Cecilia Ng

[Ed. Note: This article was shared at a conference in October 2000 in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia-Development and Liberation in the Third Millennium-that was organised by the urban rural mission and development and service desks of the Christian Conference of Asia (CCA). The footnotes, however, have been removed. Please contact AHRC if you would like the references for this article.]

Introduction

When I was asked to speak about globalisa-tion and women, a major question came to my mind: Is globalisation weakening or strengthening patriarchy? In other words, are women, as a result of globalisation, gaining more rights; or because they are now more visible in their claim for gender and social equality, have the forces of conservatism (in the name of tradition, religion and even love) reacted, making their struggle an uphill one?
However, before I begin, I would like to preface my sharing with the following three points. First, I do not believe that the globalising process is integrating us into homogeneous entities in the spheres of economy, culture, technology and governance as some would like us to believe; some call this process an euphemism for ultraimperialism. Indeed, this very globalising process has led to fragmentation and the emergence of divergent views and identity politics, for certainly globalisation is not universal. At the recent global knowledge conference held in Kuala Lumpur, two of the main themes of the conference were the indigenisation of knowledge and sovereignty-a counter discourse to that of globalisation. The forces of economic globalisation might have to contend with other forms of social and cultural resistance, thus making its spread a much more complex process. As Diana Wong puts it aptly, 'The challenge of globality today may not lie in the attainment of convergence but in the recognition and acceptance of difference.'

Secondly, it is important for us to note that women are not a homogeneous category; and while united as a gender, they are also divided by class, ethnicity, religion, age, ideology and sexual preferences. We should keep these differences in mind when we talk about 'globalisation and women' as, indeed, one woman's gain might be another woman's loss as in the case of female migrant domestic helpers.

The third point I would like us to bear in mind is that the discourse on the 'woman question' involves both men and women, that is, the social and power relations between men and women-gender relations-in all aspects of life, from the family to the economic and political spheres.

But to come back to the original question: Has globalisation chiselled away sexist structures, processes and attitudes? What have been or will be the opportunities for women's empowerment, and what are the threats to her continued oppression? I would like to argue that there have certainly been gains in terms of recognising women's rights as human rights. These gains have been made both as a result of and in spite of globalisation through centuries of struggle. Within the last three decades, these struggles have gained momentum due to the international women's movement and through the various world conferences on women, starting from 1975 to the Beijing + 5 meeting in New York in 2000. Indeed, these global meetings have attempted to put forth a global governance on women's position and rights and in this way have served to pressure national governments to adapt their stances. As a result, women's groups at the national level, including those in Malaysia, have used these global forums to also pressure from below. As Eric Hobsbawm has pointed out, 'Women's assertion of active agency is a significant expression of democratic upsurge in developing countries and shall remain one of the largest contributions for the 20th century.'

The 1995 Beijing Platform of Action acknowledged the following gains of the women's movement:

- Women's rights are recognised as human rights;
- Violence against women are legitimate issues which violate women's dignity;
- Women's housework is recognised as having value and is worthy of separate accounting.

Despite these gains, it is also clear that as we move into the 21st century -the century of the so-called borderless world-the development model which is being promoted globally is producing increasing inequality and environmental degradation (see various Human Development Reports from 1996 to 1999 produced by the United Nations Development Programme [UNDP]). The richest 20 percent of the world command 85 percent of the world's income while the poorest 40 percent own only 1.4 percent of that same income. When measuring the gender-related development index (GDI), the 1997 UNDP report discloses quite unabashedly that 'no society treats its women as well as its men.'

What then are some of the global statistics for women? Out of the 1.3 billion poor people in the world, 70 percent are women, the majority of whom are illiterate with no access to basic amenities like safe drinking water. Two-thirds of the 130 million children worldwide who are not in school are girls. Between 75 percent and 80 percent of the world's 27 million refugees are women and children. Women hold 10.5 percent of the seats in the world's parliaments. The majority of women earn an average of about three-fourths of the pay of males for the same work. In most countries, women work about twice the unpaid time that men do. One in every four households in the world is now headed by a woman. Worldwide 20 percent to 50 percent of women experience some degree of domestic violence during marriage. The primary victims of today's armed conflicts are civilian women and children, not soldiers, with rape becoming more evident as a weapon of war.

Let me elaborate on several of these issues in relation to opportunities and threats for women in this era of globalisation. I would like to highlight five main concerns: the feminisation of employment, migration and the family, violence against women, the commoditisation of women and privatisation.

Issue 1: The Feminisation of Employment

In order to respond to increasing and intense global competition, corporations are creating various strategies to meet the challenges of their own survival. One of the major strategies deals with labour and takes three main forms: labour flexibility, the casualisation of labour and the feminisation of labour. Concretely, dual labour processes are occurring. One leads to a fragmentation of the labour process resulting in low-skilled and repetitive work whereby there is a shift and/or combination of regular work with various forms of non-regular, flexible employment, e.g., part-time, temporary, subcontracted and home-based workers. The other process is the upgrading of workers' skills in multitask jobs using information communication technology (ICT), resulting in an increasing demand for multiskilled workers with hardware and/or software as well as business skills. The majority of the workers in the first category are women while those in the second are men, although more and more women are now being employed in ICT-led sectors.

The export boom in Southeast and East Asia in the last quarter of the 20th century was fuelled by the contribution of women in export-related activities and through the remittances made by migrant women workers. In Malaysia, we know that electrical and electronic products comprise about 60 percent of the total manufactured exports of the country with the industry generating about one-third of manufacturing employment in Malaysia. Many of us forget though that the majority of those employed, particularly at the operator level, are Malay women. As noted above, this trend towards the feminisation of paid employment in Asian countries was driven by the need of employers, usually transnational corporations (TNCs), for cheaper and more flexible sources of labour. Global capitalism makes use of the existing patriarchal ideology whereby women are perceived to be more subservient to (male) managerial authority, less prone to organise or be organised into unions, more willing to accept poorer working conditions and easier to dismiss using such life-cycle criteria as marriage and childbirth.

However, such a process is also double-edged. On the one hand, the globalisation of trade and the economy has definitely opened up economic and income opportunities for women, resulting in her improved status in the household and an increase in her position in society as well as her self-esteem. It has opened up choices for women in both the manufacturing and services sectors; and for those in the higher-valued industries, it has also meant an increase in her skills. My research with Maznah Mohamed and Tan Beng Hui on women electronics workers in two TNCs found that they are confident, have a great sense of pride in their company and a positive perception of themselves as part of the company in which they work. With the expansion of ICT, information processing work can now be globally distributed, leading to new modes of working, such as telework, teletrade and e-commerce. Women as offshore data entry workers, software programmers and systems analysts are finding novel employment opportunities in this digital age. In my own study of software companies in Malaysia, 30 percent of the software personnel were women.

However, on the other hand, we know that the majority of the women workers labour under inferior working conditions and often on shifts with serious implications for their social and physical health. Those in the lower end, labour-intensive consumer electronics industries suffer from health problems that include extreme fatigue and general health problems due to chemical hazards and job stress.

The current economic crisis has more serious implications for women than for men, not least because more women than men are hired in the export-led industries being affected and more women than men are in the unskilled and low-skilled jobs, but also because women are also strongly affected by the loss of their incomes within the household. The retrenchment data for the Malaysian electronics sector reveals that 26 percent of the employees in this sector were retrenched during the 17-month period from January 1998 to May 1999. The majority were local workers with women comprising 65 percent of those retrenched. Most of the retrenchment came from foreign-owned companies with their workers forming 75 percent of the total retrenched. According to Jayati Ghosh, there is a real possibility that the long march towards equality for women in the region, particularly for poor women, may be halted or even reversed by the current economic turmoil.

This is because poor women all over Asia are at the bottom of a vertical sub-contracting process which squeezes profits at each level. These women, located in urban slums, in small towns, estates, rural villages as well as migrant workers, will be the most exploited as they are often low-skilled, possess less formal education, are unorganised and, hence, are more vulnerable. They will not enjoy the opportunities offered to their sisters who have a command of information technology. In such a situation, those who fall by the wayside are the older production workers, both men and women. Genera-tional gaps will occur within and across genders in terms of the new and dynamic forms of knowledge-based employment.

Issue 2: Migration - Breakdown of the Extended Family and Kinship Network

Like globalisation, migration is not a new phenomenon. Terms like berjelai and merantau in Malaysia indicate that the notion of 'movement' is part of the local vocabulary. However, rural households were previously held together by kinship structures and reciprocal labour networks (berderau, gotong royong, bekerjasama) which ensured the cohesion of the community, including female-headed families. However, as a result of the Green Revolution, these socio-economic networks today have been replaced by cash and commodity relations, endangering these structures so crucial for social cohesion. In rural areas, with the commercialisation of agriculture and the migration of husbands and daughters to the cities, poverty now has a female face. In indigenous communities, the taking away of their customary land to make way for the construction of dams and commercial crops has led to a denigration of the status of indigenous women who once owned land and in which the planting of 'padi' (padi pun or spirit) was related to their high status in the community.

At the global level, more than 120 million migrants have left their home countries in search of greener pastures abroad, leading to a warning by the United Nations of the 'human crisis of our age.' In Asia, migration for economic reasons has denuded poor families, leaving children to fare for themselves with either their father or mother away in a foreign land. The problems faced by female migrant workers are concerns with which we need to grapple in a systematic manner.

The migration of males has been a major factor leading to an increasing proportion of female-maintained households, the majority of which live in extreme poverty. Thirty percent to 35 percent of all rural households in India, for example, are female-headed households compared to 25 percent in Cambodia, 21.4 percent in Mongolia and 15.7 percent in Korea. In Malaysia, there are 600,000 female-headed households.

The breakdown of the extended family is more clearly seen in the urban sector. Today the nuclear family is more and more the norm, especially in the cities, where the burden is heavier for working couples who have to deal with stress both at work and in the family. Stress at work is compounded by calls for efficiency, productivity and the achievement of quotas while, at the familial level, there are daily struggles to catch up with the increasing cost of living, particularly as various public services are privatised. With women finding employment and a newfound freedom, they are asking for traditional gender relations to change. Without proper communication and with patriarchal ideology slow to change, tensions within families increase, leading to a breakdown of the family. Divorce rates are increasing, especially in the cities, and society often blames women for marriage breakdowns as they have become more aggressive in 'demanding their own space.' Will there now be a backlash for women who have struggled so long for their rights?

Issue 3: Better Laws, Increased Awareness, Increasing Violence against Women: A Crisis in Masculinity?

There is no doubt that there has been an increased awareness that violence against women is a crime. In fact, this awareness, coupled with reforms in the relevant laws, has been one of the successes of the women's movement at the global and national level. Yet why is it that violence against women in many countries is not decreasing despite numerous campaigns by women's groups? As noted earlier, 20 percent to 50 percent of women worldwide suffer some domestic violence during marriage. Let us look at other statistics.

(1) The total number of reported rape cases in Malaysia increased from 879 in 1993 to 1,323 in 1997-an increase of 50 percent. The rape of teen-age girls rose form 604 cases in 1995 to 719 in 1996. Police statistics disclose that 67 percent of rapes in 1996 were victims below 16 years of age; 85 per cent of these rapes were committed by boyfriends, family members and neighbours.

(2) The reported cases of female domestic violence increased from 466 in 1992 to 5,799 in 1997, a 1,000 percent increase. This number actually shot from 2,291 reported cases in 1996 to 5,799 in 1997 perhaps because of increased awareness created by the implementation of the Domestic Violence Act.

(3) Domestic abuse of women, both physical and mental, is on the rise with Bangladesh reporting an increasing trend in suicides among women.

(4) Increased cases of dowry-related deaths and the harassment of young brides are reported in India, Nepal and Bangladesh.

(5) Prostitution, forced prostitution and trafficking in women and children with associated violence and harassment have become a major concern in the region.

(6) Widespread sexual violence against women in areas of armed conflict and civil unrest are reported in Laos, Cambodia and the Philippines.

(7) Women migrant workers are increasingly becoming victims of sexual violence.

How do we explain the above phenomenon? In Malaysia, despite the wide publicity given to the sexual harassment code, our own male parliamentarians made unwanted sexual innuendoes towards our female members of Parliament (MPs). Moreover, it is well known that when both the amendments to the laws on rape and the Domestic Violence Act were proposed there were loud guffaws from male MPs.

Feminist accounts in the West since the 1970s have suggested that gender violence increases when men feel they are losing ground as a sex. It is also not very clear to what extent the economic crisis has led to an increase of violence against women. Indeed, today 30 percent, or 2.5 billion members of the work force, are unemployed or underemployed. Many of these are men whose socio-cultural and symbolic role as the breadwinner in the family (in fact, this is increasingly untrue, but society still treats female labour as secondary) is increasingly being threatened. In Malaysia, 55 percent of those retrenched during the recent crisis were men. The ability of men to 'take care of the family' is thus being chipped away, leading, I believe, to a crisis in masculinity.

From another angle, very often the transformation of unequal gender relations touches very intimate cultural and emotional knots in our personal lives, which are the hardest to acknowledge and change. For men, who are themselves exploited as workers, it means giving up years of macho masculinity and learning to say that one is sorry after beating up your wife for years. How do you treat your wife as an equal when you have always been the master of the house? For women, 'sleeping with the enemy' makes it all the more difficult to challenge such violent relationships. If globalisation is a project of modernity leading to changing female roles, patriarchal attitudes are certainly still in the premodern, if not primordial, stage. The notion of equal partnership as articulated through relations, processes and structures have yet to take root.

Issue 4: The Commoditisation of Women and Sexuality

The market has also affected culture, which is increasingly being commercialised and commoditised. The rise of individualism (to be different, to compete with others by having more) and consumerism actually accompany globalisation and the need for TNCs to sell their products to accumulate a greater surplus for themselves. Firms and individuals follow this trend in their pursuit of materialism and the creation of status symbols. In the same vein, sexuality and women's bodies are being commoditised as never before, from pornography, sex tourism and sex trafficking to advertisements and beauty schemes which feed on our emotional insecurities and little vanities.

Economic globalisation in the form of 'market democracy' has also created the image of the New Asian Women. She is the professional woman, entrepreneur, manageress, executive who is articulate, glamorous and assertive. This image is in every women's magazine that is avidly read by the middle class and aspiring working-class women who do not have the means to buy designer clothes and skin-whitening products. This icon of the fashionable and glamorous energy-filled woman is sharply contrasted with the veiled Muslim woman.

Issue 5: Privatisation and the Rolling Back of the State

Last, but not least, let us comment briefly on privatisation, a strong arm of globalisation, and its implications for women. Under the guise of free market restructuring, the privatisation of public services has led not only to its reduced availability but often to higher prices for such services as well as basic necessities. Because women are still expected to be responsible for child care and family maintenance, they will bear the disproportionate weight of these constraints. Women as homemakers have to balance the extra costs due to increasing charges for public utilities, education and health care as a result of cuts in public subsidies. Not only will their double burden be intensified, there will also be mounting pressure to assume multiple roles both as paid and unpaid labour, e.g., taking care of the elderly, the retrenched, taking on extra work in the informal sector. Those adversely affected will be poor women who will have decreased or no access to such amenities or will have to struggle more to gain access to these services for their family.

Conclusion

What conclusions can be made? I would like to mention four main observations.

There have been increased economic opportunities for women but also mounting threats. In the present global reshaping of labour, studies have shown that, as a company adopts labour casualisation, the higher is the number of women employed and the greater is their vulnerability to exploitative conditions. Labour flexibility has also led to job insecurities for men, resulting in the erosion of their masculinity. To what extent, however, has this led to increased gender violence and strengthened patriarchy?

While the developmentalist and corporatist state, because of its links with capital, has been unable to qualitatively improve working conditions for women, global and local pressures have led it to make concessions to women, particularly in the passing of laws to improve and/or protect the position of women. In a sense, these laws have not really threatened the economic and political base of the State and of those in power and are thus tolerated. Today, however, the issue of women, at least at the level of rhetoric, can no longer be discounted.

Nonetheless, these laws, while helpful, have not genuinely transformed unequal gender relations nor have they led to more democratic processes and structures in society. Women do not want market democracy but genuine democracy. The call of the Women's Agenda for Change in 1999 for more accountability and democracy will not be accepted by the State

It is thus important for the women's movement to link up with other social movements and for the wider democratic social and political movement to seriously incorporate women's concerns. However, we must be able to present alternatives to the present trends of commoditisation, individualism and materialism as well as the forces of conservatism if we, indeed, want to engage with globalisation on equal terms and in the context of our own interests.

(Source: DAGA Info, No. 114 [Nov. 21, 2000])