Gender

Types of ZSR

How ZSR can be implemented:

Robust measures should be implemented to prevent deterioration of women’s rights and autonomy resulting from SEZ establishment.
Opportunities for local and migrant women should be created in the process of SEZ establishment, both through ensuring factory jobs are offered to women and through the development of service sector and other roles for women.
Targeted training and skills development programmes should be offered to both local and migrant women, including for supervisory, management and entrepreneurship skills.
Career and promotion opportunities in factories and SEZs more generally should be equal for women and men.

Overview of the problem:

The establishment of SEZs can promote conditions that may both increase and decrease the autonomy and rights of women, depending on circumstances. On the one hand, changes in livelihoods can deprive women of the roles they assumed prior to zone establishment, with no adequate replacement available. On the other hand, SEZ establishment and associated industrialisation can increase opportunities for women, for example by engaging in factory work in the SEZ. The resulting income can increase women’s financial autonomy and lead to emancipatory gains.

Whether women or men are hired for factory work often depends on the nature of the work, which may depend on the industries present in any zone. Men are more commonly hired for hard physical labour, whereas women might be hired for assembly line work that is more detailed and/or tedious and repetitive, or otherwise seen as more “feminine”. Women also tend to be regarded as more docile and less likely to cause trouble at the workplace. These distinctions in attributes of women and men, and the associated employment decisions, may follow rigid gender stereotypes.

When they earn their own income from factory work, both local and migrant women tend to be allowed a greater say in household and personal spending, and in life choices such as marriage and where to settle. The employment of young women may also allow them to delay marriage, which can lead to emancipatory effects. However, migrant women often live under repressive regimes of work and accommodation that, depending on the degree of restrictiveness, may limit their autonomy and the emancipatory gains from working in factories – and minimise the gains of living away from patriarchal family structures (see section on Employment and Labour).

Even where women are preferentially hired in SEZ factories, they may be paid less than men, and career progression to jobs with greater responsibility and higher pay is often less likely than for men, following traditional gender roles. Women workers are also subjected to distinctive forms of abuse, including sexual harassment, maternity discrimination, and gender-based violence.

Examples:

Lekki Free Zone, Nigeria:

In Lekki, formerly a farming and agrarian community near Lagos, Nigeria, men typically fished or farmed while women sold produce in local markets (Adeshokan, 2019). The collapse of both farming and fishing, due to dispossession and environmental impacts of the new Lekki Free Zone and related deep-sea port, has resulted in a decline in market vending, and fewer women than men have been able to shift into alternative occupations, leading to the loss of women’s autonomy. This may have indirectly contributed to cases of domestic violence (Goodburn, Knoerich, Mishra & Calabrese, 2024).

Liaoshen Industrial Park, Uganda:

In Uganda’s Liaoshen Industrial Park, supplying freshly cooked food to the SEZ’s factories provided a welcome source of income to women. One migrant woman from northern Uganda set up her own catering business providing and delivering meals to factory employees. The factories she supplied helped her set up her own kitchen and promoted her catering to other factories in the SEZ, allowing her to expand and begin employing other migrant women and men, as well as to provide her workers with accommodation on her premises (Goodburn, Knoerich, Mishra & Calabrese, 2024). This catering work benefited women by paying higher wages and allowing for more flexible working hours than most assembly line positions in the SEZ.

Sri City, India:

In Andhra Pradesh’s Sri City, electronics firms proactively recruit secondary-educated unmarried women from poor villages across the state. The women who migrate for these jobs, are mostly aged 18-25, and are often motivated by their families’ economic distress, but also work in order to fund their further education, save for a wedding or delay an arranged marriage while contributing to household income for the first time. Most work for two or three years in the factories and, through their earnings, are able to gain a degree of autonomy and voice within their natal households. Some local young women also take part in this kind of factory labour. Other firms in the SEZ, for example in toy manufacturing, provide longer-term work to older, married local women, operating sewing machines. Most have never worked outside the home before. These women’s new jobs allow them to contribute to household income and have a greater say in household spending, including investing in the education of their daughters (The Hans India, 2023).

However, despite advantages of employment for women, repressive living conditions for migrant women limit the benefits they can gain from labour migration. Confined in single-sex hostels that required a permit to leave, monitored by wardens and allowed only one weekly chaperoned excursion to buy essential items, young migrant women are unable to integrate into the local area, meet locals or other migrants apart from hostel-mates, or experience opportunities for broader social or physical mobility. Local young women, able to live at home with their families, may therefore benefit much more from the same type of factory work.

Athi River SEZ, Kenya:

In Athi River SEZ near Nairobi, one garment factory established a partnership with a major Kenyan bank to make individual bank accounts available to its workers with low minimum deposits and reduced banking charges. It began paying workers directly into these accounts. The bank accounts were particularly useful for women workers, since they allowed married women to keep some finances separate from their husbands, which facilitated expenditure on children’s school fees and food as well as savings. For unmarried women, having their own bank accounts encouraged women to build savings before marriage, enhancing their autonomy and reducing dependence on future husbands (Simavi, 2011).

Adani Ports and SEZ, Mundra, India:

In Gujarat state’s Adani Ports and SEZ in Mundra, large scale acquisition of common lands for SEZ construction has led to major changes in ways of life for local pastoralist populations (Mehta & Srivastava, 2019). These changes have had distinctive impacts on local women. Formerly, women wore heavy woollen shawls and skirts; spent their days tending and milking animals, selling milk and doing childcare and housework; and prepared meals based on millet and seasonal crops for their families. With decreased availability of land and livestock having been sold off, former pastoralists have taken up jobs in the SEZ, and their dress, diet and daily routines have changed. Wearing thin cotton uniforms (seen as shameful by many), women perform mostly factory cleaning jobs, often passing home-based duties to daughters, who may have to miss school. They buy wheat flour to make food, leading to less nutritious diets. Whereas household incomes from milk sales were managed mostly by women, factory wages are paid to individuals, causing a decline in shared family finances and increasing these women’s vulnerability. However, views on the shift away from pastoralism may vary between older and younger women, with the latter expressing typically more positive views about industrial work and gradual urbanisation (Duncan & Agarwal, 2017).

To cushion some of the negative effects of the SEZ for women, a local NGO trained both migrant and local women to become teachers and gain higher educational certificates, including Bachelor’s degrees in Education (Majmudar, 2017). These women, some of whose husbands were migrant workers in the Port and SEZ area, not only gained new livelihoods opportunities but also experienced considerable gains to their confidence, autonomy and intrahousehold bargaining power after being trained as teachers.

The case of China:

Many of the factories in China’s SEZs were staffed by migrant women, so-called “working little sisters” typically aged 18-23, who came from rural areas to work in low-skilled, labour-intensive, export-oriented industries including garments, toys and electronics. These women, who worked for typically three to four years before returning to rural China, were preferred as factory workers because they were seen as more docile than men and unlikely to reject low wages (Pun, 2005). Employing women was therefore a strategy to reduce unrest which could put off foreign investors. Women were also considered more suitable for the type of work, requiring supposedly female characteristics such as “nimble fingers” and willingness to accept tedious, repetitive work (Lee, 1998).

Migrant workers in China were usually accommodated in dormitories located on or next to the factory premises, an arrangement that provided a 24-hour labour supply and the option to subject workers to excessive overtime (Pun, 2005; Smith & Pun, 2006). However, despite these exploitative living and working conditions, at least from the 1990s migrant women typically had some freedom to experience the city in their leisure time. They were thus able to experience some gains in autonomy, including greater involvement in spouse selection and other family decisions. A growing number of migrants remained and settled in urban areas, marrying other migrants or even urban husbands (Fan, 2007; Fang, 2012; Goodburn, 2015). There were therefore significant emancipatory gains from temporary labour migration and factory work for many migrant women in China.

China-associated zones overseas

Some China-associated SEZs overseas, especially those with significant electronics and/or textiles manufacturing, have seen reproduction of the gendered recruitment patterns of China’s own domestic SEZ experience. This includes not only manufacturing by Chinese firms themselves, but also by non-Chinese firms with previous experience in China or which contribute to well-established Chinese supply chains (Goodburn & Knoerich, 2022). Since much of this manufacturing in Africa is in light, labour-intensive work, unmarried migrant women tend to be the preferred labour force (Xu, 2022).