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Sociologist discusses globalization
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(U-WIRE) MEDFORD, Mass.-American University sociology Professor Esther Ngan-ling
Chow did not have it easy growing up in China.
“I was brought up in a blue collar family and I worked as illegal child labor, 12 hours a
day, seven days a week, for four cents an hour and 50 cents a day,” Chow said at a lecture
at Tufts University on Friday.
When she developed an ulcer that sent her to the hospital before the age of ten, Chow was
forced to stop working and return to school.
“I told myself when I was younger that I must write something about this,” she said.
And she did. Chow has published several books about her research on women, East Asia,
gender, and social inequality.
In her lecture, Chow used a combination of statistics and biographical anecdotes to
illustrate how globalization, the compression of the world in spatial and temporal terms,
has benefited large corporations but has forced others, notably women, into low-paying
jobs with poor working conditions. She said this mainly leads to wage dependency and
depression.
“Every time [I have been] to China since 1993, I have seen the living standard increase…
but who’s paying for it, at what cost?” Chow asked. “Globalization is not just a social
process, it is also gendered [and it] perpetuates men’s domination and women’s
subordination.”
Globalization has created jobs for working-class women in East Asian countries, Chow
said. A female assembly line worker making Happy Meal toys might find a degree of
personal autonomy in the absence of men.
But globalization prevents women from getting better jobs, she said. Women are forced to
keep low paying, long hour jobs far from their homes, which drives them into the bottom
ranks of the social hierarchy. As a result, throughout the world, women are seen as
workers instead of people, families are broken apart when women leave children and
husbands at home, and gender based violence against women is on the rise.
Chow stressed the negative effects of a social structure that places women on the bottom
and said that awareness is the first step towards social change.
Her “big point is about global forces being gendered,” said Susan Ostrander, a professor of
sociology at Tufts. “We live in a global society and I think that gender is a critically
important piece of that society.”
Emphasizing the importance of recognizing that our daily lives are affected by the labor of
people in other countries, Chow showed pictures of the factories and workers in Taiwan
and China that she has researched over the last decade. She used the images to relate
women’s personal struggles to the effects of a changing world.
“You pay $115 for your dress here,” she said, “guess how much the seamstress gets
paid?”
Laborers in East Asia are mostly young women, some of whom send a part of their meager
weekly wages home to children and husbands. Others send money home to parents, who
help their daughters save to open small businesses. The biographies of these workers can
be heart wrenching, Chow said.
In one focus group Chow worked with, everybody started to cry and it took 15 minutes to
calm them down.
Chow has spent much of the past decade researching in China and Taiwan and gathering
information from large factories and the women who work and live nearby. One study of a
factory in southern China took a year and a half to complete. Chow and her assistants spent
days surveying thousands of workers, and then between 1.5 to three hours in individual,
follow-up interviews.
“They took the time to tell me their stories,” Chow said.
Stefanie Schussel, Tufts Daily (Tufts U.)