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The present chapter attempts to highlight the vulnerabilities of female migrants as compared to non-migrants in the unorganized urban labor market. Informal female migrants working in construction, as domestic workers, tailors/boutiques, and garment workers in the urban unorganized sector of Uttar Pradesh’s selected urban locations, are covered in this chapter. Though the fact prevails that workers in the unorganized labor markets are confronted with various livelihood crunches, still those who are migrants and swelling the urban labor markets are more prone to different vulnerabilities. There is scanty literature on the situation and condition of migrants particularly female migrant workers in India, whereas we know more about the condition of international migrants, mainly migrant workers in the Gulf and other regions. The study is based on interviews with 174 female informal workers who have migrated and 222 non-migrants from various regions of the state to the urban locations of selected cities. Our study also attempts to do an in-depth, qualitative exploration of these vulnerable women’s lives and perceptions and tries to capture layered vulnerabilities, risks, and rewards confronted due to both migration and work in the informal sector. Specifically, the findings reflect upon the fact that how strong societal norms may actually prevent women from acknowledging or articulating the true reasons for their migrations.

This chapter elucidates the wage differential between male and female informal workers in urban labour market by using employment and unemployment survey 61st (2004–2005) round, 68th (2011–2012), and Periodic Labour Force Survey 2019–2020 data of National Sample Survey Office (NSSO) unit level data. This study found that gender inequality not only increased during getting job but also persists after getting job during wage distribution. Based on the Oaxaca–Blinder (OB) decomposition, it is revealed that gender wage inequality is more in the labour market due to the labour market discrimination, that is, unexplained components. Hence, this study helps researcher, policy makers and government to fix the gender wage discrimination issues exist in the Indian labour market. This will enhance economic growth through the rise of the women labour force participation.

Gender is a defining feature of informal/precarious work in the twenty-first century, yet studies rarely adopt a gendered lens when examining collective efforts to challenge informality and precarity. This chapter foregrounds the gendered dimensions of informal/precarious workers’ struggles as a crucial starting point for re-theorizing the future of global labor movements. Drawing upon the findings of the volume’s six chapters spanning five countries (the United States, Canada, South Korea, Mexico, and India) and two gender-typed sectors (domestic work and construction), this chapter explores how gender is intertwined into informal/precarious workers’ movements, why gender is addressed, and to what end. Across countries and sectors, informal/precarious worker organizations are on the front lines of challenging the multiple forms of gendered inequalities that shape contemporary practices of accumulation and labor regulation. They expose the forgotten reality that class structures not only represent classification struggles around work, but also around social identities, such as gender, race, and migration status. However, these organizing efforts are not fighting to transform the gendered division of labor or embarking on revolutionary struggles to overturn private ownership and liberalized markets. Nonetheless, these struggles are making major transformations in terms of increasing women’s leadership and membership in labor movements and exposing how gender interacts with other ascriptive identities to shape work. They are also radicalizing hegemonic scripts of capitalist accumulation, development, and even gender to attain recognition for female-dominated occupations and reproductive needs for the first time ever. These outcomes are crucial as sources of emancipatory transformations at a time when state and public support for labor and social protection is facing a deep assault stemming from the pressures of transnational production and globalizing markets.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the characteristics of the ex-garment workers that have turned to self-employment either in the formal or informal sector in the wake of the termination of the multi-fibre arrangement, which led to job losses. This move has given rise to a new community of entrepreneurs in the Mauritian landscape. Hence, this paper tells a story of women empowerment to disempowerment and finally the struggle for them to get re-empowered. This study also shows that there has been a limit to which self-employment led to empowerment for these women as their incomes are low, and they remain in vulnerable positions.

The study analyses the transformation of a sample of ex-garment workers into new entrepreneurs. The analysis in this paper rests on survey data collected from 92 ex-garment female workers, who are presently self-employed in either the formal or informal sectors, in different parts of Mauritius.

The findings reveal that the self-employed women in the sample, who are also ex-garment female workers, are essentially necessity-driven entrepreneurs. Most of them have only basic primary education and seem to have no other choice than to engage either formally or informally in similar activities, given their prior knowledge and experience in the textile and clothing industries. The authors also find evidence of statistically significant differences across age, marital status and household size between those women in the informal sector compared to those engaged in the formal sector.

Resource constraints aside, this study could benefit from a larger sample cutting across many other sub-sectors. So far, the results of this study are only applicable to the specific sample studied. In terms of implications, the study finds that the relevant authorities should come up with targeted policies to help these women and address and alleviate the barriers that they face.

This study provides an insight to help explain why a large group of women have gone into self-employment in Mauritius in the past 10 years. The authors find that self-employment has provided an empowerment outlet for these women so that they can financially contribute to their household income. From the policy-making perspective, this implies that it is important for the government to support the activities of these self-employed women with conducive policies.

The study helps to advance knowledge on self-employed women in a small vulnerable island economy context. Given that the transition from being employed to unemployed and then the move to self-employment happened in a rather short span of time for these women, the contribution of this study is also to put at the forefront the industrial changes and the individual coping strategies.

Purpose – The main objective of this research is to explore the impacts of globalization on gender empowerment.

Methodology – This research uses a design that combines lagged cross-sectional and cross-sectional analyses. We have used ordinary least square regression. The sample size for this research is 48–70 nation-states. We have used gender empowerment measurement as an indicator of decision-making power that women in a society gain in decision making as a group.

Findings – Our findings illustrate variable effects of global economy on gender empowerment. Higher commodity concentration significantly lowers women's access to the formal and informal labor force and women's decision-making power after controlling for economic development, culture, and state's location in the global economy. Foreign direct investment lowers women's share in both the formal and informal labor force and women's decision-making power, while increasing women's share of secondary education. Thus, this research examines wider dimensions of women's experiences. We also find that some policies have positive effects, whereas others have negative effects on gender empowerment.

Originality/value of the chapter – Previous research on globalization and development has discussed the impacts of globalization on women's empowerment. However, researchers have either used women's access to formal work or education or gender development scores as an indicator of women's empowerment. Researchers have not captured women's empowerment completely. We have overcome this limitation by defining empowerment as a complex of access to resources (access to education, formal and informal labor force) and decision-making power (gender empowerment scores).

This chapter examines how gender interacts with informal workers’ collective action strategies in the context of contemporary development scripts around economic growth. Specifically, it engages the theoretical debates on the relationship between patriarchy and capitalism as the systems of domination that organize gender and class. Drawing from a comparative analysis of informal workers’ movements in India’s domestic work and construction sectors, I find the relationship between gender and class and between patriarchy and capitalism is being reconceptualized from below and differs by occupational structures and organization histories. For domestic workers, movements assert what I call a “unitary” model of exploitation. Because domestic workers’ organizations entered the productive sphere through a focus on social reproduction, their struggles conflate gender and class to reverse the shame attached to domestic work and increase the recognized worth of women’s labor. Because construction workers’ organizations mobilize male and female workers and began as class-based organizations focusing on productive work, they articulate what I term “a dual systems” approach to patriarchy and capitalism that exposes inequalities between men and women within the sector, such as unequal pay, glass ceilings, and issues of embodiment. In both cases, global development scripts have not only shaped movement approaches, but also enabled movements to articulate gendered labor subjects in innovative ways. While domestic workers’ unitary model has had more success in increasing women workers’ dignity and leadership, construction workers’ dualist model has attained more successes in attaining material benefits in the reproductive sphere. These findings suggest that debates on unitary versus dual-systems models of exploitation present a false dichotomy and veil the reality that both are necessary for feminist theory, development models, and women workers’ struggles on the ground.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the effects of changes in the relative composition and in the segmentation between formal and informal labour on earnings differentials among women over the last decade in Brazil.

The authors follow Machado and Mata’s method to decompose the changes along the earnings distribution, with correction for sample selection and using microdata from the Demographic Census of 2000 and 2010. Informal labour was divided into informal salaried labour and self-employment, and both groups were compared with the formal labour separately.

The results indicate that, in both cases, an increase in earnings differentials in the bottom of the earnings distribution due to segmentation, suggesting that the returns to formal labour have grown relatively to informal labour during the period. On the other hand, earnings differentials decrease as one moves up the earnings distribution due to the composition effect, which is stronger on the top of the distribution relatively to the bottom. Furthermore, there are compensating differentials for self-employed women above the 30th quantile, which contributed to reduce the inequality between this group and formal workers.

The paper contributes to a better understanding of the changes taking place in female labour, shedding some light on how they affect different points along the earnings distribution. Furthermore, the adopted approach proposes a new application for the correction of sample bias in the context of quantile regression by employing a logit multinomial, and using the Demographic Census data.

Lao PDR is a developing country with increasing female participation in the informal labour market. However, these informal female workers are often emotionally and physically drained due to stress in the workplace. This study aims to examine the determinants of job stress on physical symptoms associated with the mental health stigma of informal female workers in Lao PDR.

A convergent parallel approach was used with 1,037 structured interviews and 15 in-depth interviews between October 2017 and June 2019. Fractional response regression was used to analyse the quantitative data and thematic analysis to analyse the qualitative data.

The quantitative data showed a positive effect on job stress and physical symptoms associated with mental health stigma. The qualitative data illustrated that job characteristics, work environment, time pressure, job control, complexity related to workload, physical working conditions and physical demand were associated with emotional distress, depressive symptoms and long-term self-stigma.

The study findings provide guidance for developing strategies for female workers in an informal economy to help mitigate the impacts of job stress related to physical symptoms and mental health stigma.

This study offers a deeper understanding of the emotional and physical stress experienced by informal female workers in the workplace in Lao PDR, showing that job stress due to the physical workload leads to mental health stigma.

By synthesizing case studies on the informal economy throughout the world, I show that women and men specialize in different tasks, work in separate settings, and have differing access to positions of economic power in the informal economy. Moreover, women are more likely than their male counterparts to seek employment in the informal sector. I also explore why gender segregation is such a marked feature of the informal economy by examining characteristics of the informal sector that encourage such gender segregation including the relationship between the informal and formal economies and the social status of informal work.

International development organizations promote access to resources through self-employment as one of the main strategies to achieve women's empowerment. However, many self-employees are more similar to informal workers than to successful entrepreneurs affecting women's control over resources and their empowerment process. This article analyzes the relationship between informal entrepreneurship and female empowerment in the context of an emerging economy.

The authors surveyed a sample of 295 female street vendors in Bogotá – Colombia. Contingency and correlational analysis is performed.

Evidence is found about the expansion of women's capacity to make decisions about resource allocation and time managing because of informal entrepreneurship. Nevertheless, these decisions are not strategic nor given in a context with several options. Several structural constraints to the exercise of agency limit empowerment to an individual process dependent on circumstances instead of a collective process resulting in changes in women's social conditions.

This research allows for a better understanding of the potentialities and opportunities these entrepreneurships offer to women and what strategies could be implemented to take advantage of them.

Despite their characteristics, informal entrepreneurship has potentialities to improve female empowerment especially when factors beyond economic rationality, such as personal, familial and sociocultural, are considered.

The authors discuss the category of informal entrepreneurship in emerging economies and evaluate the success of this type of entrepreneurship with a gender point of view by incorporating empowerment as measure.