Women In Paid Work Essay

Both the readings inform us that the increase in women’s engagement in paid work is an important aspect of global economic integration and throughout the readings there is a continuous emphasis on how the rise of the global economy and globalization has led to insecurity of employment and income. Beneria has defined global feminization of labor as the increase in the number of women working in paid work and has further explained it by describing women’s work in different sectors such as manufacturing, agriculture, services and human trafficking. Standing defines global feminization of labor as the rise in female labor force participation and the rise of insecurity of employment and income. The increase in women’s employment has not only created …show more content…
This week’s reading gave me a clear understanding of the reasons why women started being more preferred. Employers prefer women because women labor cost is lower than men’s, greater productivity, women temporary nature of their employment and most importantly, women are easier to control than men and will likely agree with the rules set by their employer. What I found very captivating in the reading was how it tried to explain that one of the main reason for low wage and low working conditions of workers is due to the competition between labor intensive manufactures. For example, almost all products are outsourced to low cost economies, particularly where wages are very low. The different companies compete with each other for cheaper labor. The companies who are at the top of the value chain are the ones who get to choose where the products are being made and switch to another place if the owner of a factor increases their price or if they find a cheaper labor to produce to their products. In order to prevent their factory from running out of business the factor owners have no other option but to reduce the wage of their