Over the last fifty years, massive development processes have occurred in the countries of Southeast Asia. Very few have helped rural women. Indeed, policies on development, labour, agriculture, environment, and population rarely consider women's views and needs. The development paths followed by Southeast Asian countries are based increasingly on monocentric industrialisation in urban centres where resources and services are increasingly concentrated. This has led to a relative shrinkage of the rural sector, increasing food prices and creating an unhealthy reliance on supplementary food imports. Rural communities in general and rural women in particular are especially vulnerable to the processes of impoverishment. These include: the degradation, depletion or loss of the natural resource base.

Southeast Asia’s tiger-paced growth over the decades has drawn many women into the labour force, but they now find themselves at the front of steadily growing lines of workers laid off by companies across the once-booming region. Turned out of factory jobs in countries from Thailand to Indonesia, a growing number of women are forced to look for poorly paid, informal work to survive or even turn to the sex industry for work. While not many precise figures of joblessness among women are available, women workers are among the hardest hit in the new unemployment scourge because they make up 42.7 percent of the labour force in Southeast Asia.