Gender and the Global Economy: Moghadam

As has been recognized in recent years, gender and economics are not independent of one another. Women are playing an ever-larger role in the economy at the same time as we acknowledge that much of their work goes unrecognized in the economy. Moghadam discusses economics using a gender perspective and brings up some interesting points. One point which is very important is that, while women are gaining employment in many fields, this has not occurred in conjunction with a redistribution of domestic and child-care duties. At the same time, many of the jobs that women take on are of the type that maximizes profits for employers (while not necessarily benefiting the worker in the same ways as would normal, full-time work). For example, women are more likely than men to work in “temporary, part-time, casual, and home-based” jobs. Therefore, I would argue that women’s employment is still namely used to benefit men. Women must still serve men by undertaking the unpaid household labor, which requires them to also take the paid positions which have the least power and status but are at the same time beneficial to their (usually male) employers. In addition, since women are certainly still receiving less income, due both to the wage gap and to the fact that women are somewhat limited to part-time and other lower-status work, they earn lower wages and salaries than men and therefore remain subjugated in their marriages and other relationships with men. This is just an expansion of some of Moghadams’s points that I found most interesting.