The Feminization of Poverty and Workforce in the Global Economy

Globalization promised prosperity for all, but the dividends have not been shared equally. As trade barriers fell and production scattered across continents, a striking pattern emerged: women became the preferred workers of the global economy, yet they also became the face of its poverty. This dual reality, where women fuel export economies while simultaneously dominating the ranks of the world’s poor, is what scholars call the feminization of poverty and the feminization of the workforce. Understanding how these two trends are linked is essential to making sense of how the modern economy actually works for half of humanity.

What is the feminization of poverty? 🔗

The term feminization of poverty was coined by American sociologist Diana Pearce in 1978 to describe a disturbing reality: poverty was increasingly wearing a female face. The concept refers to the social and economic forces that keep women disproportionately poor and that make their experience of poverty deeper, longer, and more difficult to escape than that of men.

The numbers behind the concept are sobering. According to UN Women, an estimated 388 million women and girls were projected to be living in extreme poverty in 2022, compared with 372 million men and boys. While the gap may seem modest, in worst-case scenarios, the figure for women could rise to 446 million. Importantly, poverty is not just about income. It includes restricted access to education, healthcare, land, credit, and political voice, and women face deficits on all these fronts at once.

Why women bear the heavier burden 🔗

Several structural factors push women into poverty more often than men. First, women are concentrated in low-paid, informal, and unstable jobs. Second, they perform the bulk of unpaid domestic and care work, which limits the time they can spend earning income. Third, in many societies, they own fewer assets, inherit less property, and have weaker access to credit. Finally, gender-based violence and restrictive social norms shrink their economic choices further. The phenomenon is typically measured using indices such as the Gender Development Index, the Gender Empowerment Measure, and the Human Poverty Index, which capture inequalities beyond mere income.

Globalization and the feminization of the workforce 🔗

From the 1980s onwards, the global economy underwent a dramatic restructuring. Multinational corporations began shifting labour-intensive production from high-wage countries to low-wage ones, giving rise to global value chains. This shift drew millions of women into paid employment for the first time, particularly in garments, electronics assembly, food processing, and services.

In garment manufacturing alone, the sector employs roughly 60 to 70 million people worldwide, of whom two-thirds to three-quarters are women. In Export Processing Zones (EPZs), which are special enclaves designed to attract foreign investment with tax breaks and relaxed labour rules, women dominate the workforce. The International Labour Organization has noted that in textiles, garments, and electronics assembly, women can make up 90 per cent or more of the workforce in such zones.

Why employers prefer women workers 🔗

The preference for female labour is not accidental. Employers frequently justify it by citing stereotypes about feminine traits such as “manual dexterity,” “patience,” and “docility.” These stereotypes are then used to rationalize lower pay, weaker bargaining power, and more precarious contracts. The same supposedly natural aptitudes that make women “ideal” for fine assembly work also become the reason they are confined to the lowest rungs of the production chain, while design, management, and ownership remain male-dominated.

The economics is straightforward: women’s labour is cheaper, more flexible, and less likely to be unionized. In Bangladesh’s ready-made garment sector, for example, workers are mostly young women with little formal education, hired on contracts, with unionization rates outside EPZs estimated at only 5 to 10 per cent. This vast pool of cheap labour is precisely what makes export-led growth profitable.

The dark side of inclusion: precarious and low-paid work 🔗

The mass entry of women into paid work would have been an unambiguous good if it had come with decent wages, security, and dignity. Instead, much of it has been concentrated in jobs that strip workers of these protections. Globalization integrated women into the workforce on terms that were already tilted against them.

Wages below dignity 🔗

An International Labour Organisation analysis found that some 80 per cent of Export Processing Zones paid wages below the national minimum wage. In Bangladesh’s garment industry, even after a 40 per cent rise in average monthly wages between 2010 and 2016, most workers still earned less than 100 US dollars a month, an amount barely sufficient to keep a family out of poverty in Dhaka. Globally, women still earn roughly 16 per cent less on average than their male counterparts for similar work.

Informality and the missing safety net 🔗

In India, the picture is particularly stark. According to the Periodic Labour Force Survey, over 90 per cent of employed women work in the informal sector, with little or no access to social security, maternity benefits, or legal safeguards. Such jobs are typically irregular, seasonal, and dependent on family or local networks, making women’s incomes volatile and easily disrupted by shocks like illness, drought, or pandemics.

Female labour force participation has actually risen in recent years, moving from 23.3 per cent in 2017-18 to over 40 per cent in 2023-24. But as analysts have noted, much of this growth is concentrated in rural areas and in informal, self-employed, or unpaid family work, reflecting economic distress rather than empowerment.

Vulnerability to global shocks 🔗

Because women are concentrated in export-dependent sectors, they are also the first to suffer when trade rules change. Recent tariff recalibrations affecting countries like Lesotho, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Haiti, and Madagascar have produced what observers describe as a “gendered supply chain shock,” with women garment workers paying the highest price. In Lesotho, where the apparel industry accounts for nearly 90 per cent of exports to the US, new tariffs have pushed the country into a national state of disaster.

The double burden: paid work plus unpaid care 🔗

Even as women take on paid jobs, they continue to carry the unpaid load at home. This is the heart of what feminist economists call the double burden or “second shift.” Care work, including childcare, eldercare, cooking, cleaning, and water collection, is the invisible infrastructure on which every economy rests, yet it shows up nowhere in GDP.

The numbers are striking. Data from the National Statistical Office Time Use Survey show that women in India spend nearly five hours a day on unpaid domestic and care work, almost eight times as much as men. The Economic Survey 2024 estimates that women’s unpaid care work contributes 3.1 per cent to GDP, value that the official economy collects but does not reward.

The result is what scholars call time poverty. Even when paid jobs are available, women often cannot take them because their time is already spoken for. According to the International Labour Organization, unpaid care responsibilities keep over 708 million women out of the global labour force. Research from Ideas for India suggests that formalising part-time employment and redistributing care work between men and women could raise female labour force participation in India by six percentage points, from 37 to 43 per cent.

Why feminization of work has not ended feminization of poverty 🔗

Logically, more women working should mean fewer women in poverty. So why does the feminization of poverty persist alongside the feminization of the workforce? The answer lies in the type of work women do.

Low pay traps 🔗

When women’s wages barely cover survival, paid work does not translate into upward mobility. A worker who earns just enough to buy food today cannot save, invest in skills, or send her children to better schools. This keeps families locked in poverty across generations.

The intersectional dimension 🔗

Poverty is not distributed evenly even among women. Of the global poor women, 345 million live in Asia and Africa, and within those regions, women from marginalized castes, tribes, religions, and ethnicities face the deepest deprivation. In India, Dalit, Adivasi, and Muslim women routinely earn less and own less than upper-caste women, even when doing the same kind of work. Gender intersects with caste, class, race, disability, and geography to compound disadvantage.

Gender-based violence 🔗

Violence both causes and reinforces women’s poverty. Abusive partners restrict women’s mobility, access to work, and control over their income. In the MENA region alone, gender-based violence accounts for an estimated 3.7 per cent loss in GDP, partly because injured or controlled women cannot consistently participate in the workforce.

Pathways to decent work for women 🔗

Addressing the twin feminization of poverty and the workforce requires more than just creating more jobs. It requires creating the right kinds of jobs and recognizing the work women already do.

Invest in the care economy 🔗

Affordable childcare, eldercare, and public services such as clean water and cooking fuel directly free up women’s time. Policies like paid parental leave that include and incentivize fathers can help redistribute care work more equitably. Several economists have proposed including unpaid care work in satellite national accounts, so that its economic contribution is officially recognized.

Formalise and protect women’s work 🔗

Extending social security, maternity benefits, minimum wages, and the right to organize into the informal sector would lift millions of women out of precarity. Schemes that integrate self-employed women, home-based workers, and domestic workers into formal frameworks have shown promise.

Skills, credit, and assets 🔗

Targeted programmes that give women access to vocational training, affordable credit, and land or housing rights help break the cycle of low-productivity work. Such interventions become especially powerful when combined with infrastructure improvements that reduce the time women spend on basic chores.

Tackle the underlying norms 🔗

Ultimately, no policy will work in isolation if patriarchal norms continue to define women’s labour as secondary and disposable. Public campaigns, school curricula, and workplace cultures need to challenge the assumption that care is “naturally” women’s work and that women workers are “naturally” suited to the lowest-paid jobs.

The bigger picture 🔗

The feminization of poverty and the feminization of the workforce are two sides of the same coin. The global economy has come to depend on women’s cheap, flexible, and often invisible labour, in factories that stitch our clothes, in fields that grow our food, in homes that raise the next generation of workers. But economic inclusion on exploitative terms is not real inclusion. Lifting women out of poverty requires shifting them from precarious work to decent work, and from invisible labour to recognized labour.

What do you think? If women’s unpaid care work were properly counted in national accounts, how would our understanding of “productive” labour change? And what would it take for a garment worker or a home-based artisan in your own city to be considered as economically valuable as a software engineer?

References

1. https://www.unwomen.org/en/news-stories/press-release/2022/01/progress-on-the-sustainable-development-goals-the-gender-snapshot-2022
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feminization_of_poverty
3. https://unu.edu/cpr/article/garments-and-apparel
4. https://www.ilo.org/resource/news/export-processing-zones-growing-steadily-providing-major-source-jobs
5. https://syndemic.ca/2022/03/08/issue-2-quayyum-garment-workers/
6. https://developingeconomics.org/2023/01/13/why-global-value-chains-should-be-called-global-poverty-chains/
7. https://blogs.worldbank.org/en/jobs/making-global-value-chains-work-workers
8. https://borgenproject.org/feminization-of-poverty/
9. https://www.drishtiias.com/daily-updates/daily-news-analysis/female-labour-force-participation-in-india
10. https://theprint.in/opinion/female-labour-force-india-care-work/2929807/
11. https://odi.org/en/insights/beyond-trade-wars-women-garment-workers-bear-the-brunt-of-us-tariff-recalibration/
12. https://www.smilefoundationindia.org/blog/invisible-burden-of-unpaid-care/
13. https://www.ideasforindia.in/topics/productivity-innovation/unlocking-women-s-workforce-potential.html