Selected by Choice magazine as an Outstanding Academic Book for 1996 Gender on the Market is a study of Moroccan women's expressive culture and the ways in which it both determines and responds to current transformations in gender roles. Beginning with women's emergence into what has been defined as the most paradigmatic of Moroccan male institutions—the marketplace—the book elucidates how gender and commodity relations are experienced and interpreted in women's aesthetic practices. Deborah Kapchan compellingly demonstrates that Moroccan women challenge some of the most basic cultural assumptions of their society—especially ones concerning power and authority.

Product and service designers place increasing emphasis on the colour, form and appearance of what their organization offers and the language with which they describe it. Gloria Moss' erudite, sophisticated and fascinating book, guides the reader to an understanding of the way gender influences our visual perception. In this wide-ranging book the author explores design, visual aesthetics, language and communication, by drawing on an exhaustive range of primary sources of research from psychology, design, branding and communication. The lessons that emerge offer challenges to organizations both in the way in which their design and marketing is perceived by men and women, and how the make-up of their workforce may limit their ability to appreciate and address the diversity of customers' preferences. The challenge for management is to overcome these limitations and ensure that an organization's products and services mirror preferences of customers rather than those of senior managers.

Susan Dobscha and the authors in this Handbook provide a primer and resource for scholars and practitioners keen to develop or enhance their understanding of how gender permeates marketing decisions, consumer experiences, public policy initiatives, and market practices.

This book evaluates the global labour market in the context of gender equality, and the associated policies and regulations, particularly in developing markets, to recommend measures for encouraging gender equality. It exposes the barriers that women employees encounter as well as some of the societal and workplace policies they, specifically, are subject to. Important themes within this topic include participation rates, the looming gap in hourly pay, availability of part-time and full-time positions, value, and social status associated with jobs held by men and women. The book examines how global gender policy objectives, such as gender equality in careers, gender balance in decision-making, and gender dimensions in research, can be incorporated into policy frameworks. The book analyzes the gendered nature of assumptions, processes and theories. The juxtaposition between family and work, tradition and modernity, and dependency and autonomy, clearly still seems to be misunderstood. Therefore, the book asks whether work improves women’s positions in society and/or changes their roles in their families. The authors explore and uncover the connections among employment, entrepreneurship, migration economies, and gender global labour markets and provide helpful solutions to the perceptions surrounding women’s status, risks, and inequality that limit their economic participation. This insightful read provides comprehensive details on a variety of themes and encourages further research on policies that are key to promoting gender equality. The book will appeal to postgraduate students and researchers of labour and feminist economics, the economics of gender, women’s studies and sociology.

“My husband doesn’t have a head for business,” complained Ngoc, the owner of a children’s clothing stall in Ben Thanh market. “Naturally, it’s because he’s a man.” When the women who sell in Ho Chi Minh City’s iconic marketplace speak, their language suggests that activity in the market is shaped by timeless, essential truths: Vietnamese women are naturally adept at buying and selling, while men are not; Vietnamese prefer to do business with family members or through social contacts; stallholders are by nature superstitious; marketplace trading is by definition a small-scale enterprise. Essential Trade looks through the façade of these “timeless truths” and finds active participants in a political economy of appearances: traders’ words and actions conform to stereotypes of themselves as poor, weak women in order to clinch sales, manage creditors, and protect themselves from accusations of being greedy, corrupt, or “bourgeois” – even as they quietly slip into southern Vietnam’s growing middle class. But Leshkowich argues that we should not dismiss the traders’ self-disparaging words simply because of their essentialist logic. In Ben Thanh market, performing certain styles of femininity, kinship relations, social networks, spirituality, and class allowed traders to portray themselves as particular kinds of people who had the capacity to act in volatile political and economic circumstances. When so much seems to be changing, a claim that certain things or people are inherently or naturally a particular way can be both personally meaningful and strategically advantageous. Based on ethnographic fieldwork and life history interviewing conducted over nearly two decades, Essential Trade explores how women cloth and clothing traders like Ngoc have plied their wares through four decades of political and economic transformation: civil war, postwar economic restructuring, socialist cooperativization, and the frenetic competition of market socialism. With close attention to daily activities and life narratives, this groundbreaking work of critical feminist economic anthropology combines theoretical insight, vivid ethnography, and moving personal stories to illuminate how the interaction between gender and class has shaped people’s lives and created market socialist political economy. It provides a compelling account of postwar southern Vietnam as seen through the eyes of the dynamic women who have navigated forty years of profound change while building their businesses in the stalls of Ben Thanh market.

The book presents state of the art research on women's current position in European labour markets. It combines analysis of the latest trends in employment, occupational segregation, working time, unpaid work, social provisions (especially care provisions) and the impact of the financial crisis, with overall assessment of the actual impact of the European Employment Strategy and the specific impact of key policies, such as taxation and flexicurity. .

This book provides empirical evidence from Kenya, Tanzania and Mozambique and from different production systems of the importance of livestock as an asset to women and their participation in livestock and livestock product markets. It explores the issues of intra-household income management and economic benefits of livestock markets to women, focusing on how types of markets, the types of products and women’s participation in markets influence their access to livestock income. The book further analyses the role of livestock ownership, especially women’s ownership of livestock, in influencing household food security though increasing household dietary diversity and food adequacy. Additional issues addressed include access to resources, information and financial services to enable women more effectively to participate in livestock production and marketing, and some of the factors that influence this access. Practical strategies for increasing women’s market participation and access to information and services are discussed. The book ends with recommendations on how to mainstream gender in livestock research and development if livestock are to serve as a pathway out of poverty for the poor and especially for women.