The newly industrialized and industrializing countries of South-East Asia
and Latin America are an exception insofar as the industrialization
process in some sectors has been female-led. A significant and growing number of
women are employed in industry. Women provide up to 80 per cent of the workforce of export
processing zones in South-East Asia. Women have also made steady progress in manufacturing in
Latin America and the Caribbean.
In Africa, with the exception of Mauritius and Egypt, the share of manufacturing in total
employment, and therefore the proportion of women in this sector relative to agriculture and
services, has remained relatively low.
"Atypical" forms of employment:
the trend towards flexible working patterns and practices in response to
competitive pressures on the global markets has resulted in the growth of "atypical" or
"non-standard" forms of work.
"Atypical" forms of work cover flexible working hours,
part-time work, home work whether in traditional activities or in more advanced technologies,
and casual, temporary employment arrangements. They fall outside of labour legislation,
social security systems and collective agreements that were formulated to regulate formal
employee-employer relationships.
Largely in low-productivity and low-quality jobs: the growth in women's employment has not been
matched by the quality of the majority of jobs they have access to. Whether in the self-employed
sector in rural and urban areas, or in formal wage employment in private or public sectors, a
greater number of working women (than men) find themselves in the lower
ranks of the profession in terms of productivity, return to labour and/or occupational status.
Therefore, gender-based disadvantages prevent those who have jobs from benefiting fully from this
"access" to employment. Gender inequalities are recreated through terms and conditions of
employment, in other words, through a relatively lower quality of
employment.
Among other factors, the search for flexible low-cost labour has encouraged industrial enterprises
to resort to subcontracting with concomitant extension
of home work and other forms of outwork. In both developed and developing
countries women have been more affected by this trend than men. In the vast majority of cases,
homeworkers are women – often with small children – who engage in these activities as much
because of their family responsibilities as because of the
lack of other income-earning opportunities. Mainly invisible
and difficult to organize, homeworkers are particularly vulnerable to exploitation and are often
excluded from the protection and benefits afforded by labour legislation
