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Feminist Explorations of Labor Market Outcomes

Paper Session

Saturday, Jan. 4, 2025 10:15 AM - 12:15 PM (PST)

The Marker Union Square San Francisco, Bogart
Hosted By: Union for Radical Political Economics & International Association for Feminist Economics
  • Chair: Yasemin Dildar, California State University-San Bernardino

Macroeconomic Impact of Trade and Capital Market Integration on Women’s Labor Market Outcomes in South Asia

Sanchari Choudhury
,
Colorado State University

Abstract

Theoretical argument in the mainstream of international trade and development economics during the neoliberal era has been dominated by the viewpoint that economic liberalization, combined with export orientation will provide better job opportunities, higher earnings and better living conditions for women in developing countries. In this study, the attempt is to drive at some generalizable trends based on historical data through a feminist lens in South Asia and to investigate the neoliberal arguments through analyzing the macroeconomic structural shifts at the disaggregated manufacturing industry level post the era of trade policy liberalization and global market integration. This study majorly focuses on women’s share of manufacturing employment and feminization and defeminization by sector. A structural decomposition analysis is implemented on ISIC Revision 3 based on 2-digit data from Industrial Statistics database (INDSTAT2) in South Asian countries for years 1993-2019. SDA is used to separately identify structural shifts in the composition of employment for women across industries and changes in within-industry employment patterns in the manufacturing industry. This analysis is extended to incorporate labor productivity decomposition of industries that captures the relationship between productivity levels, intensity of human and physical capital and gendered employment patterns in various sectors. This analysis further uses a panel data framework for South Asia to study the impacts of international trade and capital market openness on women’s labor-market outcomes. This exercise enables one to investigate the structural features that are common in these countries and ones that indicate differential ways of exposure of various sectors to the global markets and its gendered implications.

Trade and Gender Employment Patterns: Did the COVID-19 Pandemic Lead to Structural Changes?

Chiara Piovani
,
University of Denver
Nursel Aydiner-Avsar
,
Akdeniz University
M. Burak Onemli
,
Izmir Katip Celebi University

Abstract

The Covid-19 pandemic, and the resulting global economic recession, had a major impact on international trade. This process has gendered labor market implications given the gender segregation in employment worldwide and the use of the gender wage gap as a cost-cutting strategy in many countries. The Covid-19 pandemic also intensified the unpaid work demands of women, affecting their capacity to sustain paid employment. This paper investigates the gendered employment effects of trade in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic in both industrialized and developing countries, based on a panel data analysis using comparable data from the ILO, the World Bank, and the WTO. Specifically, the study estimates the impact of trade openness measures (i.e., exports and imports), the Covid-19 pandemic, and the post-pandemic era on the female intensity of employment, measured by the female-to-male employment ratio, for the global economy, in each broad sector of the economy (i.e. agriculture, industry, and services), and for industrialized and developing countries considered separately. The study also evaluates in what ways the role of trade on gender employment patterns changed during and after the pandemic. The findings indicate that exports (imports) have a positive (negative) and statistically significant association with the female-to-male employment ratio. The Covid-19 pandemic appears to have reversed this pattern. The positive relationship between exports and the female to-male employment ratio appears to have lessened both during the pandemic and in the recovery period. The opposite applies to the typical negative association of imports with the female-to-male employment ratio, which showed the tendency to become positive during the pandemic and post-pandemic era. The empirical findings are interpreted based on the relevant policy measures that governments adopted during and after the Covid-19 pandemic. The paper concludes with policy recommendations to respond to the gender disparities that have emerged with the Covid-19 crisis

Monetary Policy and Gendered Employment Outcomes in Developing Countries

Milena Dehn
,
Colorado State University

Abstract

While a growing literature highlights the distributional consequences of monetary policies, the empirical evidence on the gendered effects remains limited. Using a panel of 21 developing economies between 1990 and 2020, we thus investigate whether the employment gains and costs associated with monetary policies are unevenly distributed between men and women.
We consider both the effect of unanticipated monetary shocks on gendered employment outcomes and the impact of contractionary and expansionary monetary policy stances more generally. Additionally, we consider the transmission of monetary policy from center countries. To account for asymmetries between contractionary and expansionary monetary policy, we analyze them separately.
While the gendered employment effects are mediated by differences in industrial structure and the female-intensity of industrial employment, our findings suggest that women in developing countries are affected more negatively than men if contractionary monetary policy leads to decreased employment. Expansionary monetary policy does not result in a significant reversion of this pattern. These results add to existing analyses of the conflictive dimensions of monetary policies and highlight the importance of considering gender in macroeconomic policymaking.

Women’s Labour Force Participation in Developing Countries: The Impact of Gendered Landownership Rights

Yasemin Dildar
,
California State University-San Bernardino
Ece Kocabıçak
,
Open University

Abstract

This paper challenges widely accepted assumptions regarding gendered patterns of labour: firstly, that capitalist development pulls women into non-agricultural employment and secondly, that women’s unpaid labour largely comprises the production of non-market goods and services within the home. Conventional demand and supply arguments on gender gaps in non-agricultural employment overlook the significance of patriarchal labour relations and the influence of women’s unpaid farm work on their participation in paid employment. Here we use cross-country panel data analysis and a case study from India with a difference-in-differences model to demonstrate that legal discrimination against women in land inheritance curtails female participation in non-agricultural paid employment. This occurs through several mechanisms, by: (1) keeping women in agriculture as unpaid family workers, (2) restricting women’s access to education, and (3) exacerbating the trend of rural women's marriage migration. The paper thereby contributes an explanation for the apparent paradox observed in developing countries where persistent gender gaps in non-agricultural paid employment coexist with economic growth. It also suggests that tackling barriers to female labour participation by using policies which focus solely on the provision of childcare is insufficient; rather, an exit package offering occupational training, guaranteed employment and housing is required to support women’s transition out of unpaid agricultural labour.

Urban Displacement and the Crises of Social Reproduction

Arpita Biswas
,
University of Manitoba

Abstract

The well-developed literature on contemporary land acquisitions has under-theorized their gendered consequences. Most political theorists have analyzed the effects of dispossession and displacement on the productive sphere. In doing so, they have missed out on explicitly exploring the process’ effects on social reproduction. Feminist scholarship on dispossession has worked towards remedying this. This paper draws inspiration from that literature and advocates for foregrounding social reproduction crises as a central axis of the study of dispossession. Using primary data collected from the city of Delhi that has been treated as a vicious experimental field for basti (slum) eviction measures ever since India adopted neoliberal policies in 1991, it asks what processes/mechanisms resulting from eviction led to the crises of social reproduction and what forms those crises took. In demonstrating displaced women’s struggle for the reproduction of labor power and familial and community relations, the paper contributes to our understanding of dispossession’s effects on life-making processes on a daily basis.
JEL Classifications
  • F1 - Trade