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Inaugural Address
The Double X Economy
Linda Scott, DP World Professor for Entrepreneurship and Innovation
Closing the gender gap has at long last become a world priority. The first nation-level databases to document the effects of inequality between males and females on national prosperity and human security have given us compelling reasons to act.
In 1995, the United Nations began collecting information on gender disparities from literacy rates to legal rights. Before that step was taken, there were no large-scale data from which to assess women's status across various forms of social organization, national policies, or religious traditions. Certainly we could not demonstrate the impact of normative practices. What we knew then about gender inequality had been assembled mostly since the 1970s, from data that was either local or highly selective--and often qualitative.
Within a few years after the UN's Human Development project began to include gender statistics, the World Economic Forum also started measuring the conditions of women around the world. Those data can now be supplemented by other large-scale sets, such as the World Values Surveys. Collectively, these datasets document a range of inputs and outcomes from economic participation to political engagement, from health and reproductive rights to educational achievement. They differ in their components, methods, and calculations. But we now have about fifteen years of solid information from which to understand the status of women around the world and the impact of their inequality on important issues.
The light shed by this information will eventually change everything. Before global data became available, it was possible to contend that gender inequality was natural and, thus, benign. One could argue that women had been equal in preindustrial societies but had become oppressed under industrial capitalism. And indeed this premise was common wisdom among Western feminists of the late 20th century. You could insist that women were unequal in some places but not others. And, it could be said--and often was--that discrimination against women was not even real, but was merely the delusion of poorly adjusted females. Sometimes it was conceded that gender inequality was a problem, but a only small one. Other more important issues had to be tackled first and then maybe there would be time to look at this business with the women.
We now know that none of these contentions are true. The global data show, beyond question, that gender inequality is real, it is measurable, and it is everywhere. Importantly, this pattern of inequality has massive negative effects on a surprising range of outcomes. Gender inequity drags measurably on national competitiveness, for instance, while also contributing to excessive population growth, high rates of infant mortality, and runaway disease. Unequal opportunities for females feed scourges like slavery and violence. Thus, gender inequality is neither trivial nor benign. So, though one might still insist that, being universal, gender gaps are in some sense "natural," we really can’t allow this to continue, any more than we tolerate other horrors that might be deemed "natural," such as epidemics, or "universal," such as murder and war. And the upside potential to reduce suffering and increase prosperity by eliminating gender inequality represents hope.
In some quarters, however, the most shocking thing to come out of the global gender data is that industrial capitalism, far from being the first cause that propelled women out of the Garden of Eden, has actually produced dramatically better conditions for females. The Western market democracies have histories that vary a littleintheir policies toward women; however, across the board, these countries have better outcomes for education, health, and employment than all other nations, though significant inequity remains in both advancement and political participation. The countries that industrialized under the Soviet Union show less positive conditions than the Western democracies, but both are significantly better than countries that are only now developing. All this suggests that markets and industry have a role to play in closing the gender gap.
But in fact we really don't know for sure where the causality lies nor, arguably, in which direction it flows. And that is why it is now incumbent upon the academy, especially in the disciplines concerned with economics, to take up the question. What we need to understand now is exactly how the economic constraints over females contribute to large social problems. And we need to figure out what conditions make it possible for women to break free from oppressive traditions. We need to look at past practice to find ideas for replicable interventions. And we need provide evaluative measures that take gender into account, rather than ignoring it.
So it was this agenda that set my own research question: "In what ways can the market be harnessed to empower women?" When I came to Oxford six years ago, I had just published a history documenting the interaction between the birth and growth of the modern economy in the United States and the simultaneous birth and growth of American feminism. I was convinced that these two very important phenomena had not been at loggerheads, as many of my contemporaries claimed, but in truth had each facilitated the other. I wanted to see whether the same institutions and innovations could have the same effect in countries that are developing modern economies today. My belief was--and still is--that the relevant innovations are not just systems-oriented, like employment and distribution, or legally-situated, such as inheritance and property rights, but also include the impact of certain consumer products on the daily life and work of females. It was my goal to test several things, not just stick to one alleged cure-all, like entrepreneurship or micro-finance. Gender is a complex problem that demands complex solutions. No one thing works for everybody, no single intervention solves all the problems.
My first project was to investigate the impact of Avon products in Africa. I chose Avon because I knew from my historical research that Avon, and similar systems prevalent in industrializing America, had an important impact on the women who sold its goods. My colleague, Catherine Dolan, and I went into South Africa with the permission of Avon and the support of the Economics and Social Science Research Council and the Department for International Development. We aimed to see whetherthis network of entrepreneurship worked for poor black women. Our findings were consistent with my expectations: the system provides training, support, finance, and product in a more complete, and therefore more stable way than microfinance alone or entrepreneurship training alone can do. The outcome is not only a meaningful income stream, but a sense of increased confidence, independence, and empowerment among the women.
From there, I expanded my scope into several other projects, most of them involving large multinational corporations or global NGOs. There are too many at this point for me to describe all of them tonight, so I want instead to focus on two, the provision of sanitary pads to poor rural schoolgirls and the global Pampers/UNICEF campaign against maternal/neonatal tetanus. I want to talk about these because they will help to illustrate the direction my thinking has taken as the work has unfolded.
I have come to believe that it is important for those who attempt to intervene on behalf of women to understand the feminine economy on its own terms. We tend to think of "economics" as something that neoclassical economists have thoroughly named and formularized. In fact, there are many aspects of human provisioning that have been left out of this model. Even before the events of 2008, for instance, environmentalists pointed to the dire consequences of the failure to account for natural costs. New fields like economic sociology have been thriving in the spaces overlooked by neoclassicism for about two decades. Among these, feminist economics addresses the many aspects of women's experience left out of the neoclassical programme. Neoclassicists themselves have tended to ignore the epidemic of subspecialties that have proliferated in recent decades, each predicated on some absence in the prevailing economic model. But the robustness of these fields, their growth and increasing respectability, suggest that the areas left unplowed by neoclassicism are wide and fertile ground.
My feeling, however, is that even the efforts of feminist economists have focused too narrowly on accommodating women's activities within a framework of categories, assumptions, and formulae set by neoclassicism. It often feels a bit too much like ramming a square peg into a circular hole. It is often noted, for instance, that a major aspect of women's economics left out of conventional models is care work. "Reproductive labor," as it is also often called, includes not only giving birth to infants, but the whole scope of feeding, clothing, sheltering, and chauffeuring families. These are the responsibilities of women all around the world. But care work, because it is usually unpaid, does not count as labor in traditional notions of economics and its exclusion from our models for planning is highly problematic, so feminist economists have lobbied to account for care work in some way. Yet putting a monetary value on care work and forcing it into the existing machine is not going to be adequate for engaging with gender in the way we need to do at this moment.
Women's economic participation has historically been defined by the laws and practices that exclude them from we now call "the formal economy." So, I believe, it is legitimate and instructive to think about women as having an economy of their own, as they would if there were a separate civilization, an isolated subculture upon which we have just stumbled. This economy of exclusion, this shadow economy, would be a system of exchange with its own features, rules, and ethos. Such an economy would need to be described, codified, and formularized for years before we would have the conceptual crispness we now have in neoclassicism. So, obviously, I am not going to be able to do it for you tonight. But I think we can go far enough to make it worth our while.
One of the first things we might notice is that large parts of this shadow economy are unmonetized. That’s not only because the primary activity is the unpaid labor of reproduction, but also because currency and capital are kept out of the hands of women through restrictions on inheritance, property ownership, and credit. Thinking right away of the analogy to the gift economies of preindustrial societies, an anthropologist might anticipate that it could be difficult to separate transactions in the women’s economy the way we are accustomed to doing. And she might also hypothesize that the prevailing ethos will contrast sharply to the "self-interest" we take for granted as fueling the modern economy. That anthropologist might also worry further that the circles of trade will implicate the exchange of people as goods.
Indeed, in the darkest shadow of this economy of exclusion, the only capital asset a woman has is her own body. She can barter it in marriage for the future promise of physical support, but she herself will seldom be remunerated directly, though her father might be. In the marriage contract, it will be understood that she will use her body to provide reproductive services. That is, sex, child-bearing, and household care. But she will usually be severely constrained in any attempt to earn money of her own. Indeed, in many countries --and in Western nations at one time--a woman's earnings and property automatically become her husband's once she marries. Even in prosperous families, a woman may not be able to use the household wealth, other than in the bibs and bobs given her as an allowance.
But if she is not lucky enough to marry, she may instead be forced to make essentially the same trade--though without the dignity of religious blessings--by going into prostitution. In that case, she may be remunerated, but it will be an illegal exchange and she will be vulnerable to all kinds of abuses because her work is untracked, unrecognized, and unregulated. And, indeed, we do find that women dominate in the informal economy in many roles and places besides prostitution because they have such limited access to legitimate work.
In the worst case scenario, her body may be sold, against her will, to slavers, who will make use of it by selling her reproductive capabilities, usually as a sex slave, but sometimes as a domestic servant. Slavery was not expelled from the planet by William Wilberforce. Today it is bigger than ever in history--andby far the majority of slaves are teenage girls working in the sex trade. This is an enormous business, conducted globally, and seamlessly interwined with other illegal exchanges for guns, drugs, or counterfeits. This underground economy contributes substantially to world instability and violence. Here, therefore, is just one way we can see that limiting women's participation to the domain of reproduction creates a systematic vulnerability that ultimately produces social ills for all of us.
With all this in mind, let's turn to the sanitary pads project. Today, it is common wisdom that the most effective point of leverage in economic development is to keep girls in school into the secondary level. Many good things come from this and they accrue quite rapidly: educated girls, in addition to providing talent to their national economy, become mothers later, have fewer children, provide more education and better nutrition to the children they do have, and are less vulnerable to disease and violence, thus helping to stem a tide of other problems, such as HIV transmission.
Notethesudden subtext of reproductive politics in what at first appears to be a straightforward discussion about educational achievement. The benefits accrue mainly to girls who reach secondary school--which is to say, after they will have experienced menarche. And, many of the desirable outcomes result from the girl being able to exert more control over her sexuality, in the process delaying childbirth or reducing disease.
My colleagues, Paul Montgomery, Catherine Dolan, Sue Dopson, Caitlin Ryus, and I went into west Africa beginning in 2008 to investigate whether providing free sanitary towels to poor schoolgirls would help them stay in school. The history of sanitary pads in the West was associated strongly with improved conditions for women, mostly through increased mobility for school and work. We anticipated providing pads would make it easier for girls to be in school during their periods, thus would improve their attendance and, by extension, their performance and, one hoped, retention.
What we found was considerably more complex. The traditional practice was to use scraps of cloth, just as in turn of the century America. And, in both places and times, the cloth was not reliable enough for public forays, especially for long periods of time and in mixed company. So, for mothers and grandmothers who mostly stayed home anyway, cloth was acceptable, but the demands of modern life, including going to school, required a better solution. Yet the taboo on speech about menstruation in west Africa meant that mothers did not know their daughters needed an alternative method. And community workers and teachers, often men, were completely clueless about what was going on.
In the most remote areas we studied, the girls had to walk as much as two hours to a school that had no private space or water for changing--indeed, most schools had no working toilet facility at all. Even cloth was scarce, so each girl had only a few scraps of it. She also had only very limited access to clean water and soap with which to launder the cloth. Usually, there was no private space at home in which to allow fabric to dry, so girls usually hid the damp scraps somewhere with little light or air. Because the cloth often did not dry before it was needed again, they wore damp, dirty fabric next to their bodies for four out of five days each period. The cloth, after a day or so, would emit a distinctive odor, one that the whole community could recognize and identify. So, not surprisingly, the sanitary care conditions led to girls staying away from school. And, in our preliminary trial, we did find that providing the pads increased attendance.
While trying to understand the education dimension, we stumbled upon a disturbing backdrop. Menarche is the red flag—or red card--on the playing field of educational achievement. Once a daughter has menstruated, her family can realize the value of her body as an asset--that is, they can exchange her in marriage, often for a considerable sum or livestock in return. So, from this moment forward, the girl’s family are mentally deducting each term’s school expenses against the opportunity cost of the marriage exchange. Indeed, we found that many carers, resenting the economic drain the girl's food, shelter, and education represented, would simply cut her off economically once she had "become a woman,” saying she should now take care of herself. Because the girl’s earning power is so limited, she would often then “take a boyfriend”, by which is meant a relationship where sex is exchanged for school fees and the like, including sanitary pads. Families actually seemed to expect that girls would do this, but then they would all would throw up their hands in false surprise when the girl, inevitably, turned up pregnant.