How Globalization Impacts Women’s Economic Status: Poverty, Inequality, and Marginalization

Globalization promised a flatter, more connected world – one where opportunity would travel as freely as goods and capital. For many women, however, the reality has been far more complicated. Behind rising GDPs and gleaming export hubs lies a quieter story of widening wage gaps, precarious jobs, and households where women carry the heaviest burden when economies open up. To understand how globalization has reshaped women’s economic profile, we need to look closely at three intertwined realities: deepening poverty, growing inequality, and the marginalization of women as decision-makers in their own economic lives.

Globalization and the feminization of poverty
Why women bear the brunt of poverty
Nutritional and health consequences
Rising inequality in a globalized economy
Deregulation, denationalization and shrinking safety nets
The widening income gap
Women as victims of globalization
Low-wage jobs and the export economy
Exploitative labour practices
The double burden of paid and unpaid work
The other side: where globalization has helped
What needs to change

Globalization and the feminization of poverty

The phrase “feminization of poverty” entered global vocabulary at the 1995 UN World Conference on Women in Beijing, where it was famously claimed that 70 per cent of the world’s poor were women. Recent World Bank analysis has revised that figure – women actually make up closer to 50 per cent of the extreme poor – but this does not mean poverty is gender-neutral. Researchers at the German Institute of Development and Sustainability found that female multidimensional poverty is about 70 per cent higher than male multidimensional poverty, with the largest disparities concentrated in South Asia and the Middle East and North Africa.

UN Women confirms that one in every ten women globally lives in extreme poverty, and that at prime working age only 61 per cent of women are in the labour force compared to 90 per cent of men. Globalization has not caused this gap on its own, but it has frequently widened it.

Why women bear the brunt of poverty

When economies globalize, the rules of the game change quickly – and the people with the fewest resources to adapt usually lose the most. Women in developing economies typically begin with weaker landholdings, lower literacy, less access to credit, and heavier unpaid care responsibilities. When trade liberalization exposes small farmers to cheap imports or shifts food production toward export crops, household incomes contract and women, who are often denied access to critical resources such as credit, land and inheritance, are pushed deeper into poverty.

Nutritional and health consequences

Poverty is not only about income. It shapes how a woman eats, how often she sees a doctor, and whether her daughter stays in school. In food-insecure households, women and girls tend to go without so that their children may eat, which translates directly into anaemia, low body mass, and poor maternal health outcomes. The National Family Health Survey has repeatedly documented high rates of anaemia among Indian women of reproductive age, a deficiency that compounds across generations as underweight mothers give birth to underweight babies.

Rising inequality in a globalized economy

Globalization has produced enormous wealth, but it has not distributed that wealth evenly. The Oxfam India inequality reports have consistently shown that the top 10 per cent of the population captures a disproportionate share of national income, while wages at the bottom stagnate. Within this widening gap, women face a double squeeze: they are over-represented among the poor and under-represented among the rich.

Deregulation, denationalization and shrinking safety nets

From the late 1970s onwards, many developing countries adopted Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAPs) recommended by the IMF and World Bank. These programmes pushed fiscal austerity, deregulation, privatization, and trade liberalization as conditions for financial assistance. India’s own 1991 reforms followed a similar template of opening markets, cutting tariffs, and reducing the state’s footprint in the economy.

The trouble is that these reforms were presented as gender-neutral when they were anything but. When government jobs are cut and subsidies on food, fuel, and healthcare are removed, the household burden shifts to women. The ILO has noted that economic hardships in developing countries resulting from structural adjustment programmes were forcing more women into the overcrowded, informal sector as men lose jobs in the formal sector. The shrinking of public healthcare and education means that the unpaid work of caring for the sick, the young, and the elderly falls back on women at home.

The widening income gap

Even when women do enter paid work, the income they earn rarely closes the gap. Globally, women earn on average slightly more than 50 per cent of what men earn. In India, the gap is starker in the informal economy: research on home-based workers shows that women earn around Rs. 24 per hour while men earn Rs. 48 – roughly half the recommended minimum wage. This is not a gap that closes naturally with growth; if anything, foreign direct investment has flowed into capital-intensive sectors where men dominate, while women remain concentrated in piece-rate, low-skill work.

Women as victims of globalization

The third strand of the story is the most uncomfortable: women have largely been spectators in the rooms where globalization is designed. Trade negotiations, tax treaties, special economic zone policies, and labour law reforms are written by ministries and corporate lobbies in which women’s representation is thin. The result is an economic order built largely without women’s voices, even though it reshapes their daily lives the most.

Low-wage jobs and the export economy

Garment factories, electronics assembly lines, shrimp processing units, and call centres absorbed millions of women workers as production shifted to lower-cost economies. On paper, this is a story of expanded opportunity. In practice, the jobs come with long hours, piece-rate wages, weak union protection, and abrupt closures when global buyers move on. The Council on Foreign Relations notes that the majority of Indian women work in the informal sector in jobs with limited social protections and low wages, and that cultural barriers and occupational segregation keep them clustered in industries that have not seen wage growth in recent years.

Exploitative labour practices

India’s informal sector employs nearly 85 per cent of the workforce, and women within it face conditions that would be unthinkable in formal employment. Legal analysis points to the absence of formal contracts, low wages, wage disparities, long working hours, and unsafe working conditions as defining features of women’s informal work. Domestic workers, beedi rollers, agarbatti makers, and home-based garment workers operate beyond the reach of minimum wage laws and the Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace Act, leaving them vulnerable to arbitrary dismissal, harassment, and chronic underpayment.

Globalization has also reshaped agriculture, the largest single employer of Indian women. When male family members migrate to cities or to the Gulf in search of better wages, women are left behind to run farms with even less access to credit, extension services, and machinery – a pattern that researchers describe as a feminization of poverty in rural regions driven by male migration.

The double burden of paid and unpaid work

One of the most underappreciated effects of globalization is what it has done to time. Even as women take up paid work in factories and back offices, their share of unpaid cooking, cleaning, and caregiving has barely declined. Conditional cash transfer programmes intended to reduce poverty have in some cases placed additional demands on women’s time, hindered their access to formal labour markets, and further deprived them of scarce leisure time. The result is a workforce of exhausted women whose productivity is constantly clipped by the second shift waiting at home.

The other side: where globalization has helped

It would be unfair to paint globalization in only one colour. Export-led growth has created jobs that did not exist for women a generation ago. Mobile phones and digital platforms have brought banking, weather information, and government benefits within reach. Self-help groups linked to microfinance have given lakhs of rural women their first taste of financial autonomy. Organisations such as SEWA have shown how grassroots rural women producers can link directly with international markets when given the right institutional support.

The point is not that globalization is bad, but that its benefits are distributed unevenly – and women have to organize, vote, and bargain harder to claim them.

What needs to change

If globalization is to work for women, economic policy cannot pretend to be gender-blind. That means social protection floors that survive austerity, paid maternity benefits and childcare in the informal sector, recognition of unpaid care work in national accounts, and active representation of women in trade and labour decision-making. It also means investing in gender-responsive social protection and the care economy, so that women’s entry into paid work does not come at the cost of their own health and time.

What do you think? Has globalization, in your own family or community, opened up more economic opportunities for women than it has taken away – or is the balance still tilted the other way? And what would it take for the next wave of economic reform in India to genuinely place women at the centre rather than the margins?

References

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How Globalization Impacts Women’s Economic Status: Poverty, Inequality, and Marginalization

Table of Contents

Globalization and the feminization of poverty 🔗

Why women bear the brunt of poverty 🔗

Nutritional and health consequences 🔗

Rising inequality in a globalized economy 🔗

Deregulation, denationalization and shrinking safety nets 🔗

The widening income gap 🔗

Women as victims of globalization 🔗

Low-wage jobs and the export economy 🔗

Exploitative labour practices 🔗

The double burden of paid and unpaid work 🔗

The other side: where globalization has helped 🔗

What needs to change 🔗