Introduction

The last chapter told a story of cultural identities and economic processes. This chapter considers the impact of the global economy on gender relations, in particular its effects on divisions of labour. The chapter is divided into two sections that introduce two conceptual ‘tools’, which underpin the framework set out in Figure 1 in the Introduction. The first is the gender pyramid, which provides a gender perspective on the ways in which the distribution of productive and socially reproductive labour embodied in ‘gender contracts’ impacts on women’s position within formal labour markets in contemporary processes of globalisation. It considers the effect of regulatory interventions on the construction of the ‘worker’, which reinforce gender injustices. It therefore addresses issues relating to the vertical relationships between state, market and family within the framework of this book. It assesses the implications of the increasing involvement of women as workers within global production processes that have relocated much mass production to countries in the Global South. The basis for historic gender contracts, in which women took responsibility for maintaining the household while men provided its income, are undermined, while the gender norms upon which these contracts are based are yet to change significantly, producing gender injustice.