Globalisation’s Impact on Women: Unpacking Gender Inequalities

Globalisation is often described as the great equaliser, a force that shrinks distances, opens markets, and connects cultures. Yet when we look closely at who actually benefits and who pays the price, a more complicated picture emerges. For millions of women, especially in developing economies, globalisation has been a paradox: a source of new jobs and visibility on one hand, and a deepening of old inequalities on the other. Understanding this double-edged reality is essential to making sense of contemporary gender relations.

What globalisation really means 🔗

At its core, globalisation refers to the growing economic, political, and cultural integration of countries through flows of goods, services, capital, technology, and people. In policy terms, it is closely tied to three processes: liberalisation (removing trade and investment barriers), privatisation (shifting public enterprises to private ownership), and deregulation (loosening rules that govern markets and labour).

India’s encounter with globalisation accelerated sharply in 1991, when a balance-of-payments crisis pushed the government to adopt the Liberalisation, Privatisation and Globalisation (LPG) reforms under pressure from the IMF and World Bank. These reforms reshaped industry, agriculture, services, and the role of the state itself. Alongside economic restructuring came rapid technological exchange, easier capital flows, and the global circulation of ideas about rights, work, and identity.

Why globalisation is not gender-neutral 🔗

Markets do not operate on a blank social slate. They interact with existing structures of caste, class, and gender. When globalisation arrived in societies already marked by patriarchy, unequal property rights, and restricted access to education, its effects were unequally distributed. As researchers have pointed out, in the absence of public policy, globalisation alone cannot reduce gender inequality. The same forces that liberate some women can entrench the disadvantages of others.

The opportunities globalisation opened up 🔗

It would be inaccurate to paint globalisation only in negative terms. The expansion of export-oriented industries, the services boom, and the rise of multinational corporations created employment opportunities that simply did not exist for women a generation earlier.

New jobs and economic visibility 🔗

Sectors such as information technology, business process outsourcing, retail, banking, and aviation pulled large numbers of educated urban women into formal employment. In export-processing zones across Asia, women constitute 70 to 90 percent of workers in industries like textiles, electronics, and pharmaceuticals. Wages, even when modest, gave many women their first independent income, a degree of mobility, and a stake in household decision-making.

Education, ideas, and rights 🔗

Globalisation also accelerated the circulation of ideas around gender equality, reproductive rights, and women’s leadership. International conventions, donor-funded programmes, and a vibrant NGO sector pushed governments to expand girls’ education and women’s political representation. Indian women have moved into roles as sarpanchs, chief ministers, judges, scientists, and CEOs of multinational companies, often citing exposure to global networks as a turning point in their careers.

The other side: deepening inequalities 🔗

For every woman who joined a tech firm in Bengaluru, many more were absorbed into low-paid, insecure work or pushed further to the margins of the economy. The benefits of globalisation have been distributed along sharp lines of class, caste, region, and education.

Feminisation of informal labour 🔗

One of the most striking patterns is what scholars call the feminisation of labour, a term popularised by economist Guy Standing. It describes both the rising share of women in the workforce and the spread of traditionally “female” features of work, such as flexibility, low pay, and insecurity, into the labour market as a whole. According to ILO data, in 2020, 61.1 percent of employed women globally were in informal employment, compared to 56.1 percent of employed men.

In India, this pattern is visible in garment factories, beedi rolling, domestic work, home-based piece-rate production, and street vending. Ethnographic research in Delhi’s garment units has documented how the lack of labour standards or unions has made women workers more casualised, informal and vulnerable, exposed to discrimination and harassment with limited legal recourse.

Structural adjustment and shrinking public services 🔗

The reforms of the 1990s did not just open the economy; they also reorganised the role of the state. Structural adjustment involved cuts in public investment, reduced subsidies on food and fertilisers, and tighter government expenditure. As researchers note, India’s Structural Adjustment Programme aimed at capital, energy and import-intensive growth through devaluation, deregulation, deflation and decontrol.

For women, this had concrete consequences. When public health, education, water supply, and food security weaken, the unpaid care work of feeding families, fetching water, caring for the sick, and supervising children intensifies, and that work falls disproportionately on women. The “double burden” of paid work outside the home and unpaid work inside it became heavier rather than lighter.

Agriculture and the rural squeeze 🔗

Rural women have faced a particularly complex set of pressures. As male family members migrate to cities or abroad in search of work, women are left to manage farms, a process sometimes called the feminisation of agriculture. Yet they often lack legal land rights, access to credit, and agricultural extension services. Cash-crop expansion, contract farming, and volatile commodity prices have squeezed small farmers, while women cultivators rarely show up in official statistics as “farmers” at all.

Disparities in income, health, and education 🔗

Aggregate growth figures hide deep inequalities, and many of them are gendered.

The wage gap and unskilled work 🔗

Globalisation rewarded skills, capital, and English-language education, all of which are unevenly distributed. Women who lacked formal schooling were funnelled into the lowest rungs of the labour market: assembly lines, domestic service, construction, and home-based subcontracted work. Even within the same sector, women routinely earn less than men for comparable work, and they are more vulnerable to job insecurity and the reinforcement of traditional gender roles.

Health and reproductive burdens 🔗

Privatisation of healthcare has shifted costs from the state to households. For poor families, out-of-pocket health spending often means cutting back on women’s care first, since women’s illnesses are routinely under-prioritised. Long hours in informal manufacturing, exposure to chemicals, poor sanitation in factories, and the stress of juggling work and caregiving all take a measurable toll on women’s physical and mental health.

Education: progress with gaps 🔗

Girls’ enrolment in schools has risen impressively in recent decades, partly thanks to globally backed campaigns. But the benefits remain uneven. Drop-out rates climb at the secondary and higher-secondary levels, especially among Dalit, Adivasi, and Muslim girls, and digital divides have grown sharper since the pandemic. As one review of India’s reforms notes, women, Dalits, and Adivasis have not equally benefitted from the growth driven by the reforms, with many women still concentrated in low-paying and unorganised work.

Globalisation and the feminisation of poverty 🔗

Sociologists describe the feminisation of poverty as the rising share of women among the world’s poor. Female-headed households, single mothers, widows, and elderly women living alone are especially vulnerable. Reduced state support, insecure employment, and persistent discrimination in inheritance and property combine to push women into chronic economic insecurity even as overall GDP grows.

Migration adds another layer. Countries like the Philippines, Sri Lanka, and Indonesia have institutionalised the export of female domestic workers to wealthier countries. These workers send home crucial remittances but are often separated from their own families and exposed to abuse in private households where labour laws barely reach.

So, is globalisation good or bad for women? 🔗

The honest answer is: it depends on which woman, where, and with what support. Globalisation has expanded choices for women with education, capital, and urban networks. It has shrunk choices for women without them. The same policy package that produced India’s IT boom also produced precarious garment workers, struggling small farmers, and overworked domestic helpers.

What matters, then, is not whether to be “for” or “against” globalisation but what kind of public policy accompanies it. Equal pay laws, social security for informal workers, public investment in childcare, secure land rights, quality public schools and hospitals, and strong protections against workplace harassment can shift the balance. Without such measures, globalisation tends to magnify the inequalities it inherits rather than dissolve them.

What do you think? Looking at your own family or neighbourhood, who do you think has gained the most from globalisation over the last three decades, and who has been left behind? If you were designing one policy to make globalisation fairer for women, what would it be and why?

References

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_liberalisation_in_India
2. https://www.lkouniv.ac.in/site/writereaddata/siteContent/202004050638207821sanju_tripathi_wom_st_Impact_of_Globalisation_on_Women.pdf
3. https://iasgoogle.com/news/explain-the-implications-of-feminization-of-work-in-the-developing-societies-upsc-cse-mains-2022-sociology-paper-1
4. https://www.numberanalytics.com/blog/global-feminization-of-labor-trends-insights
5. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/2455632718778355?icid=int.sj-full-text.similar-articles.4
6. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/270259750_Women_and_Structural_Adjustment_in_India
7. https://www.insightsonindia.com/2024/08/26/globalization-has-empowered-women-in-india-yet-it-has-also-deepened-gender-inequalities-in-this-light-examine-the-dual-effects-of-globalization-on-women-in-indian-society/
8. https://sociology.institute/sociology-of-development/economic-reforms-impact-india-growth-inequality/