These policies have a devastating and disproportionate impact on poor women and children. These services can be cut because it is assumed that women will walk farther and wait longer for health service. Policy makers assume that women will be there to take on the extra burden of sick parents and children. Women's bodies become just another commodity to be bought and sold. Intimidation and physical and mental violence and abuse are common place.
Women have few if any legal protections or resources.
If women's labor is a critical factor in many of the mechanisms that make globalization work then the impact of those mechanisms on women's rights have to be taken seriously. The economic models that underpin globalization need to be transformed not just to ease women's pain but to give them full respect for the role they can play in a global system of well-being and justice. A global economic system in which women are central must be one in which women enjoy their full human rights.