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Whilst undertaking research on macro-economic policy and the feminisation of poverty, I was struck by how many miles have already been walked, how many articles and books have already been written, how many task-forces have already been deployed, and how the policies of the multilateral institutions remain unashamedly as opaque and undemocratic as ever. The evidence and the research are astounding and date back to decades before now. Countless reports and articles have succinctly and systematically recorded and analysed the forces of neo-liberal globalisation and how they are destroying the livelihoods of people all over the world. I don’t know how many passionate, compelling, tragic and simply shocking stories I have read over the past years that have spelled out in sophisticated detail that the system of economic globalisation imposed upon countries of the South has to be redesigned. We have visibly been working hard to have our voices heard. It is the United States government and the multilateral institutions of the World Bank, International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Trade Organisation (WTO) and Asia Development Bank – not to mention Export Credit Agencies of national governments and the profit-greedy multinationals – that have to now take action.

Gender equality and freedom from the feminisation of poverty is enshrined in many international instruments, such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW – 1979), and the Beijing Declaration and Platforms that will undergo its ten year review at the end of this month. The recent UN Millennium Development Project (UNMDP) report also outlines some important strategic priorities in achieving Millennium Goal number three – Gender equality and empowerment of women. With such outstanding frameworks to work with, coupled with extensive research that shows clearly how people and especially women are suffering under the current neo-liberal system, why do women still constitute the majority of the poor? Why are women still not granted their full rights as human beings?

Blind policy has been negotiated for too long behind thick walls that obscure women’s diverse realities. Freedom, liberty and human rights are all energetically advocated by those in powerful positions within the neo-liberal order (usually men), however, if they placed their ears close to the ground, they would hear the voices of the marginalised, muffled by their own dancing feet. I am not saying that women do not have any agency under these powerful institutions. On the contrary, women have made and continue to make important gains in terms of rights and equality. What I am saying is that if these milestones are to continue, the monopoly on power and knowledge that is held by the multilateral institutions and others has to stop. It is simply not fair.

So what do we do as women and sisters who have passionately fought for a right to be heard, but constantly find ourselves in a position where the most powerful institutions in the world, supported by the most powerful state in the world, hear our voices, but fail to listen? We keep telling the truth until they do listen.

Why Millennium Goal Number 3 will not be achieved unless the multilateral institutions shape up:

Neo-liberal policy and the multilateral institutions that impose it play a key role in undermining sovereignty and perpetuating the feminisation of poverty. Institutions such as the World Bank, WTO and the IMF have eroded the ability of national governments to make decisions regarding economic and social policy, through the implementation of ‘globalisation from above’. Decision-making processes within the IMF and the World Bank are based on a system of investment. The more a country ‘contributes’ to the organisation, the more voting power they have. This undemocratic system of decision-making has resulted in countries of the North imposing neo-liberal policies on countries of the South. The World Trade Organisation (WTO) solidifies neo-liberal policy convergence in the international political system by creating the rules governing international trade. Agreements are drafted by “The Quad” governments of the United States, Canada, Europe and Japan, and these draft agreements are then discussed by a group of representatives from 20-30 countries, with the smaller one hundred or so developing countries typically excluded. Policies are imposed upon countries as conditions to lending, whereby the neo-liberal mantra of trade liberalisation, privatisation and deregulation becomes the orthodoxy, undermining democratic processes and participation within the state, and resulting in cleavages between civil society and the government. The recent collapse of trade talks at Cancun in 2003, exemplifies how not much has changed in macro-economic policy since Seattle in 1999.

Women, who already constitute the majority of the poor, feel the negative consequences of neo-liberal policy on a greater scale than men do. Millennium Development Goal 3 is to achieve gender equality and the empowerment of women. The latest UN Millennium Project (UNMP) task-force report on gender [1] identifies seven strategic priorities as the “minimum necessary to empower women and alter the historical legacy of female disadvantage that remains in most societies of the world”:

1.Strengthen opportunities for post-primary education for girls.

2.Guarantee sexual and reproductive rights.

3.Invest in infrastructure to reduce women’s and girls’ time burdens.

4.Guarantee women’s and girls’ property and inheritance rights.

5.Eliminate gender inequality in employment by decreasing women’s reliance on informal employment, closing gender gaps in earnings, and reducing occupational segregation.

6.Increase women’s share of seats in national parliaments and local government bodies.

7.Combat violence against girls and women.

These seven priorities are intimately linked to macro-economic policy and in particular multilateral trade rules, in that “globalisation, trade liberalisation and the emerging coherence between international financial and trade institutions greatly impinge on the policy space at the national level [and yet] there is no policy interaction at the institutional level with regard to gender mainstreaming” [2]. Achieving these strategic priorities will require an increased focus from national governments and a significant diversion of funding from other areas, but according to UNCTAD [3], multilateral trade rules: “can limit the capacity of governments to apply policies in support of gender inequality”; contribute to “maintaining large wage differentials between male workers (mostly skilled) and female workers (mostly unskilled) despite increases in exports”; and contribute to widespread job losses for women via the removal of domestic support to small-scale farmers in countries of the South. Whilst these strategic priorities identify important areas of concern in regards to alleviating the feminisation of poverty, they do not specifically refer to the structural issues of inequality that are embedded within the practices and policies of the most powerful institutions in the world governing trade and development policy. These institutions “have added gender mainstreaming to their rhetoric, but have not changed their practices or their policies” [4].

Mariama Williams from the International Gender and Trade Network (IGTN) argues that within macro-economic policy, gender is relegated to “soft” areas that “must work to complement and offset the necessary adjustment costs of macro planning decisions and outcomes”. This means that “hard” areas such as agricultural liberalisation and tariff reductions are deemed gender neutral, whereas food distribution between men and women are analysed from a gender perspective [5]. This is a significant problem whereby decisions on neo-liberal policy are not only made through an undemocratic decision-making process that favours the rich countries over the poor, but they are made without any real consideration of gender. This simply reifies existing structural inequalities and results in a perpetuation of the feminisation of poverty. Taking a closer look at two of the priorities identified in the task-force report reveals how neo-liberal policy convergence ignores gender concerns and exacerbates the difficulties faced by women. Strategic priority 4 is to guarantee women’s and girls property and inheritance rights. Land ownership is deemed important to empowering women both economically and socially, and means that women have access to direct benefits such as the use of crops and rights to their proceeds. There is also evidence to suggest that asset ownership can also protect against domestic violence [6]. The report asserts that there are few statistics on the magnitude of gender asset gaps, but that some reports conducted indicate that women hold a substantially lower amount of land ownership than men in countries throughout Latin America, Sub-Saharan Africa and South and Central Asia.

The right to ‘land ownership’ is an interesting way to discuss women’s relationship with the earth. It is estimated that women grow at least 59 percent of the world’s food, with women in Africa producing more than 70 percent of Africa’s food [7]. Clearly, women are key stakeholders in any trade agreements on agricultural products, yet their needs and interests are not taken seriously by the institutions that push for lower trade barriers, greater access for multi-national corporations and cash crop exports. The same could be said for intellectual property agreements. For thousands of years women have been looking after the nutritional needs of their families through subsistence agriculture, as well as the use of natural medicines, and now this indigenous knowledge is being increasingly “discovered” and patented by MNCs. Eco-feminist Vandana Shiva explains: “patents and intellectual property rights are supposed to be granted for novel inventions. But patents are being claimed for rice varieties such as the basmati for which the Doon Valley (where I was born) is famous, or pesticides derived from the neem tree which our mothers and grandmothers have been using for centuries. Rice Tec, a US-based company, has been granted Patent no. 5,663,484 for basmati rice lines and grains… The knowledge of the poor is being converted into the property of global corporations, creating a situation where the poor will have to pay for the seeds and medicines that they have cultivated, developed and used to meet their needs for nutrition and health care” [8].

Under the current neo-liberal agenda, women who produce food for their families are classified as unproductive, with only cash crops counting for productivity within the economy. Simplistic poverty reduction strategies such as export-oriented growth ignore the productive capacity of women in subsistence and community farming, and often destroy women’s productivity and self-worth when they are forced to change to cash crops for export, and are unable to provide food from subsistence agriculture for their families. Small autonomous producers are rendered invisible to the global economy when governments are forced to compete with giant agribusiness companies, and shift agricultural production to industrial monocultures [9].

Coupled with increases in production for exports, neo-liberal policy advocates for a reduction of welfare services, higher charges for basic services and lower wages [10]. In addition to these barriers, there are rising production costs and decreasing commodity prices as a result of cheaper goods flooding the market. The right to land ownership, then, is rendered useless when women and their families are faced with rising costs they are simply unable to meet. Increasingly poor, many families are selling their land to investors, who either use the land for industry, or create large cash crops for export. The right to land ownership also disregards the reality of communal land. In Africa, for example, wherecommunal land tenure is still common, privatisation of this land for cash crops has been a major objective of the World Bank [11], with absolutely no consideration of the historical use of the land by women for subsistence farming.

Many women are forced to find extra employment to meet rising costs, and because they are generally paid less than men, women usually find it easier to gain employment [12]. This channels them into the informal workforce, where they work as street vendors, domestic workers and in the service industry – perpetuating the gendered division of labour.

Strategic priority 5 is to eliminate gender inequality in employment. According to the report, women’s status in the labour market is inferior to men’s in most countries of the world [13]. Women in countries of the global South continue to be found in low-skill, repetitive work in industries such as textiles and electronics and the informal workforce because of the many barriers to training and education that women face as opposed to men [14]. Job segregation in terms of gender is a major area of concern for the fight against the feminisation of poverty.

Neo-liberal policy such as the removal of trade barriers, privatisation and deregulation is meant to foster a climate for foreign direct investment to jump-start stagnant economies and bring in foreign currency. MNCs are taking advantage of these environments to set up manufacturing and production facilities in countries of the South where there are large pools of cheap labour, flexible labour laws and tax incentives. This can have both positive and negative effects for women. On the positive side, the influx of MNCs entering the labour-intensive sectors of the South, such as textiles, footwear, data processing and service outsourcing has resulted in an increase in levels of employment for women in some countries [15]. The UNMDP report asserts, however, that in the last twenty years, “women’s overall economic activity rates increased… yet women’s status in the labour market remains significantly inferior to that of men’s worldwide”. Responsibility for this lies within neo-liberal policy convergence, which creates these ‘favourable’ environments for foreign investment, fails to take into account the different experiences of men and women, and focuses only on economic growth factors as development indicators, rendering gender implications invisible.

Export Processing Zones (EPZs) or Free Trade Zones, have increased dramatically as a result of neo-liberal policy, and yet recent research shows that EPZs often fall short of their goals and their performance is erratic, despite the incentives offered by host governments. Some of the biggest problems arising from the rise of EPZs include environmental damage, poor safety and health standards, and labour rights abuses. The majority of employees in EPZs are women, and despite arguments suggesting that EPZs exist as a route for women to enter the formal employment sector where wages are often higher than in the informal sector, women face sexual harassment and discrimination in hiring, wages and benefits.

There has been a wealth of research into the negative effects of Multinational Corporations (MNCs) on countries of the South, with some of the most compelling examples coming from John Pilger [16], an Australian journalist who has helped to expose some of the labour rights abuses and discrimination that women face when they are employed by some MNCs. Of course not all MNCs are guilty of labour abuses, but the climate of free trade zones or EPZs leaves it almost entirely up to the employer as to what regulations and standards they are going to impose. Under these conditions, and with the bottom line of every MNC being profit, labour rights abuses and lowered standards are inevitable.

Whilst visiting an EPZ in Indonesia, Pilger describes a common scenario: “Posing as a London fashion buyer… I was given a tour of one such factory, which makes Gap clothes for Britain and America. I found more than a thousand mostly young women working, battery-style, under the glare of strip lighting, in temperatures that reach 40 degrees centigrade. The only air-conditioning was upstairs, where the Taiwanese bosses were… The women have no choice about the hours they must work, including a notorious ‘long shift’: 36 hours without going home. I was assured that, if I wanted to place a last-minute order, that was ‘no problem’ because ‘we just make the workers stay longer’” [17].

Indonesia was described as the World Bank’s “model pupil of globalisation” under the Suharto regime before the financial crisis. When he was forced to resign in 1998, he took with him approximately $10 billion dollars of the World Bank’s money, which is still being repaid by the Indonesian people. When Pilger interviewed the World Bank’s chief economist at the time, Nicholas Stern, he asked him to explain why the World Bank or IMF did not speak out against the regime, who was singled out by the UN Commission on Human Rights because of inequality and discrimination. Stern responded that “Indonesia’s economy grew as a result of integrating into the global economy… it was a dictatorship, so people didn’t have some of their human rights” [18].

Clearly the World Bank’s narrow focus on economic growth in Indonesia is an example of how this approach ignores the consequences of neo-liberal policy on people’s lives. The reality is that labour segregation and the ‘race to the bottom’ in terms of wages in the workforce is perpetuated, not alleviated, by neo-liberal policy. The WTO Agreement on Textiles and Clothing, for example, which rested on a system of clothing export quotas for countries exporting to the European Union, Canada and the United States, expired at the end of 2004 and is being phased out in 2005 [19]. From 2005, all WTO member countries will have unrestricted access to European, Canadian and US markets. Countries who previously had high quota allocations, such as Sri Lanka, will now have to become more competitive in the market. The International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU) is concerned that an increase in competitiveness across the international textiles and clothing sectors, will result in further violations of labour practices as companies look to invest in countries where labour costs are low and labour laws are weak [20]. China is already showing signs of competitive advantage in this area of low-cost labour.

So whilst the strategic priorities of the Millennium Development Project are obvious for achieving gender equality and alleviating the feminisation of poverty, they are unrealistic given the structural impediments of neo-liberal policy imposed on countries by the multilateral institutions. No-where in the UNMDP report does it mention embedded, structural inequalities in macro-economic policy, despite the intimate relationship between multilateral institutions and national policies. The feminisation of poverty is inextricably related to policies and decisions made inside the ‘Green Room’ of the WTO, and vetoes and conditionalities on lending decisions by the US and other affluent countries within the walls of the World Bank and the IMF. These institutions have no accountability in the area of gender or human rights, and if this continues, objectives such as the Millennium Development Goals, will be difficult to reach.

It has become an imperative to wrestle back the agenda and investigate alternatives to economic liberalisation and neo-liberal policy convergence. This does not only involve reform of the international institutions that fortify the inequalities we see in the North and the South, but it involves a return to our Socratic right to question truth. Our reliance on mainstream political ideology is thwarting our ability to conceptualise truth and distinguish it from rationality. Problem-solving theories like neo-liberalism use the current structures as the framework for action and reify the existing world order with its accompanying power and wealth inequalities that reinforce these inequalities. Frameworks to alleviate poverty and to achieve gender equality are of no use unless they include a serious rethinking of the global economic system.

Published in:
Resource Net Friday File, Issue 212
Friday February 4, 2005
Association for Women’s Rights in Development ©
http://www.awid.org

Notes:

[1] UNMP Report 2005. Taskforce on Education and Gender Equality. Taking action: achieving gender equality and empowering women. Sourced from http://unmp.forumone.com/eng_html_02.html January 2005.

[2] IGTN (International Gender and Trade Network) 2004. Statement of Mariama Williams: Roundtable Discussion on Mainstreaming Gender Perspectives into all Policies and Programs in the UN System. United Nations, NY, July 6-7, 2004. Sourced from:
http://www.genderandtrade.net/Research/UNStatementMariama-07-04.pdf January 2005.

[3] UNCTAD 2004. UNCTAD XI and the Gender Implications of the multilateral trading system. Round Table on Trade and Gender, 15 June: Press Release.

[4] AWID (Association for Women’s Rights in Development) 2004. “Gender Mainstreaming: Can it work for Women’s Rights?”. Spotlight, November 2004: 3.

[5] IGTN (International Gender and Trade Network) 2004. Statement of Mariama Williams: Roundtable Discussion on Mainstreaming Gender Perspectives into all Policies and Programs in the UN System. United Nations, NY, July 6-7, 2004. Sourced from:
http://www.genderandtrade.net/Research/UNStatementMariama-07-04.pdf January 2005.

[6] UNMP Report 2005. Taskforce on Education and Gender Equality. Taking action: achieving gender equality and empowering women. Sourced from http://unmp.forumone.com/eng_html_02.html January 2005.

[7] Warren, K.J. 1997. “Taking Empirical Data Seriously: An Ecofeminist Philosophical Perspective” in Warren, K.J. 1997 (Ed). Ecofeminism: Women, Culture, Nature. Indiana: Indiana University Press.

[8] Shiva, V. 2001. “Globalization and Poverty”, in Bennholdt-Thomsen, V. Faraclas, N & Von Werlhof, C. (Eds.) There is an alternative: Subsistence and worldwide resistance to corporate globalisation. London: Zed Books.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Henshall Momsen, J. 2004. Gender and Development. London: Routledge.

[11] Federici, S. 2001. “War, Globalization and Reproduction” in Bennholdt-Thomsen, V. Faraclas, N & Von Werlhof, C. (Eds.) There is an alternative: Subsistence and worldwide resistance to corporate globalisation. London: Zed Books.

[12] Henshall Momsen, J. 2004. Gender and Development. London: Routledge.

[13] UNMP Report 2005. Taskforce on Education and Gender Equality. Taking action: achieving gender equality and empowering women. Sourced from http://unmp.forumone.com/eng_html_02.html January 2005.

[14] Ibid.

[15] UNCTAD 2004. UNCTAD XI and the Gender Implications of the multilateral trading system. Round Table on Trade and Gender, 15 June: Press Release.

[16] Pilger, J. 2003. The New Rulers of the World. London: Verso.

[17] Ibid.

[18] Ibid.

[19] ICFTU (International Confederation of Free Trade Unions) 2004. Behind the Brand Names: Working conditions and labour rights in Export Processing Zones. Available from http://www.icftu.org. December 2004.

[20] Ibid.