Economic Globalization and Feminization of Labour: The Case of Domestic Servants in India

This paper discusses the consequences of economic globalization for women in India. It analyzes the neoliberal policy frame from a gender perspective to bring out the impact of economic globalization on the women’s wor. Economic globalization has generated sources of livelihood and opened up new vistas of opportunities for women. However, labour market regulations based on the neo-liberal ideology have negative impacts on women such as feminization of labour as well as poverty, low-income, exploitation and health hazards. In India, the number of women has increased most in labour-intensive, informal and unorganized and casual job sectors, besides the huge number of those educated women who are working at low level IT jobs. Most of these women such as domestic maids are living in abject poverty and therefore they seek the job of domestic maids in urban areas. As a result of globalization, women in urban middle class families have shifted their burden of home management on to these poor women and they themselves engage in leisure activity or low paid white collar jobs. Poverty makes the maids and the female labour of their likes vulnerable to gender-based violence and HIV/AIDS due to greater susceptibility to infection during unprotected sex, the lack of education, employment and economic opportunities and inequitable inheritance laws, the cultural and gender norms restricting women’s sexuality and prevent them from availing themselves of information on sexual and reproductive health and unwillingness of government to publicly discuss the empowerment of women in gender relations and sexual practices. The negative impacts of neo-liberal economic policies have often failed the large segment constituted by the women in India.  There is therefore the need to institutionalize regulations and structures to empower women in social relations and sexuality practices in a patriarchal and historically male-dominated society of multiple hierarchies like India.