“Globalization, Women’s Work, And Care Needs: The Urgency of Reconciliation Policies” by Lourdes Beneria
The major argument conveyed by the author is that the increase in women’s participation in the labour force in many countries have created the “crisis of care”, which is the tensions created by the difficulties that families encounter in trying to balancing family time and work. In dealing with this crisis, reconciliation policies need improvements in order to counter this tension.
The author discusses several major points throughout the Address. First, the author focuses on the effects of rising women’s labour participation rates, declining fertility rates, smaller family size, and increasing life expectancy. Second, she emphasises the importance of reconciliation policies to deal with the “crisis of care”. Thirdly, the author argues that reconciliation policies in different countries have resulted in a range of models of care provisioning. Lastly, she argues that the global financial crisis does not affect men and women the same way.
The author provides many strong arguments to support her case for better reconciliation policies. For example, the author highlights the circular relationship between female migration and the provision of care. Immigrant women find jobs more easily than men. And the reason for this is because the immigrant women can help care for children, the sick and elderly, so they are essentially performing tasks that the woman in the house was traditionally assigned to perform. The women in high-income countries who are active in the work force cannot fulfill their domestic obligations, thus they hire immigrant women who can help with household tasks.
The concept of “emotional imperialism” is introduced in the reading, which is the term used to refer to the phenomenon of mothers leaving their children to seek jobs in a foreign country. The term references to the imperialism’s extraction of material resources in the