Gender and Globalisation: An Analysis of the Garment Sector in India

Since the 1970s, industrial production has been outsourced from developed countries to parts of the developing world where labor was found to be significantly cheaper and more ‘flexible'. This phenomenon was accompanied by a rise in the female intensiveness of the workforce, in a process called feminization. In this light,the objective of the current paper was to analyze how gender was embedded in the production process under contemporary global capitalism in different localized contexts, using the example of the Indian garment industry. In particular, it strove to understand the location of women workers in the industry and the differences in the way men and women workers are integrated into the sector. Using secondary data sources, the paper found that the manner in which gender was embedded in production was both “contingent and patterned” i.e. a product of both global and local factors. There also seemedto be large variations in the way feminization has taken place across different clusters and spaces of work. Moreover even as women were integrated into the sector, their position within the workforce continued to remain subordinate to that of men, as was evident from the larger share of women workers in subsidiary status and informal employment.