Unpacking the MDGs’ Indicator 3.2: women’s employment and the place of care in global justice

This study examines the Indicator 3.2: women’s share in wage employment in the non-agricultural sector –an indicator set for gender equality and women’s empowerment in the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), using a feminist lens of gender justice. By examining underlying normative assumptions of “gender equality” and “development” constructed in the Indicator 3.2, the study critically examines the liberalist underpinning of capabilities approach and modernisation theory. These normative frameworks are all anchored in the division of the public/private as a construct and thus in the construct of ‘gender’ as difference, conceiving men as autonomous being independent of care, and setting a masculine model of world view accordingly. These constructs are then reproduced in development policy, which in turn renders issues of care invisible. The research suggests that gender equality based on liberalism and capabilities approach is a male form of citizenship, and therefore fall short of the requirements of a gender justice framework which considers all human beings as economic, political and caregiver/receiver being. This study argues that –under the current globalised neo-liberal economic framework in which international and local economy policies are increasingly integrated– the use of Indicator 3.2 as a single variable for measurement can produce actions that are more economic growth-driven than rights-driven. The main reason is the fact that women are now working in larger numbers as wage laborers in a “flexible, marketized, more individualized framework” that promotes commodification of women’s labor without scope for practicing “citizenship.” Thus it is unlikely that that the use of indicator will provide a fuller picture on the links between women’s economic empowerment, employment and well-being. Another principal omission by the Indicators is unpaid care work undertaken mostly by women and are thus confined within the purview of the private, despite its critical role in sustaining paid economy in society. In this context, the study calls for greater commitments from high income countries to the creation of decent work in the MDGs as global justice. Using data from Ecuadorthe study shows yet another element omitted by Indicator 3.2: heterogeneity among women in terms of access to wage employment within one country. The Ecuadorian labour market is not only stratified along gender but also ethnic lines, and operates under the norms of division of the public/private in a way that women belonging to different ethnic groups are allocated into different levels of paid domestic work. Thus, despite the counter-neo-liberal position that the current government of Ecuador holds, poor women in different ethnic groups in this country continue to be affected by the hierarchal power relations shaped by intersection of gender, ethnicity, and global and local economy. These hierarchical relations consistently find grounding in the juxtaposition of the public/private anchored in the gender difference. In conclusion, the study questions what it means for women and a nation to be “modern” and “self-reliant,” according to the standards of modernisation theory and liberalism. Androcentrism and blindness to intersectionality tends to buttress the legitimacy policy, which holds men’s specific interests as the norm and relegates the “femininity” to the private Relevance to Development Studies The MDGs are widely used as guidelines for donors’ country assistance strategies, national development planning, and monitoring and reporting mechanisms for development. Therefore they directly shape the way people think about “development.” Opening up the concepts and targets/indicators is vital for the articulations of the voices of those adversely affected by the current “development” interventions.