Gender, Technology Change and Globalization: The Case of China

Abstract

The experience of women workers in China in the course of the transformation of the country’s economy into a technologically advanced export producer demonstrates how computer-based technology, combined with market-oriented management practices, creates a new set of problems concerning the organization of work and employment. This is examined here from the perspective of workers, management, NGOs as well as the state.

Although working and living conditions in these firms are generally very poor, workers have welcomed the jobs as a way to escape from the confines of a traditional economy. Where possible, women are using these job opportunities to accumulate capital and skills, to be applied in other occupations and enterprises. However, their relatively low level of education and skill renders women less successful than men in competition for jobs, and more vulnerable in the drive to increase productivity by laying-off workers.

By focusing on changes in women’s work, the article reveals the contradictions inherent in following a development path based on ever-higher levels of technology in the context of an intensive mode of production, to which productivity is the core value. The economy is bolstered and some workers gain employment in expanding industries, but workers who lack access to training, and who are reliant on dwindling state support for their reproductive responsibilities, are marginalized and seek employment in the growing informal economy.