‘Nimble Fingers Make Cheap Workers’: An Analysis of Women's Employment in Third World Export Manufacturing

The idea that women's subordinate position stems from a lack of job opportunities, and can be ended by the provision of sufficient job opportunities, is deeply rooted and held by a wide spectrum of opinion, from international development agencies, government bureaux and mainstream Marxists to many women's organizations. Our work in the Workshop on the Subordination of Women in the process of development at the Institute of Development Studies, Sussex University, has led us to reject this perspective as a starting point. We do not accept that the problem is one of women being left out of the development process. Rather, it is precisely the relations through which women are 'integrated' into the development process that need to be problematized and investigated. For such relations may well be part of the problem, rather than part of the solution. Our starting point, therefore, is the need to evaluate world market factories from the point of view of the new possibilities and the new problems which they raise for Third World women who work in them.