Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
employees who have no formal contracts, benefits or social protection.
In 2002, a group of researchers and activists, including the global
research policy network, Women in Informal Employment: Globalizing
and Organizing (WIEGO), worked with the ILO to broaden definitions
of the informal sector to incorporate informal waged employment and
homework that had been previously excluded. The ILO now prefer to
use the term 'informal economy' instead of 'informal sector' in recogni-
tion of the need to include waged workers as well as own-account or
self-employed workers (Chant and Pedwell, 2008). Using this defini-
tion, the ILO estimate that between 60 to 70 per cent of informal work-
ers are self-employed or 'own account' with the remaining 30 to 40 per
cent comprised of informal waged workers in both informal and formal
businesses.
This worker-centred perspective has allowed a reappraisal of the
composition and causes of informal employment, and has reasserted
the role played by gender in shaping the structure and agency of infor-
mal workers within a hierarchy of poverty and risk. Although the infor-
mal economy is not a female-dominated sector overall, over 60 per cent
of female workers in the global South work within its boundaries. Chen
et al. (2006) have attempted to provide a more gender-sensitive model
by illustrating the multi-segmented structure of the informal labour
force with particular attention paid to the location of the working poor
through a graphic depiction of an 'iceberg' divided into six segments. At
the bottom of the triangle is the least visible and lowest waged segment
comprising female homeworkers and low-paid own-account workers,
with the higher earning self-employed operators and employers at the
top. The iceberg also highlights a marked gender gap in earnings and
status, with women overrepresented in the lowest half of the segment
and with men predominantly at the top. Home-based workers and
street vendors are two of the largest sub-groups of informal workers,
accounting for 10-25 per cent of non-agricultural employment in the
global South. In 2005, UNIFEM found that women are more likely than
men to work as own-account workers, domestic workers and unpaid
labourers in family business. Although gender differentiation can arise
from structural disadvantages such as lower levels of education and skill,
inequitable access to productive and financial assets, and household
responsibilities (see Chapter 4.1), women often choose self-employment
as a positive way of balancing their reproductive and market roles over
the lifecycle (Chant and Pedwell, 2008).
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