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Why do women in Thailand end up with so few choices?

• Thailand’s rapic economic development has been predominately centred in the capital, Bangkok. The disparity in income between the city and the rest of the country is vast, with 80% of the country’s 7.3 million poor living in rural areas.
• Families in rural Thailand remain dependent on agriculture. As technological advances have increased productivity, employment opportunities have grown for men, but reduced for women.
• At the same time, the emergence of Bangkok as a tourism and export hub has created new urban opportunities for women, who are perceived to be cheaper and less likely to unionize than men, in low-level service sector and factory line work.
• The cultural pressure to provide support for their families has led to a surge in rural to urban migration in young women looking for work.
• 30% of Pratthanadee’s women finished only primary level education, and the remainder only reached secondary level. They have no additional training, few marketable skills and little work experience.
• On arrival in Bangkok, these women enter a competitive modern workforce, where they struggle to compete for even the lowest rung of formal employment.
• Employment opportunities are restricted to unskilled manufacturing and service-sector occupations, and the commercial sex sector is one of the few places where they can earn a good wage.
• As a result, rural women in Bangkok have become concentrated in unstable and unregulated industries, exploited as cheap, easy and unprotected labor.