ABSTRACT
This chapter draws on the work of feminist geographers, international relations scholars, and specialists in international political economy to construct a profile of the world's women, free from the male biases that permeate mainstream research. It adopts a feminist approach to knowledge production to correct erroneous accounts, while also illuminating structural inequities that circumscribe women's lives. The chapter traces the range of variation in women's waged and unwaged work and how their work is affected by war and by globalization. It shows how changes in the global economy concentrate women in certain sectors, contributing to the feminization of subsistence agriculture, the feminization of the conditions of labor in industrial production, and the feminization of migration. The chapter examines racing-gendering in development policies. By contrasting mainstream and feminist approaches to development, it explains how policies explicitly designed to foster economic development are promoting the feminization of poverty.
