64 SOCIAL SCIENTIST lions, an important clement in this respect is their "capacity to create and maintain divisions in the workforce on lines of gender^ race and nationality." Here the work is divided as "mental and manual", "skilled and unskilled". In 1975, women constituted more than 40 percent of the 11 million people working in electronics and 90 percent of production-line workers. One can observe that the textiles and electronics industries now run away from North America to Mexico, to the Pacific, to Asia and Africa, while research and management arc located in the United States. The reason for this is obvious. While the wages in the United States arc $3.50 per hour (minimum), workers throughout South-East Asia earn only $5.00 per day! Women arc supposed to-be only "supporting the family" and so arc given subsistence wages. Even a casual observer will be struck by the number of industries, particularly those involved in technically sophisticated production, which recruit women almost exclusively for their production processes. In Asia "over one million South-East Asian women now work for U S corporations, forming the central link in assembly lines that stretch from U S to Asia and back again." The Role of Governments In the exploitation of the cheap labour of women in South-East Asian countries, the role of the governments there is subservient to these companies. The question is always raised "why the corporations insist on a young female labour force, when there is a growing pool of unemployed men in the same areas". The answer from the corporations, of course, is "that women's work, historically undervalued, commands a low wage." For at least five to six years, women manage to physically withstand the hazardous and oppressive conditions in the multinational factories, such as obnoxious fumes, unsafe and outdated equipment, crowding, lack of ventilation, inadequate medical care and little or no union representation. These arc the main reasons for the employment of women along with her "virtues" of being "docile", of having "delicate fingers" and "patience", and so on. The multinational companies employ women in the export processing activities also (clothing, textiles, food processing) because, they say, "women have more dexterity with their hand, have more patience with tedious work". But the real explanation is the "higher profits to be extracted from womcn^s labour due to significantly lower wages .. . ." Lower wages for women is an outcome of their lower status in society.