Gender Inequality

As a result of these dynamics, women’s share of global labour income today stands at only around 30%, having barely increased since 1990.  With existing trends, it will take more than 500 years for women to reach parity with men at a global level. The struggle for gender equality remains an urgent priority, and it will require building a post-capitalist economy that values and properly remunerates women’s labour.

Women’s labour share tends to be lowest in the peripheral regions of the global South. This is because the periphery suffers a net-outflow of embodied labour to the core economies (see our entry on Drain from the Global South), and the pressure of servicing this outflow falls disproportionately on women.

The former socialist bloc has historically had the highest gender parity, higher even than in the Western core economies. This is because public job guarantees allowed women to easily access paid employment in the formal sector,⁵ while mass education campaigns and egalitarian wage-setting practices narrowed the gender pay gap.⁶ Although the 20^th century socialist states were far from achieving full gender equality and women remained underrepresented in government, economic planning allowed for some of the lowest gender-based wage inequality in the world. Note however that their progress has slowed and, in the case of China, reversed since the transition to capitalism in 1990.⁷

Still, the Former Eastern Bloc - and the Socialist Republic of Vietnam - continue to outperform the core regions in terms of gender income parity.     

Progress toward gender equality is extremely slow. According to the Global Gender Gap Index, which incorporates inequalites in health, education, economic participation and political empowerment, it will take 125 years to close the gender gap if existing trends continue. 

To overcome this impasse, it is imperative to build a post-capitalist system based on radical democratic institutions that give women an equal share in political and economic power. In the Kurdish regions of Northeast Syria, socialist revolutionaries led by the Kurdistan Workers Party are building a democratic system where political and economic decisions are made by mass-based organizations and popular councils in which at least 40% of positions are reserved for women.⁸ We must find ways to scale similar arrangements up to the global level.

Key policies include a public job guarantee to ensure equal access to paid employment, universal public childcare, and ‘balanced job networks’ to ensure that the most fulfilling and desirable work is shared equally between men and women. Public wage-setting regulations can be used to establish more egalitarian pay scales, and to ensure industries that have been socially constructed as ‘feminine’ are not underpaid relative to those that have been constructed as ‘masculine.’

Notes

1. For essential reading on capitalism and gender inequality, see: Federici (2004); Mies (1986); Dunaway (2014). 

2. In the United States, for instance, on average women earn 21% less than their male counterparts (annual earnings of full-time workers). Even when accounting for differences in industrial and occupational employment, the pay gap still sits at over 8% (Blau & Kahn 2016). This figure (8%) reflects clear discrimination in the labour market. However, feminist economists emphasise that pay differences arising from industry and occupational segregation must also be understood as discriminatory. Scholars point out that certain jobs (e.g., nursing, teaching, care work, etc.) are socially constructed as ‘feminine,’ and then devalued and underpaid on that basis, despite being essential and highly skilled forms of labour. See, Bradley (1989), Waring (2004), Cortis & Meagher (2012). 

3. Researchers arrived at these figures by using surveys that ask people how much time they spend on unpaid labour. Time on unpaid work is then valued by comparing it to similar work in the paid market. UNRISD researchers performed these calculations for 6 countries: Argentina, India, South Korea, Nicaragua, South Africa, and Tanzania. See Budlender (2008). Other studies have arrived at similar figures for Australia (51% of GDP) and China (25-32%). See Hoenig and Page (2012), Dong and An (2015). 

4. This figure is calculated by valuing the estimated number of unpaid labour hours at the US minimum wage (Clelland 2014). 

5. For a discussion of full employment and female education in the Soviet Union see, Allen (2003), especially pages 50-51, 96-97, 120-131. The power of these policies can be seen in World Bank data on female labour force participation. In China in 1990, women made up 46% of the paid labor force, compared to 25% in India and 38% in Indonesia. In Russia and Ukraine, 48% and 49% of the labour force were female, respectively, compared to 35% in Latin America and 41% in the ‘high-income’ countries. It is particularly interesting to compare Soviet Central Asia to neighbouring states. In the five Central Asian republics of the former-USSR, the female labour force rate ranged from 53% in Turkmenistan to 36% in Tajikistan, with a mean of 44%. These figures are markedly higher than the rate achieved in the Middle East and North Africa (18%) or Afghanistan (17%). The 20^th century socialist states also achieved relatively impressive outcomes on the teenage pregnancy rate, female education, and other indicators of women’s social and economic empowerment.

6. For a discussion of the role of socialist wage-setting policies in narrowing the pay gap see, Blau & Kahn (2016). The Gender Wage Gap, p. 48.

7. Blau & Kahn (2016: 48) also point to a widening of the gender pay gap with the fall of Communism in Slovenia, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Russia, which they attribute to the increased role of market forces in setting wages. The economists Jean Drèze and Amartya Sen (1989) also point out that in China the dismantling of collective institutions and rural social services jeopardised women’s access to formal paid employment and appear to have been associated with a reduction in gender equality. Indeed, during the first half of the 1980s, China’s female infant mortality rate almost doubled (from 37.7 to 67.2 per thousand). As Drèze and Sen explain, “there is considerable evidence that the involvement of women in so-called ‘gainful employment’ tends to reduce gender bias against females. In this respect, the communal form of agriculture used in pre-reform China provided much easier scope for female ‘gainful’ employment, and the proportion of women in such employment has risen quite radically in the 1960s and 1970s. However, with the new [market-based] responsibility system, Chinese agricultural production has become more family-based, with the usual division of labour that tends to place women in activities of the typical ‘household’ kind. This can indeed be an influence towards worsening the position of women in ‘cooperative conflicts,’ and through a general regression of women’s economic position and social status, can also strengthen the anti-female bias in the caring of children… Also, the burden of decreased health services seems to have been unequally shared between boys and girls, and given the pre-existing anti-female bias (whether strengthened or not in the post-reform period), the gender inequalities can be expected to be most consequential in periods of general contraction" (Dreze and Sen 1989: pp. 215-221).

8. Knapp, M., Flach, A., & Ayboga, E., (2016). Revolution in Rojava: Democratic Autonomy and Women’s Liberation in Syrian Kurdistan. Pluto Press.