A dialogue on globalization.

Abstract

he summer of 2000 was hot and humid in Princeton, New Jersey, where I live, but delightfully temperate in Amsterdam, where Diane Wolf was conducting research on post-Holocaust Jewish life. She and I have many interests in common. I have studied women's employment in Mexican maquiladoras, conducted research among Hispanic women in the garment and electronics industries, and investigated the lives of impoverished African Americans in west Baltimore. To understand the relationship between economic change and gender has been one of my top priorities for two decades. Along the way I discovered Diane's exceptional work. Her book, Factory Daughters: Gender, Household Dynamics, and Rural Industrialization inJava (1992), is an exemplary case study to which I often return in search of inspiration. Not surprisingly, I thought of her as a preferred interlocutor to discuss the relationships among globalization, feminism, and gender. Below is our exchange, which, true to the age of technological wonder, occurred in cyberspace. Patricia Ferndndez-Kelly: After more than two decades of feminist exhortations and a large supply of literature on the subject, few would deny the importance of gender as an aspect of international development. Gender is apparent everywhere, from the recruitment strategies of corporate managers to the differences in the educational performance of immigrant boys and girls, the unequal distribution of disease throughout the world, and the varying effects of "structural adjustment policies" in poor countries. Yet the concept has received scant attention in studies of globalization. Economists speak about neoliberalism and free markets as if those phenomena were gender neutral. On a lesser scale, sociologists do the same. That is partly because many studies of women and development are thinly veiled political tracts that owe more to feminist ideology than to disciplined research. They command small credibility. Diane Wolf: You overstate the injurious effects of feminist politics. A more important reason is gender. World system theory, for example, is