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From Formal Financial Institutions and Orderly Men to Informal Markets and Disorderly Women

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The Gendering of Global Finance
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Abstract

It has been generally understood that from the point of view of women engaging actively in banking and finance (lending, borrowing and working) the professionalisation and specialisation of banking and finance served to exclude women almost entirely until the late nineteenth century (Dickson, 1967; Kwolek-Folland, 1994; McDowell, 1997), when a sexual division of labour appeared within the ranks of finance and banking. As has been set out in the preceding chapters, the earlier exclusion from ‘formal’ economic activity was supported by shifting social expectations, legal restraints and changing property forms which made it increasingly difficult for women to play a direct part in financial, business and professional activity in the emerging formal markets. Indeed it was the formalisation of markets, and the abstract separation of formal from informal, which in part served to make invisible and so marginalise women’s productive and financial activities.

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© 2009 Libby Assassi

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Assassi, L. (2009). From Formal Financial Institutions and Orderly Men to Informal Markets and Disorderly Women. In: The Gendering of Global Finance. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230246690_5

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