Gender Bias and Women Welfare
Lack of access to clean water is only one way in which gender prejudices may negatively impact the lives of women and girls, as pointed out by Gunter and Van der Hoeven (2004). Gunter and Van der Hoeven (2004) point out that a lack of clean water may severely impact everyone, but women are disproportionately harmed. They said that in most nations, women are the ones who are tasked with going out and fetching water from far distant regions, as well as caring for ill family members and keeping up with the daily chores around the home. According to Gunter & Van Der Hoeven (2004), the monetary economy frequently overlooks women’s unpaid work in the home. Therefore, social and public spending cuts are seldom non-discriminatory across gender lines. According to Gunter and Van der Hoeven (2004), Privatization is harmful to women because of sexism in the workplace. According to Gunter and Van der Hoeven (2004), the public sector is generally the major employer that gives women a stable work situation; hence, when privatization occurs, women’s employment chances drop more than men’s and female job rise when compared to male losses. Additionally, it raises the percentage of women working in the informal economy, where they face more precarious and low-paying circumstances.
Hatem (1994) provides data from Egypt to demonstrate how privatization might influence women’s access to the labour force. Due to the constitution’s progressive gender equality provisions, women in Egypt now comprise half of the labour force. There was a dramatic change and reversal in trend following economic freedom and privatization followed by an IMF loan. Consequently, there are fewer public sector positions, and women’s labour faces stiff competition from males in the private sector. Women’s employment in Africa and Latin America increased when IMF privatization criteria were imposed in the 1990s, as confirmed by Çağatay & Ertürk (2004). In 1990, after adopting structural adjustment measures backed by the IMF, Zimbabwe saw a reduction of 30,000 full-time working women and an increase of 8,000 part-time workers, as reported by Riphenburg (1996). Although IMF conditionality has improved women’s employment in certain circumstances, according to Sadasivam (1997), Çağatay & Özler (1995), and Buchmann (1997), women’s economic rights have remained in threat. According to their analysis, this rise in women’s work is concentrated in the informal market or export sector, where most jobs require a high level of physical exertion for relatively little pay.
According to data that Krook and True (2012) provide, the number of women working in Kenya rose after the country received an IMF conditional loan. The Kenyan government developed EPZs, Export Industrial Zones, to address the severe unemployment that had resulted from the engagement of international financial institutions in the country. There has been a rise in the number of women working in the nation, but these women, who tend to be from rural areas, face several obstacles in the job, including sexual harassment, inadequate protections for workers’ health and safety, and mandatory overtime. It was also noted by True et al. (2012) that these women were afraid to disclose the abuse for fear of losing their jobs. Hence they seldom did. According to Detraz & Peksen (2016), the IMF is not to blame for the increased incidences of sexual harassment in the Kenya EPZs. However, IMF conditionality changes work patterns in ways that put governments in a tough position, which has a major impact on women’s economic rights.
In addition, as both Tutnjevic (2002a) and Elson (2004) point out, the larger workload carried by women is another reason why the current economic downturn has a more detrimental effect on women than on males. They claim that women end up providing for their families in impoverished nations because governments seldom do. In periods of reduced public expenditure and decreasing private revenues, women tend to labour more within and outside the home to make ends meet. However, since it is more difficult for them to enter the official sector, they often engage in female-type informal employment and spend long hours at home to replace expensive market items with home-produced alternatives. Women are also more likely to participate in community service projects, such as building communal kitchens. The emotional and psychological repercussions of financial difficulty are exacerbated in the case of women, according to Tutnjevic (2002b). Women and children are disproportionately affected by domestic violence because males take out their frustrations on them during this difficult economic time.
Seguino (2001) finds that public investments in physical infrastructure like bridges, highways, and telecommunications networks correlate directly with women’s unpaid labour and productivity. Increases in the quality of physical infrastructure, according to Seguino (2001), allow women to devote less time to unpaid labour and more to paid, productive employment. The health of mothers and their offspring might be indirectly affected by infrastructure projects, including the construction of hospitals and other medical services (Seguino, 2013). Following a similar line of thought, Elson (2013) found that reduced public investment seriously threatens female productivity. He elaborated on how these reductions place a disproportionate burden on women, noting how, for instance, when public health spending is reduced, patients can spend less time in hospitals and more time recovering at home. So women, as the primary caregivers in the family, end up taking care of the patient. Because of their increased caregiving responsibilities, workers experience lower productivity and increased absenteeism at their regular jobs and additional unpaid work.
Conclusion
In conclusion, the nature of loan economic conditions like privatization and public spending cuts can lead to an increase in the gap in gender equality as the number of such conditions rises. These cuts limit the government’s ability to protect women’s rights and stymie international and domestic efforts to close the gender gap. Increases in the economic conditions attached to an IMF loan are generally associated with widening gaps between the sexes. However, additional control variables and a longer period are required for definitive conclusions. The effects of IMF programs on gender equality and women’s rights are barely discussed in the available literature, which focuses instead on the effects of these policies on economic development, human rights, societal impacts, and financial crises. The impact of IMF conditionality on vulnerable populations, such as women, who often bear the brunt of post-loan reforms, needs further investigation.
Despite growing requests to acknowledge women’s contributions to economic growth (Elborgh-Woytek et al., 2013; Buvinic & King, 2007), IMF conditionality is worsening the problem. In contrast to the fund’s primary purpose, which is to promote economic stability in the borrowing nations, these negative effects on gender equality would lower the country’s prospects of attaining economic progress and good governance. The Fund has recently been paying increasing attention to fostering gender equality due to the realization that women’s contribution to economic growth falls well short of its potential. A gender perspective should be considered when making policy decisions and granting loans by the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The organization’s loan terms should be updated to reflect this priority. As a result, not only will women’s rights be secured, but economic development will also be bolstered (Stotsky 2006 and Elborgh-Woytek et al. 2013). Thus, the presumption that women are disproportionately harmed by IMF conditionality is supported by the bulk of the data.