Globalisation and women: The role of the Global Development Initiative

By Daniel Ooi Boon Yann.

AS GLOBAL development marches on, gender equality is one indicator that has been slow to improve.

The Women’s Empowerment Principles (WEP) 2022 report by UN Women shows that while companies showing commitment to promoting gender equality have increased, this has not been matched by intentional actions.

Furthermore, the report also finds that data reporting on gender equality, especially at the firm level, remains sketchy, hindering policy evaluation.

This is especially true for Malaysia. According to the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), while women’s educational attainment in Malaysia is nearly on-par with that of men, political empowerment is highly unequal, with women lagging far behind men.

As of 2023, female labour force participation stands at 56.2%, trailing behind that of men at 82.8%. Collectively, these show that greater education and training for women have translated poorly into jobs, income and welfare for women in Malaysia.

Therefore, global inter-governmental initiatives that promote collaboration and exchange of policy practices, such as the Global Development Initiative (GDI) spearheaded by China, are crucial to enable sound and evidence-driven policymaking.

Avenues of policy discourse such as the Asean-China Digital Ministers Meeting enable an exchange of policy best-practices and data findings. These are particularly important in dealing with policies lacking precedent and prior research, as well as policy areas that are less quantifiable and measurable, of which gender inequality and female welfare are prime examples.

Developing countries such as the Dominican Republic have hailed the GDI as a valuable support mechanism for developing countries in addressing development issues through cooperations and partnerships.

Returning to gender inequality, improving female welfare must be viewed in the wider context of globalisation. Women tend to be employed in different sectors and hold different levels of responsibility than men, implying men and women may also benefit differently from globalisation.

Women’s preferences for greater flexibility in working hours and responsibility can lead to women choosing jobs that pay less and offer fewer career advancement opportunities.

According to Claudia Goldin, the 2023 Nobel laureate for economics, this difference in preference does explain a significant part of gender wage gaps.

But how does globalisation fit into this?

Studying 134 countries, Margit Bussman of the University of Konstanz, finds globalisation does improve secondary education enrolment rates for women, but not tertiary education. This leads to the implication that women are increasingly directed into low-skill jobs for which secondary education is sufficient, but not into high-skill jobs with greater career prospects, for which tertiary education is needed.

In terms of economic sectors, women in developing countries increasingly work in the agricultural sector, which is generally low-skilled but offers greater childcare flexibility. This shows that the situation faced by Malaysia, as reported by the UNDP, is far from unique.

Collectively, Goldin and Bussman show the key to gender inequality is job flexibility. Policies such as free universal childcare, work-from-home arrangements, and telecommuting should reduce the hurdles faced by women in the labour market.

However, the WEP 2022 report states that even among gender equality frontrunners, support in managing caregiving responsibilities is still markedly low, with little progress beyond parental leave and caregiver benefits.

Even with data work by researchers, much remains to be done in terms of promoting female welfare. This is especially true because welfare is often determined by cultural norms and societal beliefs. These are products of social evolution, and thus adjust slowly.

Policy recommendations that work in Western developed democracies may not work as expected in Asian economies. Therefore, it is imperative that policymakers utilise the GDI to pool data and policy expertise, crucially those from developing countries.

A prime of GDI-enabled collaboration is the collaboration between China, Lebanon and Pakistan on women's vocational education through the Arab-Chinese Cooperation and Development Association of Lebanon and the Institute for Peace and Diplomacy Studies of Pakistan, detailed in the 2023 Progress Report on the Global Development Initiative.

Such projects do not just accomplish goals – they are also excellent avenues for data collection and analysis, allowing meaningful policy evaluation and enabling data-driven research.

More specifically, policies are needed to help women break out of the low-skill job trap that globalisation seems to drive them towards, since increased labour force participation is only meaningful if it means greater career prospects. Economies need to remove hurdles towards female career progression, especially in terms of work flexibility.

While Malaysia still lacks a wage equity policy, Malaysian policymakers should take advantage of the GDI to examine and adopt best practices from wage equity policies in countries of similar culture and development levels.

At the same time, firms need to see that gender inequality is a worthwhile and profitable investment for the future. The WEP 2022 report argues that there is a business case to be made for gender equality – heightened innovation, cost savings, increased productivity, and improved brand reputation.

Again, this needs to be translated into concrete actions by allocating capital to gender lens investing funds, prioritising gender-equal firms across value chains, and redressing harmful stereotyping for women in marketing, just to name a few. In short, efforts to improve gender inequality must be seen as inherently profitable, especially in the long-run. It is through changes in the economy that changes in social norms can be realised.

To conclude, challenges abound for gender inequality policies, especially for developing countries due to cultural differences and the lack of data informing policymaking. The GDI is an excellent platform to pool data, test policies, exchange best practices, and bring together academia and policymaking for the betterment of humanity worldwide.

Daniel Ooi Boon Yann is a Lecturer at Tunku Abdul Rahman University of Management and Technology (TAR UMT). The views expressed here are entirely the writer’s own.

The SEARCH Scholar Series is a social responsibility programme jointly organised by the Southeast Asia Research Centre for Humanities (SEARCH) and Tunku Abdul Rahman University of Management and Technology (TAR UMT), in conjunction with the 10-year anniversary of the Belt and Road Initiative.