Unit 2: Gender issues in the world of work

Emerging gender issues in the Asia Pacific region

Rural women workers

Breaking out of poverty: expanding wage employment opportunities

Breaking out of poverty: expanding wage employment opportunities

As labor is the most abundant asset of the poor, one way of improving incomes and reducing poverty is to increase the demand for labour. But this is not sufficient. It would also be necessary to ensure that the poor have in fact equal access to the opportunities created in the labour market. However, some groups are vulnerable to discrimination, exploitation and exclusion in the labour market. Much of this vulnerability is related to age, gender, ethnic group and household status.

It is well documented that women have a disadvantaged position and weak bargaining power in the labour market. Labour segmentation widely follows gender lines. Yet the pressures on women to get a wage-paying job are real and growing. In rural areas, the inability of small farms and artisanal activities to remain viable, increasing landlessness, declining agricultural incomes, and long periods of drought have compelled rural households to hire out their labour. Women heads of household, who lack family labour to work on their land or who have no cash to hire labour, often have no option but to seek wage employment.

Employment creation strategies in recent decades have included sectoral policies which aim at maximizing the employment potentials of:

• the farm and non-farm sectors in rural areas
• small-scale and informal enterprises
• export-oriented industries

and special employment creation schemes which:

• promote self-employment and entrepreneurship
• create wage employment opportunities

Within the spectrum of policies, this section focuses on special direct wage employment creation schemes which have regained prominence in certain countries as an immediate way of addressing high levels unemployment and underemployment and the worst manifestations of poverty. Two specific types of schemes are discussed:

• employment-intensive infrastructure programs
• employment schemes promoted within Social Investment Funds and Compensatory Programs set up to mitigate the adverse effects of structural adjustment and economic reform programs

Employment-intensive infrastructure programmes

The employment-intensive infrastructure programme, which draws its origins from emergency public works programmes, has evolved into a mainstream policy instrument for employment creation. The ILO has been at the forefront of this evolution. It has developed labour-intensive, local resource-based methods in over 30 countries in order to enhance labour demand in the infrastructure sector. Experience from these programmes shows that infrastructure programs have great potential for helping poor women. Poor households tend to have the highest participation in public works and construction workers from poor households tend to be women. Households with high child dependency ratios, high share of adult women, and headed by women tend to have the highest participation.

Infrastructure programs are not gender-neutral. The following lessons have emerged from ILO’s experience:

• Level and mode of payment: how men and women respond to different levels and modes of payment has not received adequate attention in evaluations of infrastructure programmes. However, given that women tend to be less mobile and have fewer income-earning opportunities than men, and that women construction workers generally come form the poorest, mostly women-headed households, it can be assumed that the opportunity costs of working in public works would tend to be lower among poor women than among other job seekers. Thus the higher the wage levels are set, the more likely poor women will face stiff competition from other (male or better-off) job seekers.

• Use of self-help labour: Given that wage work is traditionally considered man’s domain, and that in some societies women have little say over the allocation of their labour time, there is a danger that women are channelled to self-help labour while men are given preference to do paid work. For poor women, this means additional work burdens without additional gains. The danger is when "self-help" labour is not voluntary, or involves those who do not stand to benefit from the assets being created by the programme.

• Recruitment methods: Massive information dissemination using multiple channels of communication is one of the best ways to get poor women on board because women are not as physically mobile as men, nor do they frequent political and administrative centers. Women need advance notice of available work in order to reorganise their household tasks or seek permission from their husband or father. Social intermediation activities aimed at encouraging local leaders, national implementors and technicians to adopt more positive attitudes towards women’s work in construction and at encouraging poor women to join public works should also form part of recruitment efforts.

• Diversifying women’s jobs: Women’s participation in construction work is also related to the degree to which they are allowed, encouraged and enabled to perform different operations. Programme implementors and technicians often limit women’s tasks to what they define as suitable or socially acceptable for women on the basis of their own standards. However, these standards may be irrelevant to the women themselves. Some programmes have helped women perform new, usually traditionally male, occupations through awareness raising sessions, by training women and by giving women the choice of tasks to perform.

• Conditions at work sites: Providing for women’s special needs at the work site, such as those that ease their domestic burden, could make construction work more feasible for women. Some programmes have provided rest and break periods for pregnant and breastfeeding women, and places at worksites where children may be left.

Compensatory Programmes and Social Funds

The principle objectives of social funds have been:

• to generate employment opportunities quickly
• to transfer income to poor families affected by unemployment and underemployment
• to finance social infrastructure works
• to finance social assistance programmes that benefit the poor

The provision of temporary or emergency wage employment is almost always a major component. This often consists of

• public works (construction of social and physical infrastructure
• minor works
• public services (garbage collection, cleaning services)

How effective are employment schemes of social funds in expanding women’s opportunities in wage employment? This question may be viewed in terms of the benefits and costs of these programmes to participants. There are gender differences in these costs and benefits. Direct benefits to participants equal the amount of income transfer (wage paid) minus the participation costs. These costs include the income from alternative work that participants forego by joining these schemes, as well as costs from alternative uses of time and from overcoming social restrictions against participation (in the case of women). The benefits of targeting poor women may be greater than the benefits of targeting poor men with the same amount of income transfer.

How do these programmes capture poor women’s needs for employment and income in times of economic downturn? And how do they determine the extent of women’s participation? With regard to poverty targeting these programmes have adopted self-targeting by the poor through the payment of low wages and geographical targeting or poor neighbourhoods.

With regard to women within the target group or community, programmes rarely have any special policy or explicit objective to reach them. Women’s access to these benefits thus becomes mainly a fortuitous event that depends on several factors. Experience shows that the following factors affect women’s participation in these programmes:

• Institutional framework: The participation of women in supply-driven, centralized employment programmes depends on the design features of these programmes. In social funds, women’s participation depends on the nature, technical capacity and orientation of the executing agencies that access these funds. Non-governmental, women-based organizations are more likely to respond to poor women’s needs.

• Wage vs. participation costs: Men tend to overtake programmes that offer high wages while women flock to those that offer relatively low wages (i.e. wages lower than the legal minimum wage or lower than a family’s subsistence level). Wages that are too low for men compared to what they could otherwise command in the labour market, and the stigma or low-paid, women -dominated jobs raise the participation costs for men and leave room for women to apply. Women, however, have potentially higher time costs of participation when compared to men, But these costs are reduced in programs which provide options for child carer, proximity between the home and workplace, flexible work schedules, and work options which include home-based production.

A review by the ILO of selected programs currently underway suggests the following points to guide future work in the area:

• An explicit policy to reach women and collection of gender-disaggregated data are indispensable

• Setting different wage structures for men and women, or separate programs for them, should be avoided.

• Policy-makers should review accepted notions that women are secondary workers, earn complementary wages and undertake what is less productive than men’s.

• Governments and donors need especially to invest in the growth and strengthening of women-based organisations that can
  • collect gender-disaggregated information
  • influence policy
  • function as intermediaries between poor women and men, and agencies and resources
  • monitor the gender dimensions of policy and programme implementation

[Source: ILO, Gender, poverty and employment: turning capabilities into entitlements, 1995, Geneva.]

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