The Determinants of Women’s Work in the Global South and the Global North: Commonalities and Differences

• In Event: 477 - Section on Sociology of Development Paper Session. Gender and Development

Abstract

This paper attempts to provide conceptual unity to the enormous empirical literature on the economic role of women in development. This is a literature that is long on useful findings, but struggles with synthesizing results into more general theoretical propositions. I take Cohn's theory of occupational sex-typing - a theory of women's occupations in paid employment in the Global North and investigate its applicability to the Global South.

Some propositions turn out to be powerful and useful. The exclusion of women from paid employment is heavily determined by capitalist needs for labor cost minimization. This explains the presence of women in global commodified manufacturing chains, the absence of women from heavy manufacturing, and high levels of discrimination against women in petro-economies. The theory is poorly equipped to deal with household production or women's self employment in the informal sector. It also struggles with patriarchic ideologies in the Global South that differ from those in the Global North. I add new theories of a) women's household production and self employment b) women's work under cultural globalization and c) the distinctive dynamics of frontier resource extraction regimes to fill in these explanatory gaps.

Author

• Samuel Cohn, Texas A&M University