Ruth Pearson

Ruth Pearson is Emeritus Professor of Development Studies at the University of Leeds, and a member of the UK Women’s Budget Group Management Committee. She has previously been a Chair in Women and Development at the Institute for Social Studies in the Hague, and ten years as MA Director in Development Studies at UEA.

Her research interests include women’s work in the global economy and gendered globalisation. Her initial focus was on Latin America, but has recently focused on Burmese migrant factory workers in Thailand - particularly in the intersections of women’s productive and reproductive roles, the implications of this for understanding globalisation and crisis in contemporary economy) and the South Asian Diaspora in the UK (workers organisations and there struggle for workers rights).

Most notable is her work on export oriented employment, capitalism and its relation to gender. Through her work, Ruth Pearson investigates world market factories, why they have emerged in the Third World and why women often take up the bulk of these positions. She criticises the notion that a simple increase in women’s labour force participation rates leads to greater equality. For her, rather than ending women’s subordination, entry into wage work through capitalist accumulation merely transforms this subornation. She rejects that the problem is not simply about getting women into the workforce but rather the “way” in which they are integrated being the problem.

Production processes that are “standardised, repetitious, call for very little modern knowledge and are highly labour-intensive” are often moved to countries in the third world where labour is cheap, keeping organisations in the global north more competitive. Furthermore, women are brought to work in these jobs mainly because they are “women”. The common opinion is that women have “nimble fingers”, are more docile and unlikely to join unions and so are more suited to tedious, repetitions and monotonous work. This makes them the easiest and cheapest choice.

For Ruth (1998), this feminisation of labour is “far from natural” but are gender stereotypes and biases that paint women as more obedient, less likely to join a union or retaliate against harsh conditions and are “nimble fingered”. According to her, these assumptions are a result of conditioning from birth that shape women and men’s perceptions of gender roles. This implicit bias extends to all corners of a women’s life, to the skills women chose to acquire through education, their bargaining power within the household and attitudes towards their own subjugation - “Women do not do unskilled work because they are bearers of inferior labour rather they enter them because they are already inherently determined inferior bearers of labour” (Pearson, 1998).

For her, it is the capitalism - the nature of capitalism and the actions individual capitalists “must” take owing to competitive pressures - that is instrumental in women’s subordination, deplorable conditions and low wages. She points at the need to look at the “struggle” not just in terms of factory level conditions and effects on wages but rather developing the capacity of factory workers, their participation in unions, ability to look after themselves and their families. Though entering the workforce “decomposes” some forms of gender subordination, it tends to create some as well. She calls for policy intervention that are are based on the explicit recognition of this gender subordination and that which allows protection from the inevitable onslaught of subordination in a capitalist framework.

References and Further Reading:

Anitha, S. & Pearson, R. (2018). Struggles & Strategies of South Asian Women Workers from Grunwick to Gate Gourmet. London: Lawrence and Wishart
Pearson, R. (2003). Feminist responses to economic globalisation: some examples of past and future practice‘, Gender & Development, Volume 11, Issue 1, 2003, Special Issue: Women Reinventing Globalisation, pages 25-34 DOI:10.1080/741954250
Pearson, R. (1998). Nimble Fingers Revisited: Reflections on Women and Third World Industrialisation in the Late Twentieth Century. Chapter 8 in Jackson, C. and R. Pearson (eds) Feminist Visions of Development: Gender Analysis and Policy, London and New York: Routledge
Pearson, R. & Kusakabe, K. (2012). Thailand’s Hidden Workforce: Burmese Women Factory Workers, London: Zed Books.
Pearson R. & Kusakabe, K. (2012). Who Cares? Gender, Reproduction, and Care Chains of Burmese Migrant Workers in Thailand‘, in Feminist Economics, 18(2): 149-175
Pearson, R. (2004). The Social is Political. International Feminist Journal of Politics. 6:4, 603-622, DOI: 10.1080/1461674042000283381