Never Done and Poorly Paid: Women’s Work in Globalising India Author: Jayati Ghosh

Publisher: Women Unlimited

ISBN: 81-88965-44-8

About the book

This book provides a brief look at some of the important changes in the nature of women’s work in India, especially in the recent phase of global economic integration since the early 1990s.

Juxtaposing the international context for analysing the trends in domestic employment patterns, and especially the work of women, the book goes into the details of the recent global processes and its implications for the unpaid labour of women within households.

The changes, the author argues, have been particularly marked in developing Asia, which has become both the most “globalised” and the most economically dynamic region of the world. And women in Asia have taken the brunt of the changes. With respect to women’s work, there have been four apparently contradictory trends in the recent period: simultaneous increases in the incidence of paid labour, underpaid labour, unpaid labour, and the open unemployment of women. This is a paradox, since it is generally expected that when employment increases, then unemployment comes down; or when paid labour increases, then unpaid labour decreases. This book attempts to explain this paradox by describing, analysing and unravelling these tendencies and situating them in the context of wider economic processes.

About the Author

Jayati Ghosh is Professor of economics at the Centre for Economic Studies and Planning, School of Social Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. She has taught at several universities in India and abroad, and has served as part-time adviser and consultant to many governmental and international originations.

She has many books to her name and was the principal author of the West Bengal Human Development Report, 2004 which received the UNDP 2005 award for excellence in analysis. She can be contacted at jayatijnu@gmail.com

Contents

#. Preface and Acknowledgements.

1. The International Context of Women’s Work.

2. Recent Economic Growth and Employment Patterns in India.

3. Conceptual Issues in Assessing Women’s Work.

4. Working for Wages.

5. Women in Public Employment.

6. One’s Own Boss.

7. Women Workers on the Move.

8. Working Without Pay and Looking for Work.

9. Conclusion.

#. Additional References.