---
title: 'The Unfinished Business of Global South Women’s Labor'
url: 'https://thediplomaticinsight.com/unfinished-business-global-south-women-labor/'
author: 'Peseo Lao Pio'
date: '2026-06-05T13:17:06+05:00'
categories:
  - 'OpEd'
---

# The Unfinished Business of Global South Women’s Labor

The image of the Global South woman has long been frozen in time: bent over a rice paddy, hauling water, stirring a pot over an open fire. She is the world’s most reliable worker, yet the most invisible. 

She feeds nations, raises children, nurses the elderly, and increasingly powers export economies yet her labor remains stubbornly uncounted, unpaid, and politically discounted. The revolution that was supposed to carry her from kitchen to parliament has stalled halfway out the door.

Numbers tell a brutal story. Women in the Global South perform over three-quarters of all unpaid care and domestic work. In India, women spend nearly ten times as many hours on unpaid labor as men. In sub-Saharan Africa, women produce up to 80 percent of the food, yet own less than 20 percent of the land, a gap [FAO](https://www.fao.org/4/i2050e/i2050e.pdf) has repeatedly flagged as central to regional food insecurity. 

This is not a glitch in the system. It is the system. Colonial economies extracted raw materials while codifying patriarchal household structures; post-independence development models imported from the Global North treated women as passive beneficiaries rather than economic actors. The result is a labor force that is simultaneously indispensable and institutionally erased.

The paid economy has not liberated women so much as it has layered new burdens atop old ones. [Bangladesh’s garment sector](https://sdgfinance.undp.org/news-events/digital-wages-can-unlock-womens-economic-power-bangladesh), which exports over $40 billion annually, employs roughly four million workers, the vast majority women.

**Read More: [Pacific Women Leaders Gather in Suva to Turn Gender Commitments in Action](https://thediplomaticinsight.com/pacific-women-leaders-meeting-in-suva/)**

They have transformed their country’s economy. Yet they labor in conditions where union-busting is routine, sexual harassment is endemic, and wages remain below subsistence, a brutal reality. The “factory girl” was meant to be the face of modernization; instead, she became a cautionary tale about development without dignity. 

Similar patterns repeat across Vietnam’s electronics corridors, Ethiopia’s industrial parks, and Mexico’s maquiladoras. Women are drawn into global supply chains not as partners in prosperity, but as disciplined, disposable inputs.

What makes this moment different is that women are no longer accepting the script. From domestic worker unions in Latin America to the *#MeToo* movement’s South Asian iterations, from Kenyan agricultural cooperatives demanding land titles to Filipino migrant workers organizing across borders, a new politics of labor is emerging. 

It refuses the false choice between “formal” and “informal” work, between productive and reproductive labor. It insists that care is not a private virtue but a public good requiring state investment—a framing advanced by feminist economists including [Nancy Folbre](https://archive.org/details/valuingchildrenr0000folb_h3u6) and the [UN-CSW](https://www.unwomen.org/sites/default/files/2023-03/CSW67_Agreed%20Conclusions_Advance%20Unedited%20Version_20%20March%202023.pdf). 

It recognizes that a woman’s double shift (eight hours in a factory, then four more at home) is not a personal scheduling problem but a structural failure of economies built on her exploitation.

COVID-19 pandemic exposed this architecture with devastating clarity. When schools closed and health systems collapsed, women absorbed the shock. Millions exited the paid workforce. Others risked their lives as frontline health workers, cleaners, and market vendors without protective equipment or social security. 

The International Labor Organization estimated that women’s employment losses globally were 1.8 times higher than men’s during the first year of the pandemic. The recovery, where it occurred, was profoundly gendered: men returned to jobs faster, while women’s employment lagged. Yet the crisis also catalyzed organizing. 

In India, women’s self-help groups distributed food and ran community kitchens where the state failed. In Argentina, the “Ni Una Menos” movement linked femicide to economic precarity. The kitchen, it turned out, was not a place of retreat but a base of political mobilization.

**Read More: [No One is Successful Unless Everyone is Liberated: A Call for Women’s Welfare in the Global South](https://thediplomaticinsight.com/call-for-womens-welfare-in-global-south/)**

The path from kitchen to parliament remains obstructed by more than glass ceilings. It is blocked by tax systems that treat women’s unpaid labor as economically worthless, by trade agreements that ignore care infrastructure, by political parties that tokenize women’s presence while ignoring their policy demands. 

Quotas have brought more women into legislatures across the Global South (from Rwanda’s world-leading majority to Mexico’s parity laws) but representation without redistribution is an empty promise. *What good is a seat at the table if the menu still excludes childcare, pay equity, and safe working conditions?*

Unfinished revolution requires more than inclusion. It demands a fundamental revaluation of what counts as work, wealth, and worth. Some countries are experimenting: Brazil’s Bolsa Família recognized women’s care labor through conditional cash transfers, a model evaluated extensively by the World Bank.

Costa Rica’s care legislation enshrines state responsibility for early childhood and elder care. These are not charity; they are investments in the human infrastructure that makes all other development possible.

The Global South woman does not need to be saved. She needs to be paid, protected, and heard. Her labor has built the world’s economies. It is time the world’s parliaments and its economic models to act accordingly.

 

 

 

**The views presented in this article are the authors’ own and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Diplomatic Insight.*