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This paper poses the question of whether the mainstream feminist movement in the United States, in concentrating its efforts on achieving gender parity in the existing workplace, is selling women short. In it, I argue that contemporary U.S. feminism has not adequately theorized the problems with the relatively unregulated market system in the United States. That failure has contributed to a situation in which women’s participation in the labor market is mistakenly equated with liberation, and in which other far-ranging effects of the market system on women’s lives inside and outside of work – many of them negative – are overlooked. To theorize the effects of the market system on women’s lives in a more nuanced manner, I borrow from the insights of earlier Marxist and socialist feminists. I then use this more nuanced perspective to outline an agenda for feminism, which I call “market-cautious feminism,” that seeks to regulate the market to serve women’s interests.

Purpose – This chapter examines how gender, parenthood, and partner's employment are related to individual's employment patterns, analyzing paid work at individual and household levels.

Methodology/approach – Analyses use individual-level data from the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS) wave 5 for 19 countries, for adults aged 25–45. We use logistic regression and a two-stage Heckman sample selection correction procedure to estimate the effects of gender and parenthood on the probabilities of employment and full-time employment.

Findings – The variation between mothers and childless women is larger than that between childless men and childless women; differences in women's employment patterns are driven by gendered parenthood, controlling for women's human capital, partnered status and household income. Fathers and mothers' employment hours in the same household vary cross-nationally.

Mothers' employment behaviors can identify important differences in the strategies countries have pursued to balance work and family life.

Research implications – Important differences between childless women and mothers exist; employment analyses need to recognize the variation in employment hours among women, and how women's hours are related to partners' hours. Further research should consider factors that shape employment cross-nationally, as well as how these relate to differences in wages and occupational gender segregation.

Practical implications – Employment choices of women and mothers must be understood in terms of employment hours, not simply employment, and within the context of partners' employment.

Originality/value of paper – Our chapter clarifies the wide dispersion of employment hours across countries – and how men's and women's employment hours are linked and related to parenthood.

This chapter explores various structural, socio-cultural and economic factors that have precipitated the significant change in the supply of free family firm workers, specifically women’s unpaid labor. To investigate these concerns, we use longitudinal data from the U.S. Current Population Survey (CPS) and the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). We provide a general overview of critical social, cultural and economic factors impacting women’s opportunities since 1948, with an emphasis on recent historical changes between 1994 and 2020.

We find that, among other factors, the deinstitutionalization of marriage, changing rates of educational attainment, fluctuating labor force participation, economic recessions and women’s rights movements have led to a steep decline in unpaid female family workers. We further assess the distribution of unpaid family workers by industry and by age of worker to build a more nuanced picture of this trend. We sought to determine where these unpaid female workers went --to industry jobs, government work or self-­employment.

Given that complex national-level factors will continue to impact women’s life choices, family firms should consider the short- and long-term impact of the changing social value of women and their roles in family firms. We suggest family firms: ensure appropriate financial compensation for talented women, provide a range of supportive options for work-family balance to increase retention, and consider differential work opportunities for women at the start of their professional lives and those who may be interested in contributing to their families’ business in the later years of their careers.

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.

Citizenship can be understood as a multi-dimensional status, involving civil, political and social rights and obligations (Yuval Davis, 1997; Lister, 2000). Barbara Hobson (2000) has argued that citizenship is more than the relationship of individuals to the state and includes social relations between individuals too. She points out that social relations lead to a gendered citizenship for women. Their weak economic position in the labour market, their related dependence within the family and lack of representation in the public sphere demonstrate the shortcomings of the liberal concepts of citizenship. Yuval Davis (1997) makes a similar point. Building on Marshall's concept of citizenship as membership of the community, she argues that an analysis of citizenship must include not only a focus on the relationship between the community and the state, but relationships between various collectivities (gender, race, urban/rural locations, etc.) and the community.

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 demonstrates that women challenge oppressive gender relations by engaging in active agency at different levels. Iranian women’s struggles for gender equality show a critical consciousness of the politics of local male domination and an indigenous contestation of the cultural practices which sanction injustices against women.

This chapter is based on the findings and analysis of the book, Women, Power and Politics in 21st Century in Iran. It is the result of the political and personal experiences of a number of Iranian women academics, journalist and activists who live and work in Iran.

Based on the updated findings and new statistical data, this chapter argues that women, despite their high level of education and activism, continue to face gender inequality, in particular in the sphere of employment.

This chapter is intended to counter the often inaccurate and misleading impressions put forward by the media, politicians and some academics in the West when they talk about Iranian women. Within the broader feminist theoretical positioning, the aim of this chapter is to contribute to the debate on essentialism and the stereotype of Iranian women as submissive Muslim women without agency.

Feminist knowledge production is diverse. Nonetheless, consideration of the historical and geographical locations of feminist knowledge production is vital to our understanding of the complex processes of women’s liberation. Thus, Iranian women’s voices are important to what is traditionally understood as feminism.

Using the case of women home-based workers in India and the aspirations they have for their children, this chapter argues that aspirations across generations can reveal constraints and conflicts of current social positions. As workers in the informal economy, women’s work experiences are shaped by a matrix of oppression shaped by gender, class, caste, and religion. Yet, resistance to this work only became apparent when discussing hopes for their children’s future. It was in these articulations of aspirations that women stressed the exploitative characteristics of their work and their wish for their children to avoid these same experiences.

This article examines the evolution and the nature of indigenous women’s rights activism in post-conflict Guatemala. I analyze the work of the Organización de Mujeres Mayas de Kaqla, which has developed a type of women’s rights activism that is firmly rooted in Mayan cosmovisión and in women’s direct experiences. Building on their experience in the revolutionary movements of the war period the women of Kaqla seek to localize the allegedly universal discourse of women’s rights and to use it as a resource for change. I apply the perspectives of social movement spillover and of localizing human rights respectively to structure the findings, and argue that both perspectives can be insightful in understanding certain dimensions of this multi-faceted kind of activism, but that there are certain dynamics which these perspectives fail to grasp. I ask how the case of Kaqla can enrich both our understanding of how social movements can adapt to changing environments, and of how transnational discourses can become localized. The analysis also highlights the North-South power dynamic and suggests that processes of discursive adaptation are not fundamentally open.