Women of a Lesser Cost; Female Labour, Foreign Exchange and Philippine Development

WOMEN OF A Lesser Cost looks at women’s labour force participation in three areas in the Philippine Visayas - Cebu, Boracay Island and Lapu-Lapu. The book draws extensively on the large body of conceptual and primary research material generated over the last 15 years on the employment of women in export manufacturing industries owned by foreign capital. The authors set out to test the argument, put forward by Diane Elson and Ruth Pearson in the early 1980s, that employing women in export industries lowers unit costs of production which, in turn, results in the feminization of the labour force. Elson and Pearson argued that women are least-cost workers because the conceptualization of men as “breadwinners” is used to justify lower wages for women and because gender stereotypes about women’s “natural” dexterity, docility and their supposedly greater inclination towards monotonous, repetitious tasks fuel expectations of higher productivity. Women of a Lesser Cost moves the debate forward in a number of respects. First, the authors go beyond a singular focus on the export manufacturing sector and include other export oriented industries - international tourism and “hospitality” or sex work - in their analysis of women’s labour force participation in the Visayas. Although tourism and sex work are not export industries in the true sense of the term, they generate large quantities of foreign exchange. The comparison of three different industries allows the authors to highlight significant variations in the degree to which each labour force is feminized - tourism employment, for instance is clearly less feminized than the other two industries - and in the meaning and significance of women as “lesser cost” workers. Second, the authors argue that although there is some consistency in the way that export sector industries rely on gender stereotypes in their recruitment and employment practices, the way in which employers express these stereotypes can differ remarkably by industry, by type of employment within an industry, by location and over time.

A key line running throughout the book is that the outcomes of women’s assimilation into the labour force is diverse and often contradictory. Where women are preferred over men for rank and file jobs in the garment and electronics factories in Lapu-Lapu and the “non-pioneer” furniture, handicrafts and costume jewellery industries characteristic of Cebu, the reasoning is based on regressive ideas about gender attributes. Women are forced to conform to these images if they are to gain employment in the first place and retain their jobs in the long-term. Gender stereotyping has other negative effects in that it shapes possibilities for both vertical and horizontal mobility within firms. “Women’s tasks”, commonly assembly or finishing work in Lapu-Lapu, are considered to be of lower value (i.e. “unskilled”) than the “skilled” technical tasks or heavy work reserved for men. This hinders women’s skills development, confirms their status as secondary workers relative to men, while their concentration at the lower end of the wage scale means that opportunities for improving their financial independence within the household are constrained. On the other hand, women are preferred over men for jobs that are prestigious and lucrative relative to many other opportunities in Lapu-Lapu and Cebu. Moreover, where young single women are preferred, manufacturing employment offers an opportunity to delay marriage and childbirth and gives some scope for independent living whilst women with children are given an opportunity to delegate childcare tasks and often gain more leverage over household expenditure patterns than women who do not work. In short, “...while factory employment itself may not provide much in the way of satisfaction per se, it could conceivably act as a ‘stepping stone’ to positive, if gradual, changes in the personal and household circumstances of women” (page 170). This book fills a conspic