Gender equality-it’s just good economic sense
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Tanya CastleTags:
development equality human development inequality labor wage gapIn Nicolas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn’s book Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide they describe a presentation by Bill Gates at a university in Saudi Arabia. Gates spoke before an audience where four fifths were men on the left side of a curtain separating the hall, and one fifth were women wearing black abayas on the right side of the curtain. During the question and answer period one of the men in the audience asked Gates if Saudi Arabia’s goal to become one of the top ten countries in the world for information technology was realistic. Gates responded: “Well, if you’re not fully utilizing half of the talent in the country, you’re not going to get too close to the top ten.”
Gates was right. Women’s status as second-class citizens in Saudi Arabia and countries around the world has dramatic affects on a nation’s economic growth. According to a study conducted by the World Bank gender inequality significantly reduces economic growth and hinders development.
Famed economist and Nobel laureate Amartya Sen argues that the “overarching objective” of development is to maximize people’s “capabilities” — their freedom to “lead the kind of lives they value, and have reason to value.” Without an investment in gender equality exhibited through promotion of girls’ education and health neither economic nor human development will be realized. Girls and women will certainly never realize their full capabilities.
Although I prefer to regard gender equality, in fact all forms of equality between people, as a human rights issue, it is nonetheless useful to view it as an economic issue because perhaps it is via this argument that women’s education, health and empowerment will be realized. When girls and women are not educated there is a direct correlation on the lowering of a country’s economic progress. World Bank economist Stephan Klasen found that “between 0.4-0.9 % of the differences in growth rates between East Asia and Sub Saharan Africa, South Asia, and the Middle East can be accounted for by the greater gender gaps in education prevailing in the latter two regions.” More specifically, Kristoff and WuDunn take the example of Pakistan where women make up only 9 percent of the workforce in comparison to China where women represent 40 percent! It’s no surprise that China’s economy is growing much faster than Pakistan’s. Without singing the praises of the Chinese government, which is less than perfect in its human rights record, I will commend its prioritization of girls’ education and inclusion of women in the workforce.
Counting the financial cost of women’s subordination in various countries just might be the most effective method for changing the discriminatory and oppressive policy towards women. Since 1948 human rights, gender equality being one of them, have been a “priority” on the international agenda and arguably little progress has been made in achieving them. Perhaps, now that concrete data demonstrating the negative impacts of gender inequality on economic growth exists, realizing some of the rights laid out in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights might just happen faster.
However, as we know, from my last blog post “Equal pay for equal work?” simply allowing women to enter the paid workforce is not enough. They must be given equal pay for equal work. And this is still a long way off in the United States and most countries around the world.
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8:17 am
Getting women into the workforce is hugely important. One of the ways to do that is to support access to reproductive health care, which ensures women have the information and services they need to choose if, when, and how often to have children. By being able to make informed reproductive health decisions, women can stay in school, delay early marriage and childbirth, and better contribute to the workforce when they graduate.
If you want to help support girls and women access reproductive health care, check out http://www.Girl2Woman.org. Every video shared on the site raises $1 for women and girls–up to $1 million! Share a video, and help save and change women’s lives.
8:44 am
I find that the idea of seeing gender equality as sound economics is highly problematic. I have more than one reason for it, although it might be effective it creates more problems than it solves.
I suppose my main objection is that saying that women’s emancipation and bringing into the workplace will aid the country’s economic growth is kind of the same as saying that not using people trafficked as sex slaves will help you avoid contracting STIs. While it isn’t untrue, it sends the wrong message – the only reason why other people should have rights is to make your own life more pleasant(and when I say ‘your’ what I mean is ‘men’s').
Besides, approaching gender only from an economic viewpoint, all the complicated nuances of discrimination are written off as unimportant, because they do not directly impact profit. Street harrassment, rape, domestic violence etc. All of those don’t have a direct impact on women in a workplace, but they do have indirect one – just putting women in workplaces won’t fix all the problems,it’ll jsut make it worse because society will turn blind to them ‘because women are already equal, look at them working and earning, we’re done with this fight’.
Actually I could just write an essay(more like a rant) of how very much I dislike World Bank and their ideas seeping into minds of people.. I’m so over them pretending they mean well when all they actually need is profit.
9:18 pm
Chai, I agree with where you’re coming from — while I really love the idea of making empowerment an economic issue, there is a real danger that improving women’s lives becomes seen as simply a means to an end, which is a stronger bottom line. There certainly is a danger there that nuances of empowerment and women’s rights are lost. I also question the “hard data” we have on this… I think a lot of the arguments are correlative, rather than causative. I think we risk undermining efforts to improve women’s share in land ownership, the workforce, and the economy more broadly by resting on attractive axioms… Also, if you can get your rant together as a pitch, you should consider submitting it to GAB. I think this is a really interesting issue that deserves a lot more examination. Thanks for the post, Tanya!
1:24 am
I agree with Chai and Jessica this is a dangerous road to go down. It poses the question – if something accomplishes the goal but for the wrong reasons, is it a win or is it damaging longer term?
On a similar note of using economics to argue for equality, there was a piece in the NY Times yesterday about ‘The Wrong Reasons for Same-Sex Marriage’: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/16/opinion/16whitehead.html?_r=2
4:37 am
Thanks for the comments everyone! This is an issue that definitely could be explored further. Nothing in gender and development is black or white. There are many nuances. However, in regards to your comment on how much you hate the World Bank Chai and would like to write a rant about it, I’m not sure how useful that is in exploring the nuances you rightly mention in your post. I am not a whole-hearted fan of the World Bank nor any development organization because I’ve seen their programs on the ground in DRC, Cameroon, Rwanda and other countries and I’ll be the first to say they don’t always work the way they were expected to and I’d happily constuctively criticize them but this does not mean that their research is completely without basis and should be ignored. As I also mentioned in my post I prefer to see women’s equality and human development as a human rights issue rather than an economic one but in today’s world dollars and cents carry more weight (even though they shouldn’t) in the minds of many and that’s why it is worth exploring how to translate (not saying it is right) gender issues into a framework that more can understand. I agree with Jessica though, if you can get your rant together as a pitch to GAB I’d love to read it. Thanks again for sharing your thoughts!