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Social Indicators Research
Published in: Social Indicators Research 3/2017

30-06-2016

Globalization, Technology and Female Empowerment: Breaking Rights or Connecting Opportunities?

Authors: Elia Elisa Cia Alves, Andrea Quirino Steiner

Published in: Social Indicators Research | Issue 3/2017

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Abstract

What are the main impacts of globalization and new information and communication technologies (ICTs) on female empowerment? The first part of this paper surveys two main disputing arguments concerning this issue through a review of the literature investigating the causal mechanisms that links both dimensions. One stream of academia highlights the negative impacts of globalization. It argues how market liberalization resulted in the weakening of welfare policies and the flexibilization of labor rights. Another stream of literature emphasizes the role played by international organizations, like the World Bank, as well as civil society movements, and highlights how globalization made it possible for women conquer an important place in their societies. This paper attempts to add to these analyses the assumption that ICTs provided differential opportunities to women. The second part of the paper verifies which arguments are most consistent with empirical data. In a panel analysis from 2000 to 2014 we focus on how globalization may have affected female economic empowerment (measured as women’s participation in the work force) and political representation (measured as women participation on the labor force and participation in national parliaments). We find evidence that access to ICTs may represent a crucial variable to enhance women’s empowerment.
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Appendix
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Footnotes
1
This is very controversial as some argue that women benefit when flexible work arrangements are introduced and the barriers between part-time and full-time work contracts are lowered due to issues around childcare (IMF 2013).
 
2
In the basic POLS model, the estimator considers all the information as cross-section units, ignoring the temporal aspect of the data. Despite the method being frequently used, there is a problem is related to the validity of the hypotheses as there is no important information about the idiosyncratic heterogeneity and they are not correlated with any explanatory variables.
 
3
The random effects model deals with the unobservable idiosyncratic heterogeneity (ci) as a random variable that is distributed regardless of the regressors. The ci becomes part of the error and, therefore, cannot be correlated with any regressor in any period.
 
4
We carried out two tests to elucidate the consistent estimators and, among those, which one is the most efficient. In this case, there is unobserved idiosyncratic heterogeneity that is not correlated with any regressor, the fixed and random effects estimators are consistent, the latter being more efficient. If the heterogeneity is correlated with a regressor, the former is the only one that is consistent. In this fashion, we used the Breusch-Pagan Test to check the presence of idiosyncratic heterogeneity by analyzing the existence of self-correlation on the unobservable heterogeneity and the Hausman Test to check the correlation between the idiosyncratic heterogeneity and the regressors.
 
5
According to the World Bank, low-income economies are defined as those with a GNI per capita, calculated using the World Bank Atlas method, of $1045 or less in 2013; middle-income economies are those with a GNI per capita of >$1045 but <$12,746; high-income economies are those with a GNI per capita of $12,746 or more. Lower-middle-income and upper-middle-income economies are separated at a GNI per capita of $4125. Note that low- and middle-income economies are sometimes referred to as developing economies. The term is used for convenience; it is not intended to imply that all economies in the group are experiencing similar development or that other economies have reached a preferred or final stage of development.
 
6
According to Hsiao (2003), a panel is said to be balanced if we have the same time periods, t = 1,…,T, for each cross section observation. For an unbalanced panel, the time dimension, denoted Ti, is specific to each individual.
 
7
Codings on a 21-point scale from −10 (most autocratic as hereditary monarchy) to +10 (consolidated democracy) are based on expert evaluations of the political regime in countries, relying on a fairly comprehensive definition of democracy, which includes electoral rules and various measures of the openness of political institutions and aspects of institutionalized democracy and autocracy.
 
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Metadata
Title
Globalization, Technology and Female Empowerment: Breaking Rights or Connecting Opportunities?
Authors
Elia Elisa Cia Alves
Andrea Quirino Steiner
Publication date
30-06-2016
Publisher
Springer Netherlands
Published in
Social Indicators Research / Issue 3/2017
Print ISSN: 0303-8300
Electronic ISSN: 1573-0921
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-016-1395-1

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