The Price of Progress: How the Global Economy Exploits Women’s Labor
Labor, Wealth, and the Gendered Economy
Legal equality and reproductive autonomy are essential—but they mean little if women lack economic power. Across the globe, women’s ability to make decisions about their lives is shaped not just by laws or rights, but by access to income, control over labor, and freedom from economic exploitation. These are the cornerstones of independence, yet in almost every society, they remain elusive for many women.
From informal markets to boardrooms, women are working—but disproportionately in roles that are underpaid, undervalued, and unprotected. They are essential to national economies and family survival alike, yet rarely receive the compensation or recognition they deserve. Whether in garment factories in Bangladesh, care jobs in the U.S. and Europe, or agriculture in sub-Saharan Africa, women’s labor powers the global economy. But the benefits of that labor often bypass them.
This inequality is not incidental—it is structural. It is built into how wages are set, how work is defined, and how society assigns value to labor traditionally done by women. It is reinforced by a global economy that depends on unpaid care work, precarious employment, and systemic barriers to ownership and leadership.
In this section, we examine how gendered labor hierarchies, pay gaps, and caregiving responsibilities shape the everyday realities of women around the world—and what it will take to create an economy that works for everyone.
💰 The Global Gender Pay Gap
Women around the world still earn less than men for work of equal value. According to UN Women, the average global gender pay gap remains around 23%—meaning women earn 77 cents for every dollar earned by men. The gap is even wider for Black women, Indigenous women, migrant workers, and mothers.
The global labor force participation rate is approximately 72% for men and 47% for women.
Women are overrepresented in low-wage sectors like domestic work, retail, caregiving, and hospitality.
In many countries, women are legally barred from certain types of work, or face discriminatory hiring practices.
While women make up nearly 40% of the global workforce, they hold only 24% of managerial roles, and just 10% of Fortune 500 CEOs are women. In politics, media, and corporate leadership, the “glass ceiling” is reinforced by networks of privilege, lack of caregiving accommodations, and institutional bias.
Efforts to close the gap—such as pay transparency laws, equal pay audits, and quota systems—have shown promise but face significant resistance, especially in male-dominated industries and cultures where gender norms remain deeply entrenched.
🧕🏽 The Unpaid Labor Crisis: Motherhood as a Penalty
Beyond the wage gap lies another form of economic inequality: the burden of unpaid labor. Women spend an average of three to six more hours per day than men on unpaid work—cooking, cleaning, caring for children and elderly relatives.
According to the International Labour Organization (ILO), if unpaid care work were assigned a monetary value, it would represent at least 9% of global GDP—more than the entire tech industry. And yet this labor is invisible in most economic measures, unprotected by labor laws, and unsupported by public services.
This burden comes at a steep cost. The “motherhood penalty” refers to the lower earnings, reduced hiring prospects, and slower career advancement faced by women with children. Fathers, by contrast, often benefit from a “fatherhood bonus.”
In many countries:
There is no paid maternity leave, or only a few weeks provided.
Affordable childcare is inaccessible or non-existent.
Part-time and informal workers (the majority of whom are women) have no job security, healthcare, or pensions.
In the United States, the situation is especially stark. It is the only high-income country without guaranteed paid parental leave at the federal level. This forces many women to return to work within weeks of childbirth—or drop out of the labor force entirely, with lasting financial consequences.
The devaluation of care work—and the lack of policies to support it—is one of the most significant barriers to gender equality. Until caregiving is recognized, redistributed, and supported, economic justice for women will remain out of reach.
🌍 Migrant Women: The Frontlines of Labor Exploitation 🌍
The most brutal labor exploitation often targets the most vulnerable: migrant women in informal, domestic, or care work. These women operate in the shadows of the global economy—providing essential services while being excluded from legal protections, union representation, and public visibility.
In Saudi Arabia and across the Gulf, migrant domestic workers—many from West Africa, the Philippines, Nepal, and South Asia—work under the kafala system, which ties their immigration status to a single employer. This system enables widespread abuse: wage theft, sexual violence, psychological isolation, and in some documented cases, suspicious deaths or suicides. Because workers cannot legally leave their jobs without employer consent, they are effectively trapped in modern-day servitude.
In Lebanon, economic collapse and civil unrest have left thousands of African and South Asian domestic workers abandoned by employers—many unpaid and forced to live in embassies or on the streets.
In the United States, undocumented women perform essential labor in homes, farms, meatpacking plants, and garment factories. They are often paid below minimum wage, denied rest breaks, and subjected to unsafe conditions. Many are also vulnerable to sexual harassment and assault, but fear of deportation keeps them silent.
In Europe, Eastern European, African, and Filipina women work as live-in caregivers and cleaners—excluded from labor protections and often confined to employers’ homes. In Italy and Spain, women working in the care sector are called the “invisible welfare state”—they prop up aging societies while receiving no state support themselves.
Migrant women are the backbone of care economies that refuse to recognize them. Their labor allows middle- and upper-class families to outsource caregiving, while the women themselves remain underpaid, overworked, and legally unprotected.
And yet, without them, the system would collapse. They embody the paradox of modern capitalism: essential but expendable. This invisibility is not accidental—it is a product of intersecting systems of gender, race, class, and citizenship status designed to extract labor without granting rights.
As global migration continues to rise, and care needs increase in aging societies, protecting migrant women workers will be one of the defining labor rights challenges of the century.
🦠 COVID-19 and the “She-cession”
The pandemic made a bad situation worse. Women were 1.8 times more likely than men to lose their jobs due to COVID-19 disruptions, particularly in service sectors, informal economies, and caregiving roles. These sectors—hospitality, domestic work, retail, and education—were disproportionately impacted by lockdowns, and they also happen to be dominated by women.
At the height of the pandemic, women globally lost more than 64 million jobs, resulting in $800 billion in lost income in 2020 alone, according to UN Women. The burden of school closures and overwhelmed health systems fell squarely on women, many of whom had to leave paid employment to care for children, elders, and sick relatives.
And while economic recovery has begun in many regions, it has been uneven and exclusionary. Women’s labor force participation has not returned to pre-pandemic levels in several countries, especially among mothers, older women, and women in informal work. The caregiving crisis that COVID exposed has not been resolved—it has simply been reabsorbed by women, often at great personal and financial cost.
Moreover, many governments responded to the crisis by prioritizing corporate bailouts and male-dominated industries, rather than investing in care infrastructure or gender-equitable recovery plans. Public spending on childcare, eldercare, and health services remains stagnant or in decline in many parts of the world.
The ILO warns that these setbacks could delay gender parity in the workforce by decades. In some regions, COVID may have permanently altered women’s labor participation trajectories—creating a “new normal” where part-time, precarious, and unpaid roles are even more entrenched.
📉 Economic Crises Fuel Cultural Backlash
Around the world, economic instability often triggers a return to conservative gender norms. When institutions falter and livelihoods are threatened, the temptation to retreat to traditional hierarchies intensifies. Gender becomes both a scapegoat and a political tool, used to channel anxieties about modernity, globalization, and loss of control.
• After the 2008 financial crash, right-wing populists rose to power across Europe and the Americas on promises to “restore the family” and “protect traditional values”—thinly veiled appeals to patriarchal norms. Policies that rolled back reproductive rights, defunded gender programs, and promoted stay-at-home motherhood became centerpieces of post-crisis recovery in some nations.
• During COVID-19, many governments prioritized business bailouts and stimulus packages for male-dominated industries like construction and manufacturing, while leaving caregiving infrastructure—nurseries, eldercare, school systems—grossly underfunded. This forced millions of women back into the home, not by law, but by economic necessity.
• In countries like India, Brazil, and Poland, conservative cultural backlash accompanied pandemic-era austerity, with religious and nationalist leaders calling for a return to “natural gender roles.” Feminist organizations and LGBTQ+ rights groups were defunded, surveilled, or painted as threats to national unity.
• Rising male unemployment—especially among working-class men in industries like manufacturing and mining—has fueled resentment, often redirected at women and queer people who are framed as taking up space or disrupting “natural” hierarchies. This sense of displacement is ripe for exploitation by demagogues promising a return to rigid, orderly gender roles.
The result is a perfect storm, where economic fear drives cultural regression—and gender becomes the battleground for broader ideological wars. In these moments, feminists and gender rights advocates are not only fighting for equality—they are defending the very possibility of pluralism, social progress, and inclusive democracy.
📚 Education ≠ Equality
Girls’ education has improved dramatically in the past 30 years. Today, more young women are finishing primary and secondary school, enrolling in universities, and excelling in academic achievement than ever before. In many regions, girls now outperform boys in basic literacy and educational attainment.
But education alone is not a guarantee of economic mobility or empowerment. The promise of education is often broken by the realities of the labor market.
• Women remain significantly underrepresented in STEM fields, where some of the highest-paying and fastest-growing careers are concentrated.
• Leadership pipelines are still male-dominated. Even in sectors where women make up the majority of entry-level workers (like healthcare or education), men are more likely to rise to executive roles.
• Cultural norms and workplace discrimination continue to shape women’s career paths. In many countries, women are steered toward “nurturing” or administrative roles—and penalized or ostracized for choosing careers deemed “too ambitious” or “too masculine.”
• Even highly educated women frequently face gendered hiring practices, pregnancy discrimination, and workplace harassment that limit their advancement or drive them out of male-dominated industries.
In short: access to school is no longer the ceiling. The barriers now lie in the transition from classroom to career. Until economic systems are restructured to match the ambitions, talents, and contributions of women, education will remain an incomplete promise.
🌟 Where We Go from Here
Some countries are showing what’s possible with bold, coordinated action:
• Iceland has mandated pay equity audits and enforces equal pay by law.
• Estonia provides more than a year of paid parental leave, with flexibility for both mothers and fathers.
• Spain and France have implemented wage transparency policies, encouraging companies to close pay gaps and report progress.
These are promising examples, but they remain exceptions. Most economies continue to treat gender equity as peripheral—a matter for human resources departments or election talking points, rather than a central measure of economic well-being.
To create truly inclusive economies, we need more than policy tweaks—we need a systemic transformation that:
• Values unpaid care work by integrating it into national budgets and labor statistics
• Protects migrant and informal workers, who often operate without contracts, healthcare, or legal recourse
• Enforces wage parity through proactive audits, legal mandates, and corporate accountability
• Centers economic policy around gender equity—not as an afterthought, but as a core driver of development and recovery
Because economic power isn’t just about money—it’s about freedom, safety, self-determination, and dignity. When women control their economic lives, they are better equipped to leave abusive relationships, care for their families, participate in politics, and shape the future.
In the next section, we’ll turn to the political sphere: exploring how women around the world are still fighting for basic safety, voice, and visibility in public life—and how backlash, violence, and exclusion continue to define the gender gap in power.