World-renowned development scholar Diane Elson told a University of Wisconsin crowd Wednesday the global financial crisis is taking a particularly severe toll on women in developing countries.
The lecture, which was organized by the Havens Center, was labeled “Gender Dimensions of the Global Financial Crisis: Middle and Low Income Countries.” The orator was Elson, a professor of sociology at the University of Essex in the United Kingdom who is regarded as one of the 50 key thinkers on development.
Elson highlighted her lecture by speaking on the vulnerability of women and children during the tough economic times in some of world’s middle- and low-income countries.
“As a result of this financial crisis and recession, women and children are one huge vulnerable group,” Elson said.
Elson said during financial crises in South Korea and other low-income countries, women’s labor rights are permanently lost and women’s jobs are usually the first to go.
Elson also added, in the long-run, women who are fortunate enough to retain their jobs have their rights undermined by their employers.
“Those women who keep the jobs are also being exploited by employers who compensate for the financial crisis by cutting wages and overtime rates, as well as creating precarious contracts,” Elson said.
But the men are also vulnerable, Elson added.
The short-run impact, for example, of the financial crisis in Zambia caused over 8,100 men to lose their copper mining jobs, though Elson said that women are “hit much harder” than men in manufacturing when it comes to layoffs.
According to Elson, all of these unfortunate instances entail irreversible adverse impacts.
As these women lose their jobs, they resort to saving money by not purchasing prepared meals and by cutting their children’s meal intake from two to one a day. In turn, this causes the children to drop out of school and enroll in child labor.
Then, these children become malnourished and gender norms cause girls to be worse affected than boys. As a result, these girls become malnourished women, which translate into complications in pregnancy and low birth weights, causing people to die prematurely.
Elson said in order for these desperate measures to become abandoned, the government needs to do a better job of managing their budget.
Some students who attended the lecture agreed that the lack of similarity in the affects of the crisis on men and women is an important issue.
“It’s amazing to see the disparity between men and women in their respective fields when it comes to employment and job loss in these countries,” UW senior Daveon Coleman said.
Others felt the effects of the crisis should be an agenda-setting issue around the world.
“It’s interesting how the effects of the crisis trickle down to all aspects of life,” said Minjon Tholen, a second-year graduate student at UW. “Seems sad, though, that this topic is almost unheard of within the media.”
