BIDS Publications

Abstract on "Women and the Informal Service Sector" by Dr Anwara Begum. Co-authored article with Dr Mahmudul Alam, in " Role of the Informal Service Sector in Urban Poverty Alleviation, published by ESCAP, UN, New York 1996; ST/ESCAP/1706. Six Country studies comprising of Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, Pakistan, the Philipines and Thailand.

Participation of women in the labour force is on the rise in the developing countries. The level of female participation in the labour force is relatively high in the newly industrializing economies and in South-Asia and it has increased dramatically in the last two decades (Escap, 1994). Female labour force participation rates in the early 1990s ranged from 39 per cent in Indonesia to 76 per cent in Thailand. On the other hand, the rates in South Asia have been low with only moderate growth. This is partly due to the serious problem of undercounting of economically active women in the predominantly agricultural economies of South Asia, where reporting of women’s work is still considered a sign of low social status. Moreover, the use of male enumerators to obtain the required information from the male head of household adds to the problem.

The increasing trend of females joining the labour force is partly due to an increase in the level of education among them, so that, women are seeking work outside home to improve their quality of life. The other group of women that enter the labour market is driven by economic circumstances to generate additional income for family survival. Most women in the latter group enter the informal sector because there are not enough jobs in the formal sector, and they often do not possess the required education and skills for this purpose.

Sex-based discrimination in the labour market some time pushes women into marginal activities. Cultural factors in some countries restrict women’s mobility which in turn reduce their options of finding work. Women’s responsibility towards their children and family also influence the nature and extent of their participation in the job market; many, especially married women, prefer home-based work, so that they can combine their role of homemaker with their work relatively easily. Also lack of availability of child care facilities at an affordable cost can force married women to work at home.

While women can be found in all activities of the informal sector, they are disproportionately represented in the service subsector, as there are relatively few barriers such as skills and capital requirements to enter this subsector. It emerges from the country studies that within a broadly defined service sector, women are disproportionately represented in petty trading and domestic services. Women generally end-up with low-paid and less secure jobs. Women working at home as subcontractors suffer the worst exploitation. Levels of earning of female workers tend to be lower compared with those of male workers, partly due to their lower education/skills and partly due to sex-based discrimination. For example, the country study on Pakistan reports wide earning differentials between male and female workers in the informal sector: a female worker earns 44 per cent of the average income of her male counterpart. Other country studies also come out with similar results.

The nature of problems and constraints faced by female workers in the informal service sector, though not much different from those faced by male workers, are more severe. For instance, all workers in the informal service sector have low access to human resource development facilities such as education; however, access to education is much more restricted for females. Women’s Associations and Working Women’s Forums have provided assistance and contributed towards enhancing women’s bargaining capacity by making them aware of their exploitation and uniting them in demands for higher wages.

Co-researcher and Editor for the study on "The Gender Imbalance of Growth of Export Oriented Manufacturing in Bangladesh", funded by The World Bank.

Abstract: The increasing participation of women in the formal market economy has multi-dimensional impacts in different spheres of life and society. These developments have improved women’s economic involvement and they are receiving wages for their labour. It might also represent a transformation in gender relations in the economic and social spheres. However, it has exposed women to a new set of risks, including unsafe and unhealthy working conditions, sexual harassment and abuse in the workplace, and greater vulnerability to gender-based violence outside the home and workplace. Migration, in the case of workers of the export oriented industries, is a physical severance of the individual from the familiar support of family, on one hand, and emancipation from the traditional shackles of society, on the other. Although, in the majority of cases of the export oriented industry workers, migration is undertaken within household and individual consensus realms, there is a community level convention which comes into play subsequently. A lot of the perceptions which have been derived from the case studies here, as well as other documented evidences, are obviously affected by the societal condemnation of export oriented wage work for women. The effects of migration are inextricably linked to the constant pressure, on the individual, of balancing the economic gains against the modified social environment and altered civic ranking in the rural and urban areas. Almost all the workers in the export oriented industries have had delayed marriages if they have joined the jobs while still single. Major and specific studies on these workers have documented working girls’ delayed marriage. According to the Demographic and Health Surveys (1993), more than 70 per cent of the girls in the 15-19 age group in Bangladesh, were married. The impact of export oriented work on deferring the age at first marriage of migrant female workers is quite significant. On purdah, almost all the respondents supported it because it absolves the women from allegations of enticement; their work schedules and journeys to work expose them to threats of sexual harassment every day. A moderate veil creates a sort of shield (also a mental barrier) for them from the unwanted leers of strange men. Women in the export oriented industries have somehow found a strategy to resolve the impasse between their home based traditional, secluded roles and their economic participation (the modern role) by making the veil public.

Resume: Dr. Anwara Begum obtained Ph. D. from the University of Liverpool for her thesis on "Poor Rural Migrants to the City of Dhaka" in 1995. She has to her credit several research papers, reports, working papers and has authored the book titled "Destination Dhaka – Urban Migration: Expectation and Reality", by University Press Limited, Dec. 1999, Dhaka. She is an active researcher on urban residents and has a wide interest in urbanization and its related development issues. She has conducted extensive surveys on the poor, especially the pavement dwellers and the slum dwellers. She has collected primary information for the informal service sector workers too, through structured questionnaires and case studies. Her study fields are urban area development priority, formal and informal industry worker conditions, housing and settlements and the problems of social and economic deprivation of urban and rural poor dwellers, human resource development, and rural-to-urban migration. She has contributed as co-researcher and Editor for the study on "The Gender Imbalance of Growth of Export Oriented Manufacturing in Bangladesh", funded by The World Bank. She has also worked as Consultant for Gender and Planning, Monitoring and Evaluation for "An Appraisal of Three Medium –Sized Local NGOs", which was a Norad/SDC funded project.