Top Quotes: “The Double X Economy: The Epic Potential of Women’s Empowerment” — Linda Scott

Introduction

“As the car whirled through the unlit streets of Accra, my heart pounded. The driver explained the scenes moving past us, his voice full of rage and sorrow.

Hundreds of homeless adolescent girls moved like shadows in the night. Some were half-naked, bathing in buckets because they had nowhere private to go. Others slept in piles. “They run from the villages,” the driver said. “Their parents want to sell them to a man they don’t know, to be a wife who must work like an animal by day and submit sexually by night. They run to the city, believing they can escape.”

Many had pregnant bellies or were holding infants. Rape was a fact of daily life in the villages, he said, but these streets were no safer. “We have a generation growing up, from birth, on the street,” the driver said in anguish. “They will never know a family or a community. How will they learn right from wrong? What will happen to Ghana when these children become adults?”

Many girls worked in the markets carrying shoppers’ purchases in baskets they balanced atop their heads, but some fell into prostitution. Still others became trapped in a nightmare of ancient stature: the slave trade that still emanates from West Africa and feeds the vast crime rings of the world.”

“The unlikely truth that equal economic treatment for women would put a stop to some of the world’s costliest evils, while building prosperity for everyone, is at the core of this book’s argument.”

“An unparalleled influx of data since 2005 reveals this reality: a distinctive pattern of economic inequality marks the female population of every nation, each with the same mechanisms holding the disadvantages in place. Everywhere, the barriers to women’s economic inclusion reach beyond work and salary to encompass property ownership, capital, credit, and markets. These economic impediments, combined with the cultural constraints usually imposed on women — limited mobility, reproductive vulnerability, and the ever-present threat of violence — form a shadow economy unique to females: I call it “the Double X Economy.””

“Male economists’ animus toward women has recently been the subject of essays in The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Financial Times, and The Economist. Press attention was sparked by a study that revealed, in shocking detail, what economists say about women in private. A million posts from an online discussion group where economics students and faculty gossip about their colleagues were analyzed to see whether, in unguarded moments, economists spoke about men and women differently. The words most frequently used about a female colleague were hotter, lesbian, sexism, tits, anal, marrying, feminazi, slut, hot, vagina, boobs, pregnant, pregnancy, cute, marry, levy, gorgeous, horny, crush, beautiful, secretary, dump, shopping, date, nonprofit, intentions, sexy, dated, and prostitute. The terms used in connection with males were mathematician, pricing, advisor, textbook, motivated, Wharton, goals, Nobel, and philosopher. Female economists told journalists these word lists reflect the way senior economists teach junior members to disparage women.

Economics is the most male-dominated field in the universities worldwide — more so than even the science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields. Because of rising numbers of women in science, more than half of Ph.D.s in scientific fields now go to women in some countries — like the United States — but less than a third of economics doctorates do. Women’s representation hasn’t improved in decades because economists don’t see a problem with their gender mix. As explained by the economist Shelly Lundberg, “Conventional wisdom in most disciplines is that diversity per se is good. Mainstream economics tends to reject that a reflection of the willingness to believe that lack of diversity is an efficient market outcome. Economists are much more likely to believe that if there aren’t many women in the field, it must be because they’re not very interested or not very productive.”

The culture of economics departments, however, strongly suggests a different explanation. Forty-eight percent of female economics professors say they have experienced sex discrimination on the job. There is a pervasive atmosphere of bullying: many point to the economics research presentations required of new recruits, junior professors, and doctoral students, which are always subject to hostile scrutiny by the male faculty “trying to nail the speaker to the blackboard.” At academic conferences, 46 percent of women say they will not answer a question or present an idea for fear of being treated unfairly. In 2018, the American Economic Association acknowledged that misogyny in the field resulted in “unacceptable behavior [that| has been allowed to continue through tacit toleration.” Leah Boustan, a Princeton economist, explains that economics professors see women as an inferior class whose entry into the discipline threatens their status. These academics therefore intimidate women, hoping they will leave so as to keep their own prestige intact.

Economics as a discipline has an outsize impact on society because of its role in advising governments. “If systemic gender bias skews the way the field looks at things,” said The Economist, “that has implications for the policymakers and others looking to academic economists for analysis, advice or indeed wisdom.” Economics professors’ bias against real women translates into a negative attitude toward the topic of women’s economics, making it hard for the Double X Economy to win a place on the global agenda.

The philosophy that underpins this intransigent stance also presents an imposing barrier. The first principle is that the economy is built on the collective actions of rational, informed individuals who act independently to make free choices in their own interest. Such an economy, if left to its own devices, is said to aggregate into the optimal outcomes for everyone — no matter how unequal things may look — as if guided by Adam Smith’s famous “invisible hand.” If someone has not benefited from this economic dexterity, then she either has some inborn deficit or has self-selected into her disadvantages.

The Double X Economy struggles with conditions so opposed to these basic premises that they falsify the entire philosophy. As we shall see over the course of this book, women, as a class, have severely constrained choices, have important information actively withheld from them, and are punished for showing anything like self-interest. Indeed, when it comes to economic choices, women can seldom act independently; rather, they are often coerced into acting irrationally — that is, against their own best interests. Women contend with economic exclusion, not merely unequal economic outcomes.”

“The only explanation the prevailing philosophy can offer is that (a) women are biologically inferior when it comes to any kind of economic engagement or (b) they have chosen to put themselves in an underprivileged position in every country and every domain in the woild economy, a proposition that is as bigoted as it is implausible.”

“We can now say, with considerable evidentiary support, that excessive male dominance is actually a destabilizing factor that reduces the chances for survival, especially because it so often leads to conflict. But the default explanation that gender equality was a luxury — and that male power somehow made populations better off — fit people’s beliefs, so, at the time, folks just accepted it.”

“The capability that working women have to create prosperity has now been proved using data from 163 countries. Men, in all countries, form the bedrock of the economy because pretty much all of them work, more or less all the time. That means, short of a revolution in productivity, growth is not going to come from male labor because men are maxed out. Women, however, are often an untapped or underutilized resource, so getting more females engaged causes the economy to grow. The data shows that women’s entry into the labor force is additive, so the new trend does not result in employment losses for men, as is often feared. The belief that economic inclusion for women is a zero-sum game — that is, that gains by one sex happen at the expense of the other — has proved false.

By helping countries to prosper, women’s economic empowerment produces a better environment for all citizens. But the reverse is also true: where women have no freedoms, everyone suffers. In the poorest and most fragile countries, indicators of gender equality are lowest and the effects of women’s economic exclusion are devastating, perpetuating poverty and contributing to violence, as well as increasing hunger, denying children’s needs, wasting resources, feeding slavery, and encouraging conflict. The destructive impact of extreme male dominance in these societies is felt by everyone on earth.

Enabling women is now a proven strategy in the fight against suffering. “As study after study has taught us, there is no tool for development more effective than the empowerment of women,” wrote Kofi Annan, Secretary-General of the United Nations.”

“In the World Economic Forum’s Executive Opinion Survey, managers in 132 nations are asked, “In your country, for similar work, to what extent are wages for women equal to those of men?” The sum of their answers is not a direct report of actual pay, but an estimate of what normative practice is in that country — what women are customarily and, implicitly, fairly paid.”

“At the level of global exchange, where the markets and profits are very large, the exclusion of women is nearly total. Very few women participate in international trade or win large institutional sales contracts, both areas of the economy in which men control a staggering 99 percent of business. Yet, according to the International Monetary Fund, introducing better gender balance to global trade would be beneficial, because such diversity makes economies more resistant to downturns and more prone to innovation.”

“Intimate partner violence against women costs the global economy US$4.4 trillion annually, or 5.2 percent of GDP. To put that into perspective, it’s about the same percentage that nations spend on primary education, and thirty times what the world spends on international aid. Because domestic attacks are so often witnessed by children — and boys tend to repeat the behavior as men — their economic impact continues far into the future.”

“The Double X Economy therefore brings an ethic of leadership that could quell the worst impulses of the patriarchal system. Having been excluded from the world of high finance and quick riches throughout history, women appear to assess risk more realistically than do men. Having been charged with the cultivation of children, they seem to have a longer horizon than their male compatriots for return on investment, as well as a greater aversion to long-term damage, such as is happening to the environment. Perhaps because of their historical emphasis on home and connection, women are more likely to invest in their communities, to give to charity, and to demand social responsibility from both the products and stocks they buy.”

“Women are economically disadvantaged in every country in the world. Indeed, it appears that women are economically unequal within every group on the planet. There are no religious, ethnic, class, or racial groups in which women, as a class, are as economically autonomous as men. It’s because females are unequal in every group that a program to better include women economically would benefit all segments of the world population, including the most marginalized people. Never in history have we had such a vivid blueprint for eliminating suffering, achieving justice, and ensuring peace. Never before has it been possible to troubleshoot one problem and solve so many others. What we can achieve is worth every effort we can make, every new tool we can invent, and any funds we have to invest. Now is the time for all women and men to join the movement to empower the Double X Economy.”

Blaming Women

“We found that girls did indeed miss school because they had only improvised sanitary materials. However, we also learned that they did not drop out of school from academic discouragement but because of forced marriage, pregnancy, or a decision to run away.

When a girl menstruated, we were told, she was considered “ripe” by the men in her community and therefore both marriageable and sexually available. Her father would want to marry her off quickly to get the ‘bride price,” a significant payment that a groom makes to the father in exchange for his daughter. The going rate for a wife was about US$500, with which a father could buy a cow and still have US$150 left over.

The girl’s marriage also unburdened the parents of her education and upkeep. So marrying your daughter off early looked like a great deal. The father usually chose the prospective husband who made the best offer or struck a bargain with someone to whom he owed a debt. I once asked a teacher in Ghana whether daughters had any choice over what man they married. “No!” he snapped. “When you are a woman, you do not choose!” I let it drop, unsure whether he was incensed by the practice or with me for asking an impertinent question.

After marrying, the daughter usually moved to live with her husband’s family, often in a village some distance away, and was thereafter required to turn over any earnings she might have to him or his relatives. The birth parents, therefore, did not see any economic value in keeping their daughters in school; they were more likely to invest in their sons’ education because the boys stay at home, gradually taking over farms and supporting their parents in old age. These cultural arrangements common across the developing world — result in a strong preference for sons.”

“Girls being raised by a relative other than their parents — which was often the case, given the HIV/AIDS epidemic — sometimes had their economic support taken away from them when they began to menstruate. The relative would insist that the girl was a woman now and should be able to take care of herself. As we were told by mothers, aunts, and grandmothers, the common expectation was that the girl would “take a boyfriend” to support herself, especially if she wanted to stay in school. If she got pregnant, this boyfriend sometimes married her, but otherwise she and her child fell further into poverty.

Too often, pregnancy was the result of rape. Iwas shocked at how common forced sex was and how much it was tolerated. A 2012 study of fifty thousand schoolgirls in ten African countries showed that a third of sixteen-year-old girls had experienced forced sex, usually from about the age of twelve — probably on the arrival of puberty. Coercion was more likely when the community had a favorable attitude toward transactional sex, and many adults themselves had experienced forced sex.”

“Keeping menstruation a secret was critically important to making the change. Unfortunately, the materials girls used in place of sanitary pads were a dead giveaway. They used “found” cloth, usually scraps from old garments, but sometimes stuffing from mattresses or anything else that might absorb fluid. However, the materials usually were not absorbent enough, so leaks were frequent; if that happened in a public place like school, they were “outed.”

But it gets worse. Cloth has to be washed and dried, yet there was no plumbing, and often girls did not have soap or a private place where the materials could dry. They rinsed the cloth in river water (which is often unclean) and tried to dry it in a secret place, usually under a bed, where it was dark and dirty. Because cloth was scarce, they had to wear each scrap again, even while it was still damp. After a day or two, the cloth would emit a distinctive odor that everyone recognized, and some would comment openly. The health agencies taught girls to hang cloth to dry in sunlight, but putting the bloodstained rags in public view only made the girls more vulnerable.”

“Ten years later, sanitary pad programs are common in economic development. NGOs and governments work to make sure girls have them, and a whole community of researchers has grown up around the effort. Local entrepreneurs produce affordable, eco-friendly versions, as well as better means of disposal. One day, the United

Nations’ water and sanitation group leader telephoned me to ask about pads for a policy discussion. As she explained the debate, she remarked that the committee felt the real issue was dignity, not education, and that access to pads should be a human right. I felt proud; we had accomplished a lot. But if we had proceeded based on the explanations for the macro-data from outside observers — that the girls sold themselves for cool clothes or became academically discouraged or went home to help their mothers — we would have been well off the mark and misguided in our solutions.

I am now conducting a study in Uganda to assess whether mobile banking accounts help rural women keep control of their earnings. Back in the 2000s, mothers we interviewed accepted that their daughters would marry instead of finishing school and blamed them if they got pregnant or ran away. Today, when I ask this new generation of mothers what they are saving for, they tell me they want to ensure their daughters can stay in school. I get this answer from women whether or not they went to school themselves — they hope their daughters’ paths will be different from their own. By economically empowering these mothers, we can help them make that happen.”

“Several interviewees alluded to an outlier, a prestigious school in the Midwest that had been able to train, hire, and retain an unusually high number of female finance faculty. A woman there told me her school was so different because its first dean had insisted people be polite to one another. To me, it spoke volumes that ordinary courtesy would make such a huge difference.

Most female business school faculty also struggle with student aggression. Male primacy among MBAs is established by taking down a teacher. Believing that women are born bad with numbers, these students usually try to catch a female professor in a math error while teaching. In one story, a group of male MBAs made a pact to reduce their female teacher to tears before the end of the term. They reached their goal, with time to spare. The schools generally don’t discipline MBA students, leaving female faculty without recourse.

Female students are undermined by the aggressive culture, too. A few top schools have seen that even though incoming females had the same qualifications, their performance declined during the first semester. Finance classes, in which teachers and male students alike were reported to be disdainful toward women, had a particularly negative impact. Women who planned finance careers switched to marketing, believing that they “must not have what it takes.” Because the toxic behavior in the schools affects career choice, it is then carried out into the financial sector.”

“In the business schools, the problem was said to be that women simply were unable to do math, which meant they were incapable of doing the “hard” research required to succeed. If women were biologically bad at math, not much could be done about it. And that is exactly what the finance professors wanted done — nothing. But even when the women did do the math — and did it correctly — the finance guys changed the narrative to maintain their prejudice, saying they must have had help from a man. So, the actual problem here was the disrespect the alpha males had for women. These men are extremely unlikely to be convinced by anyone else that they are wrong.

In both cases, therefore, the actual propellant behind the numbers was coming not from the females, but from the males, who exerted their will through the institutions they dominated by monopolizing decision-making and control over resources. Research shows that aggressive male behavior will continue for as long as it is rewarded. In business schools, the faculty aggressors are paid the most and command deference from everyone. Fathers in Africa get paid for selling their daughters and improve their standing with other men by doing so. Even the rapists get sex without consequences and assert an attitude of prowess that gives them status.

Other features typical of the Double X Economy are present in both instances. Patriarchs make decisions for everyone else in each place — imposing marital norms on females who would rather pursue education and autonomy than bow under an expectation of silent servitude and self-sacrifice; fertility is used as a blunt instrument on both continents, with the African girls being forced to bear children, and the American women being heavily pressured to give up motherhood for work, or work for motherhood. In both instances, females are being deprived of the fruits of education because of the patriarchy’s ideas about the proper role for a wife.”

“In psychology, this sensitivity to gender role conflict is called “precarious manhood” or “masculine gender role stress” (MGRS): men who are too tightly attached to traditional notions of masculinity react with outsize anger to any gender role challenge, even trivial or subtle ones. Economic dominance is a particularly sensitive issue for them. Psychologists explain this behavior by pointing to a pervasive need among males to “earn manhood” continually throughout life: the never-ending pressure makes some men particularly sensitive to the constant risk of being found inadequate. When directly confronted, these men respond with a flash of disproportionate wrath and then need to reestablish their manhood in order to let go of that rage. In laboratory tests and field studies, they defuse their anger by punching things, engaging in risky behavior, spending money, or gambling. In real life, these men, as a group, tend to drink a lot, beat their wives, gamble, and do drugs. One thing precarious men consistently do under threat is to reject any proposition that implies or refers to gender equality. Crucially, however, precarious men appear to be a distinct minority; in the studies, the men who did not exhibit the response were between 60 and 80 percent of the sample.

In a situation where MGRS men are setting the tone, normal men also become stressed about the requirements for manhood and will behave in ways they usually would not, sometimes by acquiescing silently and others by becoming aggressive themselves. Importantly, their response is not about the women at all, but is a matter of signaling loyalty and worthiness of “manhood” to other guys. The end result is often that all the men close ranks against the women, blocking a more productive response.”

“According to research, the key to resolving this situation is to change the gender balance of the group by increasing the number of females. A practical rule of thumb is that, at about 30 percent female, the problem begins to diminish; at about 40 percent, it has nearly disappeared. The business schools, however, would face the same catch-22 that many other male-dominated organizations confront: they need to change the gender ratio to dissipate the toxic environment, but they can’t get women to stay because of the toxic environment.

In the business schools, efforts similar in purpose to Dean Nitin Nohria’s program at HBS have been undertaken since 2014. As a result, most schools have actually increased their percentage of women faculty pretty impressively in the past five years. A key strategy in softening school culture has been to accept equal numbers of males and females into the MBA programs instead of the 70-to-30 or worse skews that had been typical. According to my interviews, changing the gender mix of the students has an immediate positive impact on the culture by reducing MBA aggression — the faculty say they can feel the difference right away. The second strategy has been to reduce the number of finance classes the students take, especially in their first term. That way, the finance guys don’t have as much opportunity to set the tone by rewarding male students for aggression and using it to diminish the female students. By requiring students to take a full slate of finance classes in the first term, the schools had also been holding up finance professors as models to be emulated; reducing the number of finance classes gave other faculty the chance to step forward as heroes, especially by teaching courses on leadership or business ethics, which have a positive effect in themselves. In essence, the business schools addressed their gender problem by addressing some of the institutional issues perpetuating it. And that approach produced progress.”

Excluding Women

“East African custom holds that the widow herself is property and so cannot own property. Without property or income of her own, she would have no way to feed her children if she tried to take them away, so she is usually forced to submit to “wife inheritance,” a practice whereby she becomes the wife of one of the tribe’s other males. The question of which man the widow will marry is not for her to decide. The way it works is that the men who stand to inherit the deceased man’s property have sex with her until they decide which one will take her as a wife. “That evening [after the funeral], many men come to her and there is no control,” a Kenyan woman explained to Human Rights Watch. “She would have the ability to say no but for economic factors. If this man is giving you soap, this man is giving you meat, you cannot say no. It is only those women that are economically empowered that can say no to sex. This man comes with inducements, with inducements she needs.” Many communities in East Africa also practice “widow cleansing,” by which a designated “cleanser,” usually an outcast, rapes the widow; his sperm removes her deceased husband’s ghost, making her “clean” enough to be acceptable to her new keeper.

All this is done without a condom. As a widow cleanser in Kenya explains, “I don’t use condoms with the women. It must be body to body … If no sperm comes out, she is not inherited … don’t do anything to stop pregnancy. Two widows have had my children. I don’t act as the father or give assistance.” Uganda has one of the highest rates of HIV/AIDS in the world, and women there are twice as likely as men to have it.

Improbably, what I have so far described is the more orderly process. In a custom called “property grabbing,” any male relative can come to the dead man’s home, throw the widow and her children out, and plant himself as a claim on everything there. Others then make competitive claims, and violence often breaks out.

Why doesn’t the widow go back to her birth family? Her parents were paid a bride price at the time of marriage. Her family cannot take her back unless they repay the husband’s clan. The birth family would also have to take on the economic support of the widow and her children. Girls are married to distant clans in the first place because they are an economic burden. So, her own family may not allow the widow to return.”

“The best security a woman can have is a son to inherit land and so provide limited safety for her and her female children. The international community can be judgmental about this attitude, but son preference among women is rooted in real fears. The economics must change before the attitude can.”

“Groups of men organized into cooperatives to win regular contracts with food buyers from the city. The men’s groups uniformly barred women from membership, as agricultural co-ops in developing countries usually do.

All over the world, food buyers award large contracts to males, even though the work is mostly done by women, whether as subcontractors, wage laborers, or unpaid family members. For example, FAO reports that 70 percent of the sugar contract farming in South Africa is done by women. Females put in longer hours than men do in vegetable contract farming in the Punjab, though the contracts are controlled by men. A large contract-farming scheme in China explicitly excluded women from signing the contracts, but thousands of women farmers did the bulk of the work. In Kenya, only 10 percent of all large farming contracts are held by women, while in Senegal the figure is 1 percent. Contractors avoid deals with female farmers because their hold over land is insecure, they don’t produce large volumes, don’t have the right equipment or transportation, don’t have the stability that a credit line gives you, and just generally represent a supply risk.

The folks gathered at Rose’s told me that, on the same day each week, big trucks from the cities would roll into the valley and stop at a designated place to buy produce. The trucks were coming the next day, so I got up at dawn and went to see it for myself. Men brought in huge amounts of produce. They appeared to have their own pickup trucks or to be sharing them. They seemed to know the truck drivers and obviously had prearranged transactions. Once in a while, I saw a woman with a big bunch of bananas strapped to her back, and maybe a baby on her front, walking from truck to truck, looking bewildered. The women could not break into the routinized conversations and transactions. And the trucks were buying only in volume, not in bunches from someone’s back.

Women are typically limited to squeezing income from a small plot close to home — graciously “given” by husbands–by growing a little produce or raising small animals. At the same time, they do most of the work on their husbands’ land, for which they go unpaid, and they also take care of the house and children. Sometimes they try to sell handicrafts. Women typically do not share any income from their husbands’ land, even though they provide most of the labor. So, in addition to being unable to join in the large contracts, they don’t see money for themselves from their husbands’ profit. Husbands will take produce that their wives have planted, cultivated, processed, and packaged, then sell it in the marketplace and pocket the money. Men then give their wives cash for what they deem to be necessities.”

“The most prominent reason companies work with women in agriculture is to ensure supply. Men are moving to cities and emigrating to other countries at increasing rates to look for work, but the women they leave behind to farm are still seriously disadvantaged. Manufacturers like Coca-Cola and Mondelèz, which need certain crops to produce their products, and retailers like Walmart and Marks & Spencer, which sell certain fruits and vegetables directly to consumers, are getting worried about the effect that leaving women — with their limited rights and resources — responsible for farming will have on supply. Already, the future supply of bananas, coffee, and cocoa has been jeopardized, and other crops seem likely to follow.

We should all be concerned about the impact this inefficiency in agricultural markets has on world hunger and poverty. The United Nations says that 925 million people in the world are chronically hungry; of those, 150 million would be fed if we removed the disadvantages for women in food production. Research also shows that when the playing field is level, female farmers produce as much as men. For the many poor nations that rely on agriculture as their primary source of GDP, fixing this specific gender problem would cause an increase of about 2.5 to 4 percent per annum.”

“Violence frequently takes the form of purposeful starvation. The displeased man will withhold food from the woman — and sometimes her children as well — until he sees fit to restore her right to eat. A 2011 University of, Texas study, for instance, found that half of married women in rural Bangladesh had been physically abused by their partners in the previous year. In this culture, the women are not allowed to leave their residence, so everything that comes into the home must arrive in the hands of the head of household, making intentional starvation a convenient means of punishment. “They beat us so much but we don’t go away,” reported one. “They don’t bring food when they are angry, not even for their children.” Many of these respondents chose to go hungry rather than risk a beating by asking for more food. One woman gave her food to her daughters but would not mention her own hunger because, she said, “He will beat me at night.”I

Male dominance over the allocation of food is most visible in the widespread practice of feeding females in a family last and least. Different dinnertimes, different rooms for eating, and different foods deemed “for women” are all ways in which unequal food allocation is ritualized and made “part of our culture.””

“Low birth weights are associated not only with many risks in infancy but also with diseases and weaknesses that persist throughout life; infants born of malnourished mothers are 20 percent more likely to die within their first five years. For a long time, though, it was argued that countries where smaller babies were born simply had other cultural preferences. (Or something. “It’s their culture” is a refrain that covers a lot of nonsense.) Anyway, INTERGROWTH-21st established definitively that birth weight is a function of how well the mother has been fed and cared for. The countries that have small babies are places where women are not treated well — and, in particular, are fed last and least.

But that’s not all. This research team says that the nutritional and health care of the woman, even before pregnancy, has an impact on the child; females must be cared for over the course of years before conceiving. Birth defects, some of them heritable, can be caused when a female is not fed well enough, even in childhood, because all the eggs a female will ever have are in her body when she is born. Whenever she sustains low nutrition, those ovaries are more likely to be damaged. So, the practice of feeding females less not only produces a whole train of people who are smaller than they should be, but also fits them out with a kit of diseases and hands them more birth defects.”

“According to evolutionary scientists, the human mind evolved in a setting of violent conflict wherein coalitions of males struggled to gain dominance over one another. Current scientific thinking holds that testosterone itself is most properly understood as an expression of the impulse to dominate. The appetite for dominance further translates into a personality trait, social dominance orientation (SDO). People with high SDO prefer a rigid hierarchy that their own group dominates and approve of violence to maintain their power. High SDOs are more likely to be male, sexist, homophobic, and racist. They prefer authoritarian, male-dominant social structures. Some evidence suggests that SDO may be inherited. Decision-making and discipline in any organization where there is a higher proportion of SDO people than those with egalitarian values would profoundly affect the daily experience of each individual — and would certainly reduce inclusivity toward women. This would be particularly true in groups where the SOs hold the top posts.

Evolutionary scientists therefore emphasize that, even though we have had a long history of violent social dominance by males, the human orientation to dominance is highly malleable. This is true in part because the human brain gives our species a special ability to assess situations and then to change radically and rapidly in response.

This ability is one reason that Homo sapiens now covers the world, while our cousins still live solely in Africa.”

“We can inter something about ancient hunter-gatherer societies by looking at the few “forager” societies observed by modern anthropologists. Women often hunt in these societies. They normally kill small animals, close to home, as do men. Men hunt big game, but such expeditions don’t occur often. Indeed, hunting big game is actually an inefficient means of getting food, and meat is not usually a big part of the diet; rather, most groups subsist mainly on plant foods. The men nevertheless recount elaborate stories of big-game hunting — apparently endlessly — so meat becomes solidly identified with masculinity. Some anthropologists suggest that the function of hunting is better understood as “status signaling” among the men, rather than as a quest for nutrients.

The earliest humans did not form nuclear families.”

“Once humans began forming settlements, the fighting between groups led to raiding, establishing a new basis for subsistence: goods taken by violence. As the most aggressive raiders wiped out settlements — in the same way gangster chimps destroy others the human way of life became even more violent. As with the warrior chimps, the destruction of more peaceful communities and the capture of females for breeding would have skewed our species further toward violent domination. Eventually, hunting and raiding grew into a phenomenon that encircled the globe: the warrior economy.

From there, human history marched on like four thousand seasons of Game of Thrones. Warrior societies built vast stores through conquest. Kings and emperors, as well as their circles of sycophants, controlled the wealth and distributed it among the best warriors, so, like hunters, they had material advantages as well as prestige. These men, the most violent in the society, were also rewarded with multiple wives, so they had more opportunities to leave their mark on the gene pool than less warlike males did — possibly pushing humanity further down the path of selecting for dominance.”

“The “traditional” nuclear family with a single male provider has been the standard for only about 150 years out of humanity’s 200,000-year history.”

“Man the Hunter, said mid-twentieth-century archaeologists, was a carnivore with a killer instinct that female humans did not have. He was tall and walked upright to see large game across the savanna. His big brain gave him the idea that first separated humans from animals: tools, especially for killing prey. Man the Hunter traveled in all-male groups and was often goné from home for a long time.

This scenario has been completely debunked. We don’t have the teeth of a carnivore, nor do the remains of our predecessors. Proto-humans were not tall, did not live on the savanna, did not hunt large game, lived in trees rather than caves, ate mostly plants, and had brains the size of chimps’. They were more likely to be prey than predator. No one knows whether men or women invented tools. Yet Man the Hunter continues to enforce gender roles in the economy.”

“Women’s economic subordination is too cruel, too widespread, and too lasting to be blamed on a five-thousand-year-old farming echnology. Furthermore, plows are not usually pushed or pulled by people, but instead are harnessed to large draft animals. Plows had wheels early on, and then seats to sit on while the animals worked. How much upper-body strength one really needed is questionable.

As with hunting, it’s not so much that women can’t plow but that no one notices when they do. Throughout history, women have plowed whenever a husband or father died or became incapacitated. They have also plowed when men went off to war — and continued to do so if their men didn’t return. For instance, in the U.K, and the United States during both world wars, women were recruited by the government to farm — and to plow, as can plainly be seen in recruiting materials from the period.

Not only are women strong enough to push a plow; they can pull it in place of draft animals. I found a travelogue written in 1870 in which an American describes a scene said to be common in Germany. A man would harness his wife to a plow, then drive the woman like an animal while he himself sat on the little seat and smoked. The American claimed that German women were proud to do this for their men.”

“You can read histories of the Silk Road until your eyes burn and never see mention that women made the luxury fabric that built China.

The production of silk in China was brutally hard work that gave us foot-binding, an iconic emblem of women’s subordination. Early in the twenty-first century, Laurel Bossen and Hill Gates traveled to interview the last surviving women who’d had their feet bound. Bossen and Gates established that the purpose of foot-binding was not sexual, as had previously been thought. Instead, this crippling act was performed on three- to five-year-old girls to immobilize them so they would sit still for the lone hours required to spin. Somewhere in the past, demand for fabric became so great that women worked day and night, struggling to keep up with quotas. The pressure was so intense that mothers would perform this mutilation on their own daughters. It had been going on for centuries. Does this count as hard, dangerous, and important work?”

Polygamy and Veiling

“Polygamy has been common more recently than you might think. Having multiple wives or concubines was legal in China until the People’s Republic was established in 1949. Hindu men in India were allowed to take multiple wives until the Hindu Marriage Act of 1955. Though a few Muslim-majority states, like Tunisia and Turkey, have outlawed polygamy, most Islamic states still allow it — and India, home to one of the world’s largest Muslim populations, makes an exception to allow Muslim men to have multiple wives. Today, polygamy is still accepted in fifty-eight states scattered through Africa, the Middle East, Central and South Asia, and the Malay Archipelago.

Having many wives has been a way for men to display wealth and status in all polygamous societies. “Common” men have often been limited by law or religion to one wife, while higher-ranking men could have many. For example, in Indian history, the number of wives a man could have was determined by caste.”

“The Incan emperor lavishly rewarded loyal nobles and successful warriors by giving them wives — sometimes many of them — in recognition of service. The ruler’s inventory of women came through a tribute system. Each province paid annual taxes in ten- to twelve-year-old girls, selected for their beauty. Upon their arrival in the capital, the girls were ranked on appearance, then sorted into classes. The highest class became priestesses, the next became secondary wives of the emperor, while girls among the third class were awarded to nobles and warriors. The least beautiful became servants. A fifth group were employed as court entertainers and spent their days weaving cloth. And, according to McEwan, all these little girls were thrilled just to be there.

As unsavory as the Incan example is, I found here the most compelling link in my effort to trace a long-standing and worldwide practice of trading women as goods. Consider this: The humans who populated the Western Hemisphere had been separated from other Homo sapiens populations for twenty-five thousand years after they left Siberia. Yet when the Spanish arrived in what is now Peru during the sixteenth century, polygamy, patriarchy, male aggression, and trade in women were entrenched in the Incan culture they found — just as they were in Eurasia, where these phenomena can be documented going back at least four thousand years. That connection suggests strongly that patriarchy, polygamy, and the trade in women were already present among Eurasian populations when the forager ancestors of the Incas left.

There are many similarities between the practices of the Incas and those of other societies elsewhere in the world. Organizing women into classes on the basis of their service to men was common once complex societies emerged. Virtually every ancient Eurasian society, including the Greeks and Romans, thought captured women were appropriate compensation for soldiers.”

“Even now it is the law in Angola, Bahrain, Cameroon, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Tajikistan that a rapist must marry his victim to compensate for the economic loss sustained by the victim’s father.”

“The practices of veiling, seclusion, and chaperonage seem to have been spread around the world by trade and conquest, just as other beliefs, practices, and objects were. If we take veiling and seclusion as markers for a system that excluded women from economic participation, we can trace the Double X Economy, going east from the ancient Middle East into India, west into North Africa, north across the Mediterranean, and eventually into Europe. In some societies, such as in ancient Greece, women were so secluded they went from their father’s home directly to their husband’s, never interacting with the outside world at all.

In the Mediterranean cultures from which m European history is normally traced, veiling, seclusion, male arrangement of marriage, male control of property, and exclusion from inheritance were generally present. In medieval Europe, there was some veiling and seclusion, as well as male control over all property, arranged marriage, and restrictions on female inheritance. The Spanish carried many of these practices to the New World, having themselves been influenced by the rules of Islam coming north from the Middle East. Indeed, some form of veiling, seclusion, or chaperonage has been practiced in most of the world, and seclusion is still practiced today, from Africa to the Middle East and into the Indian subcontinent.

While it is commonly accepted that women have always worked in the home because of children, there is an equally strong case to be made that women worked at home because they were not allowed to leave.”

“It’s commonplace to try to excuse or protect the worst of these practices — like child marriage or female genital cutting — by saying, “It’s their culture.” But the truth is that this tragic system of exploitation and control is everyone’s cultural history.

Furthermore, wherever the most restrictive practices are still in place, the people of that culture don’t necessarily agree that they should continue. Understanding Masculinities, a recent study of Middle Eastern men’s and women’s attitudes toward the vestiges of these ancient practices, shows the divide.The men and women disagree on lots of these issues — but on virtually every item, the men disagree with each other. Large majorities of both sexes agree that their culture, though it does have these restrictive practices, should do more to achieve equality for women. So we should not assume that, just because these practices appear in a place, the local citizens don’t want them changed.”

“This is a horrible thing to do to a creature whose brain is literally wired for empathy. In 2019, the American Psychological Association recognized the hallmarks of “toxic masculinity,” a harmful condition rooted in negative versions of manhood being forced on little boys — and something that requires special guidelines to be treated. APA announced that its decision drew “on more than 40 years of research showing that traditional masculinity is psychologically harmful and that socializing boys to suppress their emotions causes damage that echoes both inwardly and outwardly.”“

“In India, dowry has become a life-and-death matter, even though the government has outlawed it. The Indian marriage exchange is subject to long negotiation, but sometimes the groom and his family protest afterward that they weren’t paid enough or that they were promised something that hasn’t been delivered. They continue to ratchet up their demands, as the bride’s family keeps trying to come up with funds to pay. Eventually, it’s just extortion, with the bride as a hostage. When the bride’s family can no longer afford to pay, the groom and his family murder her. The typical method is to douse the wife with kerosene and set her on fire. The groom and his kin provide alibis for one another, so the police can seldom make a homicide charge stick. Bride burning is extremely common, with officials estimating that one Indian woman dies this way every hour. Women’s rights groups say it’s more like every fifteen minutes.

Another current echo of the marriage practices of the past is “marriage by rape” or “bride kidnapping,” in which the objective is to claim a bride without paying the father. The crime is committed by poor men, but also by men who would be unacceptable to families for other reasons, like drug addiction or a criminal record A man kidnaps a woman, sometimes with the assistance of other men or family. He takes her to a secure place and rapes her repeatedly, to make her unacceptable to another man. Then he goes to the woman’s father and offers to marry her. The families are so ashamed of their daughter losing her virginity that they usually pressure her to agree. Though marriage by rape occurs in every region of the world, it is probably most prevalent in Central Asia, where the crime has increased since the fall of the Soviet Union. In Kyrgyzstan, for instance, about a third of all marriages occur this way.”

“Desertion was common. Men would leave home to go where there was said to be work. Long-distance trade also often required them to be away. Women, because they were obliged by custom to remain at home, were excluded from these opportunities and transactions. As shipping developed, men went off to sea, and they also marched off to the many wars Europe endured. Men could be killed on any of these trips. Nevertheless, abandoned wives had to wait interminable periods for the Church to recognize a husband’s protracted absence as death, and only when he was declared dead could a woman marry again, rescuing herself and her children from destitution. Deserted wives and widows, as well as their children, became the most visible group among the poor.”

“A 1954 report from Scotland Yard remarked: “There are only about 20 murders a year in London and not all are serious — some are just men killing their wives.” Women were still economically subordinated under the threat of violence from the men on whom they depended.”

“A Pakistani man returned home to the Swat Valley after studying law in the capital. His attention was caught by the plight of rape victims whose credibility was to be tried in court. They needed to have four male witnesses testify that they had been raped, and barring that, they would be charged with adultery, for which the punishment was years in prison or death. He knew this was against Pakistani legal traditions and felt it was contrary to the teachings of his religion. So he defended these women and got them off the charges of adultery. But then the authorities put him in prison. There were swarms of men in the jail living in inhumane conditions. “You can imagine what happened to him,” said Michael, and I could feel the whole crowd groan with the certainty that the lawyer hero was himself raped or beaten in jail.

But the story ended in surprise. When the other men in the prison found out why the lawyer was there, they all went on a hunger strike until he was set free.

Michael ended his talk by arguing how change would come. “Men are capable of seeing how others are harmed, of feeling another’s pain. They may seem tough, but these guys have big hearts. An appeal to their compassion, changes in our ideals of what it means to be a man, and ending men’s power over women will, together, finally stop violence against women.” The human capacity to empathize, to see the distress of others even when it results from one’s own cruelty, offers us an important reason for hope.”

“Economic development experts would prefer the wives in Bangladesh go to work instead of staying at home, so as to stimulate economic growth. Increasing GDP allows countries like Bangladesh to build infrastructure — roads, schools, plumbing, electrification — as well as to develop social services to support the citizenry, especially the very poor. Growth, if handled with the population’s well-being as the goal, increases household incomes, improving health, nutrition, and education. But men in low-income countries resist allowing women to work outside the home, especially if the women are married.

When the ready-made garment industry arrived in Bangladesh in the 1970s, young single women seeking their freedom ran to the cities to work. Today, textiles and garments account for 75 percent of Bangladesh’s GDP, represent the only multibillion-dollar industry, and are the main source of growth. The garment-sector workforce is more than 80 percent female.

Factory work brings women autonomy and is often the first step out of poverty for them, for their children, and sometimes for their birth families. Despite these workers’ crucial contribution to the national economy, however, they are still reviled because they challenge traditional expectations of women. The workers use their wages to buy modern clothes and mobile phones, seeming to flaunt their independence and success. When they are attacked — as they often are — some authority will inevitably excuse the crime, charging that women are “out of their place” or immodestly dressed.” Factory-girl behavior is a flashing red warning to village husbands: “Don’t let your wife out.””

Labor

“The NCL worked by uniting two ends of the Double X Economy, middle-class consumers and factory workers, in the fight for a common goal. The concept was that the “clubwomen” held economic power through their spending that could be used to pressure businesses to improve conditions for female employees. They began with retailers who employed women as salesgirls and who relied almost entirely on the shopping preferences of married middle-class women for their livelihood. The first action was to draw up a “Standard of a Fair House,” a list of requirements that included equal pay for women, regular and reasonable hours, a paycheck every two weeks, paid vacations, holiday leave, and other employment rights. They then made a “White List” of stores that adhered to the standards and announced that their membership would only patronize stores on the list. Other stores, wanting to be on the White List, changed their labor practices accordingly.

The NCL manufacturing effort began with muslin underwear, again on the rationale that both buyers and employees would be women. If a manufacturer met their standards, the NCL allowed “White Label” to be stitched into its garments. Once again, NCL members publicly vowed to buy only products with the White Label sewn inside and, again, it worked.

The NCL also successfully lobbied state legislatures to enact limitations on how long the workday for women could be, how much they could lift, and other protective rules. By midcentury, however, the women’s movement had realized that these restrictions kept females out of the best jobs, and worked to repeal them. The NCL fought for equal pay, too. The justification for paying women less than men was that they all had a man somewhere who was the real source of their support, so there was no reason to pay females a living wage. In many charged debates, the NCL pressed the case for a wage substantial enough for a woman to live on her own. Labor unions, arguing that men should be paid a “family wage” since they were supporting families, believed that if women were awarded a living wage, it would jeopardize their case for men’s family wage. Why would companies pay a man more to support a family if the females under his roof could earn just as much? In the end, the NCL won the living-wage fight, but only in principle. Women were still paid less than men, on the basis that their needs were fewer.“

“The WTUL instead supported striking workers, offering important assistance during two long, violent strikes by the International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union (ILGWU) in 1909 and 1910. The WTUL provided money, bought household necessities, intervened with authorities, and accompanied strikers to pickets. These prosperous wives locked arms with strikers, knowing police would hesitate to hit or arrest a well-dressed and probably well-connected woman. When they witnessed police brutality, they filed complaints and raised bail.

Though the strategy was effective, the strikers sometimes resented and mocked “the mink brigade.” The class division was even more intensely felt after the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, in which 146 workers, 83 percent women, died, some jumping from the top floors while helpless bystanders watched. Investigation revealed that fire escapes were blocked and doors locked; employers feared the workers would steal and leave work early.

In the wake of the tragedy, the women workers decided it would be more appropriate for them to break with the WTUL and instead make common cause with working-class men. The historic alliance across classes of women was thereby broken. By 1920, the ILGWU leadership had been taken over by men, and it remained a male-dominated union, focused mostly on men’s labor issues, until it fizzled out in the 1990s.”

Reproductive Rights

“Some men “married” women at will and had children just as casually. Contraceptives for women aren’t readily available, and men refuse to use condoms, so each time one of them decides to move on to another woman, more children are left behind. Most of these kids have no hope of an education; their mothers can’t afford to pay for it. They do well to feed and shelter their kids.”

“When reproductive services focus only on ‘“family planning” or abstinence, they fail to get at the root cause of high fertility: women don’t choose. The reckless sexual behavior of the men, the brazen intrusion of sexual predators, and war rape, as well as the tolerance of forced sex, polygamy, and irresponsible fathers, keep fueling the fire. Solutions for high fertility always seem to focus on the women, turning away from a confrontation with men. But if you really wanted to solve this problem, you would focus on encouraging social sanctions against rape, bigamy, and desertion.”

“Europeans already joke that Germany is “the nursing home of Europe” or “the country with no children.” The nation’s fertility rate has been under 1.5 since 1970, and in some years it has dropped below 1.25. Germany had a short-lived increase in births after World War II. When the women born during that time entered the workplace in the early 1970s, however, German culture pushed back with policies meant to encourage women to stay home instead. Fertility began to decline immediately, dropping back to wartime levels by 1978. Today, 78 percent of German households have no children in them.

Perhaps surprisingly, Germany’s three-year paid maternity leave, one that women in other countries covet, was among the conservative policies introduced in the 1970s. But no day care facilities for children under three were authorized or built, by either the public or the private sector. That meant mothers had precious few childcare alternatives, whether they took leave or not. When children started school, mothers still did not receive a break, because all the way through the secondary level, German school is, even now, only a half day. Mothers whose children have finished school have a hard time getting good jobs, having been out of the full-time workplace for fifteen years. Given all these obstacles, only one in ten German mothers returns to work after giving birth.

As a consequence of this wrongheaded set of policies, the number of “permanently childless” women in Germany is the highest in Europe. Childlessness is the new normal. These policies also affect the job prospects of all working women. When employers think about hiring a young female candidate, they can’t help realizing that if she becomes pregnant while employed, she will be on leave for three years, and then there is only a small chance she will ever come back. This is a huge disadvantage for women coming into the workforce, and their representation shows it. Top German employers interviewed by the World Economic Forum in 2010, for example, said that only 33 percent of their entry-level employees were female, compared with 40 percent in the U.K, and 52 percent in the United States.

Forcing qualified women to give up their careers and to sacrifice their education and experience, particularly when the labor supply is set to dwindle dangerously, is a poor strategy for staying afloat in an aging-population scenario. Furthermore, millions of women now entering old age will, as a result of past policies and practices, either have very small pensions or none at all. The gender pension gap — the difference between what men and women receive in pensions — is 60 percent in Germany. Many women will require government support.

In 2006, the German government finally woke up to the disaster it had created and began revising its policies. It’s too late to save Germany from its aging crisis, but the changes might make it a little shorter.

A misogynist might ask why Germany did not simply force women to have more children by outlawing contraceptives and abortions. In response to that question, population experts point to Romania. In 1966, blaming abortion availability for population decline, the communist state outlawed both contraceptives and abortion, instituting a horrific system of enforcement:

Motherhood became a state duty. The system was ruthlessly enforced by the secret police, the securitate. Doctors who performed abortions were imprisoned, women were examined every three months in their workplaces for signs of pregnancy. If they were found to be pregnant and didn’t subsequently give birth, they could face prosecution. Fertility had become an instrument of state control.

Romanian fertility did increase, but the upsurge in births led to another frightening specter, the rise of government “orphanages” to house hundreds of thousands of offspring whom parents could not afford. Since the government did not allocate adequate funds to care for these children, Romania’s next cohort grew up in horribly abusive conditions — underfed, underdeveloped, unloved and unclean. That generation, now known as the decretei for the Decree 770 against birth control, spawned the revolutionaries that brought about the violent end of Romanian communism in 1989. The impact of this ill-advised policy continues to be felt in higher violence, substance abuse, crime, and suicide among the decrefei.”

“If we apply an economic gender lens to the analysis, we can see that affordable, high-quality childcare would pay for itself. Brookings estimates that providing childcare to half the children in America would cost US$42 billion, so we are trying to cover a US$84 billion expenditure. Christine Lagarde, head of the International Monetary Fund, says that U.S. GDP would rise by 5 percent if women worked at the same level as men. U.S. GDP is about US$20 trillion, so that’s US$1 trillion. The tax revenue from that US$1 trillion would be US$271 billion — more than three times the cost of providing universal early childcare. A more conservative estimate would assume only one-third of the recent decline in female labor force participation, recovery of which would yield US$93 billion in tax revenue. So childcare would be covered, either way, by the incremental tax revenue generated by working mothers.”

Brain “Differences”

“One of the most interesting studies to falsify the “girls can’t do math” meme appeared in Science in 2008: it showed that female performance in math tests varies directly with the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap index. Where gender equality is high, female math performance is also high, but where it is low, female math performance is also low. This suggests that the effect of gender practices is strong enough to influence test results, and if these kinds of systematic variations occur, biological difference can’t be the cause.

The last gender math gap left standing was in spatial reasoning. But in 2007, a study by Jing Feng demonstrated that the gender gap in spatial cognition closed after girls had just ten hours of video game instruction. Today, primary school children do not demonstrate this gap at all, likely because of early exposure to games, phones, and tablets. The difference in their experience overrides what was once regarded as a biological sex difference.

Also in the 1990s, mathematicians demonstrated that the gender gap in the highest percentiles of math achievement (and other achievements, such as chess) was a function of the pool of boys being larger, and not a real performance difference. Given these findings, it was no longer possible to claim biological superiority as the reason there were more males among leading scientists, chess players, or Nobel laureates.

As all these studies debunking a biological math gap grew, however, the popular media continued to advance the theory that men’s and women’s psychologies were vastly different.”

“An elegant new theory of the brain has now risen to explain all these similarities and variations. We now know that humans learn to think by creating synapses that connect parts of the brain.

A newborn must generate a hundred billion synapses in order to function as an adult. But only six thousand genes are available to do that at birth, a number sufficient to produce only 10 percent of those connections. The remaining work is done through experience and learning. We are absorbing information and building synapses each second of our individual lives. The connectome grows, reconfigures, and recedes as you learn and forget; studies have shown the connectome acquiring and then losing map information, juggling skills, and piano-playing prowess. Many of us have lost the ability to speak a language we once felt we knew. As these lessons and losses collect, the pattern of connections in each person’s connectome becomes as unique as a fingerprint or a snowflake.

Cultures normally teach boys and girls different things. So we might expect to see systematic differences in their knowledge at the population level, such as those Hyde observed. Therefore, their connectomes may be differently patterned. But we don’t know yet.”

“The trend toward education does not cause women to take jobs; the opposite is true: job availability for women spurs them toward education.

The shining example of this phenomenon is Latin America and the Caribbean. Figure 23 illustrates trends in female higher education enrollment in that region since 1970, alongside female labor force participation and GDP. You can see the relationship between growing numbers of working women and the increase in higher education; because there are now more and better jobs open to Latin American females, girls and their families invest in education and expect a different kind of future.”

“Females are indeed only half as likely as males to study information and communications technology (ICT), but the proportion of all students studying ICT is less than 5%. The difference between the 6.5% (male) and 3.2% (female) is not sufficiently important to make a big deal about. Males do dominate in the field, but the big picture is that almost nobody is getting those degrees.”

“The stereotype is that females study the “easy subjects,” like the liberal arts. It’s true that women do study the humanities, education, and social sciences more often than men, but they also major in business more often. In fact, three times more women study business than study the humanities. Forty years ago, business education was very male dominated, and it is still heavily quantitative and competitive. Women don’t seem daunted. Those trying to sell this stereotype haven’t done their homework; they merely assume women don’t do business because they’re too busy doing art.”

“In the late 1990s, private schools in America began accepting lower admissions standards for boys, in order to maintain a gender balance. Over time, these practices have resulted in an admissions system that makes it harder for girls to get in, even if they have better academic records. In spite of this intentional disadvantaging from school admissions officers, 57 percent of all students today are female.”

“The actual explanation for lower numbers of males in college is that young men don’t need as many credentials as women do for the same jobs. A North American study that used 122 million professional profiles found that female software engineers needed a master’s degree to get the same job that a male with a bachelor’s can get. North American men also continue to advance more rapidly, earn more money, and monopolize leadership, even when they have less education.”

“A recent PEW study further reported that women who work in STEM jobs where the majority of workers are men are significantly more likely to experience sexual harassment, demeaning social behavior, and sex discrimination. The World Economic Forum says half of young women entering the ICT industry have left by their 12th year, twice the frequency in other industries. Their average tenure is only 7 years.”

Equal Pay

“A 2007 book called Women Don’t Ask said women get paid less because, unlike men, they don’t negotiate for more money. The authors’ solution was simple: women should “man up’ and ask for pay increases. Subsequent studies showed, however, that there is a good reason women do not try to negotiate higher salaries: those who do tend to get punished. Asking for money is seen as inappropriate behavior for women, as is the assertion of one’s own value that must underlie the request. The less transparency surrounding pay parameters, the worse the women do when they ask for more money, and having another offer in hand doesn’t help. One much-hyped study argued that women could win salary negotiations if they asked nicely enough, but that was disproved by still more studies. Turns out, if you are a woman, you can’t ask nicely enough. Most women already know that. Which is why they don’t ask.”

“The biggest sex discrimination suit ever, launched against Walmart in 2001, had 1.6 million plaintiffs.”

“In the United States, women’s pay as a percentage of men’s rose steeply from 1973 to 1990, a gain of about 30 percent overall. But beginning about 1990, the rise plateaued; over the next three decades, American women saw a gain of only 12 percent, in total, against the gender pay gap. Had the Americans kept up the same pace that was experienced between 1973 and 1990 to the end of the twentieth century, they would now be at equal pay.

The slowing in American progress is attributable to the rise of the right wing and its success appointing conservative judges, especially to the Supreme Court. The swing toward a right-wing judiciary has already essentially destroyed the 1970s women’s employment rights using three drastic measures: (1) allowing employers to use employment contracts to override equal rights, (2) pushing courts to limit the use of punitive damages, and (3) declaring that women do not constitute a class.

Beginning in the early 1990s, employers began making new hires sign employment contracts stipulating that any employment complaint had to be resolved through arbitration, a practice that consistently works against the employees. Employees also must sign away the right to enter a class action suit. A series of lower court rulings initially said these contracts were illegal. But, in 2018, the Supreme Court declared “forced arbitration” requirements constitutional. By that time, 60 million women and men, representing nearly 50 percent of the American workforce, worked under such arrangements. For the women bound by forced arbitration, the Supreme Court had negated the system of provisions that had been propelling the U.S. toward equal pay.

During the same period, courts deciding discrimination cases began limiting awards to restoration of back pay and eliminating punitive damages altogether. Again, this change can be chalked up to conservative strategies to gain control of the judicial system.

The Walmart case, Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. v. Dukes, et al., was another situation in which all the lower courts had held for the plaintiffs, but the Supreme Court reversed them. In 2004, that case had been certified by a U.S. federal court as a class action suit on behalf of all past and present female Walmart employees; however, the 2011 Supreme Court decision held that women could not be a class. The ruling was split along both gender and ideological lines, five conservative male judges against four liberals, three women and one man.

The story has gone down in popular culture as Walmart winning the biggest sex discrimination suit in American history, but the question that decided this case was not whether there had been sex discrimination at Walmart, but whether women as a group have enough “commonality” to call themselves a class. The conservatives claimed the complaint was just an aggregation of singular experiences, so the women had to pursue their case on an individual basis.

The SCOTUS objection to thinking of women as a class had lurked under the law for a long time, because of the implicit comparison with race, on which U.S. equality legislation is based. In the 1978 Bakke case, for instance, the opinion of the court emphasized the historical mistreatment of African Americans as the basis for class status, but explicitly rejected women’s similarity because “the perception of racial classifications as inherently odious stems from a lengthy and tragic history that gender-based classifications do not share.” This attitude is similarly visible in the 2011 Walmart decision, and it is clearly attributable to the fact that women did not have a written history until recently and the public has not been made aware of it now that it exists.

Since the Walmart case was decided, multiple cases going through the courts have been decided on the basis of the precedent saying women do not experience enough commonality in employment discrimination to constitute a class. The plaintiffs were denied class action status in a lawsuit against Microsoft, despite two massive, authoritative, and independent reports concluding there were statistically significant patterns of women being paid unequally and promoted less often — and multiple lawsuits pending from other women.

Though the Obama administration made a significant contribution to women’s employment rights by passing the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009 (which broke the power of salary secrecy to minimize recovery of damages), the right wing has continued to push equal pay backward. Trump abruptly canceled an order, made under Obama, to require companies to report detailed pay information by gender; fortunately, a federal judge ordered the administration to continue collecting the data required under the law. But several bills addressing the equal pay problem are languishing in the U.S. Congress, blocked by conservatives.”

“In 2010, the European Commission published another report that analyzed the available mechanisms for reform. The conclusion was that the main solution would be to move the responsibility for enforcing gender equality laws from the shoulders of individual women — and take the entire matter out of the hands of the judiciary — by returning oversight and enforcement to the governments, in much the same way that tax avoidance, bank fraud, and safety violations are monitored and prosecuted. There would be regulations, a reporting requirement, an office that monitored compliance, a force of people tasked with periodic assessments of individual businesses, and a set of penalties. Specialist tribunals would adjudicate complaints, should they arise, and labor unions would be required to submit collective agreements for approval.”

Women as Consumers

“Picture this: Women in all nations where Christmas is celebrated pledge they will spend only 80 percent of what they spent last year. They swear to continue reducing spending by the same amount every year until the gender pay gap is closed. There’s a hashtag, T-shirts, buttons, bumper stickers. News coverage. Retailers, manufacturers, and economists quake in their boots.

Even a 20 percent reduction in Christmas spending sounds a big alarm. For the national economies of the West, the holiday season is extremely important. Consumer spending keeps the juices of an economy going; where Christmas is the main annual celebration, a large percentage of any year’s spending occurs in the last quarter of the year. In the United States, for example, consumer spending accounts for 70 percent of GDP, of which more than a third occurs in November and December; this burst of shopping generates about US$23 billion in retail sales in department stores alone and US$60 billion in online shopping. The single category of toy sales generates about six hundred thousand jobs. Christmas shopping affects almost every sector: food, housewares, toys, jewelry, perfume, clothing, consumer services, travel, beverages, electronics, books — you know the rest.

As they say, Christmas happens only once a year. You get the money or you don’t — there’s no making up for the loss in the next quarter. A 20 percent slowdown in consumer spending during the holiday season is enough to throw the Western economies completely off track. To illustrate: from year to year, growth in holiday shopping of 2 to 4 percent is considered the sign of a healthy U.S. economy; anything less keeps businesses awake at night.

Now imagine: Just as the West has caught its breath from the Christmas shock, the world’s women are gearing up for the 80 percent Chinese New Year. The Lunar New Year is the biggest holiday in the world. In 2018, roughly US$142 billion was spent in China alone. The Chinese economy depends increasingly on consumer spending for growth; a decline of 8.5 percent in 2018 spending for the Lunar New Year had economists wringing their hands. Think what a 20 percent drop would do.

Ramadan, another holiday with big economic impact, comes in the spring. Then, in the fall, there’s Diwali — the mother of all festivals in India’s festival-based economy. At the end of the year, the women’s action trajectory would come full circle back to Christmas, where the spending will now be 80 percent of 80 percent. The whole action is orchestrated by social media, something the women of the world proved they could do with the Women’s March in 2017.

None of these holidays would happen if women did not make and buy all the things needed to pull them off. The spending is totally under their control. It’s a slam dunk. Consumption is an area of the economy that is often overlooked or undersold by both economists and feminists. But the purchase decisions that affect consumption drive the economy with a similar impact to investment decisions, and no one has more control over those choices than women. In Western Europe and North America, women control upwards of 75 percent of consumer spending. Boston Consulting Group calculates that the market represented by women’s spending worldwide is three times China’s GDP and six times India’s — the two most populous countries on the planet. This is the one part of economic life where the Double X Economy rules. Why is this power being wasted?

I think it’s because the women’s movement long ago bought into a production-centric view of economics. This is a male-oriented approach that says making stuff is important but buying stuff — because it’s a girl thing — is not. We have lost sight of the power that buying has over the economy — and women have only recently come to control it.”

“The determining factor for all the choices was that the man of the house controlled spending. In this community, most of the women did not work away from home, while the men commuted to a small town nearby. The men were paid in cash, while the women bartered goods among themselves. The men, therefore, always had coins and bills, while the women had only the cash that their husbands gave them to buy “necessities” — or what passed as “necessary” by male estimation.

None of the women knew how much her husband earned or how much money he might have squirreled away somewhere. Nor did they know what we discovered: that at midday he bought a meal of rice and meat, foods she and the children very seldom ate, and he washed it down with a soft drink. Occasionally, he would use whatever money he had left in the evenings to treat the kids, and sometimes his wife, to a soda and candy. Of course, being the only one who can give a gift is an expression of power, and wives could never treat the children at all. As for phone cards, they were considered necessary items for men who went to town for work. Batteries were for “his” radio. He also needed shiny new shoes and good-looking clothes for working in town, while clothes for the women were not considered a necessity.

To a person, every woman we interviewed insisted that her husband did not drink beer except when another man treated him. Yet the men, when they were in a same-sex group, admitted to drinking every evening. They also said they paid in rounds with a different man paying each night, so that all but one of them could go home and honestly say he had been treated by another man to beer. Over time, each man’s bill averaged out to be several dollars a week; the households in this community made about two dollars a day. But the men explained that the beer-drinking ritual was part of being a man, and that you really could not refuse to participate.

I understood this completely — such rituals are common among humans — but it irked me because of the ongoing controversy about sanitary pads. NGO workers could be pretty high and mighty in those days about how frivolous sanitary pads were, always insisting that they were too expensive for these poor households. But once we learned about the money being spent on beer, I began asking the NGO people if they knew about it. They all did, of course. Though they did not know exactly how much was being spent, they knew it was probably significant, in proportion to the income levels. No one had ever spoken to the men about whether these expenditures were appropriate. We had learned by this time that most girls could get by on a packet of pads that cost a dollar a month — versus at least ten dollars a month for beer. The men, when speaking in their own groups, admitted they knew the schoolgirls needed the pads, but no one ever talked to them about it because the topic was taboo. This silence enabled them to “play dumb” and ignore the issue altogether.”

Gender-Aggregated Data

“BLC Bank in Lebanon has become a favorite exemplar to show the power of gender-disaggregated customer data. In 2014, this bank painstakingly pulled apart its customer records and found that women were a small but highly profitable and low-risk part of their business. Women owned about a third of all small-to-medium businesses in Lebanon but held less than 5 percent of conventional business loans. In other words, the segment was a big one but was being ignored and therefore underserved by Lebanese banks. Since no other banks in the country were trying to attract female business owners as clients, the market segment was wide open, and since the Lebanese financial market was stagnant, serving women was one of the few opportunities for the bank to grow. BLC Bank decided to go all out to become the bank of choice for women.

Assisted by the International Finance Corporation (IFC), BLC Bank did extensive market research among female business owners, including focus groups and interviews. After listening to the women explain their business needs and preferences, the bank designed and adapted products and services to suit them. For instance, Lebanese women who own businesses experience severe time poverty, meaning they wanted the bank to provide longer business hours, closer locations, and streamlined application processes.

Through this research, BLC Bank also learned that Lebanese women were sensitive about the negative way in which bankers treated them. The bank would have to communicate directly that it accepted this criticism and would treat female customers with respect.”

“Instead of hiding its intention to court women as customers behind gender-neutral imagery, BLC Bank addressed the problem head-on. The bank produced a series of humorous commercials, dramatizing the problems women usually have with banks. It retrained all its employees to avoid biased behavior and put incentives in place to reward them for recruiting female customers. In a laudable effort to walk the walk, BLC Bank also changed its personnel policies in order to increase the number of women at higher ranks within the bank. And it began posting YouTube videos in which employees acted out their own skits to teach lessons about gender discrimination in the workplace.

Not surprisingly, BLC did become the bank of choice for Lebanese women; the increase in female customers was substantial, as were the number and size of loans made and the number of accounts opened. Women usually buy all financial services from one supplier, and the new BLC customers did the same, making these female customers more profitable than male customers. The women also exhibited much lower default rates. Finally, the bank’s customer surveys showed that both men and women applauded the bank’s progressive steps to include women. BLC Bank had successfully captured a profitable, low-risk customer segment in a stagnant market. The only thing stopping other banks from doing the same is their own prejudice.”

“So the task is to “make up” new financial indicators that reflect the realities of gender — and calculate the benefits that come from addressing those realities. An example would be that if you were rating a bond to build a municipal subway system, you would evaluate the project more positively if it had better structures to keep female commuters safe at night. Better safety for women would reduce costs attached to police and medical responses, as well as raise productivity, both of which would add financial benefits to the city’s project, thereby raising the value of the investment. The concept has begun to catch on: a Gender-Smart Investing Summit in London during fall 2018 was packed to the rafters with investors wanting to adopt investment strategies that benefited women.Gender-lens investments can be selected using any number of criteria, from women’s representation on boards to female-friendly product design.

The gender-lens investment approach was considered implausible until recently. But when Bloomberg tested its new Gender Equality Index in 2017, the concept had clearly moved into the mainstream. Bloomberg provides investment information to 325,000 financial institutions around the world. Its base of investors had asked it to create a gender rating system, apparently believing that the stocks of companies with better gender inclusion would outperform other indexes. Turns out, Bloomberg’s investors were right.

The gender-index prototype Bloomberg initially tested was very basic, rating companies on things like the number of women.”

“However, in the years that followed, the Gender Equality Index for financial companies increasingly outperformed the Bloomberg Financial Services Index, as well as the MSCI financial indexes. By 2019, the Bloomberg Gender Equality Index was 50 percent higher than the other two (Figure 30).

In 2018, Bloomberg added data from more companies, 230 corporations that cooperated by supplying additional information. Adding these new firms allowed the index to reflect gender equality across several industries. By the third quarter of 2019, the expanded Gender Equality Index had been outperforming the MSCI World Index and the MSCI All Country World Index every month.

The Bloomberg Gender Equality Index offers something important to women’s economic empowerment. Using this index, Bloomberg subscribers will be able to choose to buy individual company stocks from a gender perspective, and can watch how the gender-friendly companies as a whole perform financially. So far, the index shows a positive connection between a company’s gender performance and its financial value: gender-equal companies are simply better investments than companies that are not women-friendly. Therefore, investors will be motivated to buy more stocks from companies with good gender practices, which will likely push up their stock prices — and companies that don’t do well on gender will be incentivized to change their ways.”

“Sexist financial advice is also hurting national economies. Research conducted by Sylvia Ann Hewlett and Andrea Turner Moffitt among six thousand wealthy individuals in the United States, the U.K., India, China, Hong Kong, and Singapore showed that women were so unhappy with financial advisors that a very large percentage were working without one. A great many of these women were, as a result, leaving their money in cash rather than investing it.

If a significant portion of wealth in women’s hands is lying around in cash rather than invested, it reduces their country’s ability to grow its economy, to create jobs, and to support innovation. Given the higher propensity women have for investing in firms with a positive social and environmental impact, this problem also reduces the resources available to combat intractable problems. Even the wealth management companies would earn more money if only they would treat women with respect. Instead, by clinging to their gender prejudices, they choose an economically irrational course that hurts women, hurts their country, and hurts their own pocketbooks.”

“Men hold 99 percent of the procurement contracts in the world and consequently, they control 99 percent of international trade. So this is a lucrative part of the economy where women are almost totally excluded.”

“Canada’s new “progressive” approach to trade is nothing less than a vision of a new world order; the government asserts that it will no longer conduct trade under the world’s overarching economic philosophy because it is destructive and unsustainable. A focus on gender is, in its view, a primary strategy for moving the world economy toward a humane and sustainable future. Canada’s trade commission also estimates that lifting barriers to female participation in world trade would boost its own economy by US$114 billion.

In July 2017, Canada and Chile reached the first international trade agreement ever to have a gender-equality provision. The “Trade and Gender” chapter of the updated Canada-Chile Free Trade Agreement explicitly asserts that trade is not gender-neutral and goes further to emphasize “the importance of incorporating a gender perspective into the promotion of inclusive economic growth, and the key role that gender-responsive policies can play in achieving sustainable socioeconomic development.”

In the provisions of the agreement, both nations reaffirm their commitments to all international accords on gender equality and commit to promoting public knowledge of their own “gender equality laws, regulations, policies, and practices” domestically. Then, there is a list of activities that Chile and Canada will include in their women’s empowerment plans, from financial inclusion for women to increased representation in leadership and decision-making. Sex-disaggregated data will be collected and analyzed by both countries, separately and jointly.

Importantly, for the circumstances I have described in this chapter, the Canada-Chile trade agreement creates a joint committee that is explicitly empowered to work cooperatively with NGOs, the private sector, international agencies, and “other relevant institutions as appropriate” in pursuing gender equality through trade.”

“Data shows that men will not lose jobs if women come into the workforce, because the resulting growth drives the creation of more jobs. Men benefit in other ways when they share economic responsibilities with women: overwork, male-dominant workplaces, and the lone responsibility to provide take a profound toll on men worldwide.”

“Economists are also likely to resist. That discipline is heavily invested in an ideology that cannot stretch to explain the systematic exclusion of half the human species. Women’s disadvantages, they insist, must be the result of “self-selection” — that is, they ask us to believe that women in every country, in every time, in every industry, in every occupation, and in every domain of the world economy have either made the same self-defeating choices or have been lacking whatever quality was required for success in all instances. But the Double X Economy is traceable to a tragic history rather than millions of individual women making the same poor choices or sharing the same inadequacies.”