Women And Industrialization In Asia

First published in 1995. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Transforming Gender and Development in East Asia brings together a collection of original essays from top scholars in the United States and Asia to explore the centrality of gender in the process of economic development in East Asia. Contributors demonstrate through ethnography, personal narratives, field observation, and in-depth interviews the essential parts women have played in the national growth, economic restructuring, and industrialization of East Asian countries, including South Korea, Taiwan, China, Hong Kong, Singapore, and China.

This volume examines the nature of married women's participation in the economies of three East Asian countries—Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea. In addition to asking what is similar or different about women's economic participation in this region of the world compared to Western societies, the book also asks how women's work patterns vary across the three countries.

This collection contributes to key theoretical debates about women workers in Asia and breaks new ground by focussing on issues that have been little documented in other studies in the area. It provides new information and insights into labour systems associated with labour intensive export manufactures and state-labour relations in a comparative context. The contributors present a range of unique and varied perspectives from which they consider aspects of the increasing integration of Asian economies, exploring implications for their labour markets.

A handbook for understanding the situations of women in Asia today

Despite the massive influx of women into the labor force as a result of globalization, the gender inqualities at work have remained largely unchanged. This book addresses two related questions: What has prompted the feminization of manufacturing work in developing countries, and why has it failed to significantly erode gender inequalities at work? Teri L. Caraway offers case studies and in-depth analysis of employment changes in Indonesia combined with cross-national data to show that the feminization of the workplace produced by industrialization policies has reconfigured and reproduced, rather than overturned, gender divisions of labor at work. Caraway challenges the conventional wisdom that export-oriented industrialization and women's cheap labor are the driving forces behind feminization. Instead, she argues, the answers can be found in weak unions and current social practice. Caraway employs information about a wide range of industries--capital-intensive, male-dominated, non-export firms as well as female-dominated, labor-intensive, export-oriented industries--in arriving at her conclusions. Her findings will prove discouraging to anyone who hopes that globalization has become a positive force in improving the lives of women workers.Caraway's multilevel methodology for analyzing changes in gendered patterns of employment and her introduction of "gendered discourses of work" as a major explanatory variable will make Assembling Women a valuable resource for women's studies scholars, development economists, political scientists, and sociologists as well as all with an interest in Southeast Asian Studies and labor and industrial relations.

This volume of twelve original essays examines the interplay between women's education and development, and if and how it has changed women's status, in selected nations in Asia. Educational expansion in recent decades have benefitted women in Asia at least in quantitative terms. Industrialization has also created room for increased waged employment for them. However, the relative openness of these systems has not been paralleled at the cultural level. Women in Asia, which remains largely patriarchal, are thus caught in contradictions. This volume examines how women use and compromise with opportunities and limits in education, the role of education in their economic participation, and the enhancement and tension brought to their family roles. The volume is edited from a cross-national perspective. The chapters, each covering a nation, rest on a common framework. Each begins with a brief historical account of education fore women. It then investigates the extent women have been able to take advantage of them. What follows is an analysis of how women use their education in the labor market and in the family. Society's definition of women's roles in the family often acts to reduce the effect of schooling on women's economic participation. This interplay is further complicated by such factors as social class and/or caste, religion and ethnicity.