Cheap labour is globalization’s best friend. Follow the flow of cash across the world: and you know that investors are looking to get more done for less, at huge profits. This has encouraged two very prominent trends in the job market: jobs are bring outsourced to developing economies like India, China or Thailand where basic infrastructure already exists; and immigrant labourers leave behind underdeveloped economies for countries where working for less than the local labourer, they make more than they might have in their homes.

But what does this mean for women? Does either trend allow women to gain autonomy over their bodies, control their fertility and manage their lives? We’ll examine this through two blogs. First, let’s take a look at women in Asia who benefit from the inflow of foreign currency.

Individualism is globalization’s golden promise. As foreign currency flows into countries like India and China, the middle class in both countries is suddenly experiencing economic empowerment and with it the freedom of choice. Watching the changing trends in advertisements around Asia will show that the American dream has found a home on Asian shores. Young Asians can afford several amenities that were “luxuries” to their parents; this includes health care in private hospitals.

For middleclass women this presents another unprecedented trend. If they were once marginalized because of rigid social hierarchies that chose to treat them as a second, less important person within their own homes, they now have the means to negotiate their position in the society and at their homes.

Take M, a young woman in her mid-thirties, whom I ran into at a coffee shop two weeks ago, and who decided to take her chances and pitch a business deal to me. Her pitch was simple: join me, so your family can stop working so hard, and can benefit from your profits. She said her father a state employee had bent over backwards in a socialist economy to pay for her and her brothers to have a decent education and a good marriage. But now she was ready to play the capitalistic market, use the breaks the state has given to small businesses to make her own profits. While M pitched her story to me, I was doing a very different kind of math: here was a woman who had broken free from at least some traditional patriarchal rules. She had married when she was asked to; but was now travelling the country on her own looking for business partners. From what she said, it looked like she also had enough power at home now to decide when and how many children to have.

This is the kind of success story that neoliberalism thrives on. But while it might seem like women are able to gain power within the existing economic framework, it is really worth questioning if neoliberalism numbs feministic motives to question patriarchy and any ideas of masculinity that it engenders. It can be argued that globalization has set into motion a trend that endorses cutthroat competition and with it a very masculine ideal of success.

Neoliberalism also leaves gender disparity unquestioned. While women might feel more empowered than the generations before them, they are not necessarily as empowered as their male peers. Women get paid less than men worldwide for similar jobs. And not uncommonly, their success is shorter-lived and less celebrated than those of men in their homes.

But what of reproductive choices? While it does seem like economic empowerment within the neoliberal framework, might give women the power to choose better reproductive options, one really needs to question if such basic health care options like contraception and abortion should be on the market at all. Or should it be offered to all women as and when they need it.

As Marlene Gerber Fried, an acclaimed American activist for reproductive justice writes in her essay 10 Reasons To Rethink Reproductive Choice:

“Choice is a market concept. In our capitalist society, choices are consumer decisions. If something is for sale, then supposedly we can choose it.”

The best example for this is probably abortion tourism: where one country issues a ban on abortion, and those rich enough to afford travel, avail of abortion services in a neighbouring country. ASAP’s youth champion from Cyprus, Fezel Nizam, shared stories with us during November’s Youth Advocacy Institute: “There are organized tours to take women from Turkish Cyprus to Turkey for an abortion and back. They make money through this tourism.”

This is not the only time when women’s unmet needs have become goods in the market. Recent media reports, and a blog post written for us by Samsara’s founded Inna Hudaya, show in Indonesia, restrictive law has led to the mushrooming of safe but extremely expensive abortion clinics. These abortion blackmarkets exist in other Asian countries as well.

Such a market takes away power from women who do not qualify to complete in the globalized market. Without money, they lose agency and their ability to negotiate their reproductive lives.

It might be the irony of our times: but in trying to eliminate injustice among women previously marginalized because of strict patriarchal rules, are we creating a different marginalized group now defined through a neoliberal lens of success?