Women and Globalisation of gainful employment are also predominantly women and, first of all, migrants. The"femini­sation of poverty" has been an established ex­pression ever since the Eighties. Already in the Seventies, the international divi­sion of labour was accelerated by transferring labour intensive steps of production of the clothing and electronic industries from the in­dustrial nations of the North to the countries of the South. Thus, costs of wages and additional wage costs were reduced step by step in the highly industrialised countries. This happened already at the expense of jobs for women, as labour intensive production was and still is per­formed predominantly by the female gender. Often, this is the so-called"remaining work" that could not yet be replaced by machines, at least not more cost-effectively than women do. Women work in"low-wage countries" for a lower wage, as the name already points out. Local companies are lead by these low wages. They are also interested in saving additional wage costs and taxes. And in the"low-wage countries" women work more willingly, because only few of them are union members. The threshold countries of South-East Asia owe their high growth rates, praised as an economic miracle, to the millions of women that were sucked into the factories of the world market and spit out again, in a global rotation process. Especially young women were hired for dump­ing wages and laid off again after a few years, when they got married or had a family. This often happened in the German clothing indus­try as well. Christa Wichterich reports that in South East Asia alone, the number of women employed has risen from 25 to 44% since 1970. In Bangladesh 700,000 new jobs were created in less than 20 years(1997). On the other hand, 70% of the former 900,000 jobs in the German textile and clothing industry gradually disappeared between 1970 and 1995 - mostly women's jobs. The axing in the former Democratic Republic of Germany was even more severe: from 320,000 jobs in the textile branch of industry only 26,500 were left(ibid). The new stage of the globalised division of la­bour is not only marked by the growing velocity in which transfers of production take place and the increasing geographical fragmentation of in­dividual production cycles. Transnational cor­porations have expanded their activities to the services sector, in which 57% of the female workforce is employed, compared with 51% of the male workforce(Altvater/Mahnkopf 1996, p. 296). Women sit in satellite offices or at home with an online-link to their computer and"earn an extra income" a few hours a day. This saves the extension of public transport and educa­tional infrastructure for the care and education of children. It saves investments in facilities for care and social welfare. Everywhere in the European Union, the partici­pation rate of women in gainful employment has been on a continued rise. The Federal Republic of Germany, with an employment rate of 42%, ranges about average. The employment rate of women in the"new" German Laender is signifi­cantly higher than in the"old" ones. Although the social infrastructure is worsening, the model of the traditional marriage with a male bread­winner is no longer attractive to many women. They are not willing any more to perform do­mestic and family chores, unpaid social tasks and subsistence labour without remuneration. First of all, women's jobs have become increas­ingly flexible and precarious. Workers' rights are dismantled, jobs are divided into ever smaller portions and particularly women are pushed out of the first labour market. A full lifetime em­ployment that secures subsistence is the excep­tion, basically everywhere. The rule are"patch­work careers", disrupted by leaves for education or care, by unemployment, insignificant work or unpaid"voluntary" labour. In all of Europe, flexible structures of gainful employment are considered"female employment patterns", but rub off on men to an increasing degree. Women are just pioneers of this new organisation of la­bour. 6