ABSTRACT
Mainstream economists and political scientists assume that trade liberalization is a gender-neutral process. They consider the absolute gains from trade to be a rising tide that will lift all boats and are relatively silent about the inequalities and deleterious social impacts that may result from greater dependence on global markets. Feminist scholars, activists and policymakers have questioned this neoliberal view, highlighting the mutual, two-way linkages between trade policy and gender, and the often adverse, differential impacts of economic liberalization and crises on women relative to men (UN Inter-Agency Network on Women and Gender Equality Task Force on Gender and Trade 2004; Williams 2004). Trade exacerbates existing gender inequalities that result from societal, structural hierarchies. In Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries, for example, trade-related employment losses disproportionately affect women as the industries that are most globally competitive and penetrated by imports (such as the textiles and footwear industries) are also the most female labour intensive. At the same time, structural gender inequalities serve as barriers to building a country’s trade capacity to take advantage of the global market opportunities that come with liberalization. Developing countries, for instance, tend to concentrate women in low-skilled production and reproduction as a strategy for achieving comparative advantage, and thus underutilizing women’s human capital.
