The 1980s and 1990s have witnessed rapid and complex global changes- economic, political, cultural and technological- that have greatly influenced almost every aspect of human life including gender relations. The most significant of these globalisation trends include:
(1) the rise of a global economic order that opens up financial markets to free flows of commodities and capital, exacerbated by the rising supreme command of transnational corporations;
(2) the declining role of nation states in ensuring the well-being of their people and their resignation to the seeming inevitability of neo-liberal policy agendas; and
(3) the marginilisation of the poor, particularly women, who are expected to shoulder the burdens of both austerity and altruism in the home, workplace and community at large.
