South-East Asia and the Pacific. Progress but formidable challenges remain

South-East Asia and the Pacific (ILO/SEAPAT) is a diverse region in terms of the economic system and size, level of development, cultural background and history of the various countries it comprises. These factors have respectively influenced on women workers in societies, economies and labour markets. Asia still largely holds the traditional view that women's primary role is to be mothers and wives, and that men's is to work and be the breadwinners. With women's increasing levels of education, economic development and a demographic change, however, a larger number of them have joined the labour market, and relations between men and women have been undergoing a steady, concurrent change. Women enjoy more equality at work in some countries than others. Similarly, various economic forces, such as liberalization, economic restructuring in an increasing overall globalization, and the recent Asian financial and economic crises have also deeply affected the socioeconomic well-being and employment patterns of millions of women and men in the region in recent years. Despite some progress made during the last 10 years, a large majority of women workers in Asia and the Pacific continue to work in the informal and rural sectors, in jobs with lower remuneration, lower job security, and more in atypical forms of employment compared to men.

Labour force participation of women in the region ranges from 26 percent to 83 percent . A recent ILO study on the overall trends in changing labour force participation shows that economic factors, as well as policy measures are having an impact on the labour market. The graph below shows the changes in the gender differentials of Labour Force Participation Rates (LFPRs) between 1980 and 1990, and, where possible, for1990-97, from an individualized growth perspective. It lists the countries according to their growth during the last 15 years. China was the star performer, followed by the Republic of Korea and Thailand.

Gender-gap changes are different when the countries are ranked by individual performance, as indicated in the graph. While the Chinese and Vietnamese economies score reasonably well in those terms, despite the transitions they have experienced, several high-growth economies, such as Thailand, Malaysia, Hong Kong and China, did not advance as much as expected. Sri Lanka, despite comparatively low growth of its economy, significantly narrowed gender gaps in LFPRs, presumably because of the policy measures it took earlier. There is a striking difference between India, whose economy grew a little faster, and Sri Lanka where a widening of the gender gap in LFPRs occurred between 1980 and 1990 . On the other hand, Australia and New Zealand closed gaps in LFPRs, at a time when their economies were sluggish because of their policies in favour of women, which started in the late 1960s and bore fruit during the 1980s - but less so in the 1990s. The study found that economic factors can complement or reinforce social factors, eitherreducing or increasing gender differentials.

In the developing part of the region, a large majority of women are working in the urban informal or rural sector. In the early 1990s, the levels of informal sector employment as a percentage of total employment in the urban sector varied between two-thirds in Pakistan and 10 percent in Bangladesh. There are also high levels of underemployment of women in terms of hours worked. Generally, women tend to be more underemployed than men. Women are also found in homework, and their share of part-time employment is overwhelming, showing that women's employment is constrained by their household responsibilities and the resulting limited time available for remunerative work. A critical form of women's work, is unpaid work, since it is generally unaccounted for in the economy. It consists largely of household and voluntary work, is not normally reflected in the System of National Accounts, and is thus excluded from the GDP. Furthermore, women are also found increasingly in atypical employment.

An increasing number of women depart their home countries in search of jobs abroad, and most of them are found in such gender-stereotypical jobs as domestic work or in the "entertainment" industry. The statistics show that in some countries many - and in others most - migrant workers are employed under irregular conditions. An important reason for the extraordinarily high proportions is that in migrant-exporting countries, the core institution concerned - the state - may limit itself to prescribing and supervising formalities and migration channels.

At the time of the Beijing Conference, the total number of migrant workers in Asia was some 6 million. Although data collection systems on migration do not disaggregate (i.e., break down) figures by sex, it is estimated that 1.5 million of these workers were women. Women have begun to redress the gender imbalance by dominating the authorized outflows from sending countries such as Indonesia, the Philippines and Sri Lanka.

Migration can be personally empowering for women, but can also have the opposite effect due to the command over their lives by others. And while most of the time economic benefits are derived, families - most of all the children - often suffer from the absence of the father or mother.

Labour migration occurs because there is an economic demand for services. That demand is institutionally controlled and shaped by society's "gatekeepers", who reflect economic interests and social or political concerns, and sometimes personal preferences. Wherever economic growth is strong and lasting, certain jobs are progressively shunned by all nationals except the very poorest ("SALEP" jobs). If migrants in general are concentrated in such jobs, migrant women are concentrated in the most vulnerable of them.

Women migrants employed as household workers are subject to abuse and exploitation; even violence. Household work, even when undertaken in accordance with migration and recruitment regulations, is not covered by the labour laws of most countries. Moreover, domestic workers are isolated, sometimes forbidden to leave the household, and routinely have their passports withdrawn by employers or intermediaries, thus opening up means for pressuring them into submission. Fortunately, domestic workers weathered the Asian financial crisis much better than most other migrants.

The kind of work they do, and at low cost, makes household owners think twice before dismissing them. Migrants working in the sex sector are most often women, and whether they are in a regular or irregular situation, they are the most vulnerable of all. The number of migrants employed in this sector is significant; other service workers and operators in manufacturing constitute a much smaller group.

More than three out of five of the world's working children are found in Asian developing countries - 153 million, and 46 percent are girls. If household work were fully taken into account, the number of working girls would be still higher. The Asian crisis starting in mid-1997 is generally believed to have pushed more girls and boys out of school and into work. Poverty is the cause of child labour, and it is thought that it disappears as incomes rise. In Asian low- and middle-income countries, however, this is not really supported by recent data, which suggests that, as with the elimination of gender inequalities of adults, more than economic growth is required to eliminate it.

Most girls (and boys) work in agriculture, fishing and forestry. Depending on the extent to which boys are favoured when it comes to schooling and the prevailing sexual division of labour, girls may outnumber boys in agriculture and in services. Girls are highly vulnerable to physical or emotional harassment and abuse, particularly where they are led into commercial sex work or work in private households. Working children miss school and training. Thereby, they tend to have low productivity jobs and are destined to remain in that type of work in the future, their families will have low incomes, and their countries will be relegated to the bottom rungs of the international division of labour.

The trafficking of women, as well as boys and girls, is a phenomenon in many parts of the world. The trafficking pattern is linked to perceived income disparity among countries. Thailand is the main receiving country for trafficked women and children from poorer surrounding countries, with Thai and Filipino women trafficked to high-income countries or territories both inside and outside of Asia. South Asia, India and Pakistan are the main receiving countries from others in the subregion. Some women are trafficked onwards to the Middle East. Selectivity in terms of age and location of origin is a striking feature of this practice. Teenagers are supplied to the commercial sex industry or private households, and very young children are made to beg or solicit. The costs of trafficking are high for its victims and their communities in terms of health, as well as physical and psychological abuse.

Poverty tends to afflict women more than men. There is a direct relationship between the prevalence of the agricultural sector and the incidence of poverty; the higher the sectoral share of agriculture in total employment, the more pronounced the poverty ,and mostly in agriculture itself. Since women are over-represented in agriculture and related activities, where average income and wage levels are lowest, women are disproportionately affected by poverty. As for agriculture, so for the informal sector. Low-income activities predominate and, as a whole, make the informal sector straddle the poverty line. Many women seek refuge in informal sector activities, but most of them are scarcely able to satisfy their personal needs and those of their children. Unemployment, too, generally afflicts women disproportionately and makes them less well-off than men in the developing countries of Asia and the Pacific.

In some countries, the gender dimension of poverty can also be gauged by the incidence of woman-headed households. While they are not worse off than other households in all cases, in countries where poverty is widespread they are at a disadvantage. Women have less access to employment and income opportunities, since they tend to be less mobile than men and have less access to productive assets and resources. Female-headed households are also more likely to suffer when structural adjustment or other economic reforms are carried out and the governments' social expenditures are cut back.

Quantitative assessments of the impact of the Asian crisis on women's labour force participation, unemployment and incomes, indicate an unambiguous worsening in some countries, with mixed results in others. Different countries seem to show varied results in the formal sector. But, except for Korea, where there seems to have been discouraged women workers, women's participation rates have gone up (for example in the Philippines and Indonesia), indicating that women have increased their level of economic activity while earning less or the same as before. In general, the Asian crisis brought hardship to many women due to the high rate of inflation and the market decline, causing the poorer populations in particular to fall further down on the poverty scale. Particularly hard hit have been women agricultural labourers, homeworkers, traditional artisans, weavers, and vendors.

Women in Asia and the Pacific

Women's jobs are mostly low-skill, low-pay, low-quality, in a limited range of sectors and occupations at the lower rungs of the job ladder

Quality and levels of employment are linked to their levels of poverty

Women are more unemployed and underemployed than men, and more often in atypical forms of employment

In many of the countries they are the majority in rural and informal sector employment

In some countries, women have greater access to training and employment, increased economic autonomy and social status-narrowing gender gaps

Flexible employment provides opportunities for men and women, but few women can combine paid work with family responsibilities

Globalization tends to foster deregulation, downsizing, outsourcing, informal sector and part-time or homework arrangements, all of which tend to stay beyond the reach of labour legislation and social protection

Globalization has disproportionately increased the number of women working abroad in precarious, vulnerable and exploitative jobs, without social security

In the recent Asian financial crisis, gender-based discrimination in retrenchment has also become a major issue, and while women have been resilient in earning extra income in order to provide for the basic needs of their families, it means their diminishing income is being overstretched in the overall economic downturn. Furthermore, worrying forms of employment have come to the fore, such as child labour and trafficking in women and children. The debate remains, however, whether the social sanctions against women in the labour market can be lifted by specific social policies and measures which can protect women or promote gender equality at work, in tandem with the overall economic policies and long-term growth in general.

Gender! A Partnership of Equals Geneve: International Labour Office, 2000. 115 p.

Gender! A Partnership of Equals
Geneve: International Labour Office, 2000. 115 p.