Women, work and technology: The participation of female workforce in the Mexican insertion into Global Value Chains
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.22481/ccsa.v20i36.11418Keywords:
Global Value Chain, Maquiladora Export Industry, Feminist EconomistAbstract
This paper intends to expand the approaches of Global Value Chains (GVCs) for developing countries, intersecting gender analysis with debates about the economic and technological power structures that are crucial to these chains. The main objective of the work is to verify how gender dynamics intersect with economic dynamics in GVCs, and also to understand how these dynamics are related and reinforce each other, with emphasis on how it develop in Mexico‟s Maquiladoras. For this prupose, it‟s employed a case study of the changes and dynamics on female participation in the Maquiladora Export Industry in Mexico through bibliographic review and analysis of the indicators on the workforce in the IME, analyzing the dynamics and changes in the composition of the female workforce in the sector during the period from 1980 to 2010. The results indicate that the Maquiladoras underwent a process of feminization in its initial phase, with a subsequent drop in this proportion, as the process of flexibilization of the work on Mexico deepens. However, the use of female labor was essential for the consolidation of the IME in Mexico and for the insertion of the country in global chains.
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