Female Workers in the First and Third Worlds: the ‘Greening’ of Women’s Labour

Abstract

Nimble fingered young women working in serried ranks in a South East Asian electronics factory is by now a widespread image. More than that it is the image of women industrial workers in the Third World. Virtually all of the analysis of women’s work in the industrial sector in the Third World is based on the experience of export platform factories. From a number of often first-hand research and other reports about women working in a variety of sectors, regions and countries in the Third World an ideal and universal picture has emerged which has tended to coalesce the Third World into a single undifferentiated country where women factory workers are young, industrious, naive and passive. And it seems likely that the same kind of generalisations are being translated to analysis of women working in the new technology industries of the industrialised world.