Women's Untapped Potential: Examining Gender Dynamics in Global Trade
Maria knows she is good at selecting ripe tomatoes, but she doesn’t know any women who own nurseries like the one where she works in Honduras. Susan does housekeeping for a hotel in Kenya, but there is little chance that she would ever lead a safari. Salma, at a call center in Egypt, can calm down angry customers, but she has never seen a female manager in her office.
Global value chains (GVCs) are essential to modern trade, and women’s labor is essential to many products and services that are traded across countries. But many limitations hold women back from participating more fully and equally to men in this important and growing global labor force, as we show in a collaborative project by the International Trade Department and the Gender Division at the World Bank. Though the names above are fictional, the situations are representative of what we found in case studies in the horticulture sector in Honduras, the tourism sector in Kenya and the call center sector in the Arab Republic of Egypt.
The world is increasingly interconnected, and nowhere is a better example of that than the border between Mexico and the US. Lined with factories, the division between the two countries is blurred by a comprehensive trade agreement, international production chains, and other economic and social ties. On the Mexican side of the border, close to 
Picture a global supply chain. The 
Value chains are an ever more prominent feature of global commerce, with goods being processed – and value being added – in multiple countries that are part of the chain. No longer is trade as simple as manufacturing in one country and selling in another. Rather, goods often cross many borders, undergoing processing and accruing components in diverse settings before ending up in a retail store. A 
A company importing desktop computers into Russia expects border processing times of up to six weeks. Chinese customs authorities take so long inspecting drug shipments that a global healthcare company must hold nine days’ worth of inventory. Concerned about the prevalence of theft, a cell phone manufacturer must provide a security detail for overland shipments in Mexico.
Like the massive earthquake in Japan earlier this year, the floods in Thailand are again exposing the vulnerabilities of fragmented global supply chains.