Gender by Emma Foster

After reading this chapter you will be able to:

Understand the major challenges and contributions to conventional IR theory when we consider gender

Identify the main debates surrounding gender and international security

Understand the main debates surrounding gender and international development

Identify possible and likely future directions in the study of gender and IR

Introductory box: Gender inequality on a global scale

Although women are the ‘cornerstones of economic life’ (Steans 2006: 99) labouring as farmers, workers and carers, their work is undervalued across the globe, often dismissed as ‘women's work’ and receiving lower pay or no financial remuneration at all. Women make up the majority of workers in many export processing zones (EPZs) that are crucial to global market chains. For instance in Bangladesh women make up 85 per cent of the workers in EPZs and in Nicaragua they make up 90 per cent. This work is almost always low paid and low status yet is crucial to international trade. Women, on average, are paid 17 per cent less than men for the same work. Similarly, in terms of political equality, women are still very much under-represented. Although the number of women in national assemblies has increased by 8 per cent in the last decade, reaching 18.4 per cent in 2008, this is far from reaching the goal of gender parity whereby neither men nor women hold more than 60 per cent of the seats. In fact, at the current rate it is unlikely that developing countries will achieve parity until 2045 (UNIFEM 2009).

Beyond economic and political inequality more drastic forms of gender inequality can be recognised globally. For example there is what, economist and development theorist, Amartya Sen calls ‘natality inequality’ (2001: 35) which refers to the use of sex-selective abortion, whereby female fetuses are aborted due to the preference for boy children in patriarchal countries and regions. This has had an impact on female to male population ratios in states such as China, South Korea and India and elsewhere in South and East Asia. For example, in India in 2001 the ratio of boys to girls aged 0 to 6 years was 927 girls to every 1,000 boys, a ratio gap that has increased since 1981 when the figures were 962 girls to 1,000 boys. This difference in sex ratios is considered to be, in part, an outcome of prenatal sex determination — through ultrasound scanning which is widely available in India even in rural areas — and the decision then to terminate unborn females (Jha et al. 2006: 211). The favouring of boy children over girls is an issue of international relevance and is an extreme manifestation of gender inequality.