Gender Perspectives on Globalization

Gender Perspectives on Globalization The social impact of globalization: case of Indian nurses migration The globalization advent can be dated back to the post WWII era leading to the cold war period where countries increasingly chose the nations that they aligned their diplomatic, political and economic allegiances to. This trend was informed by the global economic trends that prevailed after the WWII and the need for economic allies in order for a country and to some extent a region to survive.

The World Bank (2014a) advances globalization as the increased interdependence of countries on each other due to the ever increasing finance, trade, human resources and ideologies at the global level. It is characterized by the significant increase in the international trade patterns and the establishment of cross-border investments and these are noted to be the two major characteristics of globalization as sated by Mrak M. (2000:Pp3-6) and these cannot be overlooked.

Abstract This paper will delve into the social influence that the globalization trend has take, especially in line with the human resources relocation across borders that are becoming more fluid allowing population flow across the world, creating a more beefless world each day. The case in point within the scope of the paper is the issue of female nurses' migration in India and how this plays a role in the disruption and the reshaping of the role of gender in India.

In as much as globalization might have started after the WWII, it really intensified in the years leading to 1980s. This is when there was a massive change and technological advancement that made transport and communication much cheaper and faster as well as the liberalization of trade and capital markets and cross border investment, this is the period that this paper will focus more on within the context of India nursing profession.

A number of international institutions came into being in the course of globalization like the World Bank, the IMF, World Trade Organizations and General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GAAT) which helped make the capital markets more fluid and uniform, the labor capital inclusive. These bodies have all along helped in opening up the market and promoting free trade as opposed to the protectionism tendencies that were the norm before the onset of globalization and the subsequent bodies.

This opening up of markets also got extended to the labor markets where professions were no longer confined to a given country or a given region, but went far beyond the conventional borders. This has seen the movement of labor and skills plus professions across the globe with subsequent consequences being felt by the concerned nations. There is a significantly high exportation of labor from the least developed nations whose economies are weak as compared to the nations with better established economies (International Organization for Migration, 2006:Pp3).

The motivations for this type of migration of labor, the effects and the consequences for both countries will be a subject of discussion in this paper as well. Thesis The process of globalization has disrupted and reshaped the gender norms and led to extensive migration of the women nurses in particular from India to other parts of the world, with accompanying consequences.

Globalization and the social impact India has seen a massive shift in the labor market trends over the last two decades with people in the nursing fraternity being one of the highest affected in the shift in labor supply bearing the demand occasioned by globalization and the subsequent trends.

Ideally, in the face of globalization, if the forces of demand and supply hold constant, there is need to see the two countries that engage in trade exchange mutually benefit from each other and not just one side taking the full credit or benefits (Gupta G., 2013:Pp47). The above claim is further solidified by the Ricardo Theory of comparative advantage, which indicates that a country will only export the commodity in which it has a comparative labor-productivity advantage in (Costinot A. Donaldson D., 2012).

This means that a country can only export the excess labor or goods, after taking care of the production costs and other indirect cost and still remain with an advantage in terms of the internal supply for the demand of the service or the goods. However, this is rarely the case, particular among the developing countries and the underdeveloped nations.

In the DCs, the resources do not allow for the establishment of adequate skilled labor and even the little that they manage to train is drained to other nations where the pay for the service of the skilled labor is considered to be relatively higher hence leaving the mother country without adequate skilled labor.

This trend is further perpetrated by the attractive nature of the skilled labor from the DCs once they land in the developed nations since their labor cost is relatively lower and still offer quality service, the employers would then hire from outside as many as is logical for the organization to effectively run since this would save the organization from extra costs in terms of high salaries and related benefits that may not extend to the immigrant employees.

The historical perspective of nursing in India gives the value that was attached to nursing especially under the British colonialism and how this changed hence the roles of the nurse also evolved. The British found it important to have the nurses from the Indian community to conduct several assignments in the hospital. The British wanted to have trained nurses from the Indian community to take up several administrative and even teaching responsibilities. However, they found it harder than they initially thought to teach the local Indian population.

This was due to the view that the local population held towards nursing. It was considered widely as a menial job and that people from the lower caste are the ones who were to take up such jobs. The caste and the religious ways and practices hindered the Islam and Hindu women from taking up the nursing jobs. Apart from the caste system, there was the low social status that was accorded to women that made them be looked down upon hence shied away from by many people.

The British however set out to sort this misconception, in the 1920s and the 1930s they established several nursing schools in different parts of the country with the sole aim of standardizing the nursing training and bring it dignity. By the time India attained its independence from Britain, almost each province had built its own nursing school. Since then, nursing has been considered as part of the curative and the preventive measures of the health system within the nation.

The centrality of nursing was further emphasized in the post-colonial times with strategic plans like the five-year plans being put in place for boosting nursing and making it more relevant to the community. Currently nursing courses take four years and six months and yet another half a year in the internship program.

These comprehensive programs have not solved the problem of shortage of nurses in India and this shortage has been attributed to among other reasons lack of basic amenities in the rural areas, lack of sufficient accommodation, low professional and educational chances for the nurses in the country, poor working conditions, lack equipment and supplies for the nurses, no incentives for promotion, too much workload, difficult staffing norms, time spent doing other duties apart from those of nursing as duty, low salaries fro nurses, few teaching staff for nurses and lack of regulation of private nursing institutions.

These conditions prevalent in India have made the trained nurses to look elsewhere for employment especially among the more developed nations with prospects of better working conditions in general (Gill R., 2011). Shortage of nurses in India The health needs of the people of India are not taken into serious consideration when it comes to employment of nurses. The graveness of the situation is seen from the heath indicators of India which point at a serious lack of human resources in this particular sector.

The health indicators of India in comparison to other countries have it that it still experiences quite high mortality rates standing at 41 dead infants before attaining one year for every 1,000 births (The World Bank, 2014b). The disparity in the nurses to patient ratio is also indicative of a gross shortage of nurses within the country with the nurse to population ratio standing at 0.80:1000 as at 2004.

The need for nursing services is noted to be direr in the rural India than in the urban areas bearing the lack of facilities, poor road infrastructure and the lack of incentives for the nurses to keep working in the rural areas. Generally, the nursing profession in India lacks the needed professional status in the country, they are offered low and unattractive salaries, and even there is little recognition within the community.

It is also worth noting that most of the learning institutions work as appendages to the hospitals and not independently as is required due to lack of enough facilities (Senior K., 2010). International migration of nurses from India The aforementioned appalling working and environmental conditions have occasioned a mass migration of nurses from India.

Apparently the situation seems to be self perpetuating since the bad working conditions in the country informs the migration of the nurses to other countries and this migration causes a further shortage each year hence a cycle that is unlikely to end any soon, hence the more interest in this subject. India has been discovered as the new place to source for well trained and English speaking nurses especially for the developed nations that have acute shortage of nurses.

The immigration, however, is not a new phenomenon but can be traced back to the 1970s when a few Indian nurses started to migrate to other countries, particularly in the Gulf to work in the newly built hospitals there, due to the better salary prospects and the ability to send back home money to build homes and such like amenities. These were the first generation of migrant nurses and this trend continued to the present times since little has changed over the years in Indian nursing fraternity (International Labor organization, 2013).

Apart from the local demand for medical services, the demand abroad in countries like U.S., UK, Canada has made nursing a more lucrative career in India. In 2005, the number of nurses migrating from India to other nations stood at well over 60,000 and due to these huge numbers of migrants, India has been one of the most recognized among the countries where nurses go to practice their nursing.

The advantage that India has in securing jobs in the developed nations is the large resource pool as well as the competence in English. The other factor is the similarity of the educational patterns where majority of the states use the same system hence the quality is easily gauged making the recruitment easier as noted by Nagarajan R., (2010). A more interesting angle is the realization that nursing is mainly taken up by the female students which is considered widely as part of many families' strategy for a longer process.

It is noted that majority of the nurses in India come from the lower-middle class families. Taking a daughter for the nursing courses is an expensive venture for these lower-middle class families and they invest not just money but their hopes too with faith that their investment in the daughter will pay back well. Migrating from India to go work outside the country is seen as one of the best fruits of investing in the girls.

The remittances back home that the women sends once they start working abroad, are not just considered as good for the family's economic betterment, but are also saved for the ultimate dowry that will be paid by the girl's family to the man when the time for the marriage finally comes, since this is the Indian culture (Gill R., (2011:Pp55).

These remittances back home are seen to be central to raising the social status of the family as a whole hence goes beyond the individual lady who goes for the training and a job abroad. The migration may also be seen by some families as a way of relieving the lady from the strict and controlling norms of the Indian culture. This is how the nursing profession and the migration, which has been made easy by the globalization trends, becomes a tool for gender manipulation.

A family would rather have a girls go for the course rather than a man hence this has led to the nursing profession to be largely seen as a profession for the women. It reshapes the gender norms where instead of having equal opportunities and preferences for both genders, nursing is gendered so much that it becomes inclined towards the female gender.

Once the lady is educated by the father and most of the time the extended family, she becomes more of a family property that is controlled and must use her newly acquired position of a nurse abroad to benefit the entire family, as principle and necessity (Kumari R, & Shamim I., n.d:Pp10-11). It is further noted that most women in India take up the nursing profession and study it because they have plans to work abroad as Pavan M.V. (2012) of The Times of India notes.

A common and outstanding reason for this is the fact that once a lady goes to the outside countries, then they stand a higher chance of getting married.

This is mainly based on two major considerations which are stereotyped; one is that she is viewed as a lady who comes from a better off social class or has helped the family to move higher in the social ladder hence will be able to pay the dowry, and secondly, the man that she marries will have better chances of moving to join her in the foreign land and hence get a better paying job there as well.

This disrupts the traditional gender roles in the Indian context where after marriage the man was meant to be the provider. Here, it turns out that the migration, made possible and easy by globalization turns the woman to be seen as a source of employment.

This is the reality of migration of nurses in India, indeed, the prospecting marriages are usually categorized into three as follows; the first is the lady working abroad and with a working permit takes the lead, the followed by the nurse working abroad but without a working permit and the last in the ladder of preference is the lady who has finished her nursing course and has applied for a job abroad (Kumari R, & Shamim I., n.d:Pp81-82).

The ladies have hence lost their individualism and gender roles and are now looked at as commodities to be graded and these are the adverse effects of globalization which have roots in the early 1970s as noted above. The above situation of categorization is understandable since the issue of pay makes a great difference once a lady gets to the foreign land. For instance, in India, a nurse will be paid Rs. 2500 per month and yet the same nurse may end up earning Rs.

40,000 per month in a foreign land, it is this disparity that exacerbates the migration hence redefining the gender roles altogether. Most of the Indian nurses often migrate to the gulf countries or the Western countries. The migration to the Gulf countries is seen to be relatively easier than to the Western world due to the migration conditions that are in place (Kumari R, & Shamim I., n.d:Pp120-121).

Among the preferred nations in the gulf are UAE, Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain and Oman since they offer better salaries and better livings standards as compared to Saudi Arabia and Yemen. However, even in these preferred Gulf nations, the women Indians face a lot of social and religious restrictions. Here, these female nurses have no opportunity at all to become citizens, they cannot own a business or even a house in these Gulf nations and also have few educational opportunities available even for their children.

The married women who are heading to the gulf cannot be given a family visa hence cannot bring their families, only men are allowed to (Sharma K.D. et.al, 2013:Pp120). These social and religious restrictions deprives the female nurses the chance to continue playing their rightful.