The Intersection of Global Economy, Politics, and Gender

When we picture international politics, we usually imagine summit halls full of presidents, diplomats negotiating treaties, and central banks moving billions across borders. Women rarely appear in this picture, and when they do, they are placed at the edges. Feminist scholars argue that this absence is not accidental. It is built into how we define what counts as “important” in global affairs. The political scientist Cynthia Enloe spent her career asking one deceptively simple question that reshaped an entire field: where are the women? Once you start looking, you find them everywhere holding the global economy together, usually in roles that go unnamed and unpaid.

Why a gendered lens matters in international politics
Cynthia Enloe and the question that changed the field
Women in the global economy: visible products, invisible workers
The double burden of work
The invisibility of women’s labour
Women in international politics: present but not powerful
Progress that has stalled
Gender mainstreaming and the case for inclusion
From the margins to decision-making
Bringing the threads together

Why a gendered lens matters in international politics

For most of its history, the study of international relations treated the state, war, and trade as gender-neutral subjects. Feminist theorists challenged this assumption directly. They argued that mainstream theory was not neutral at all but androcentric, meaning it took male experiences and priorities as the default standard for the entire field. The result was a discipline that could explain alliances and arms races in great detail while completely ignoring the women whose labour and lives sustained those systems.

A gendered lens does not simply add women to the existing story. It questions the story itself. It asks why certain activities, like fighting wars or signing trade deals, are treated as “high politics” while others, like raising children, growing food, or caring for the sick, are dismissed as private and apolitical. Feminist scholars point out that these supposedly private activities are precisely what make the public world of politics and economics possible.

Cynthia Enloe and the question that changed the field

Cynthia Enloe is widely regarded as a founder of feminist international relations. Her landmark 1990 book Bananas, Beaches and Bases charted the many roles women play in world politics, including plantation workers, diplomatic wives, factory labourers, and sex workers near military bases. Her central argument was that looking at international politics from the perspective of women forces us to reconsider our assumptions about what international politics is even about.

Enloe’s method was to follow women into the places where they had been rendered invisible. By tracing how women’s work was made cheap in globalised factories and how their emotional and physical labour propped up governments’ war policies, she exposed the gendered, racialised, and class-based structures underpinning militarism and the global economy. Her larger point was that ignoring gender does not make analysis more objective. It simply hides a part of how power actually works.

Women in the global economy: visible products, invisible workers

The global economy depends heavily on women’s labour, but it is structured so that this labour stays cheap and largely unrecognised. Think of the clothes, electronics, and food that move through international supply chains. A large share of the workers producing these goods in export-oriented factories are women, often hired precisely because employers assume they will accept lower wages and fewer protections. Enloe’s research on sneaker factories highlighted exactly this pattern, where women’s work is deliberately made inexpensive to keep production costs down.

This points to a deeper feminist insight about the world economy. Hierarchical gendered structures are not just a side effect of global capitalism. Feminist theorists argue that these inequalities may actually support the international system of states and contribute to the uneven distribution of wealth and resources. In other words, the cheapness of women’s labour is a feature, not a bug, of how the system generates profit.

The double burden of work

One of the most important concepts feminist scholars use to explain women’s economic position is the double burden. This refers to the expectation that women will take on paid work without giving up their primary responsibility for unpaid domestic labour. A woman might spend a full day in a factory or office and then return home to cook, clean, and care for children and elderly relatives. She does two jobs but is paid for only one.

This burden persists even as women’s education levels rise. From early childhood, social norms position women as natural caregivers while framing men as primary breadwinners, and these norms prove remarkably stubborn. The double burden is not a matter of individual choice. It is a structural condition reinforced by culture, media, and the absence of public support systems like accessible childcare.

The invisibility of women’s labour

Closely tied to the double burden is the problem of invisible labour. A great deal of the work women do, especially care work, never appears in official economic statistics. Cooking meals, raising children, nursing sick family members, and managing a household are essential activities, yet they are typically excluded from measures like Gross Domestic Product because no money changes hands.

The scale of this hidden work is staggering. In India, time-use data shows that women spend roughly five hours a day on unpaid domestic and care work, nearly eight times as much as men. This is among the highest such ratios anywhere in the world. Care work functions as the unseen infrastructure of the entire economy. Without it, no worker could show up to a job and no market could function, yet it is treated as if it has no economic value at all.

This invisibility has real consequences. When unpaid care work is not counted, it is not factored into policy. Countries that have successfully raised women’s participation in the workforce did so by investing in care systems such as childcare and eldercare services, recognising that care is economic infrastructure rather than a private family matter. Estimates suggest that treating care as a genuine sector of the economy could unlock enormous value and create millions of jobs.

Women in international politics: present but not powerful

If women are essential yet undervalued in the economy, a similar pattern appears in formal politics. Women have always participated in international affairs, but rarely from positions of real authority. Enloe drew attention to the role of the diplomatic wife, whose unpaid social and emotional labour helped sustain embassies and foreign service careers, work that was vital to diplomacy yet completely uncredited.

The numbers on formal leadership tell the same story. As of 2025, women made up only 27.2 per cent of members of parliament worldwide, and fewer than one in four cabinet ministers was a woman. Women served as Heads of State or Government in just 25 countries. Even where women hold ministerial posts, they tend to be assigned portfolios seen as “soft,” such as social protection and gender equality, while men dominate areas like finance, defence, and foreign affairs. This is the pattern feminist scholars describe as women being confined to secondary or supportive positions.

Progress that has stalled

There has been genuine movement over the decades. The share of parliamentary seats held by women rose from 11.3 per cent in 1995 to 27.2 per cent in 2025. Yet this progress has slowed dramatically. Despite 2024 being a major election year across the globe, women’s parliamentary representation grew by only 0.3 percentage points, the slowest rate of advance since 2017. At this pace, genuine equality in political decision-making remains generations away.

Why does representation matter beyond fairness? Feminist scholars argue that who sits at the table shapes what gets decided. When women are absent from trade negotiations, security councils, and economic planning bodies, the specific ways global decisions affect women’s lives go unexamined. A policy designed without attention to gender often deepens existing inequalities, even when it appears neutral on paper.

Gender mainstreaming and the case for inclusion

The response to this exclusion that emerged from feminist activism and scholarship is a strategy called gender mainstreaming. It was formally endorsed as a global strategy in 1995 at the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, whose Platform for Action remains a foundational blueprint for gender equality.

Gender mainstreaming means more than appointing a few women to senior posts. The United Nations defines it as the process of assessing the implications for women and men of any planned action, including legislation, policies, and programmes, in all areas and at all levels. The goal is to make women’s concerns and experiences an integral part of how policies are designed, carried out, and evaluated, so that women and men benefit equally and inequality is not reproduced.

From the margins to decision-making

The deeper ambition of mainstreaming is to move gender equality from the margins to the mainstream of decision-making. This involves practical tools. One example is gender budgeting, where governments examine how spending and tax decisions affect women and men differently before finalising them. Such tools recognise that budgets and policies are never truly neutral and that hidden bias can quietly widen inequality.

Including women’s perspectives in global governance is not framed merely as a moral nicety. It is treated as a route to better outcomes. Decision-making bodies that reflect the populations they serve tend to produce more inclusive policy and are linked to higher levels of trust and satisfaction with democratic institutions. When the people who do the world’s care work and fill its factory floors also have a voice in shaping the rules, those rules are more likely to address realities that would otherwise stay invisible.

Bringing the threads together

The feminist analysis of the global economy and international politics rests on a single connected insight. Women are not absent from world affairs. They are present at every level, sustaining economies through cheap and unpaid labour and supporting political systems from supportive roles, yet they are systematically denied recognition and power. The double burden keeps them overworked, the invisibility of their labour keeps them uncounted, and their exclusion from leadership keeps their interests off the agenda.

Asking “where are the women?” turns out to be a powerful diagnostic tool. It reveals that the global order we often treat as natural and neutral is in fact built on gendered foundations. Gender mainstreaming and the inclusion of women in decision-making are the practical responses to this realisation, attempts to redesign global politics so that the people who hold it up are no longer left out of shaping it.

What do you think? If unpaid care work were officially counted as part of the economy, how might that change the way governments make spending and policy decisions? And do you believe simply increasing the number of women in parliaments and ministries is enough to transform global politics, or does the deeper structure of “what counts as important” also need to change?

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Table of Contents

Why a gendered lens matters in international politics 🔗

Cynthia Enloe and the question that changed the field 🔗

Women in the global economy: visible products, invisible workers 🔗

The double burden of work 🔗

The invisibility of women’s labour 🔗

Women in international politics: present but not powerful 🔗

Progress that has stalled 🔗

Gender mainstreaming and the case for inclusion 🔗

From the margins to decision-making 🔗

Bringing the threads together 🔗