Women's Employment and Development: A Conceptual Framework Applied to Ghana

Offers a conceptual framework for analyzing the interrelationship between development and womens employment. Supply and demand interactions are analyzed with emphasis on the role of labor market discrimination and different patterns of market employment are related to the concept of female economic dependence with a distinction made between the efforts of industrialization and development. The framework is used to analyze the dramatic increases in the female labor force in Ghana between 1960 and 70. This is best represented as a supply shift in response to stagnant real income implying that womens real wages had fallen. The employment increase does not then represent an expansion of purchasing power but a means of maintaining it. Although womens employment and share in the modern sector grew rapidly it did not absorb the majority of new female job-seekers; policies aimed at large scale industrialization did not work to the general benefit of women and tended to displace them from traditional sources of income. Womens increased participation in the labor market cannot be seen as a sign of increased economic independence but reflects an already relatively high degree of independence. Employment changes are not thus good indicators of changes in income and status when direct measures are unavailable: a nonceptual framework is needed that will account for the complex interrelationships between development employment and economic independence if the meaning of changes in womens employment is to be understood.