GENDER INEQUALITY ON A GLOBAL AND LOCAL SCALE 297Even U.S. women who are well off by world standards are badly
harmed by discrimination based on sex—and so are their families.
The U.S. gender wage gap—the gap between the median wages for
women and for men—costs American families $200 billion every
year (Murphy and Graff, 2005; Hartmann, Allen, and Owens,
1999). If working women earned the same as men for the same jobs,
U.S. poverty rates would be cut in half. Nearly two-thirds of all hun-
gry adults in America are women; globally, seven out of 10 of the
world’s hungry are women and girls (UN World Food Program,
2004). More women around the world are working than ever
before, but women face a higher unemployment rate than men,
receive lower wages, and number 60 percent of the world’s 550 mil-
lion working poor—those who do not earn enough to lift themselves
and their families above the poverty line of $1 a day (International
Labor Organization, 2004). Taken together, trends like these have
come to be known as the feminization of poverty—a worldwide
phenomenon that also afflicts U.S. women.
In the United States, women of color are even more burdened
by gender inequality because gender inequality is usually com-
pounded by racial inequality. In all the indicators above, the racial
gap is wide. Like White women, women of color also perform
what sociologists call the “second shift,” the housework and child
care that need to be done after the regular work shift is over. But
minority women also tend to hold the lowest-paying, least-
rewarding jobs, often without health care benefits or sick days
(Sklar et al., 2001). Recent immigrants may face an additional
layer, as cultural expectations derived of paternalistic cultures fur-
ther compound the burdens of gender-based poverty and racism
(UNDP, 2006).
Moreover, the global economy means the economic condition
of both women and men in the United States is linked to that of peo-
ple in other parts of the world. Driven by U.S.–based multinational
corporations, all workers have become part of an international divi-
sion of labor. (See Chapter 13) Corporations scanning the globe for
the least expensive labor available frequently discover the cheapest
workers are women or children. As a result, the global division of
labor is taking on a gender dimension. Women workers, usually
from the poorest countries in the world, provide lowest-wage labor
to manufacture products sold in wealthier industrial countries
(UNDP, 2006; Oxfam International, 2004).
Globalization has also changed the dynamics of global gender inequality. Just as
globalization tends to unite us in increasingly tight networks through the Internet and
global cultural production, it also separates us. Globalization has dramatically affected
geographic mobility as both women and men from poor countries must migrate to
find work in more advanced and industrial countries. This global geographic mobil-
ity is extremely sex segregated: Men and women move separately. Men often live in
migrant labor camps, or dozens pile into small flats, each saving to send money back
home and eventually bring the family to live with them in the new country. Women,
too, may live in all-female rooms while they clean houses or work in factories to make
enough to send back home (Hondagneau-Sotelo, 2001).
Some women and girls are kidnapped or otherwise lured into a new expanding
global sex trade, in which brothels are stocked with terrified young girls who
Sweden
Norway
Iceland
Denmark
Canada
Britain
Germany
Australia
France
Netherlands
United States
Spain
Austria
Russia
China
Switzerland
Argentina
South Africa
Japan
Italy
Indonesia
Brazil
Mexico
India
South Korea
Egypt0 1 2 3 4 5 6 77 = complete equality of the sexes, 2004Overall rank,
out of 581 2 3 4 7 8 910
13
14
17
27
28
31
33
34
35
36
38
45
46
51
52
53
54
58FIGURE 9.4Gender Equality
Source:From “Sexual Equality,” The Economist, May 28, 2005.
©The Economic Newspaper Limited, London. Reprinted with
permission.