The past two decades have been momentous for the Asian region, and especially for East and Southeast Asia. This is now the most “globally integrated” region in the world, with the highest average ratios of trade to GDP, the largest absolute inflows of foreign direct investment, substantial financial capital flows and even significant movements of labour. These processes have in turn been associated with very rapid changes in forms of work and life, especially for women. Indeed, the changes have been seismic in their speed, intensity and effects upon economies and societies in the region, and particularly upon gender relations. The processes of rapid growth (and equally rapid and sudden declines in some economies) have been accompanied by major shifts in employment patterns and living standards, as familiar trends are replaced by social changes that are now extremely accelerated and intensified.

We have thus observed, in the space of less than one generation, massive shifts of women’s labour into the paid workforce, especially in export-oriented employment, and then the subsequent ejection of older women and even younger counterparts, into more fragile and insecure forms of employment, or even back to unpaid housework. Women have moved – voluntarily or forcibly – in search of work across countries and regions, more than ever before. Women’s livelihoods in rural areas, dominantly in agriculture, have been affected by the agrarian crisis that is now widespread in most developing countries. Across societies in the region, massive increases in the availability of different consumer goods, due to trade liberalisation, have accompanied declines in access to basic public goods and services. At the same time, technological changes have made communication and the transmission of cultural forms more extensive and rapid than could even have been imagined in the past. All these have had very substantial and complex effects upon the position of women and their ability to control their own lives, many of which we do not still adequately understand.

In this paper, I will consider some of these processes and their possible implications for women in China and Southeast Asia. In the first section, some broad macroeconomic processes are briefly outlined, and then the effects upon women’s work in the region are discussed. In the second section, changing patterns of gendered migration are considered. The final section deals with the material, social and political implications for women in China and Southeast Asia.

Integration through trade and capital flows, and women’s work
The Asian region as a whole is seen as the part of the world that has benefited the most from the process of globalisation. In terms of growth rates of aggregate GDP, as Chart 1 indicates, this region – and especially East Asia – far outperformed the rest of the world. High rates of growth in East Asia are of course dominated by the performance of China; however, in several countries of Southeast Asia such as Malaysia and South Korea, the relatively rapid recovery from the crisis of 1997-98 has added to the general perception of inherent economic dynamism in the region as a whole.
Chart 1 >>

It is now commonplace to note that this economic expansion was fuelled by export growth. What is noteworthy is that until 1996, for most high-exporting economies except China, the rate of expansion of imports was even higher, and the period of high growth was therefore one of rapidly increasing trade-to-GDP ratios. For the whole of East and Southeast Asia and the Pacific, trade amounted to more than 60 per cent of GDP in the 1990s (Chart 2), which is historically unprecedented. Of course, Singapore and Hong Kong China have always had high trade-GDP ratios in excess of 200 per cent because of their status as entrepot nations, but even countries like Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam have shown ratios greater than or approaching 100 per cent. Even the giant economy of the region, China, had a trade of GDP ratio of 44 per cent in 2001, and it is estimated to have increased further since then.
Chart 2 >>

This very substantial degree of trade integration has several important macroeconomic implications. First, since these economies are heavily dependent upon exports as the engine of growth, they must rely either on rapid rates of growth of world trade which have not been forthcoming in the recent past) or increasing their shares of world markets. In the last decade the second feature has been more pronounced, but of course such a process has inevitable limits. These limits can be set either by rising protectionist tendencies in the importing countries, or by the competitive pressures from other exporting countries which give rise to the fallacy of composition argument. It has been noted (UNCTAD 2003) that such tendencies remain strong and have adversely affected terms of trade of high-exporting developing countries over the past decade, indicating that rapid increases in the volume of exports have not been matched by commensurate increases in the value of exports. This is turn means that the search for newer or increased forms of cost-cutting or labour productivity increases is still very potent. This is one reason why employment elasticities of export production have been falling throughout the region, and have also affected women’s employment in these sectors. 

Second, the high rates of growth are matched or exceeded by very high import growth in almost all the economies of the region, barring China and Taiwan China, which are still generating substantial trade surpluses. The net effect on manufacturing employment is typically negative. This is obvious if the economy has a manufacturing trade deficit, but it is also the case even with trade balance or with small manufacturing trade surpluses, if the export production is less employment-intensive than the local production that has been displaced by imports. This is why, barring China and Malaysia, all the economies in the region have experienced deceleration or even absolute declines in manufacturing employment despite the much-hyped perception of the North “exporting” jobs to the South.[1] It should be noted that China, which accounted for more than 90 per cent of the total increase in manufacturing employment in the region, could show such a trend because imports were still relatively controlled until 2001, and because state owned enterprises continued to play a significant role in total manufacturing employment.

This region also experienced the most capital flows in the developing world from the mid-1980s until 1997. Thereafter, as Table 1 indicates, the Southeast Asian financial crises put a sharp brake on such inflows, other than FDI. It is well known that the rapid inflows of relocative FDI into Southeast Asia, especially from Japan, were crucially associated with the export boom in those countries. But from the mid-1990s, the FDI inflow reduced quite sharply in most countries of the region other than China. China, of course, remains the most significant developing country recipient of FDI inflow, and in 2002 achieved first position in the world in this regard, beating the US economy to second place. However, much of this FDI (around 60 to 70 per cent according to some estimates) is effectively “round-tripping” as unrecorded capital outflows come back in the form of Non-Resident Chinese investment because of the constraints that were placed upon resident private investors. In the period 1992-93 to 1996-97, FDI was replaced by fairly substantial inflows of finance capital in the form of either external commercial borrowing or portfolio capital, which caused real exchange rates to appreciate, led to current account deficits and therefore created the conditions for the subsequent crisis of 1997-98.
Table 1 >>

These other capital flows have been even more volatile and less reliable for Asia in the recent past. As Table 1 shows, net flows into the region have been negative or close to negative for the past four years. The huge build-up of foreign exchange reserves by the central banks of the Asian region over the first 9 months of 2003 (much of which is being held as securities or in safe deposits in the developed world, especially the US) suggests that net outflows in the current year are likely to be particularly large. So the East and Southeast Asian regions have experienced very sharp and large swings in capital flows over the past decade, which have also been associated with relatively large swings in real economies. The current capital export is really the result of reserve build-up because of central banks in the region attempting to prevent currencies from appreciating, as some of the lessons from the 1997 crisis are still retained by policy makers in the region. 

What this means, is that economies in the region are generally operating below the full macroeconomic potential, which in turn affects employment conditions, especially for women workers. In many countries of the region, as evident from Table 2, there has been a decline in female labour force participation rates since 1995. In some countries, such as Cambodia and Thailand, the decline has been quite drastic. Very few economies reported an increase (Philippines, Singapore, Hong Kong China), and these were relatively much less in magnitude. It is likely that reduced opportunities for productive employment have been responsible for the tendency for fewer women to report themselves as being part of the labour force, what is known in the developed countries as the “discouraged worker” effect.
Table 2 >>

Further, the defeminisation of export-oriented production at the margin, a process which began even earlier than the Asian financial crisis, has continued. It is now accepted that the relative increase in the share of women in total export employment, which was so marked for a period especially in the more dynamic economies of Asia, was a rather short-lived phenomenon. Already by the mid 1990s, women’s share of manufacturing employment had peaked in most economies of the region, and in some countries it even declined in absolute numbers.[2]

It is now apparent that even the earlier common assessment of the feminisation of work in East Asia had been based on what was perhaps an overoptimistic expectation of expansion in female employment. Trends in aggregate manufacturing employment and female employment in the export manufacturing sector over the 1990s in some of the more important Southeast Asian countries reveal at least two points of some significance. The first is that there is no clear picture of continuous employment in manufacturing industry over the decade even before the period of crisis. In several of these economies - South Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong China - aggregate manufacturing employment over the 1990s actually declined. Only in Malaysia, Indonesia and Thailand was there a definite upward trend to such employment. 

Thus, while female employment in manufacturing was important, the trend over the 1990s, even before the crash, was not necessarily upward. In most of the countries mentioned, there is a definite tendency towards a decline in the share of women workers in total manufacturing employment over the latter part of the 1990s. In Hong Kong and South Korea, the decline in female employment in manufacturing was even sharper than that in aggregate employment. Similarly, even in the countries in which aggregate manufacturing employment increases over the period 1990-97, the female share had a tendency to stabilise or even fall. Thus, in Indonesia the share of women workers in all manufacturing sector workers increased from an admittedly high 45 per cent to as much as 47 per cent by 1993, and then fell to 44 per cent by 1997. In Malaysia the decline in female share was even sharper than in South Korea : from 47 per cent in 1992 to only 40 per cent in 1997. A slight decline was evident even in Thailand.

This fall in women’s share of employment is evident not just for total manufacturing but even for export-oriented manufacturing, and is corroborated by evidence from other sources. Thus Joekes [1999] shows that the share of women employed in EPZs declined even between 1980 and 1990 in Malaysia, South Korea and the Philippines, with the decline being as sharp as more than 20 percentage points (from 75 per cent to only 54 per cent) in the case of Malaysia.

The evidence suggests that the process of feminisation of export employment really peaked somewhere in the early 1990s (if not earlier in some countries) and that thereafter the process was not only less marked, but may even have begun to peter out. This is significant because it refers very clearly to the period before the effects of the financial crisis began to make themselves felt on real economic activity, and even before the slowdown in the growth rate of export production. So, while the crisis may have hastened the process whereby women workers are disproportionately prone to job loss because of the very nature of their employment contracts, in fact the marginal reliance on women workers in export manufacturing activity (or rather in the manufacturing sector in general) had already begun to reduce before the crisis.

In the subsequent period, manufacturing has tended to occupy a much less significant position in total employment of women. In Malaysia the share of women workers in manufacturing to all employed women fell from its peak of 31 per cent in 1992 to 26 per cent in 1999; in the Philippines from 13.3 per cent in 1991 to less than 12 per cent in 1999; in South Korea from its peak of 28 per cent in 1990 to 17 per cent in 2000; and in Hong Kong China from 32 per cent in 1990 to 10 per cent in 1999. [3]

 In any case, the nature of such work has also changed in recent years. Most such work was already based on short-term contracts rather than permanent employment for women; now there is much greater reliance on women workers in very small units or even in home-based production, at the bottom of a complex subcontracting chain. Already this was a prevalent tendency in the region. For example, labour flexibility surveys in the Philippines have shown that the greater is the degree of labour casualisation, the higher is the proportion of total employment consisting of women and the more vulnerable these women are to exploitative conditions. [ILO 1995] This became even more marked in the post-crisis adjustment phase. [Pabico 1999]

In Southeast Asia, women have made up a significant proportion of the informal manufacturing industry workforce, in garment workshops, shoe factories and craft industries. Many women also carry out informal activities as temporary workers in farming or in the building industry. In Malaysia, over a third of all electronics, textile and garments firms were found to use sub-contracting. In Thailand, it has been estimated that as many as 38 per cent of clothing workers are homeworkers and the figure is said to be 25-40 percent in the Philippines [Sethuraman 1998]. Home-based workers, working for their own account or on a subcontracting basis, have been found to make products ranging from clothing and footwear to artificial flowers, carpets, electronics and teleservices. [Carr and Chen, 1999; Lund and Srinivas 2000]