Women's studies and globalization

Women Globalization

Women's Experience of Globalization

One of the factors that have shaped women's experiences of globalization has been the international demand for labor in various international locations. Much of the globalization trend has been driven by technological innovations that allow for greater communication, information sharing, travel, and other items that have allowed people to share different items across the globe. This trend has also shaped the manner in which labor demand can influence women. Before globalization labor was virtually static and immigration was sparsely used and there were a significant amount of resources required to migrate. However, there are many more opportunities for both migrant men and women.

The availability of options for men to work in migrant positions also places indirect pressures on women to do the same given the breakdown of the traditional family structure and relatively few domestic options. Many migrant women will leave a developing country to pursue labor options in developing nations as domestic workers (Parrenas, 2008). One of the most demanded positions for a Pilipino woman migrant worker is as a care worker in many developed countries in which they provide service to middle to upper income families in Great Britain, France, the Netherlands, Italy, Spain, and Greece among others.

The implications of this are that the women of the Philippines go to other nations to help reproduce other societies by feeding, nurturing, and caring for their citizens. In the domestic culture they are told that they should work outside the home while simultaneously told that their place is inside the home. This is most likely a result of the changing in the demographics of the migrant workers. In the beginning of the migrant trend in the Philippines it was dominated by men. However, in recent years the trend has reversed on the basis of gender and more women are leaving the country to fill roles that are associated with domesticity.

The Constitution of the Philippines defines the women's proper place as being in the domestic sphere and this gender construct penetrates the culture. Thus the increase in migrant workers who are technically abandoning their children and families goes against the moral law in the culture. However, instead of using globalization to subvert the role of women in their domestic facilities, the trend is that the labor that is associated with reproductive labor is given to migrants with less privilege instead of promoting solidarity among women in the international arena. Thus the migration of women does not necessarily do much to break the role of their domesticity.

The Filipino women and their roles in the international labor market are filed with roles that are considered to utilize their domesticity skills such as nimble-fingered electronics production work or as domestic workers or nurses or some other aspect of care work (Parrenas, 2008). Therefore there is an ideological difference in the efforts of countries like the Philippines to modernize and their reliance on their established cultural conceptions of gender. The women who migrate are actually given classes on how to refrain from putting their morally bound "purity" at risk when they are geographically separated from their husbands.

Although the culture includes a strong dedication to the ideas of feminine purity and subversion, much of the Filipino economy is driven by the employment of female workers overseas. When the female workers are overseas they are often asked or even order to send remittances to their families in their domestic country. Based on current estimates some believe that roughly thirty-four or thirty-five percent of the total population in the Philippines is directly dependent upon remittances from migrant workers (Parrenas, 2008).

The Philippine government has promoted the deployment of women for means of acquiring foreign currency to pay the interest on loans that it has acquired from various international lenders. Furthermore, even with many of the country's best labor sources leaving for employment in overseas markets, the smaller labor pool left in the country has not seen many benefits. It was predicted that the smaller total size of the domestic labor pool would decrease the total unemployment rate and work to stimulate the economy. However, the unemployment rate remains relatively high and wages have not seen any real increase.