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Finance, Production and Reproduction in the Context
of Globalization and Economic Crisis
Diane ELSONThis paper analyses the gendered global interaction of the spheres of ﬁnance, production and reproduction in the context of the financial crisis in
2008/9. It examines the gendered origins of the crisis in the West; and the gendered impact of the crisis in Asia. It argues that the crisis was generated by aneconomic system in which ﬁnance had come to dominate over production andreproduction; and in which the safety nets of last resort have been provided byunpaid work in the sphere of reproduction. It suggests that securing a moregender-equitable recovery from the crisis in Asia requires more than changing
the gender-division of labour and gender norms in production. It requires amore fundamental reorganization of the relations between the three spheres, sothat finance and production serve the needs of reproduction, the sphere inwhich the care essential to human well-being is provided.

Keywords：Finance, production, reproduction, gender, crisis

Introduction
The extent of globalization has been amply demonstrated by the way in which, in the last four
years, all countries have been impacted in some way by the ﬁnancial crisis that began in autumn 2008
on Wall Street, USA, and quickly enveloped banks in Iceland, Ireland, the UK and other European
countries. This ﬁnancial crisis in the heartlands of global capitalism led in 2009 to recession in the
USA and Europe, and to falling output and incomes and rising unemployment around the world; andin 2010/11 to rapidly rising prices for food and fuel, as large western ﬁnancial companies moved their
speculative operations from ﬁnancial to commodities markets. The form and severity of crisis has
been diﬀerent in diﬀerent parts of the world but no country has entirely escaped, demonstrating how
quickly adverse economic events are transmitted from one country to another in the context of globalization. In this paper I argue that to understand these crises from a gender equality perspective itis helpful to situate them in the context of the gendered global interaction of the spheres of ﬁnance,
production and reproduction. I apply this framework to examine the gendered origins of the crisis in
the West; and the gendered impact of the crisis in Asia. I argue that the crisis was generated by an

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Finance, Production and Reproduction in the Context of Globalization and Economic Crisis

economic system in which ﬁnance had come to dominate over production and reproduction; and inwhich the safety nets of last resort are provided by unpaid work in the sphere of reproduction. I suggest that securing a more gender-equitable recovery from the crisis in Asia requires more thanchanging the gender-division of labour and gender norms in production. It requires a more fundamental reorganization of the relations between the three spheres, so that ﬁnance and production serve theneeds of reproduction, the sphere in which the care essential to human well-being is provided.

Three Spheres of Economic Activity
The sphere of ﬁnance includes proﬁt-oriented retail and investment banks, insurance companies,
hedge funds, etc. and their regulators, including Central Banks and Ministries of Finance. As well as
these “formal” institutions, there is also an “informal” sector of money lending by pawnshops, kerbside dealers, and landlords and merchants. As well as all these proﬁt-oriented institutions, there aresocially useful ﬁnancial institutions, such as mutual or co-operative savings and loans funds, subsidized
micro-ﬁnance and state banks.
In the sphere of production, goods and services are produced for sale, through activities such as
farming, mining, construction, manufacturing, wholesaling, retailing, and supply of leisure services, etc.
This sphere includes both formal and informal paid work; and people work as employees, in self-employment, and as contributing family labour in small farms and businesses.
The sphere of reproduction is a non-market sphere of social provisioning, supplying services
concerned with the daily and inter-generational reproduction of people as human beings, especially through their care, socialization, and education. It includes unpaid work in families and communities, organized unpaid volunteer work, and paid (but non-proﬁt) work in public services like healthand education. It is in this sphere that the care essential for human well-being is created.
All three spheres are linked internationally through international ﬁnancial markets, international
direct investment, international development assistance, international trade, international migration,international information flows and international networks. The spheres are coordinated throughthese links. But the coordination is far from perfect, and there are frequently ruptures and crises. In
the early 1980s, in the early stages of international liberalization of trade and ﬁnance, there was a Latin American debt crisis; in the late 1990s, when globalization had deepened further, there was an
Asian ﬁnancial crisis, and in 2008, there was a ﬁnancial crisis which began in Wall Street and led to a
global fall in output and employment, and a profound fall in well-being for millions of people.
All three spheres of economic activity are gendered, both in the ways they are peopled and in
the norms that structure their operation. There are gendered divisions of labour and decision making,so that men and women are not randomly distributed throughout these spheres. While men andwomen work in all three sectors, womenʼs work time is disproportionately concentrated in the sphereof reproduction across all countries. In production, women and men tend to be concentrated in diﬀerent occupations in diﬀerent industries, but the occupations and activities seen as “womenʼs work” and4

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“menʼs work” vary considerably, depending on the context. For instance, in most countries, employment in construction is seen as “menʼs work” and the jobs in this sector do go mostly to men; but notin India, where it is normal for women to work in construction and the industry is a major employer
of women. Norms that the primary earners in a household should be men and the primary carers
should be women tend to be strong in most countries, even if in practice womenʼs earnings are vitalto keeping families out of poverty. The task of feeding family members tends to be a female responsibility in most countries, and women try to ensure that they can do this, using whatever means possible.
Thus the institutions of an economy are bearers of gender. This is often seen as the “natural”
outcome of innate differences between women and men, and the different choices they therefore
make. But feminists challenge this, pointing to the ways in which choices are shaped; and that diﬀerences are created by socialization. However, gender norms are not set in stone. In a crisis, existing
gender norms may be reinforced; or they may decompose, with individual men taking on roles normally associated with women, and vice versa; or they may be transformed through deliberate collective action, by civil society groups, or by governments, to overcome gender stereotypes.

The Origins of the 2008 Financial Crisis
The gendered characteristics of the ﬁnancial sphere have been referred to by some commentators as a factor in causing the 2008 ﬁnancial crisis in the USA, both in terms of the domination of men
in decision making and the prevalence of macho norms of behavior. For example, Nicolas Kristof, aprominent journalist on thereported:“At the recent World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, some of the most interesting discussions revolved around whether we would be in the same mess today if Lehman Brothers had
been Lehman Sisters. The consensus (and this is among the dead white men who parade annuallyat Davos) is that the optimal bank would have been Lehman Brothers and Sisters. Wall Street isone of the most male-dominated bastions in the business world…. Aside from issues of fairness,thereʼs evidence that the result is second-rate decision-making.” Nicholas Kristof,
February 8, 2009.
There is some merit in this idea, but getting more women into decision-making positions in largebanks would not by itself prevent recurrence of this kind of crisis, not even if they were to change
the culture of banks. It would also be necessary to change the way that banks are regulated, and tochange underlying structures of business and society, including the way that ﬁnance relates to production and reproduction (Young, Bakker and Elson [eds] 2011).
Underlying the ﬁnancial crisis in the west are global shifts in investment and production, especially to Asia, leading to intensiﬁed competition and downward pressure on wages in the west. In the
USA , for instance,productivity growth over the last 20 or so years has not been matched by growthin wages. These factors have led in the USA, UK, Ireland, and other western countries to rising fe-

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male labour market participation, propelled by rising demand for low-cost labour to meet global competition; and rising supply of female labour as average households needed more than one income to be
above the poverty line, and to meet the costs of housing. But most women did not get secure “breadwinner” jobs, with high wages and social beneﬁts. Indeed , fewer men got “breadwinner” jobs. Gender
gaps in labour markets fell̶but so did economic and social rights for both women and men. The
share of national income going to workers fell. Inequality between households rose sharply (Seguino,2010).
Consumption growth was sustained by credit, especially in the USA, UK and Ireland, masking
the downward trend in median real wages. The use of credit cards increased rapidly. The sphere of
reproduction became dependent on the sphere of ﬁnance. Women got better access to credit̶but often on adverse terms. This was especially the case in the USA, where there was “predatory inclusion” of women in the so-called sub-prime market for loans, especially mortgage loans related to housing (Balakrishnan, Elson and Heintz, 2011). Poor quality mortgage loans were aggressively marketed
to groups that had previously been excluded from large-scale borrowing. Such loans seemed attractive to ﬁrst-time borrowers. There was a fall in the availability of public housing at aﬀordable rents.
Buying a home seemed an attractive idea at a time when the value of homes was rising: it seemed
you got not only a place to live but also an asset of appreciating value. In the USA ﬁnancial companies targeted new borrowers with interest rates that initially were very low, though after a couple ofyears the interest rate would rise considerably. Previously excluded groups, such as women household heads and African Americans were over represented in those who took such sub-prime loans.
Access was easier but terms were more onerous over the life of the mortgage. In 2005, a sub-prime
loan on a median price American home implied $85,000 more in total payments than a regular loan.
Women borrowers in the USA were more likely to receive sub-prime loans than men at every income
level. In 2007, rises in prices of fuel and food in the USA made it harder to pay the mortgage, and thenumber of people defaulting on their loans began to rise.
This rippled out from the housing sector because of the way that changes in ﬁnancial regulation
had facilitated ﬁnancial innovation. Regular and sub-prime mortgages were packaged together to produce new assets, which were given the highest ratings, triple AAA ratings, by the three major ratings agencies in the USA. These derivative assets were extensively traded and ended up in the handsof banks headquartered in a wide range of other countries (though not in countries like China and India which had more stringent banking regulations). By 2006, the stability of the international ﬁnancial
system depended on the ability of low and middle income holders of sub-prime mortgages in the USA
to service their debt. Defaults on these mortgages led to a collapse in the value of assets derived fromthem. Securitization and funding via global capital markets created channels of contagion in which acrisis originating in one product in one location spread to other products and throughout the world.
Putting more women in charge of banks might have led to more careful appaisal of the risks of ﬁnancial innovation, but it would not have addressed the underlying problem of what some have called
the “ﬁnancialization of everyday life,” and the proﬁt-seeking globalization that underpinned this. In

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Iceland, where the ﬁnancial crisis led to major political changes, and the election of a women prime
minister, there is, perhaps, more awareness of the need to address underlying economic and social
structures, as this report in a British newspaper suggests:“Icelandʼs spectacular meltdown was caused by a banking and business culture that was buccaneering, reckless̶and overwhelmingly male. Business editor Ruth Sunderland travelled to Reykjavik
to meet the women now running the country, and heard how they are determined to reinvent business and society by injecting values of openness, fairness and social responsibility.”

Febru-

ary 22, 2009.
To reinvent business and society in this way requires changing the way in which ﬁnance relates
to production and reproduction, putting ﬁnance at the service of production and reproduction rather
than allowing ﬁnance to dominate the other spheres of the economy. In Western Europe, the welfare
state provides a system of universal social protection that helps to cushion the impact of the crisis on
the sphere of reproduction. However, the severity of the crisis has reduced the tax revenue that underpins the welfare state, and it is being severely cut back in Iceland, Ireland, the UK, Portugal,
Spain, Italy, and Greece.

Asia and the 2008 Financial Crisis: A Framework for Analysis
The implications of the 2008 ﬁnancial crisis for Asia can be examined in terms of the matrix presented below. The rows represent the three gendered economic spheres, ﬁnance, production and reproduction. The columns represent economic processes: the first column represents the processes
through which the ﬁnancial crisis was transmitted to Asia. The second column represents the immediate impact of the crisis, following its transmission; and the third column represents responses ofgovernments, ﬁrms, and people. The matrix identiﬁes some of the key aspects and is not exhaustive.

Economic
Sphere/Economic
Process

Transmission
Channels

Impacts

Responses

Finance

Production: Formal
and Informal

Reproduction

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Finance, Production and Reproduction in the Context of Globalization and Economic Crisis

Implications in the Sphere of Finance in Asia
In the sphere of ﬁnance, transmission took place through international ﬁnancial markets, leading
to falls in the value of shares in stock markets, and some falls in incoming direct investment. But
there was no banking crisis in Asia, even though the ﬁnancial sector is predominantly governed bymen. As a result of the experience of the 1997 Asian ﬁnancial crisis, many governments already had
controls on banking operations, including on capital inﬂows and outﬂows, and had built up large reserves of foreign currency. Some governments did seek loans from the IMF to cover the rising balance of trade and budget deﬁcits, and there is a risk that the conditions attached to such loans may
have adverse implications for gender equality. Commercial banks were not heavily involved in lending
to women. Rather it was micro credit institutions that lent to women, but these were not linked to international ﬁnancial markets, and were not much aﬀected by the ﬁnancial crisis. However, poor women, trying to cope with economic hardship arising from the impact on production, may have increased
their demand for loans from informal moneylenders in order to buy food, to pay health service fees,and so on. In doing so, they may have taken on debt that will be an onerous burden in the future.
This might also be considered a form of predatory inclusion of women in the ﬁnancial sector.

Implications in the Sphere of Production in Asia
The ﬁnancial crisis in the USA and Europe was transmitted to the sphere of production in Asia
via falling demand for exports (resulting from the crisis-induced recession in the USA and Europe).
This led to falling output, employment and earnings in the export sectors. The gendered implications
depend on whether the export sector depends heavily on female employment, as it would if garment
production is signiﬁcant, or whether mostly men are employed, as would be the case in mining. In theformer case, the ﬁrst wave of loss of jobs and earnings will aﬀect women more than men; in the latter
case, the ﬁrst wave of loss of jobs and earnings will aﬀect men more than women.
In many Asian countries, the export sector is female intensive, and womenʼs jobs were the ﬁrst
to go. According to an Oxfam report, in 2008/9, Sri Lanka and Cambodia each lost 30,000 garment industry jobs; and more than half of the 40,000 jobs lost in the Philippines were from export processing
zones, which employ mainly women. There were claims of employers evading payment of severancecompensation, and women in some countries mobilized to demand their compensation (Emmett, 2009).
Women who kept their jobs were hit by cuts in wages and overtime rates, increasingly precarious
contracts, loss of beneﬁts such as subsidized meals and transport. Some of the improvements thatpressure for fair trade had been bringing to women workers were put in jeopardy. The Oxfam report(Emmett, 2009) notes that the ethical trade manager of one major global fashion brand complainedthat the determination to reduce margins was pulling her company to source from enterprises that
could supply at the lowest cost, despite the fact that they oﬀered precarious employment and evenused bonded and traﬃcked labour. Evidence was cited of UK companies abandoning suppliers with8

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relatively good wages and conditions in Sri Lanka and China, in their quest for ever lower prices.
Oﬃcial ﬁgures for unemployment, as reported by the ILO, show a less dramatic picture (ILO andAsian Development Bank, 2011: 20). There were increases in unemployment between 2007 and 2009
in East Asia for both men and women, but rates of unemployment in both years were higher for men
than for women: male unemployment increased from 4.3% to 4.9% and female unemployment increased form 3.2% to 3.7% . In ASEAN countries, male unemployment remained at 5.2% but female
unemployment rose slightly, from 5.8% to 5.9%. In South Asia, reported unemployment rates actually
decreased, from 4.2 % to 3.9 % for men and from 5.3 % to 5.1 % for women. In Japan, unemployment
rose, for men from 3.9% to 5.3% and for women from 3.7% to 4.8%.
However, unemployment statistics may not in themselves be a good guide to the relative impact
on womenʼs and menʼs employment. Women who lose their jobs may disappear altogether from thelabour force statistics which often just include formal sector jobs , if̶as in some countries̶they
have no rights to unemployment insurance (and thus do not register as unemployed), or because they
do not go looking for another (formal sector) job, because they do not expect any to be available (andthus do not count as unemployed in labour-force surveys). This does not necessarily mean, of course,that women become idle. Instead, they may take up informal employment̶either home-based orstreet-based̶of a kind that does not get captured by the labour-force statistics. In Korea after the
1997 ﬁnancial crisis, oﬃcial unemployment rates were higher for men than for women, even though
the rate of job loss was higher for women (Lee, 2010). Deteriorating terms and conditions of work for
women in Thailand, Indonesia, and Cambodia in 2008 and 2009 were reported by the ILO and AsianDevelopment Bank (2011: 21, 18).
Earnings and conditions of work were not only hit in the export sectors. There was a knock-on
impact in informal employment supplying the domestic market. Some evidence is provided by thestudy on the impact of crisis on informal workers in 10 cities, including some in Asia: Durban (South
Africa), Blantyre (Malawi), Nakuru (Kenya), Lima (Peru), Bangkok (Thailand), Malang (Indonesia), Kasur (Pakistan), Pune (India), Bogata (Columbia), Santiago (Chile) (Horn, 2009). Interviews were conducted with 164 informal workers (79% of them women) in three occupations: waste pickers, home-based
paid workers, street vendors. The study found that a quarter of respondents who were street vendors and home-based paid workers had increased their hours of work to try to make ends meet. But
sales were falling, competition from new entrants into informal work was increasing, and they wereunable to sustain their incomes (Horn, 2009).
Similar ﬁndings from other studies conducted in Indonesia, the Philippines, Cambodia, Vietnam
and India are reported by the ILO and Asian Development Bank (2011: 26, 27), which conclude thatwomen informal workers were harder hit than men. The reasons include the over-representation of
women in the most vulnerable sectors; womenʼs more limited alternatives owing to cultural constraints and household responsibilities; menʼs better access to networks and resources, including credit; and the neglect of women in stimulus packages.
Many governments did respond to the impact of the economic crisis on their economies with a9Diane ELSON

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ﬁscal stimulus (i.e. an expansion of public expenditure and/or cut in taxes) which supported production via subsidies, tax breaks, and government contracts. The gender implications of ﬁscal stimulus
vary according to the industries which are favoured by the stimulus. If the favoured industries arecars and large-scale construction (for example, the construction of major roads), then in most countries, this will do more to preserve menʼs jobs than womenʼs jobs. This may be appropriate, if men
have disproportionately lost their jobs. But if the opposite is true, or if the rate of job losses for women and men has been more or less similar, then a more balanced ﬁscal stimulus is called for. This
could be one that targets small ﬁrms as well as large ones (in so far as small ﬁrms employ relatively
more women than large ﬁrms), or one that supports the expansion of social infrastructure (such as
health and education , in so far as these services tend to employ relatively large numbers of women).
In 2010, output recovered strongly in most of Asia (though not Japan), with GDP in Developing
Asia growing at 9.3% (ILO and Asian Development Bank, 2011: 32). However, there is every likelihoodthat there will be a permanent impact on the labour market, with a long-lasting undermining of rights
to work and rights at work for women. According to the ILO and Asian Development Bank,recovery
has not been gender-equitable.

Implications in the Sphere of Reproduction in Asia
The sphere of reproduction may be impacted by the ﬁnancial crisis, both via the impact on Asian
production, and via the impact on migrants to other regions, who may reduce remittances or return
home, because of loss of earnings and employment. The impact via international migration turned out
not to be as serious as had been anticipated (ILO and Asian Development Bank, 2011: 23-24). Many
male migrants who had migrated to the construction sector did indeed lose jobs, but the large numbers of women who had migrated to care-related jobs, including nursing and paid domestic work, didnot. No country that exported substantial numbers of female workers reported a large-scale return of
migrants; and remittances continued to grow.
The impacts on formal and informal production in Asia, discussed above, did lead to falls in theincome that households have at their disposal to support their reproduction, so that poor women had
to cut spending, even on necessities. In addition, poor women found that there was often a squeeze on
their time, as more household members sought work in the informal economy, and those alreadyworking in the informal economy worked longer hours to try to maintain earnings. In addition, household members and in particular poor women, undertook extra unpaid work to try to make ends meet.
For instance, here is what women who had lost jobs in garment factories in Cambodia said about
their experiences (Emmett, 2009):“I lost my job, Iʼve been evicted from my house and my belongings were conﬁscated by the landlord. Now I rent a small room with my husband and two children. Weʼve had to cut our spending on
food. Weʼve had to reduce our expenses on food medicine, and other necessities. I often feel dizzy andhave stomach pains through feeling hungry.

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Women informal workers in Asia have reported similar experiences, and also told of additional they
were doing (Horn, 2009). For instance:“I try to economize by spending money only on necessary things. I take leftover cloth and makeclothes for myself now.” Home-based woman garment worker, Bangkok, There are no regular up-todate statistics available on the extent of unpaid work, but a number of case studies suggest that these
are not isolated experiences. The ILO and Asian Development Bank report (2011: 29) suggests thatgendered norms of responsibility for childrensʼ well being meant that women were pushed into doing
more work, both paid and unpaid.
Through these measures, which are better described as desperation measures than coping strategies, poor women tried to secure the continued reproduction of their households. But they did not always succeed. A study of low income communities in eleven countries (Armenia, Cambodia, Ecuador,
Ghana, Indonesia, Nicaragua, the Philippines, Thailand, Vanuatu, Vietnam and Zambia) found thatwhile many groups displayed resilience in the 2008/9 crisis, there were limits to this:“Assets once depleted take years to recoup; working extra hours in second or third jobs leaves alegacy of exhaustion; loans taken on to ﬁnance consumption accumulate into crushing debt burdens;
and meals forgone can aﬀect children for their entire lifetimes.” (Green et al., 2010: 5).
The problem continues that ﬁnance and production are not organized to be at the service of reproduction. Rather, the sphere of reproduction has to adjust to the pressures from ﬁnance and production; and the best eﬀorts of poor women may not be able to safeguard their children, themselves andother family members.

Changing the Relation between Finance, Production and Reproduction
Discussions are underway in Asia on how to “rebalance” Asian economies. It is proposed that demand be redirected from public spending to private investment and consumption; that domestic-led
growth should replace export-led growth; that green jobs and enterprises should be created and that
there should be greater regional integration via trade. This implies a restructuring of Asiaʼs global
links. The question of whether this will also lead to greater gender equity is discussed in a report by
the ILO and Asian Development Bank (2011).
The report points out that if rebalancing involves cutting public expenditure on social services,
this will impact on women more than on men because of womenʼs responsibilities in the sphere of reproduction. The potential adverse impact will be made worse by the aging of the population that istaking place quite rapidly in many Asian countries. Growth in demand for care services can lead tomore jobs for women, because this work is disproportionately done by women. But the expansion ofbusinesses providing these services for a proﬁt will exclude low income old people (who are disproportionately women) as they will not be able to aﬀord such services.
The ILO/ADB report suggests that a move to domestic-led growth will require the expansion of
the middle class, and will generate more demand for paid domestic workers, who will likely be mi-

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grants from the poorer areas of Asia. However, we need to be aware that such employment tends tohave lower earnings and enjoys less rights than employment in labour-intensive export-oriented manufacturing. Expansion of intra-regional trade will bring beneﬁts to some, but, as the ILO/ADB reportnotes, increased competition may drive down the earnings and worsen the working conditions of
women in informal employment and agriculture.
The report provides many useful suggestions on how to mainstream gender equality into the rebalancing of Asian economies including more voice for women in decision making. However, I would
put more emphasis on a deeper restructuring in which finance and production are re-oriented toserve the needs of reproduction. This means re-orienting monetary policy and the regulation of thebanking system towards employment creation and support for public services and social protection. It
is insuﬃcient to focus on reduction of ﬁnancial risks through accumulation of large foreign exchange
reserves when there are so many unmet needs in the sphere of reproduction. Finance needs to be
mobilized not just to provide better access to women entrepreneurs, but also to fund a redistributive
system of universal social protection which includes women as beneﬁciaries in their own right. This
would be an important step to securing the creation of an economy in which ﬁnance and production
support the sphere of reproduction in which the care that is essential to human well-being is provided.
（Diane ELSON, Department of Sociology, University of Essex）

References
Balakrishnan, R., Elson, D. and Heintz, J., 2011. “Financial Regulation, Capabilities and Human Rights in the US Financial Crisis:
the Case of Housing”;
Emmett, B., 2009. “Women Workers Pay the Price for the Global Economic Crisis”; Oxfam International Discussion Paper,
March.
Green, D., King, R. and Miller-Dawkins, M., 2010.
Oxfam Research Report,Oxford.
Horn, Zoe Elena, 2009.

Synthesis Report.

Inclusive Cities Study led by WIEGO (Women in Informal Employment Globalizing and Organizing).
ILO and Asian Development Bank, 2011.

Geneva.

Lee, J-Y, 2010. “Restructuring womenʼs employment in South Korea, 1997-2005: the role of the state and NGOs”; Draft PhD
thesis, Department of Sociology, University of Essex.
Seguino, S., 2010. “The Global Economic Crisis: Its Gender and Ethnic Implications and Policy Response”;
18 (2).
Young, B., Bakker, I. and Elson, D (eds.), 2011.

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