ABSTRACT
Does globalization have a gender bias? Wood (1991) found an apparently fortunate asymmetry: trade between developed and developing countries corresponded with an increased female intensity of employment in developing countries and had no noticeable negative symmetric effect on the female intensity of employment in the traded-goods sector of industrialized countries. As Wood noted, the asymmetry is particularly striking because it contradicts the findings of research done in the mid-1980s. Schumacher (1984), using 1977 data, found that a representative (and trade-balance neutral) bundle of imports and exports between six European Union countries and developing countries had a distinct positive effect on male employment and negative effect on female employment. And Baldwin (1984) found that women make up a disproportionately large share of workers displaced by foreign trade. Though at odds with both theoretical prediction and prior empirical evidence, Wood’s asymmetry result has received surprisingly little attention. In this chapter we revisit the Wood Asymmetry, using more recent and disaggregated data (22 manufacturing industries) for 10 OECD countries for the 1978–95 period. We use factor content analysis to calculate changes in male and female employment associated with trade expansion. We find that in most of the countries in the sample (in particular Australia, Canada, Japan, the Netherlands, and the USA) trade expansion with non-OECD countries resulted in employment declines that disproportionately affected women. In most continental European countries in our sample (France, Germany, 2 and Italy) there was little or no gender bias in the decline in employment associated with the expansion of non-OECD trade.
