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York and Ergas (2011) (excerpts and points summarized)
1. Authors explore 2 Issues: what are they?
(1) Women’s status in nations overlaps with the world-system position of those nations
and
(2) The influence of women’s status within nations on a variety of national
characteristics.
2. What do the Authors find out about women’s status?
a. Women’s status has a moderately strong association with world-system position: core
or semi/periphery
b. Regardless of a country’s world-system position, GDP per capita, and urbanization, in
nations where women have higher status (variously measured), total fertility rates, infant
mortality rates, military expenditures, and inflows of foreign direct investment are lower,
and public health care expenditures and per capita meat consumption are higher. These
results suggest that women’s status has social effects.
3. Why do the authors’ argue that the history of capitalist development i s a gendered
and racialized phenomenon?
a. When companies make policies and decisions on recruiting and employing
workers, institutional exclusion of women and racial minorities occur. As these
groups are not regarded as equal, they are not hired.
b. It is assumed that women provide domestic labor, enabling male workers to be
available to meet the demands of employers. Globally, these assumptions are
intrinsic to the organization of labour. Genderrd and racialized labour structures
reinforce male hegemony in preexisting patriarchal cultures around the globe.
c. Colonial influence entrenches Male hegemony as it imposes such views on peoples
with limited or no previous gender hierarchy, as in the case of the Cherokee frontier.
Before colonial influence, the Cherokee recognized matrilineal rights and celebrated
women’s subsistence labor
d. Women who do paid work, tend to earn the lowest wages and do the least valued,
although not unimportant, jobs. This is especially true for women of color
e. Unpaid labor allows production costs to remain low, which, in turn, keeps
commodities cheap and corporate profits high
f. Global trend toward the “feminization of labor,” both unwaged and waged in both
informal and formal economic sectors, is a well documented phenomenon
4. Explain the Semiproletarianization of the household with example:
When corporations externalize costs of production by paying waged workers less than
the amount needed to maintain, feed and reproduce their household, women and
children in the household have to work to provide subsistence for the household. This
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systemic and institutionalized form of sexism forces households to absorb these
costs through women’s reproductive and subsistence labor
Individuals in households adapt to corporate externalization of production costs
by pooling resources in order to live, including wages, reproduction, subsistence
food production, and informal work, such as craft production.
Example: In Philippines when companies commercial export aquaculture was
introduced in a small, previously subsistence fishing community, the community’s
economy transitioned from subsistence fishing to commercial exploitation of their
resources. This resulted in increased malnutrition and hunger in the community. As a
result of the loss of food and social services, women adapted by working three to four
more hours a day without pay to help their husbands do their jobs, and produced and
sold crafts, livestock, and dried oysters or fish in informal markets.
5. What do the authors’ note as the impact of the structural adjustment policies on
women’s education?
The structural adjustment policies in the Third World, have negative effects on
women’s educational and occupational achievement.
6. What do the authors’ examine as six different features of nations that have been of
interest to quantitative macro-comparative researchers:
1. Total fertility rate,
2 . Infant mortality rate per 1000 births
3. Government health expenditures as percentage of GDP
4. Military expenditures as a percentage of GDP
5. Net inflows of foreign direct investment as a percentage of GDP
6. Meat consumption per capita (kg/year).
Total fertility rate and the infant mortality rate are indicators of reproductive
health, spending on health care and the military get at social and political priorities,
foreign direct investment deals with economic links to the global economy, and meat
consumption is related to agricultural production processes and cultural characteristics
7. What are the authors’ findings on how women’s status is connected to a wide variety
of processes and social outcomes.
There is clear evidence that:



Where women have higher educational status, fertility rates and infant mortality
rates are lower. These findings point to the major demographic and health
consequences of women’s status.
Women’s status has a distinct effect on social priorities. Where women’s status is
higher, military expenditures are lower and government health care expenditures
are higher.
Women’s status is associated with national links to the global economy. There is
less foreign direct investment in nations where women have higher status, which
suggests that gender equality leads nations to be less dependent on the global
economy.
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Finally, diet and agriculture also appear to be affected by women’s status. Where
women’s status is higher, meat consumption is higher.
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