Friday, May 25, 2012

The role of women in Sri Lanka's exports

The country has a few major exports, tea, garments and the remittances of migrant labour being the most important.

I just realised that the majority of the workforce in all of these sectors is women. In the tea industry, almost all of the most productive work is done by women.

In the garment trade, the majority of the sewing staff are women and are well represented in other parts of the industry as well.

The migrant labourers include skilled and unskilled workers but all of the housemaids are women.

Interesting, huh?

Does anyone have any statistics of employment by sex in these sectors to share?

5 comments:

pp said...

i've mentioned this a few times on posts, though i've never managed to find the stats. i wonder if its because no one has bothered to slice up the date to show these indicators.

http://www.cbsl.gov.lk/pics_n_docs/10_pub/_docs/statistics/other/econ_&_ss_2011.pdf pg 22 has housemaid numbers

Jack Point said...

Thanks PP.

Angel said...

I think prof. Neloufer of the University of Colombo put out a big publication with the numbers (about 4 years ago). Will try to dig up a copy.

T said...

Labour Force Survey has some of the data disaggregated by sex http://www.statistics.gov.lk/samplesurvey/LFS_Annual%20Report_2010.pdf Also try Plantation ministry.

Jack Point said...

Thanks for those comments. Barely have time to check the blog these days.