How Globalisation Marginalizes and Exploits Women in the Workforce

Globalisation was once sold as the great equaliser, a force that would lift women into formal employment, fair wages, and dignified work. Three decades after India opened its economy in 1991, the picture is far more complicated. Millions of women have indeed entered factories, call centres, and export hubs, but the terms of their entry have often been precarious, poorly paid, and stripped of basic protections. Behind the glossy statistics of female employment lies a quieter story of marginalisation and exploitation, where women are positioned at the lowest rungs of global value chains and absorb the shocks of a system that profits from their cheap labour.

The gendered face of globalisation
Low-wage, low-skill traps
Export-led industrialisation and the new exploitation
The informalised formal sector
Migration, caste, and compounded vulnerability
Job insecurity and the disposability of women workers
Where unionisation is structurally weakened
The hidden cost: unpaid labour and the double burden
The economy that runs on invisible work
Austerity, social services, and shifting the burden
Health, safety, and well-being
Rethinking the promise of globalisation

The gendered face of globalisation

Globalisation, in its purest economic sense, refers to the freer movement of goods, capital, services, and labour across borders. But this movement is not gender-neutral. When multinational corporations look for cheap, flexible, and compliant workforces, they overwhelmingly turn to women, particularly young, rural-migrant, and socially marginalised women. Scholars describe this as the feminisation of labour, a process where industries that once employed mostly men are restructured to depend on female workers, not because of any sudden recognition of women’s skills, but because women can be paid less and are less likely to unionise.

The numbers speak plainly. Of the roughly 397 million workers in India, around 96% of female workers are concentrated in the unorganised sector, without contracts, social security, or any meaningful job protection. So while globalisation has expanded women’s presence in the workforce, it has done so in a way that concentrates them in the most vulnerable corners of the economy.

Low-wage, low-skill traps

Women in globalised industries are most often found in jobs labelled “low-skill”, a term that itself hides bias. Garment stitching, food processing, electronics assembly, beedi rolling, and domestic work all require enormous dexterity, stamina, and patience. Yet they are classified as unskilled because the people doing them are women. This classification then justifies low wages. A feminist critique of global production has long pointed out that the garment sector, for example, has seen a systematic rise in undesirable jobs paying “feminine” wages, where lower pay is naturalised as appropriate for women’s work.

This is not just a labour market quirk. It is structural marginalisation. Women are pushed into sectors where productivity is high but pay is low, where their bodies and time are squeezed for export profits, and where moving up is almost impossible.

Export-led industrialisation and the new exploitation

Trade liberalisation in the 1990s opened India to global supply chains, and one of its most visible outcomes has been the explosion of export manufacturing. The textile and apparel industry alone contributes 17% of India’s export income and is the largest employer of women, who make up more than 60% of its workforce. Bengaluru, Tirupur, Chennai, Delhi-NCR, and Mumbai have become hubs where rural-migrant women from Jharkhand, Bihar, Odisha, West Bengal, and Uttar Pradesh stitch clothes for global fashion brands.

On paper, this is empowerment. In practice, it is a new form of exploitation dressed up in the language of opportunity.

The informalised formal sector

Export factories are technically part of the organised sector, registered and regulated. But the workforce inside them is informalised. As one detailed study notes, garment workers face a reality of low wages, poor conditions of work, inadequate access to social security, and gendered division of tasks along with gender-based discrimination and harassment. Many women are hired through contractors, leaving them without formal contracts and outside the protection of labour law. When supply chains extend further into home-based work, even the pretence of formality disappears.

This informal core inside formal industries is the engine of “competitiveness”. Brands keep prices low and profits high by squeezing the bottom of the chain, and the bottom of the chain is almost always a woman.

Migration, caste, and compounded vulnerability

Globalisation does not exploit all women equally. The women most likely to end up in garment factories, export processing zones, or domestic work are those with the least bargaining power. Studies show that low income women from marginalised communities, including Scheduled Caste, Scheduled Tribe, and Muslim women, dominate these workforces, often without literacy, land, or social networks at their destination. Cut off from family support, far from home, they become vulnerable to wage theft, sexual harassment, and forced overtime.

The intersection of gender, caste, religion, and migration status compounds disadvantage. A young Dalit woman migrating alone to Bengaluru to stitch jeans for a European brand faces a stacked set of vulnerabilities that a male urban worker in the same factory simply does not.

Job insecurity and the disposability of women workers

One of the defining features of globalised labour is its disposability. Workers are hired when orders are high and discarded when they are not. Women bear this insecurity in concentrated form because they are seen as a flexible reserve, easy to bring in during booms and easier still to push out during downturns. India ranks fifth in global garment exports, and the bedrock of this export industry is poorly paid, migrant women and men marked by high rates of exploitation and precarious employment.

The COVID-19 lockdowns made this disposability brutally visible. Factories shut, orders were cancelled by international brands, and women workers were sent home without wages, often without even severance. Many never returned to formal employment. The same logic plays out in smaller crises every year, when export demand dips and women workers are the first to be let go.

Where unionisation is structurally weakened

Collective bargaining is one of the few tools workers have against exploitation, but globalisation has actively weakened it for women. Subcontracting, short-term contracts, and home-based piece-rate work fragment the workforce, making it almost impossible to organise. Recent legal changes that require longer notice periods before a strike further raise the cost of resistance. Women workers who do try to unionise often face retaliation, dismissal, and even sexual harassment, all of which discourage others from joining them.

The hidden cost: unpaid labour and the double burden

Even as women have moved into paid globalised work, their unpaid work at home has not gone away. In fact, it has often intensified. According to data referenced by the International Labour Organization, women in India spend 10 times more time on care work than men, in both urban and rural settings. They cook, clean, fetch water, look after children, and care for the elderly, all without pay, all while also working in factories, fields, or other people’s homes.

This is the double burden, and globalisation has sharpened it. Long factory shifts, irregular hours, and migration away from extended family networks mean that the support systems women once relied on are eroding even as their workloads grow. The result is what scholars call “time poverty”, where women have little to no time for rest, education, or any pursuit beyond paid and unpaid labour.

The economy that runs on invisible work

This unpaid labour is not a private matter. It is the silent infrastructure on which the visible economy stands. When public services like childcare, healthcare, and eldercare are underfunded, the burden falls back on households, and within households, on women. A recent estimate suggests that India’s care economy could unlock $300 billion in value and create over 60 million jobs by 2030 if it were treated as economic infrastructure rather than a moral duty assigned to women.

Globalisation has not just changed labour markets, it has changed the state. Structural adjustment, fiscal discipline, and pressure to attract foreign investment have often led governments to cut spending on welfare, subsidies, and public services. When public health systems shrink, women look after the sick. When public childcare is absent, women stay home or rely on older daughters. When food subsidies are reduced, women eat last and least. The withdrawal of the state is rarely framed as a women’s issue, but in practice, it is overwhelmingly women who absorb the costs.

Researchers studying globalisation in India have argued that the skewed income and wealth structure, combined with persistent gender discrimination, has not meaningfully shifted under commercialisation, capitalisation, foreign trade orientation, and financialisation. In other words, the policy package of globalisation may have grown the GDP, but it did not dismantle the gender hierarchies that decide who benefits from that growth.

Health, safety, and well-being

The well-being costs of globalised work for women are real and measurable. Long hours in poorly ventilated factories, exposure to chemicals in dye houses, repetitive strain from sewing or assembly, and the mental stress of insecure work all take a toll. Women in BPOs working night shifts face additional safety concerns. Migrant women workers, separated from family networks, are more vulnerable to sexual harassment and gender-based violence. Yet healthcare access remains uneven, and employers rarely treat occupational health as a serious concern for workers they consider replaceable.

Rethinking the promise of globalisation

None of this is to say that globalisation has been entirely bad for women. Paid work has given many women a degree of financial independence, exposure to ideas of rights, and a foothold outside the household. Women’s unions in Bengaluru and Tirupur, formed by garment workers themselves, are evidence that exploitation does not erase agency. But agency is not the same as justice, and individual resilience cannot substitute for structural reform.

The real question is not whether women should participate in the global economy, they already do, in enormous numbers, but on what terms. A globalisation that treats women as a reserve army of cheap labour, that depends on their unpaid care work to keep wages low, and that abandons them at the first sign of a downturn, is not a model of development. It is a model of extraction.

What do you think? If a significant share of India’s export earnings rests on the cheap labour of women in informal-within-formal jobs, what would it actually take to redistribute the gains of globalisation more fairly? And how should the value of unpaid care work, the invisible foundation of the visible economy, be reflected in policy and national accounts?

References

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How Globalisation Marginalizes and Exploits Women in the Workforce

Table of Contents

The gendered face of globalisation 🔗

Low-wage, low-skill traps 🔗

Export-led industrialisation and the new exploitation 🔗

The informalised formal sector 🔗

Migration, caste, and compounded vulnerability 🔗

Job insecurity and the disposability of women workers 🔗

Where unionisation is structurally weakened 🔗

The hidden cost: unpaid labour and the double burden 🔗

The economy that runs on invisible work 🔗

Austerity, social services, and shifting the burden 🔗

Health, safety, and well-being 🔗

Rethinking the promise of globalisation 🔗