Blumberg Magic Potion-Poison Potion Soc Dev Handbook-ASR format PDF

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MAGIC POTION/POISON POTION: THE IMPACT OF WOMEN’S ECONOMIC EMPOWERMENT VS. DISEMPOWERMENT FOR DEVELOPMENT IN A GLOBALIZED WORLD Rae Lesser Blumberg

Abstract

Keywords gender, development, globalization, gender stratification, theory

Bill Clinton famously said, “It’s the economy, stupid!” and his emphasis propelled him to the Presidency of the United States; in the movie, Jerry Maguire , the star athlete’s mantra was, “Show me the money.” Yet, despite the importance of economic and monetary factors on our lives, I argue that the impact of whether or not women control money and other economic assets is insufficiently recognized by development scholars. This article is about women, money and development. My claim is that a woman’s economic power is important for her, her family, her community, her nation and even for global development. I also assert that it is very important that in recent years, nearly worldwide, more and more women are not only earning but also gaining more control of income. Why does this matter? The central point of this article is that when women generate – and control – money and other assets, their economic empowerment is linked to a cornucopia of benefits, from greater gender equality to more income growth and well-being for both families and nations. Indeed, I suggest that women’s economic power is a virtual “magic potion for development.” But the converse – women’s economic disempowerment – is linked not only to subjugated women but also to a woeful array of problems, including a widespread worsening of human welfare and a strong correlation with 1

armed conflict. It is a veritable “poison potion for development,” which almost invariably is distorted, slowed or stalled. The article is organized as follows: First, it presents two examples from the Global South where women’s economic position has risen but they have been endangered by practices linked to demands from today’s globalized capitalist economy. The first example is from my own fieldwork in Ecuador (since Peace Corps in Venezuela, I’ve worked in 45 countries in almost every sector of development except large-scale dam projects). The second concerns Bangladesh. Both cases involve relatively poor nations exporting products produced or processed mainly by young women to richer, more powerful nations in our capitalist world system. Though Bangladesh is far more gender-unequal, in both nations, these women have gained new income that helps them, their families and nations. Still, their jobs often involve significant personal risk – although growing movements based on consumer concerns in the rich nations are helping to mitigate the dangers. Meanwhile, to varying degrees, the women have gained control of that income, which boosts its benefits to others and, especially, to themselves. Second, it then introduces hypotheses from my gender theories about how and why women’s control of income is so important to their own position and to development. It also presents supporting data for the “magic potion” thesis. Third, it presents theory and data for the “poison potion for development” argument – that where women do not have economic power, outcomes are often grim. For example, the most male-dominated economies and societies seem more vulnerable to armed conflict and extremist movements, including takeovers. The male-dominated regions and nations are geographically located and traced to rain-fed agrarian societies where women have never been important in key productive activities. The “poison potion” outcomes are divided into the categories of the “four horsemen of the Apocalypse” (war, plague, famine (here, treated as malnutrition) and death, with an Afghanistan case study included in the discussion of war. 2

Fourth, it presents conclusions. These again link women’s economic power vs. lack of it to specific geographic regions with particular types of traditional economies and kin/property systems, as well as considering different development trajectories and current levels of wealth and well-being based on whether these are countries benefitting from the “magic potion of development,” women’s economic power, or suffering from the “poison potion of development,” women’s economic disempowerment.

WHEN WOMEN’S ECONOMIC POWER RISES IN TODAY’S GLOBALIZED WORLD: TWO CASES Ecuador Starting around 1990, Non-Traditional Agricultural Exports (NTAEs) boomed in Ecuador, especially in flowers and broccoli (Blumberg 1992).1 Both cultivation and processing of these crops are very laborintensive. And employers generally have preferred females – for their delicate touch, lower likelihood of organizing and lower wages. In Ecuador’s Central and Southern Andes regions, where economic growth had been low and jobs for young women scarce, a new day dawned. In most places, employers sought young women with above-average education for their locality. Since there’s a lot of seasonal overtime, they could earn more than graduates of the highest academic high school track (baccalaureate). In my Rapid Appraisal research (Blumberg 2002a), young women processing flowers or broccoli for export said they felt personally empowered and so happy that they could help their families: most of them gave some money from each paycheck to their mother (not one gave to the father). But, they said, it was at their own discretion. Almost all stated that their help led to greater appreciation and respect from their families. Another common outcome was that their parents encouraged them to delay marriage and keep on working. They said, too, that their parents often pushed their younger sisters to stay in school so they could get those jobs that paid so well by local standards (Blumberg 1992; Blumberg and SalazarParedes 2011). The risk factor has been pesticide exposure. But protective gear and measures can cut

1 I’ve worked in Ecuador over 30 times since 1989, totaling over 1.5 years, including five times with NTAEs.

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the danger. And international “green label” campaigns already have led many firms to adopt such procedures, especially in flowers. Even so, real dangers to the women persist (ibid.). Ecuador is No. 3 in global flower exports, behind Holland and neighboring Colombia (which has a minimum wage almost $100 less/month). Ecuador’s position is more precarious in flowers than in broccoli, where its location on the equator and fields at just the right (high) altitude result in the world’s greenest, densest florets. But on June 27, 2013, Pres. Raul Correa renounced the Andean Trade Preference Act that permitted free entry of those products (and thousands of others) to the U.S. Current reports about the flower industry range from rosy (Collyns 2015) to cautious (Conefrey 2015). 2 Overall, the future seems less certain for Ecuador’s NTAEs and their mostly female young labor force. Bangladesh At about 169 million, this is the world’s eighth most populous nation (CIA Factbook 2015; Ecuador is under 16 million). Bangladesh is overwhelmingly Muslim, with a patrilineal-patrilocal kin/property system3 and traditional norms of female seclusion (purdah). But when the Grameen Bank and BRAC (the world’s largest NGO) brought microcredit to poor women in the 1980s, the women challenged purdah to spend a few hours every week or fortnight going to the meetings to pay their loan installments and hear talks on, and then discuss, everything from group buying and marketing to the importance of keeping their daughters and sons in school. Bangladesh is arguably the most microcredit-saturated country on Earth, with mostly female-targeted programs in almost every village. It is germane that microcredit programs grew up concomitantly with the government’s strong family planning (Ahmed 2006, 2013). The Total Fertility Rate (TFR) declined from 6.3 children per woman in 1975 (a few years before Mohammad Yunus launched the Grameen Bank ) to 2.2 in 2013 (World Bank 2015a; i.e., a hair above replacement fertility). Meanwhile, women earning income helped send both their boys and girls to school. The 2 Conefrey found only 41 percent of current sales going to the U.S., coupled with a drop in exports to economically troubled Russia, while plantations in East Africa, which are closer to European markets, are booming. 3 Patrilineal descent is reckoned through males and in patrilocal residence, the bride lives with/near the groom’s male kin, usually arriving with no allies or friends; women rarely have de facto land rights, no matter the law.

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gender gap in primary and secondary education has vanished; girls now predominate at both levels (UNESCO 2015; Shamsuddin 2013 says this was aided by an inclusive secondary school Conditional Cash Transfer program4). A better-educated female labor force now is the backbone of the country’s $20 billion/year export textile industry (Motlagh 2014), second largest after China (Haider 2007), with over 4 million workers, some 5600 factories (Weiss 2014) and over 80 percent of exports by value (Stratfor 2015). It’s helped boost women’s total labor force share from 23.9 percent in 1999-2000 to 36 percent in 2010 (ILO 2013; Roy 2012); now fully 57 percent of women are in the labor force (World Bank 2015b). Unfortunately, the industry has burst onto the global media scene because in 2013 a factory fire killed 112 and an eight-story building housing five factories collapsed, leaving over 1,134 dead and 2,515 injured (Motlagh 2014) – in both cases, almost all young women (Weiss 2014). There’s no reason such risks cannot be fixed. So far, more than 150 mostly large European firms that buy these products have signed the legally binding Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh, while 26 mostly large U.S. firms (e.g., Wal-Mart, Sears, Gap) have committed to less rigorous safety upgrades and liability limits – and there are new labor laws on paper although it’s not clear how much they’ll help worker rights (Motlagh 2014). As in Ecuador, outside pressure and campaigns by rich country-based consumer, NGO or labor-oriented groups has helped reduce practices endangering the workers that may be partly attributable to pressures from the powerful firms and countries that buy the products. Overall, it appears that Bangladeshi women earning income from microenterprises or factory jobs have more voice in their households and more freedom of movement than before the transformation began a generation ago, although men remain quite dominant (Ahmed 2013).5 4 Conditional Cash Transfers (CCTs) give money, almost always to the woman, in return for children’s regular school attendance, health visits, or other conditions. They’re mostly successful but may be short-term.

5 In ethnographic research on Muslim, Hindu and “risht” (low-caste) Bangladeshi villages where all women had microcredit loans, Ahmed (2008) found husbands commonly beat their wives but a few did not and treated them more equally; she recommends using such men to change other men as a highly cost-effective way to curb 5

What do these two examples show? First, globalization promotes women’s work and earning power, though often in precarious jobs or activities. Second, globalization also has brought oversight or “green label” campaigns (often with strong female presence) which have led to reducing some of these mostly female export workers’ risks. But third, Do et al. 2011 find that countries making products relying on women’s paid labor become more gender-equal. The next section helps illuminate how this happens: it more closely examines what results from income that women control from their labors.

“MAGIC POTION FOR DEVELOPMENT”: THEORY AND DATA ABOUT WOMEN’S ECONOMIC EMPOWERMENT There are both theoretical and empirical reasons why, for women, money they can control matters so much at both micro and macro levels and why their growing economic power is virtually a “magic potion for development” at levels ranging from the micro (the woman, her children and family, her community) to the macro (the state and even the world economy). First, with respect to theory, both my general theory of gender stratification (e.g., Blumberg 1984, 1988, 1991, 2004a, 2009a, 2015a) and my still-evolving theory of gender and development (e.g., Blumberg 1989a, 1989b, 1995, 2001a, 2004b, 2009b, 2015b) posit that the single most important – although not the only – factor affecting the level of gender equality is relative female/male economic power, defined as control of key economic resources (e.g., income, property, credit). domestic violence. The men’s violence may not be immutable, however: (1) where women have well-established control of income, they are less likely to be beaten (Blumberg 1978, in a 61-society sample; 2004b); indeed, (2) the strongest predictor of violence against women is economic dependence (Levinson 1989, in a 90-society sample), and (3) in Mexico, there was an initial spike in wife beating when women first received income from a Conditional Cash Transfer program; other CCT programs have since avoided this via proactive measures (World Bank 2012:34). More generally, some laws can constrain women’s economic activities, while other laws and government policies, including those against domestic violence, can help their economic empowerment as well (World Bank 2013). Valentine Moghadam’s article, this volume, discusses government policies and programs affecting women.

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Third, the article also posits and presents empirical data that for gender equality, economic is both the most important as well as the most achievable of the five main types of power; the other types are political, force/violence, ideology and information/education. In fact, economic also is the only form of power where women, not infrequently, have surpassed men, i.e., the only one that crosses the “50-50 line” of gender equality. In fact, it ranges from near-zero for women (men control almost the whole economic pie, as in Afghanistan today (Blumberg 2015b; see below)) to near-100 percent (women control almost the whole economic pie, as among the Iroquois of Colonial North America; Brown 1975, Blumberg 2001b). In none of the other types of power do women effectively and broadly wield more than half. So, let’s consider women’s relative empirical position in those other four types of power: 

Women fare worst with the power of force. They’re more often the victims than the wielders of violence (it is relevant that women have 1/3 to 1/2 less upper-body strength and that men historically have controlled most heavy weapons).

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Women are moving up in political power, though mainly in representation in parliament, where the world average in September 2015 was 22.9% women in the lower house (IPU 2015; the U.S. ranks 76th, with 19.4% women in Congress). Actually, 22.9% is double that of 1995. The “quota revolution” began in earnest in that year, when all 189 nations at the Fourth World Conference on Women adopted a Plan for Action (PFA) and Beijing Declaration encouraging governments to establish targets (Blumberg and Vichit-Vadakan 2012). By 2015, 128 nations had some form of gender quota in parliaments at the national and/or sub-national level (IDEA 2015). But in top cabinet posts and as heads of state, women’s proportion remains much lower.

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With respect to ideology, there are still many societies that consider men superior and none that consider women superior (although 136 nations’ constitutions now proclaim male-female equality/nondiscrimination; World Bank 2012:2). 7

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Concerning information/education, globally, girls’ gender gap in primary education narrowed from 92 girls per 100 boys in 1999 to 97/100 in 2012.6 Regionally, only sub-Saharan Africa and the Arab States remain below parity although some of the South Asian countries also remain well below, e.g., Afghanistan, with 72 girls per 100 boys enrolled in primary school (UNESCO 2015). Secondary education improved from 91 girls/100 boys in 1999 to nearly 97/100 in 2012. And at the level of higher education, more women than men now attend universities (World Bank 2012:9). But despite this progress, full educational equality for the world’s females remains a long way off, especially in the poorest region, sub-Saharan Africa, as well as in the traditionally most male-dominant regions, Middle East/North Africa (MENA) and South Asia. In the U.S., females outnumber males at all levels of higher education up to and including the Ph.D. And women now outnumber men as college graduates (Nelson 2015). But women still lag well behind men in most of the (better-paying) science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields – with a major exception: U.S. women are at parity with men in life/biological/health sciences Ph.D. degrees (Blumberg 2009a?).

Also, just because a country has opened its educational system to women doesn’t mean that it will welcome their labor force participation (LFP). Four of the places in MENA with the world’s lowest female LFP rates (World Bank 2015b) have more women than men in higher education (UNESCO 2012: 79): Algeria (15% F LFP); Iran (17% F LFP); Jordan (16% F LFP), and West Bank/Gaza (15% F LFP). Also, empirical data show that women’s economic position remains the strongest form of power in affecting the wealth of nations. Comparing losses due to inequality in female employment vs. in education, a UN Economic and Social Survey of Asia and the Pacific estimated that the region lost $42 to $47 billion annually because of women’s limited access to employment, vs. only $16 to $30 billion lost annually because of inequality in education (United Nations 2007:103). More recently, Jim Yong Kim, the President of the World Bank, in a Washington Post column (Kim 2014:A15), cited a study that “women’s

6 Parity has been defined as 97 of either gender to 100 of the other (UNESCO 2015).

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low economic participation created income losses of 27 percent in the Middle East and North Africa.” The study, by Cuberes and Teignier (2012), also estimated that raising female employment and entrepreneurship to male levels could improve average income by 23 percent in South Asia and by 15 percent elsewhere. In sum, economic is, indeed, women’s most consequential form of power. And it’s still growing: In 2008, women comprised 40 percent of the world’s labor force and 44 percent of its paid labor force (World Bank 2012:212). The current world average of female labor force participation is 53 percent – i.e., in the average country, more than half the women are in the labor force (World Bank 2014a, author’s calculations). Within India, the “states that have the highest percentage of women in the labor force have grown the fastest as well as had the greatest reductions in poverty, according to the World Bank” (Faiola 2008:A12). Plus, in a 2006 analysis of the strongest factors promoting growth in global GDP from ~1985-2005, The Economist concluded: The increase in female employment in the rich world has been the main driving force of growth for the last couple of decades. Those women have contributed more to global GDP growth than has either new technology or the new giants, China and India (The Economist April 6, 2006:16). To drive home their point, the article’s title was: “Forget China, India and the Internet: Economic Growth is Driven by Women.” Next, as the foundation for understanding just how female economic power acts as a “magic potion for development,” I’ll present some hypotheses from my gender stratification and gender and development theories and mention some supporting empirical studies. A. Micro-Level Hypotheses: Greater Women’s Economic Power  Greater Personal Autonomy & Greater Welfare of their Children 1. Greater Personal Autonomy a. >Self-confidence: I’ve never seen a negative case. An early study is Kusterer et al. (1981), who found that well-paid Guatemalan women processing plant workers 9

controlled their income and increased in independence/self-reliance, self-confidence, self-esteem and perceived respect of their families; the researchers called this “the most important and most positive [finding] of all” (ibid.: 81...