Globalization and the Exploitation of Third World Women

Globalization has had a significant impact on the lives of women in the developing nations, which we will further examine in the two countries – Bangladesh and Kenya. In this paper, Globalization is defined as “a complex economic, political, cultural, and geographic process in which the mobility of capital, organizations, ideas, discourses, and people has taken a global or transnational form (Valentine Moghadam 1999). Globalization has more negative effects on women in third world countries such as Kenya and Bangladesh. Corporations hire people in the third world countries, due to the cheap labor force. Corporations like to hire more women than men in the cheap labor force, because women “work in labor intensive industries at lower wages than men would accept and in conditions that unions would not permit “ (Moghadam 1999). There has been a shift from the agrarian sector to commercial and industrial sectors which pays more. Women also experience social and economic injustice while at work. Females generally hold a secondary status compared to males, both in the household and the work environment. Although the women labor force in the industrial and commercial sectors get paid higher wages then women who work on farms, the wages are not enough to keep them from depending on the financial support of males in their family. This in turn makes the female gender much more depended and prone to exploitation in many ways. The inability of female workers to generate enough capital to support themselves as well as their families, suggests that until wages increase along with better working conditions, the economies of Kenya and Bangladesh will continue to exist in poverty. At the same time, women are given opportunities to work and become ...

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...terate and powerless in various areas of their life. People need to be empowered by being resistant to these processes and participate in building viable economic and political alternatives. Their should be massive reforms on people’s basic needs and welfare and not on the policies that favor international capital. Global imperialism should be replaced with global democratic governance of the people, especially who are vulnerable to exploitation in the developing nations. Their should be social justice and a control of means of production, which can be achieved through democratic empowerment because globalization disempowers the people by displacing their productive forces. People should be given the right to make decisions on their own, and especially women who have proved through their ambition of working hard and contributing significantly to the countries GDP.