Turning Globalization and the Diffusion of Democracy into Opportunities for Women and Girls

Abstract

Considering the recent trends of the increasing globalization of the market economy and the diffusion of democracy, the modern world needs to pay closer attention to pro-women and pro-girls policies if gender discrimination is to be challenged. Such policies could mark an era of building greater gender equality across the world by strengthening domains of women’s well-being that have been shown to decline in the initial years of the democratization and globalization of countries.

Women, who have more complex societal roles than men and whose employment is more tenuous, are more vulnerable to the rapid restructuring in macro-political and economic systems and bear more of the costs of systemic changes. My world-scale analyses show that women and men benefit unequally from the growth of democracy and the global economy – men’s well-being improves with the growth of democracy and globalization but women’s well-being declines. According to my follow-up studies, the decline lasts for over a decade (2014). These findings suggest that prior results of research proposing that democracy and the global economy improve people’s well-being are most likely biased when gender and the level of development in countries are not accounted for. To protect women and girls and to avoid gender discrimination, globalizing and democratizing countries should prioritize gender mainstreaming in their policies.

Citation

Wejnert, B. (2015), "Turning Globalization and the Diffusion of Democracy into Opportunities for Women and Girls", Enabling Gender Equality: Future Generations of the Global World (Research in Political Sociology, Vol. 23), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 3-27. https://doi.org/10.1108/S0895-993520150000023001