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88 Women in the Economy (MWG-011)
Development’. Boserup (1970) analyzed the changes that occurred in agricultural practices as society
became modernized and examined the differential impact of these changes on the work done by men
and women. She found that ‘Economic progress benefits men as wage earners in the modern sector,
while the position of women is left unchanged, and even deteriorates when competition from the
growing modern sectors eliminates the traditional enterprises carried on by women.?’ As per her
observation, ‘European settlers, colonial administrators and technical advisers are largely responsible
for the deterioration in the status of women in the agricultural sectors of developing countries.
It was they who neglected the female agricultural labor force when they helped to introduce modern
commercial agriculture to the overseas world and promoted the productivity of male labor.’
She was the first one to use gender as an independent variable in her analysis of development. As the
differential impact of ‘modernization’ for men and women became evident from several such studies,
the argument to include Women in Development was put forward and became known as WID
approach. Thus, the gender literature has often disagreed with modernization theory as Boserup
(1970), Elliot (1977) and others have argued. WID was an argument to integrate women in
development without analyzing the reasons for deferential impact of development.
The developmentalists explained that the erosion of women’s role in traditional sector forced them to
take up jobs in the informal sector, petty trading, domestic work etc. Besides their domestic tasks
within the household resulted in the ‘double burden’ of work. Norms that attribute to women all
responsibility for childcare and household management while holding men accountable for the
financial support of the family presumably limit women’s education and training, lower their
employment aspirations, reduce the time and energy available for extra-domestic work, and restrict
women’s access to technology and credit. As a result, women are unable to compete successfully with
men for employment opportunities within the labor market. Central to developmentalism is the thesis
that modernization entails costs as well as benefits and that the impacts of social and cultural changes
are unevenly distributed throughout different sectors of society. Certain disadvantaged groups such as
women, minorities, and the poor tend to bear a disproportionate share of the burdens of
socioeconomic development.
Thus, they tend to accept the assumption of modernization theory that industrialization, urbanization,
and structural differentiation eventually expand opportunities for qualified persons to find work in the
‘modern’ manufacturing and service sectors. Thus, women’s relatively low rates of labor force
participation and their concentration in certain occupations are generally attributed to conflicting
familial responsibilities, women’s inadequate motivation and training, cultural stereotypes confining
women to ‘feminine’ roles and other factors that place women at a competitive disadvantage in the
labor market.
Thus, developmentalists did not explore the reality that whether number of occupational alternatives
available in the capitalist development model are sufficient to accommodate large number of qualified
women and men seeking paid employment or not. The nature of demand for women’s labor was
neglected aspect in these theories.
Demand Side Theories: Challenges to Modernization
Theory The exploitation theory, dependency theory and the world system theory have challenged the
basic assumptions of the Modernization theory. They have concentrated on the nature of demand for
women’s labor to explain the status of women workers in the globalized world economy.
The Exploitation Theory: The Exploitation Theory is associated with the Marxists understanding
of the society and social change. As per this theory, ‘profit’ is the result of the exploitation of wage
earners by their employers. It rests on the ‘labor theory of value’. As per the labor theory of value,
‘value’ is intrinsic in a product according to the amount of labor that has been spent on producing the
product. Thus, the value of a product which is created by the workers is higher than the value of labor
and other inputs used in the production. This addition to the original value is ‘Surplus Value’ created
by the workers who made that product and it is reflected in its finished price. The income from this
finished price is then divided between labor (wages), capital (profit), and expenses on raw materials.
The wages received by workers do not reflect the full value of their labor, because some of that value
(part of surplus value) is taken by the employer in the form of profit. Therefore, ‘making a profit’
essentially means taking away from the workers some of the value that results from their labor. This is
known as capitalist exploitation.
Dependency Theory: According to Andre G. Frank (1967), the main proponent of the dependency
theory, the world is divided in the ‘core nations’ and ‘peripheral nations. The wealthy nations of the
world (core nations) need a peripheral group of poorer countries in order to remain wealthy.
Dependency theory states that the poverty of the countries in the periphery is not because they are not
integrated into the world system, but because of the way they are integrated into the world system.
The process of international integration helps the resources to flow away from the ‘periphery’ (the