compliance approach to equal opportunity and the business approach, which views it as beneficial to organisational competitiveness.
ESCAP. 1994. Women in Asia and the Pacific: 1985-1993. Second Asian and Pacific Ministerial Conference on Women in Development, Jakarta. New York: United Nations.
ILO Library: 94B01/131 English
LABORDOC: 259611
This report contains four conference documents dealing respectively with "Women in economic development", "Women in social development", "Women and empowerment", and "Regional priority issues and proposals for action."
ESCAP. 1993. Women in Politics in Asia and the Pacific. Seminar on the participation of Women in Politics as an Aspect of Human Resources Development, Seoul, 1992. New York: United Nations.
ILO Library: 93B01/159 English
LABORDOC: 265364
This report includes the text of the Seoul Statement on Empowering Women in Politics.
Forsyth D.J.C. 1996. Women Workers in Fiji’s Formal Sector. Suva.
ILO Library: 96A1061
LABORDOC: 269621
ILO. 1991. The Window of Opportunity: Strategies for enhancing women’s participation in technical cooperation projects. WID Occasional Paper No. 3. Geneva: ILO.
This booklet, meant for ILO officials, project staff and consultants, presents various simple ways of enhancing women’s visibility and active role in planning and monitoring development projects and programmes. It examines factors to consider when planning, monitoring and evaluating different types of projects and presents advantages and disadvantages of women-specific and mainstreamed projects.
Karl M. 1995. Women and Empowerment: Participation and Decision-Making. UN Non-Governmental Liaison Service. London: Zed Books.
ILO Library: 95A809
LABORDOC: 260498
Neumark D. and M. McLennan. 1995. "Sex Discrimination and Women’s Labour Market Outcomes." In Journal Of Human Resources (Madison), 30(4), Fall, 713-740.
ILO Library: 95P40150
LABORDOC: 268367
Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Young Women, this article provides some evidence that sex discrimination may be related to lower wages and has a statistically significant effect on the probability that women will change employers.
Rubery J. and M. Smith. 1996. Factors Influencing the Integration of Women into the Economy. International Training Centre of the ILO, Turin: ILO.
ILO Library: 96B09/174 English
LABORDOC: 268688
This report shows trends for the period from 1983 to 1994.