This demonstrates a clear example of the extent of gender differences in the division of labour in the UK in the 20thcentury. .
Factory work, like that written about in Cavendish and Glucksman's book (2009) is less common in the UK today. The equivalent kind of production has shifted across the world to areas where female labour is cheaper (Elson & Pearson, 1981). The assembly and production of electronic equipment such as iPods, smartphones and laptops, more common in countries the other side of the globe (Dicken, 2007). The primary destinations for this sort of production during the 1980's were emergent Asian countries such as Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore. Women compromised the backbone of the workforce. Often they were rural migrants who moved to cities for such newly available factory work. There is a clear gender difference in the division of labour, with women primarily constituting the labour force of these factories, and the men often achieving higher paid jobs supervising or controlling these factories. Kreye found that women's wages in world market factories were, in general, twenty to fifty per cent lower than wages paid for men in comparable jobs (Frobel et al. , 1979).
In the 1960's there was an intense phase of globalisation, which assisted the transformation of many local and national production processes. As a result of this, a large workforce was in demand. The 'cheap', 'unskilled' workforce overwhelmingly compromised female workers (Ruwanpura, 2011). By 1985, the manual workforce of Export Processing Zones's was over a million, of whom, eighty per cent were women, and of this seventy per cent were in South or South East Asia (Mitter, 1986:41). Export Processing Zones (EPZ) are areas where companies can import equipment, material and machinery for the manufacture of export goods without having to pay duty. These zones were largely set up in developing countries by their governments to promote industrial and commercial exports.