In the unprecedented expansion of world markets that began more than two decades ago, women play crucial roles. Some have been called beneficiaries of this globalization; but many more are its losers. NOW sheds light on how globalization has affected women's lives worldwide.
NOW with Bill Moyers on Friday, September 5, 2003 at 9 PM on PBS
(check local listings at http://www.pbs.org/now/sched.html)
In Thailand, thousands of young women line up early every morning for buses that take them to factories where they spend long hours gluing tennis shoes or stitching T-shirts for export to the United States. Oftentimes they don’t return home until 2 or 3 AM. These women are the fuel on which globalization runs and if they’re lucky, they earn Thailand’s minimum wage: less than a day. In Senegal, healthcare and public school systems, which were considered a model for emerging nations in the 1960s, are closer today to being a national disaster. And it is poor women who have borne the brunt of these consequences of globalization. Many Senegalese blame the turnover on the financial conditions set by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. On Friday, September 5, 2003 at 9 PM (check local listings at http://www.pbs.org/now/sched.html) on PBS, in a special report, NOW with Bill Moyers investigates the landscape of female poverty in the developing world. Award-winning producer Sherry Jones examines how women have experienced globalization - from international financial programs to international trade agreements to the unfettered power of multinational corporations.
Also, physicist, and scholar Vandana Shiva joins Moyers in conversation about the impact of globalization on the environment and communities in India. She describes globalization's impact on local communities in her country, "Suez, this world's biggest water company, wants to privatize the Ganges. 100,000 people were displaced. And the women started to talk about how many women are starting to commit suicide. Because they can't walk the water and the government has cancelled every local water scheme saying, "Now all the money, all the public wealth has gone into these mega-projects. So not only are rural communities denied the water, they are denied the public investment to bring water if their own village has run dry. So we have women jumping into the Ganges because now the Ganges instead of being their mother for life has become a graveyard. So it is, in a way, a system of dispossessing the poor."
Original: Examining the Impact of Globablization on Women Around the World