Structural Adjustment and Women’s Work: The Developing World Perspective

When governments in the developing world borrowed heavily from the International Monetary Fund and World Bank during the 1980s and 1990s, the loans came with conditions. These conditions, known as Structural Adjustment Programs or SAPs, promised economic stability through cuts to public spending, privatization, trade liberalization, and currency devaluation. On paper, they were presented as gender-neutral economic reforms. In practice, they reshaped women’s working lives in ways that few policymakers anticipated, pushing millions out of stable public sector jobs and into the precarious world of informal labour, export factories, and home-based piece work.

Understanding structural adjustment and why it mattered for women 🔗

Structural Adjustment Programs were a standard package of economic reforms imposed on debt-strapped developing countries: government spending cuts, privatization of public enterprises, trade liberalization, currency devaluation, and removal of subsidies on basic goods. Countries across Latin America, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Asia adopted these programs in exchange for emergency loans. India’s own version arrived in 1991, when a balance of payments crisis pushed the government to accept the New Economic Policy, which included devaluation of the rupee, higher interest rates, reduced public investment, cuts to food and fertilizer subsidies, and increased openness to foreign investment.

The trouble is that macroeconomic models underpinning SAPs were gender-blind. They assumed that workers were interchangeable units in a market, ignoring the fact that women in developing economies were already disadvantaged in access to credit, land, education, and formal employment. As a result, the burden of “adjustment” fell unevenly. Postcolonial feminist scholar Chandra Mohanty has argued that SAPs effectively reprivatized women’s labour by shifting the responsibility for social welfare from the state back to households, where women carried most of the unpaid caregiving load.

The shrinking of the state and its consequences 🔗

Before structural adjustment, the public sector was one of the most important employers of women in developing countries. Government jobs in schools, hospitals, public administration, and state-owned enterprises offered something rare in the private market: relatively equal hiring practices, job security, maternity benefits, and pensions. SAPs forced governments to slash these payrolls. Public sector hiring freezes, voluntary retirement schemes, and the privatization of state enterprises eliminated millions of stable jobs across the developing world.

Women were often the first to be let go. Officials sometimes perceived women workers as less productive because of their familial and child-bearing responsibilities, making them more vulnerable during downsizing. Cuts to spending on health, education, and welfare hit women twice. They lost public jobs, and they absorbed the unpaid work of caring for the sick, the elderly, and children that the state had partially supported earlier.

The push into informal and low-wage work 🔗

With formal jobs disappearing, women had to find income wherever they could. The result was a massive expansion of informal employment. Informal work is defined by its lack of written contracts, social security, paid leave, or legal protection. Workers can be dismissed at will, are rarely covered by minimum wage laws in practice, and have no recourse when injured or harassed.

In India, much of the post-1991 employment growth occurred in the informal sector, marked by low wages, job insecurity, and a lack of social protection. This produced the phenomenon known as “jobless growth,” where GDP rose steadily but decent employment lagged behind. The services and IT sector boomed, but agriculture and manufacturing failed to absorb surplus labour at scale. For women, who were already concentrated in low-skill agricultural work, this meant migration to cities for whatever paid work was available.

Home-based and piece-rate work 🔗

One striking feature of the post-liberalization landscape is the rise of home-based piece-rate work. Women roll incense sticks (agarbattis) and bidis, stitch garments, assemble electronic components, embroider, and pack products from inside their homes, paid by the unit rather than the hour. In Karnataka’s agarbathi sector, women make up over 90% of rollers, doing low-value tasks while men handle the more profitable scenting work. Home-based workers enjoy some flexibility but face very low wages, high product rejection rates, and complete invisibility in labour statistics and union organizing.

This pattern of “outsourcing” the labour-intensive parts of production to women at home is not an accident. Global firms reduce costs by subcontracting through multiple layers, creating what scholars call “formalized informality”-global brands profit while the women at the bottom of the chain remain unprotected by labour law.

Export-led industrialization and the garment factory floor 🔗

The other half of the structural adjustment story is export-led industrialization. SAPs encouraged developing countries to specialize in labour-intensive manufactured exports, with garments at the centre. Governments saw the apparel industry as a fast route to industrialization, foreign exchange, and employment. Foreign brands saw it as a way to lower production costs. And in country after country, the factory floor filled up with young women.

The garment and apparel sector globally employs between 60 and 70 million people, two-thirds to three-quarters of whom are women. In South Asia, women constitute around 70% of garment workers in Sri Lanka and roughly 60% in Bangladesh and India. The reasons employers prefer young women are well documented: they are paid less, are perceived as more docile, and have fewer opportunities to organize.

The working conditions behind the price tag 🔗

Despite the industry’s economic importance, conditions inside export factories are often grim. Workers face long hours, mandatory overtime, wage theft, unsafe buildings, and gender-based harassment. Around 90% of India’s workforce is informally employed, and for garment workers specifically, the figure is similar. Three-quarters of garment workers in the region remain outside the protection of formal labour law.

Amnesty International has documented chronic poverty wages, excessive overtime, and dependence on informal, temporary, and piece-rate labour across the South Asian garment industry. Special Economic Zones, set up to attract foreign investment, frequently restrict union activity and limit workers’ ability to raise grievances. In Bangladesh, an Oxfam report cited by Earth Day found that 91% of garment workers struggle to afford enough food for their families, and 25% face some form of abuse.

Gender-based violence and sexual harassment are routine. Research in India and Bangladesh has found that male managers and supervisors often bully, harass and sexualize the women who work for them, with women from marginalized communities such as Dalit women in India facing compounded discrimination. Most garment workers in the region are also internal migrants from rural areas, cut off from family support networks, which makes them especially vulnerable.

Why export jobs are precarious 🔗

Export-led jobs are also unstable by design. Production moves to wherever labour is cheapest, so factories can close with little notice when buyers shift orders to another country. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, around 800 to 1,000 small and medium factories in Bangladesh closed permanently, throwing women workers into joblessness with no severance. Bangladesh’s garment workers continue to face insecurity and exploitation in the aftermath of political upheaval, with many veteran workers losing jobs they had held for over a decade.

Liberalization and the deepening of precarity 🔗

India’s reforms followed a similar logic and produced similar gender outcomes. The 1991 New Economic Policy reduced agricultural subsidies and opened markets, which pushed women out of rural livelihoods and into urban informal work. Industries like textiles, which had previously employed women in some formal capacity, underwent restructuring that replaced permanent positions with contract or home-based arrangements without benefits.

Post-liberalization India saw a shift in the urban occupational landscape that placed women disproportionately in low-paying, informal, and unskilled sectors such as domestic work, textile factories, and retail. Even within the celebrated IT and service sectors, women remain clustered in lower-paid roles. The garment export industry, which grew dramatically after 1991-exports rose from USD 696 million in 1980-81 to USD 4.76 billion by 1999-2000 in Karnataka alone-became one of the largest employers of women, but mostly on insecure terms.

The double burden 🔗

One of the most consistent findings across the literature is that structural adjustment increased women’s total workload without increasing their security. Cuts to public services meant women spent more unpaid hours fetching water, caring for sick relatives, and supplementing family income. Paid work was added on top, not in place of, this unpaid labour. Time constraints and household responsibilities also limited women’s geographical mobility, narrowing their ability to take advantage of new job opportunities that emerged far from home.

Reading SAPs through a feminist lens 🔗

What scholars in feminist economics have argued is that SAPs were never neutral. They rested on assumptions about how households work, who does unpaid labour, and what counts as productive activity-assumptions that systematically undervalued women’s contributions. The reforms increased the supply of cheap female labour exactly when global capital needed it for export production. This convergence is sometimes called the “feminization of labour”: as economies opened up, women’s share in the paid workforce rose, but mostly in jobs that were poorly paid, insecure, and stripped of rights.

The promise of liberalization was that markets would generate enough good jobs to absorb everyone displaced by reform. For many women in the developing world, that promise has not been kept. They moved from subsistence agriculture or public sector clerical jobs into garment factories, agarbathi rolling, domestic work, and street vending-often working longer for less, with no safety net underneath them.

What do you think? If economic reforms had been designed with women’s existing burdens and inequalities in mind from the start, what would they have looked like differently? And given that export-led growth has lifted some women out of household isolation while exposing them to factory exploitation, how should we weigh the trade-offs between paid work and dignified work?

References

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structural_adjustment
2. https://ideas.repec.org/a/taf/femeco/v6y2000i3p105-122.html
3. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/0305750X94000735
4. https://polsci.institute/india-democracy-development/1991-economic-crisis-liberalisation-india/
5. https://www.academia.edu/31170149/WOMEN_WORKERS_IN_URBAN_INFORMAL_EMPLOYMENT_THE_STATUS_OF_AGARBATHI_AND_GARMENT_WORKERS_IN_KARNATAKA
6. https://unu.edu/cpr/article/garments-and-apparel
7. https://www.amnestyusa.org/blog/join-the-fight-for-garment-workers-rights/
8. https://www.business-humanrights.org/en/latest-news/south-asia-garment-workers-in-bangladesh-india-pakistan-sri-lanka-face-systemic-denial-of-freedom-of-association-under-global-supply-chains/
9. https://www.earthday.org/beneath-the-seams-the-human-toll-of-fast-fashion/
10. https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/campaigns/2025/11/workers-rights-in-the-garment-industry-a-gender-discrimination-issue/
11. https://globalpressjournal.com/asia/bangladesh/bangladeshs-garment-workers-face-crisis-regime-collapse/
12. https://sociology.institute/urban-sociology/shifting-urban-occupational-landscape-india/