I think you've misunderstood me. I am not making a normative or a blanket statement about the benefits, the virtues or the dangers of free trade. Sometimes free trade does very good things for people, sometimes free trade lifts people out of poverty, sometimes free trade empowers women economically, sometimes it closes the gender inequality gap. Sometimes, however, free trade has adverse consequences.
The point I'm trying to make today is that we need better data about the circumstances under which free trade has adverse consequences, and we need a strategy for mitigating what those consequences might be.
The other point that I'd like to caution against is the tendency to talk about women as economic actors only. Women are certainly economic actors. Women are workers and consumers, but women are also carers. Women are engaged in formal economies, and women are working in informal economies.
We don't have good data about how trade liberalization impacts women in informal economies and how it impacts the work they do in the home. It's an indisputable fact that an overwhelming amount of social reproductive labour falls on the shoulders of women, so we need studies and data about how services liberalization, for example, impacts the social reproductive labour that takes place in the home.