ABSTRACT
This paper shows how markets integrate and sometimes intensify traditional gender and other social discriminatory structures. The central question posed is whether the globalization process, with its accelerated market penetration and dichotomization of material and social reproduction, is empowering or disempowering for women in the context of economies such as Nepal. This is an economy that is just emerging from the subsistence stage with many other social divisions existing alongside gender. We shall fi nd that globalization tends to transplant and perpetuate these divisions and the hierarchies in which they are embedded.
