that “maternity protection,” in contrast to “parental protection,” includes an intrinsic bias in the assignment of child care to mothers without equal share with fathers. With the increasing informalization of jobs, the implementation of ILO standards seems even more remote and they are subject to a great deal of critical scrutiny (ILO 1997). Fourth, one of the differences between the earlier periods of informalized labor and current conditions is the degree to which women have been able to take up actions at the national and international level. Structural adjustment and economic crises have led women to organize around labor issues as well as around tensions related to unpaid work and household survival strategies. A good example has been the key role of women in getting the ILO Convention on Home Work approved in June 1996. As Elizabeth Prugl (1999) has argued, this was a feminist victory, with international networks such as HomeNet providing extensive information, and using the special relationship that its members had forged with unions in advance of the conference to get their arguments on the floor. Although the rate of ratification at the country level is still very low, the Convention provides concrete goals and a regulatory tool for organizing further action. Other organizations that concentrate on women and informalized work are the Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA), which has gained international notoriety for its accomplishments, and Women and Informal Employment: Globalizing and Organizing (WIEGO), which has organized a network of workers, activists, and academics who focus on the informal sector, including home-based workers. More details on these institutions are presented in Chapter 7.
Contradictory tendencies for women’s employment Despite the above analysis, during the past three decades there have also been positive changes that should be taken into account in order to evaluate the more complex and often contradictory tendencies affecting women’s work. Worldwide and in much of the literature on the subject, female employment has for the most part been linked to exploitative conditions, low productivity, and low pay. Yet these generalizations need to be qualified. As women’s educational levels and labor force participation have gradually increased—in some cases dramatically—the dynamics of women’s employment have become more complex. First, gender gaps in education have been decreasing significantly across regions. For example, the Arab countries have experienced some of the most dramatic increases in women’s educational levels, with women’s 79
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CHANGING EMPLOYMENT PATTERNS AND THE INFORMALIZATION OF JOBS