Book Review: "Assembling Women: The Feminization of Global Manufacturing". By Teri L. Caraway

Teri Caraway’s study of Indonesian labor in workplaces such as the garment, textile, electronics, timber, tobacco, and automobile industries is a contribution to the literature on the feminization of factory work in Southeast Asia. Overall, the book, presented in six chapters, questions why female inequality in the workforce continues. Why do women outnumber male workers in export-processing industries while the same numbers of women are not represented in capital-intensive industries? According to Caraway, political economists believe that once women entered the paid labor force, they would eventually equal male workers in number, but political economy analysis has not been able to explain why this did not occur. Her analysis takes a gendered and multilevel methodological approach and uses gender as a category of political economic analysis (p. 5) in order to explain women’s continued inequality in the workforce.