Equality for Women = Prosperity for All: The Disastrous Global Crisis of Gender Inequality

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

THIS BOOK COULD NOT have been written without the support and the insights of a large number of friends and colleagues, all of whom were patient enough to provide us with their feedback and observations, which did much to improve the final manuscript. We would like to acknowledge one colleague in particular, whose contributions were crucial to the writing of this book. Sarah Iqbal’s research on the human rights dimension of gender equality was very much the starting point for the chapter Rights and Wrongs. She also generously provided us with important data and valuable insights for the chapter on violence against women. This is a relatively new area of focus for the Women, Business and the Law report, a project that actually provided the initial inspiration for this book; the WBL project has been ably managed by Sarah in recent years.

It would be difficult to name all but equally impossible not to mention some readers whose insights, commentary, and encouragement helped to shape this book. Among these are Laurie Adams, Noorjahan Akbar, Veronika Bard, Kaushik Basu, Julia Berger, Nancy Birdsall, Maud de Boer Buquicchio, Erica Bosio, Diana Chacon, Monica Das Gupta, Bani Dugal, Amanda Ellis, Saba Ghori, Ruth Halperin-Kaddari, Coby Jones, Yasmeen Hassan, Ernesto Hernandez-Cata, Asif Islam (who brought to our attention key pieces of data and relevant dimensions of the literature and was one of our most committed readers), Melissa Johns, Jackie Jones, Khrystyna Kushnir, Nora Lankes, Hans Peter Lankes, Jannie Lilja, Mirta Tapia de Lopez, Cristina Manzano, Katherine Marshall, Yasmina Mata, Bahia Mitchell, Elena Mustakova, Moisés Naim, Lindsay Northover, Valeria Perotti (who co-authored with one of us a paper on the role of culture in economic development which was the starting point for the chapter The Culture Question), Rita Ramalho (who contributed several key ideas and material to the chapter on women and work), Anna Reva, Eduardo Rodriguez Veltze, Pilar Salgado, Melanne Verveer, and Farbod Youssefi. We would like to express special appreciation to Laura Apperson, Marcia Markland, and Katherine Haigler at St. Martin’s Press who provided constant encouragement and generous editorial support. We are grateful to Debra Manette for her excellent copy editing, and Nancy Ackerman from AmadeaEditing provided expert additional editorial support. Any limitations and imperfections in the book, however, are our own.

The views expressed in this book are the authors’ own and do not necessarily reflect those of the organizations with which they are affiliated.

INTRODUCTION

As long as women are prevented from attaining their highest possibilities, so long will men be unable to achieve the greatness which might be theirs.

—'ABDU'L-BAHÁ, PARIS, 1912

THE RIDDLE OF THE SPHINX

The disparity between the sexes and their supposed equality has posed a riddle that has perplexed minds great and small, in one culture or another across the planet, since the beginning of time. We cannot quite resolve the conundrum. Men and women belong to the same species; we are all members of the human race. And yet we are clearly different. It is not merely skin deep, this difference; it is not just a disparity of race and color. It seems to be a fundamental difference of function, of biology, some would even say of neurology, psyche, possibly soul.

So how can we be equal? We have puzzled over this paradox for millennia.

At first glance there seems to be no solution to the enigma, no answer to the riddle. We stare at the sexless features of this weathered Sphinx¹ and find no clue in its blank gaze, no key to the pitiless differences spawned by its enigmatic gender. Indeed, obsessive scrutiny only complicates matters, for the multiple disparities between men and women can blind our eyes, like sand. And so we have concluded over time that the only way to lay the problem to rest and resolve the riddle is by avoiding it altogether. We have drawn clear demarcations round our separate genders and defined who we are in strict relation to what we are not, just to reassure ourselves of our existence. In other words, we have preferred sex segregation to equality if only to control the threat posed by our differences.

A strict separation between the sexes, of social and political roles, of public and private space, has been one way of resolving the conundrum for many societies and cultures over the ages. It is like nationalism, racism, even religion. Countries can ignore each other and feel no economic or cultural threat, as long as they are miles apart; we can convince ourselves that East is East and West is West and never the twain shall meet,² as long as there is no outsourcing of the labor force and no international competition over the market. Similarly we have imagined that sex segregation could lay the riddle of gender to rest. As long as men and women kept to their separate spheres, as long as their roles and responsibilities were strictly defined and rigidly regulated by gender-specific laws and customs, we could try to convince ourselves that the problem did not actually exist. The patriarchal order has resolved the dilemma by ignoring the conundrum, and keeping women in their place.

But the Sphinx is a subtle creature. Her riddles have a way of returning to haunt us.

When Sophocles wrote his tragedy Oedipus Rex in 429 BC, he conjured what it would be like to live in a city cursed by the Sphinx. The imaginary Thebes of classical antiquity was a place where a man could murder his father with impunity and marry his mother without a qualm. It was a place where a son, standing innocent at the crossroads of choice with his eyes wide open, could still be completely blind to his own and his parents’ true identity. And in this city, the wells were poisoned and people were dying because they could not solve the Sphinx’s riddle.

Sophocles’ play dramatized the terrible price society would pay if sexual taboos were ignored, if paternity was not strictly controlled, and if women were not kept in their place. The answer to the riddle of what walks with four legs in the morning, two legs at noon, and three in the evening was man; it was also a warning against a world in which sisters could be daughters, in which women could rule over their murdered husbands and commit incest with their sons. Sophocles was, in effect, sounding the credo of the patriarchal order.

But perhaps the real curse of the Sphinx is our blindness to the fact that it contains multiple meanings. The curse of our times is no longer what poisoned our wells in the past. The riddle of our age can no longer be solved by the old answers. The plague that is poisoning our civilizations today, and undermining our cultures, is neither incest, nor the loss of paternal identity. It is the segregation of the sexes. We are living in a world today cursed by gender inequality.

No one has a monopoly on it either. The curse is everywhere: in the public as well as the private sphere, at the domestic as well as the international level. It controls our finances, our information technology, our laws in many a land. It exists in rich countries as well as poor, can characterize every race that calls itself human, and has manifest itself across virtually all cultural traditions. The whole planet, and not just Thebes, lies in its grip.

It is also protean, for gender inequality assumes myriad shapes, a thousand and one different forms and faces: the control of joint income and assets in the household; the violation of basic human rights through enforced female seclusion and domestic violence; the abuse of power in the buying, selling, and inheriting of property; obsolete laws and our inability to implement new ones. Some kinds of inequality can be as subtle as mere misinformation, as invisible as the suppression of essential knowledge, which cripples a person’s autonomy. Other kinds, especially in the private sphere, can masquerade more gracefully, as protection, as security, even as love. The sheer pervasiveness of this curse is proof of its complex causes, its multiple consequences. The riddle of the Sphinx can only be resolved by its own disparities in our times.

Its answer lies in the equality of the sexes.

LOOKING FOR ANSWERS

For more than two centuries, the inequalities prevalent between men and women in the world have been defined in moral terms.³ The debate for and against gender equality, which began in the late eighteenth century and which is still far from being over, has traditionally been grounded in notions of human dignity and social justice. Many have spoken about how the suppression of women’s rights and freedoms is inconsistent with democratic values and international law. We have focused on how it is a violation of ethics, a denial of basic logic, and a subversion of moral philosophy. We have argued about gender equality in terms of rights and wrongs.

But the subject has been pushed beyond the boundaries of ethics in recent decades. It has raised questions about religion and culture, which have provoked intense emotional debate in our times. Gender inequality has brought people out on the streets. It has morphed into a political cause as well as a quasi-religion and mystique. The exposure of physical and psychological abuse, of domestic oppression and emotional violence, has lifted voices and raised banners across the world. Veils have been cast off and reimposed. Women have refused to wear bras and claimed control over their reproductive rights. Much breath and rhetoric have been expended on this subject, and not just ink, but tears and sometimes even blood, have been dangerously spilt.

Lately, however, the discussion has become less heated. Emotion has been overtaken, to some degree at least, by economics. This is a relatively new development. The tone is cooler now, but steelier. Debates are becoming determinedly measured, in more ways than one. Arguments on the subject are drawing on a growing body of academic research, which claims that the price we are paying for inequality is too high, that gender inequality in education and employment reduces economic growth.⁴ We are starting to assess the costs of inequality to society as a whole and to define women’s lack of opportunity on economic rather than ethical grounds. This is a very different approach to the subject.

It has taken millennia for us to admit to this fundamental reality: that gender inequality is a waste of human resources. It has taken centuries to look, fairly and squarely, at the bottom line of women’s rights. Although sexual oppression has existed for much longer than the environmental crisis, we have estimated the costs arising from climate change much more quickly, have been willing to evaluate the damage resulting from our ruthless exploitation of natural resources much more readily than we have been able to bring ourselves to account for the losses sustained, the potential squandered, and the myriads of lives ruined on this planet as a result of the systematic repression and abuse of half the human race.

Now we are finally beginning to sum it all up. We are learning to read the equation differently. It is time to recognize that equality for women = prosperity for all.

This book will ask some critical questions about the misallocation of resources and the restrictive laws affecting women, about the relationship between failing economies and the legal status of women, about the long-term consequences for society of ignoring the culture of violence against women. Some of these questions are so complex that they have already resulted in a century of false answers, to the detriment of both sexes. Others are so troubling that we have found ways to sidestep them for millennia, to our mutual cost. But although many of these questions are still challenging, we can no longer elude the answers.

And there are two reasons why.

The first, as already indicated, is the blindingly obvious but until relatively recently unacknowledged fact that the subjugation of women has resulted in a whole range of social ills and possibly even political dysfunction across the world. What is more, these ills are becoming worse the longer they are allowed to prevail and are posing a threat to our collective security. The suppression of women is causing grave consequences across the generations; we can no longer ignore it. The dysfunction of civil society resulting from the denial of women’s aspirations is a growing burden; we can no longer sustain it. Society as a whole is paying a heavy price for the limitations imposed on women, and the costs of inequality, economically as well as environmentally, individually as well as collectively, are just too high to pay any longer.

The second reason is that gender equality is not a zero-sum game; it does not imply any loss for men. Quite the reverse. It is of benefit to all and to the advantage of all, because the development of human potential is a collective necessity. We all pay the price when our legal systems curtail a woman’s property rights, or reduce the number of jobs she can hold, or place restrictions on her ability to contribute to the business of life, or subject her to a culture of violence, both physically and psychologically. The most competitive countries in the world, those that are prosperous, that have attained high levels of income per capita, and that are currently operating near the boundaries of what economists call the technology frontier, are the very same countries where women have the greatest equality, where their rights are protected, their well-being is promoted, and their potential is increasingly enhanced. In other words, when men walk in partnership with women, it is to their own advantage. When they do not, economies fail.

WHY ECONOMIES FAIL

Of course, oversimplification will not serve; this subject, as the Sphinx well knows, is a complex and multifaceted one. There are many reasons why a country’s economy may not flourish. For example, it may depend for its income on a handful of commodity exports, the prices for which are beyond its control. This happened in 2009, when the Russian economy contracted by 8 percent because it was entirely dependent on oil and a few other commodities, the prices of which collapsed as a result of the global financial crisis. A country’s economy may also be unable to sustain improvements in living standards because of volatile conditions, such as bad weather, changes in taste, or other unexpected shocks. In the early 1980s, US monetary policy turned sharply contractionary to tackle double-digit inflation, and the subsequent rise in interest rates all over the developing world precipitated a debt crisis, which led to years of low growth. Frequently, authorities may simply fail to implement policies that are supportive of growth, through excessive borrowing, or by spending resources they do not have, or by wasting them on oversized military establishments and prestige projects instead of education and public health. Even when macroeconomic policies are focused on the so-called right things, such as improved productivity and competitiveness, a country can suffer from a range of institutional weaknesses—widespread corruption, excessive bureaucracy and red tape, an overly protective trade regime—all of which undermine private sector investment.

In addition, we do not fully understand the relative importance of all these factors—accumulation of savings, the declining role of agriculture, demography, government policy, migration, technological change, globalization, to name but a few. We do not entirely grasp their relative roles, either, in shaping the evolution of income inequality, particularly between men and women, and the links between this inequality and economic growth. Some of these factors are obviously more amenable to change than others through shifts in the content of policies. Others—technological innovations, for example—are more exogenous in nature, responding to a combination of factors, such as human creativity, the profit motive, and, to a lesser extent, government incentives. We also cannot ignore that the relative importance of such factors will naturally vary from country to country, depending on its stage of development; their significance also shifts over time, in response to structural changes in the global economy.

Economists have built successful careers on the strength of failures that cannot be ignored. Failed economies have been exhaustively analyzed, critically assessed, painstakingly compared, and laboriously studied over the past decades. Problems related to mindless regulation, rampant inflation, lack of policy implementation, and endemic corruption have kept experts busy since the early decades of the twentieth century, when it became lucrative to propose theories on how economies could improve. But the one factor that seldom enters the discussion when assessing the effectiveness of any particular economic policy concerns the role of women. The single subject that is systematically relegated to peripheral importance is gender. It is in this area that our failures have been the most glaring.

Perhaps we have ignored the gender issue because we have failed to see women as essential protagonists of successful economic development. And perhaps we have underestimated the importance of the role played by the law in influencing the lives of women and enhancing economic opportunities for them. This book will focus on the relationship among these three key factors—women, economic opportunity, and the law—in an attempt to come closer to solving the riddle of equal rights.

WOMEN, BUSINESS, AND THE LAW

For those who have examined gender inequalities from a legal perspective, it rapidly becomes clear that governments virtually everywhere use the law to abuse women’s rights and discriminate against women. And it is equally clear that the first casualty of such discrimination is a woman’s economic empowerment. In every legal system in the world that is in some way geared against gender equality, women suffer from an economic point of view. The Gordian knot between business practice and the laws of the land has effectively created a stranglehold for women everywhere. If they are to acquire those necessary rights that would make them equal partners with men in society, this stranglehold needs to be loosened.

Innumerable studies conducted in recent decades have exposed just how many forms of gender discrimination are embedded in the law and how these varying aspects of discrimination have dramatic economic consequences for the lives of women. The law can curtail job opportunities available to a woman, reducing meaningful recompense for her social contributions. It can impose limits on her working hours or on the types of industries in which she can be employed, excluding her from major sectors of the economy and, in particular, from better-paid jobs. The law can place a married woman at a disadvantage in terms of gender-differentiated property rights, giving control of household assets to her husband. Since banks almost always prefer to use land, buildings, and other physical assets as security for loans, moreover, the law can also prevent a man’s wife from utilizing those assets as collateral to gain independent access to the financial system. The law can impose restrictions on a married woman’s freedom of movement too, requiring that she have permission from her husband to work or to travel. In many countries, moreover, the law designates the husband as head of the household, which gives him control over key decisions, such as choosing the family residence, obtaining official documents necessary to start a business, and engaging in activities that boost entrepreneurship. In all these cases, the law is being used, consciously or not, to undermine the very conditions that would be conducive to the establishment of a more just and equitable society.

Since these facts have gradually become obvious to thinkers and analysts over the past few decades, increasing research has been undertaken to examine the causes and evaluate the consequences of the economic dimensions of gender discrimination sanctioned by laws around the world. One example of such a systematic examination is the Women, Business and the Law (WBL) project at the World Bank, and its findings will be drawn upon in this book as a means of analyzing the links between women, economics, and the law.

The WBL project monitors the relationship between gender equality and the law in 173 economies, accounting for 98 percent of world gross national product. It provides a close reading of the constitutions, the civil codes, the family law, and other legal instruments in these countries in order to assess their impact on women’s lives. It asks a series of critical questions that highlight the possibility of restrictions on women’s participation in the economy in order to reveal areas of gender discrimination within different dimensions of the law. It then analyzes the limits imposed on equality so as to show the impact of such discrimination on the broader economic life of the nation.⁵

Set in relation to one another and in conjunction with a close reading of the law in each of the economies analyzed, the answers to these questions offer a compelling dataset, a fascinating map outlining the legal impediments affecting women’s participation in key areas of economic life. They also provide evidence of how these impediments can compromise the economic performance of the country as a whole. They show, at a glance, not only where the law is being used to abuse woman’s rights but also which forms of abuse directly correlate to and have an impact on the economic health of a nation. The results, based on a cross section of countries, are effectively a clinical diagnosis of the current state of gender equality in the world.

The 2016 Women, Business and the Law report addresses some of the critical questions to be explored in this book. Its data illustrate how the interrelationships between restrictive laws, weakened economies, and women can be enlightening as well as surprising, disturbing but also difficult to ignore. It proves that, like most enduring riddles, the questions we ask often provide us with the best of answers.

These chapter summaries highlight some of those questions.

THE CHAPTERS

1: The People Problem

Where are the missing women of the world and how much are we paying for their disappearance? Who is killing the baby girls and what are the long-term consequences of son preference? In the past, we thought the people problem simply meant there were too many of us. Now we realize that the dangers posed by a population explosion may be less ominous than those we create when we leave half the population out of the definition of us. Chapter 1 analyzes the relationship between gender equality and demographics and asks why men always come first.

2: The Virus of Violence

Why do the privileges of son preference invariably lead to violence against women? How do imbalanced demographic patterns impact the health and survival of women and girls, and what are the exclusively female forms of abuse to which they are subjected in various cultures and societies? Chapter 2 evaluates the root causes and endemic consequences of violence against women and assesses the costs of the physical, psychological, and economic discrimination against them, particularly under the so-called protective guise of provisions and prohibitions of family and labor law.

3: Women and Work

What is woman’s work? Why are women sometimes kept out of the labor force and so often relegated to the least well paid or least prestigious jobs when they choose to join it? What happens to an economy when women who want to work outside the home are given few incentives or are actively discouraged from contributing their talents to society? Chapter 3 looks closely at the consequences of women’s exclusion from the economy, at their underrepresentation in decision-making roles, and at whether or not quotas help address the problem of their diminished political and economic empowerment.

4: The Culture Question

What if outdated labor laws cannot be changed because of cultural taboos? What if women who try to improve their lot become victims of cultural crimes? Can legislation intervene when religion sanctifies certain interpretations of gender roles and rights and privileges the status quo that is resistant to change? Chapter 4 attempts to address one of the most complex, contentious, and ambiguous aspects of gender inequality: namely, how culture and cultural exceptionalism have dominated discussion about the universality of human rights.

5: Rights and Wrongs

Can universal rights really have an impact on gender equality? Can international conventions change age-old customs at the grass roots? And have female suffrage and the vote actually empowered women to legislate change over the course of the past century? Chapter 5 explores this history from the mid-nineteenth century until the present day and looks at the ways in which civil law, common law, and, increasingly, sharia as well as traditional Asian laws have influenced women’s mobility, protected their marital and inheritance rights, and shielded them from legal abuse.

6: Education for Equality

Where does education fit into the equation? How does it influence gender equality and have a lasting impact on the economic health of a society? Is it really the ultimate barrier that could resolve the issue of gender inequality, or is it actually the ultimate threat to young girls who seek higher education in certain cultures? What kind of education can serve the goal of improving gender equality and how far can the fabric of civic society be enhanced and changed by it? In Chapter 6 we gauge the benefits of providing and evaluate the costs of denying education to girls.

7: The Costs of Inequality

This book begins by asking why economies fail and what women have to do with it. But it ends by looking at the costs of maintaining systems of governance that license injustice and privilege gender inequality. Chapter 7 looks closely at the data provided by the WBL project at the World Bank in order to assess which laws must change if women’s rights are to be upheld, their security protected, their employment access improved, and their education enhanced. It asks whether gender equality can really bring prosperity to all.

1

THE PEOPLE PROBLEM

Numbers tell us, quietly, a terrible story of inequality and neglect.

—AMARTYA SEN

When we see extremely skewed demographics, we have very good reason to suspect that something is wrong.

—ERIC RIES

GENDER GENOCIDE

Let us try to keep a measured tone and talk politely about this subject, if we can. The naked truth is that after centuries of denial, we are finally acknowledging what might be called a predilection for sons in certain societies. That is to say, we are now ready to admit that many people, from various cultural backgrounds and across a wide spectrum of ages, have preferred to have baby boys rather than girls. This is one of the most disturbing and age-old manifestations of gender discrimination in the world and is accompanied by its dark double, the rejection of daughters.

Where have all the women gone, and what has happened to our girls?

There are bound to be missing factors in any assessment of what are the drivers of human prosperity. It is difficult to analyze exhaustively how these factors can weaken the fabric of society, or in what ways, for instance, discriminatory labor laws can jeopardize economic growth. But of all the absent elements in this analysis, none is as significant as leaving women out of it altogether.

There was a time when leaving women out of the records was the norm in both East and West. Most women in history, unless they happened to be queens or empresses, notorious prostitutes or apostates, were not considered a significant part of any equation. We learn of the missing through paintings and through literature, through private letters and personal objects, like thimbles, spindles, spoons, and lace. But history rarely gave us the identities of the users. The triumphs and tragedies of half the human race were all too easily obliterated.

But we have become better at keeping track of the missing in our own times. It is possible to maintain records of our losses in undreamed-of ways today. Instead of writing elegies read by few or private diary entries intended for none, we now mourn the missing publicly, litter the window fronts of post offices with photos of lost cats and dogs, and stick the faces of our children on the lampposts of city streets, to advertise their disappearances. And there may be darker reasons too for remembering. Massacres have left their bloody traces on the pages of history. Holocausts and genocides must not be forgotten if they are not to be repeated, even after years of political amnesia and denial. And we have discovered that forensic science can pursue war crimes into their graves and bring their perpetrators to court at last. We have learned to memorialize the missing in order to bear