There are still upwards of 20 countries that do not grant equal nationality rights to women. Discrimination against women happens all across the world, and women are extremely over-represented in the brain drain phenomenon (OECD, 2007). This is in part due to the fact that women in less developed countries do not have equal access to education, especially tertiary education, and therefore women leave in search of better opportunities. According to the statistics of brain drain, “where emigration of highly skilled women is higher, the poorer is their country of origin” (OECD, 2007). While this movement of women does allow them to seek higher education and opportunities in more gender equal countries, it takes away from major change and development being pushed to happen in their home countries. The feminization of migration has been a more recent but extremely influential part of the immigration experience. According to the OECD, in 2000 women represented 51% of the foreign-born population of OECD countries. The countries most affected by this gendered brain drain are African countries, especially in those where gender bias is stronger.

Costs of Gender Inequality

Gender inequality is more costly in an integrated world because it diminishes a country’s ability to compete internationally—particularly if the country specializes in female-intensive goods and services. Even though international peer pressure has led to more countries ratifying treaties against discrimination, in 2015 there were still 155 out of 179 countries that had laws somehow restricting women specifically (World Bank, 2015). Davids discusses the reorganization of gender as part of the global strategy of capitalism, by placing the male gender as dominant and female as submissive. Capitalism depends on there being a winner and loser, a dominant party and a submissive party. Globalization in previous gender arguments has been assumed as an “external process” in which women don’t have a role in creating, just reacting to and becoming a victim to. While the authors stick to a review of previous literature and address each previous claim with a counterclaim of their own, the argument was very Western-focused and not very descriptive with the solutions they offered for the “unhappy marriage” between gender and globalization. The authors also were not descriptive of where the orthodoxies came from, but rather just labeled them as a phenomenon that had been around and existed for quite some time. They did address the feminization of poverty, and in turn how that has led to a feminization of immigration, and they also showed how there is a need for both genders to be involved with the reconceptualization of gender within a global and local scale. Important solutions to consider, both with the gendered brain drain and gender inequality around the world, include economic empowerment for women that allow for women to influence a power shift within the household and the ability to achieve outside of the household, as well as offering more economic opportunities for women in their home countries and making policy change around gender gaps in endowments, agency, and access to opportunities.

Personal Experiences

Imagine you want to buy a smoothie on the bust streets of Vietnam. You’re talking with your Vietnamese partner, who happens to be a guy, and you’re talking about your families and hometowns. You walk up to a smoothie lady (not THE smoothie lady that everyone usually goes to, but a different one), and you ask in broken Vietnamese for a mango smoothie and go to hand her your money. She shakes her head and hands at you and continues talking to your Vietnamese partner. Confused, you stand there for a second before she has your Vietnamese partner take your money from you and give it to her. Thinking it maybe just had to do with the language barrier, you think nothing of it. She then hands your smoothie and change back to your partner who he then hands both to you. He later explained to me that in traditional Vietnamese society, shopkeepers wouldn’t take money from women unless it was a close friend or relative, but that men had to do all of the exchange of money and women were not allowed to. There are many small interactions like this one that reinforce male power that could be mistaken for something else if not observed closely. While this moment did not necessarily affect me as an individual, it’s easy to see how a culture of this leads to a greater level of repression of women.

Much of the gender inequality comes from how children are raised by their parents. While the past couple of generations of Vietnamese youth have had less strict expectations from their parents to stay home and allow their parents to make big decisions for their lives, like marriage or vocation, there are still these little moments where you can see how boys and girls are raised to lean in to different expectations, not unlike the US. For example, motorbikes are a huge thing there. I saw a boy riding his tricycle down the street with two large boxes strapped to the back, just like his father would have on the back of his motorbike. This child seemed to be about three or four years old, so it is engrained from a young age. Next to him was a girl who by the standards of the society she lives in, will be raised to be a good wife first and a professional second.

In the traditional standards, women are expected to take care of the home while men are supposed to take care of his parents and his family, being the breadwinner for them all. If families only have daughters, it is seen as having a sense of “karmic misfortune”. However, families that only have daughters are still happy and parents growing in age don’t have to worry about not having any sons to take care of them as the daughters have been said to do an even better job than the sons would. Often, the sons will even abandon their duties of taking care of their parents to their sisters, who end up helping take care of their own parents and their husband’s parents. Even still, they are given none of the respect that sons are given.

While it is true that American women do face injustice here in the U.S., there are far greater gendered injustices happening around the world from sex trafficking to a greater amount of domestic violence to severely restricting laws. While all of these things do occur in the U.S., the magnitude of the problem is just as drastic if not more abroad. Women who do hold other types of privilege, such as being an American citizen, need to be using their voices to be advocating for women around the world, as do men. While gender equality is not projected for another couple hundred years, change can and will be made.