Gender and trade

This document presents a brief on the importance of supporting women to gain from trade.

The Fairtrade Gender Strategy seeks to attain gender equality and women’s empowerment in producer organizations through building women’s and girls’ power and agency. The strategy aims to deliver a transformative approach to gender mainstreaming in the Fairtrade system.

This publication explores the interconnectedness of gender, trade and public procurement in four steps : -an exploration of the linkages between public procurement and trade, with specific reference to domestic, regional and global dimensions of trade; -a discussion around the extent to which public procurement policies are gender equitable; -a consideration of the importance of integrating gender considerations into public procurement and trade policy. -Lastly, the publication presents four case studies on public procurement policy and practices taken from Commonwealth countries, with a particular emphasis on emerging gender-specific dimensions.

This paper provides that trade and trade policy is not gender-neutral: government leaders have recognized there are differential impacts on women and men, and have made commitments to take steps to ensure that trade policies do not have an adverse impact on women’s economic activities. National governments need to develop capacity to understand how gender can constrain a country’s capacity to take advantage of the opportunities presented by trade liberalization. They also need to develop capacity to identify those groups that will be most negatively affected by a proposed trade policy, so that adequate steps can be taken to protect those groups, and, where feasible, measures designed to facilitate their entry into new sectors opened up as a result of trade liberalization. This may involve decisions in on the pace, scope and sequencing of trade policies.

This document provides a gendered analysis of the horticulture, tourism, and call center global value chains (GVCs), based on a survey of the literature and case studies carried out in Honduras, Kenya, and the Arab Republic of Egypt. The studies focus on export sectors that have had high female employment and have been relatively underexplored from the angle of trade and gender research. The studies show that GVCs and their upgrading dynamics have important gender dimensions, and that integration and upgrading are influenced by, and have an impact on, gender relations. While the conditions and dynamics in the sectors in concern are very different, certain broad conclusions are drawn from the results of the studies. The first is that patterns of job segregation are observed in all case studies, with women being assigned to specific jobs, though the reasons for such segregation differ from sector to sector. The second conclusion is that women face gender-intensified constraints, though their extent and articulation may be quite different, depending on the value chain. The third is that constraints related to women's primary responsibility for reproductive work have been identified as important in all three studies. This social division of labor is deeply embedded in developed and developing countries, but poor infrastructure, particularly in rural areas, heightens this challenge for women in developing countries. This report also suggests appropriate interventions to improve the constraints faced by women.