The Gender Dimension of Special Economic Zones
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decline highlights the fact that the feminization of employment is a historically specific and contingent phenomenon in which women tend to predominate in some occupations during particular periods in time.11 Some other limits to the feminization of labor include worker resistance, including the actions of male-dominated unions that seek to exclude women from formal employment,12 a closing gender wage gap that may result in a falling demand for female labor, and the willingness of males to accept “feminized” or insecure, low-paying and flexible positions (in this regard, see Barrientos, Kabeer, and Hossain 2004, 6).
The Economics of Female-Intensive Production in SEZs In this section, we develop a more general argument about the role of women in SEZ employment, by linking feminization to the changing structure of world trade that has occurred with the evolution of global value chains (GVCs). Production has become increasingly fragmented and internationalized, with different activities being carried out in disparate locations and coordinated increasingly through GVCs. Kaplinsky (1998, 13) describes a GVC as “the full range of activities that are required to bring a product from its conception, through its design, its sourced raw materials and intermediate inputs, its marketing, its distribution and its support to the final consumer.” The rapidly growing share of intermediate goods in world total merchandise trade is evidence of this phenomenon. For the period 1988 to 2006, world trade of total merchandise tripled (grew by 300 percent), while the intermediate goods component of total merchandise trade quadrupled (grew by 400 percent) (WTO 2008, chart 13, 102). But what drives a firm’s decision to subctontract? Milberg (2004, 60–61) suggests that firms engage in arm’s-length subcontracting, rather than intrafirm trade, when the expected cost savings from the former exceed rents from internalization, which is more probable when intermediate product markets are, or can be made, highly competitive.13 Fostering downstream competition allows lead firms to shave supplier margins, keep supply conditions flexible, and transfer risks onto producers, perpetuating asymmetric market structures that distribute value added across the chain in a highly skewed fashion.14 When externalization itself fosters competition among suppliers, the asymmetry of market structures can be considered endogenous to the lead firm’s strategies (Milberg 2004, 61).