Women’s empowerment and economic development :

No Magic Bullets

Dr.Dileni Gunewardena

Economists tend to get a bad press, often deservedly. Events in the last few years in the global economic scene have done little to improve the way they are viewed. However, a small band of economists who work on truly global issues of poverty, hunger, disease, education, savings and credit are changing that, by writing for a larger public and presenting the “rich body of evidence” in the form of economic research done by themselves and others over the last decade or two that “show why the poor, despite having the same capacities and aspirations as anyone else, end up with entirely different lives.”

Esther Duflo, Abdul Latif Jameel Professor of Poverty Alleviation and Development Economics at MIT and co-author of Poor Economics: A Radical Re-thinking of the way to fight Global Poverty could easily be the poster girl for this group. Educated at the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris, and at MIT, she has won many prestigious awards including a John Bates Clark medal for the best American economist under forty, and has been on the “top” lists of many magazines including Foreign Policy’s hundred most influential thinkers, Fortune’s “forty under forty” most influential business leaders and the Economists’ best young economists. A key message of her work is that “the battle against poverty can be won, but it will take patience, careful thinking and a willingness to learn from the evidence.”

In a recent paper, titled “Women’s empowerment and economic development” (MIT, Nov 2011), Duflo has a similar message. She argues that while empowerment of females has important benefits for economic development, and economic development has led to the improvement of female lives in many ways, one cannot expect that a one-time improvement in either of these two will create a self-sustaining virtuous circle that reduces gender inequality and improves the lives of women. Rather, her position is that “continuous policy commitment to equality for its own sake is needed to bring about equality between men and women.”

Duflo’s paper helps us to “learn from the evidence” by reviewing a large number of rigorous empirical studies conducted over the last two decades that shed light on the linkages between women’s empowerment and economic development. Two of the studies Duflo reviews are based on Sri Lankan data and have important messages for us.

The first of these studies is an exploration of the link between life expectancy and human capital investment. Seema Jayachandran of Standford University and Adriana Lleras-Muney of Princeton University (both from Departments of Economics) use Sri Lankan data from 1946 to 1953 when there was a sudden drop in maternal mortality risk to examine if this has an effect on girls’ education. Their argument went like this-reduction in maternal mortality increases life expectancy for girls (and not for boys), so families who think of education as an investment should be investing more in girls education relative to boys now that girls will live longer to reap the benefits of that education.

They found that the 70% reduction in maternal mortality risk during the period they examined led to an increase in female life expectancy at age 15 of 4% and increase in female literacy of 2.5% and an increase in female years of education by 4%--and a significant increase relative to boys. Sri Lanka reaped yet more benefits from this reduction in maternal mortality-- educated females delayed the age at which they had their first birth, which reduced fertility which in turn improved economic development.

But just as the Sri Lankan experience is a lesson to other countries, there are lessons from other countries for us to learn. An example Duflo presents from Mumbai shows that low-caste females had a greater advantage with the opening up of the Indian economy and increase in “respectable” labour market opportunities for females such as outsourced telemarketing, at the same time as English-based education opened up for both boys and girls. Among lower castes, girls were more likely than boys to go for English language education, enabling them to access these new job opportunities.

The second Sri Lankan example Duflo presents is the work done by de Mel, Woodruff and McKenzie (2009) that showed that cash grants to women had no effect on business profits, challenging the conventional wisdom that giving micro-credit to women will have larger effects for women rather than for men. Duflo cites studies in other countries that found similar results, and summarizes the potential explanations-women work in different sectors, they may have less know how in entrepreneurship, they may be less committed to the business (or have husbands who do not let them grow their businesses). Because women face many constraints, addressing just one constraint may not work.

Duflo’s concluding message is that “neither economic development is the magic bullet it is sometimes made out to be. Equity between men and women is only likely to be achieved by continuing policy actions that favour women at the expense of men, possibly for a very long time.” She recognizes that this is not a comforting message, but It may be a necessary message-Óto prevent the backlash that failed miracle solutions generally attract.

The Battle between Gyna and Homo sapiens

Daya dissanayake

Leonard Shlain, a vascular surgeon by profession, used the term Gyna sapiens for the female of Homo sapiens, in his 2003 book ‘Sex, Time & Power’. He says that Gyna sapiens rose to the challenge of evolution 150,000 years ago, from Homo erectus, leaving her male counterpart, Homo sapiens, trailing behind.

Shlain explains the new label. “So much greater were the changes in the female of the new species than those of the male that it would have been more accurate for scientists to have named our genus and species Gyna sapiens, rather than Homo sapiens.” It was the female who faced the crisis at childbirth, after she began to walk on two legs and her infant developed an unusually large brain. If not for her evolutionary adaptations human species would have become extinct, long ago.

“The male and the female brains show anatomical, functional and biochemical differences in all stages of life....Both sexes are equal in intelligence, but tend to operate differently. Men and women appear to use different parts of the brain... (Zeenat F. Zaidi, Faculty of Medicine, King Saudi University) This observation justifies the use of Gyna sapiens, as a separate identity for women kind.

If Gyna too behaved like Homo, humankind would have disappeared from the face of the earth thousands of years ago. They would not have been able to survive. The woman outlives the man, under most conditions, in the most sophisticated social conditions in a city of a ‘developed’ country, or in the most underdeveloped village in an Asian or African country. Survival of the fittest is proven once again. In the U.S. women live at least five years longer than men, but the women’s life expectancy is declining, probably because they too are beginning to live more like men. In Sri Lanka women live for 76.2 on average while men average only 68.8. In Japan women’s life expectancy at birth is 86.1 while for men it is only 79.0 (2005-2010). In Mozambique women 39.0, men 38.3. Women are still ahead even in the country with the lowest life expectancy. (UN statistics)

Homo is not fit enough to survive. He could be bigger in size and have more muscle strength. But he lacks endurance. He cannot face either joy or sadness, pain or pleasure by himself. He cannot face physical exertion. He needs external props like alcohol and other substance to face all these situations. Men and women work together in the fields, but it is only the men who need the alcohol in the evening. When they face separation from a loved one, the man needs to console himself with alcohol, while the woman could face it by releasing her emotions by crying.

Very often, a mother has been able to bring up her children much more successfully after her husband is gone. She is able to manage her family better when she becomes the ‘man of the house’, to use a male chauvinist phrase.

It is the men in the family who consume more meat even though it is the women who need the meat for the proteins and iron, which she has to replenish regularly due to loss of blood. On this issue Leonard Shlain could be challenged, about women needing more meat, because in India, women have survived without consuming any form of animal flesh for several thousand years, and they are as fit as any woman in the west, and far superior to their men. In most parts of the world, It is the men who consume most of the food and the women have to be satisfied with the leftovers, and yet she is healthier. Even in countries where women have the opportunity to share their food equally, they consume much less than the male, because their bodies are more efficient, they need less nutrients and less calories.

Laetoli footprints

Even in ancient times, according to Evelyn Reed, women gathered food for themselves and their children: men hunted food for themselves. She claims that the most reliable sources of food were not animal but vegetable. (Women’s Evolution, 1975)

Men claim that they have larger and heavier brains than women. What they do not wish to admit is that women are excelling them in academic and industrial and technical fields using their smaller brains, which in turn means the smaller brain is more efficient. The claim by Homo against the Gyno is like a claim that a bulky desktop PC is higher in capacity than a notebook.

Men were so happy with the chauvinist statements by Charles Darwin, “the child, the female, and the senile white all had the intellect and nature of the grown-up Negro”. Here Darwin was completely wrong, because women and Negros often have far superior brain power than some adult whites, and old age does not bring senility affects on the brain.

In 1997 Dean Falk at the State University of New York, pointed out that the size of the female human brain is larger in proportion to body size, than is the male brain and has just as many neurons.

One more argument brought up by Darwin was “that a weak man unless he was a good hunter is seldom permitted to keep a wife that a stronger man thinks worth his notice”. This does not prove that man is higher on the ladder of evolution, but it only shows the barbaric nature of the less evolved man. Darwin had also ignored that the woman and the children did not depend on the man for their food.

J. M. Adovasio, Olga Soffer and Jake Page, published ‘the Invisible Sex, uncovering the true role of Women in Prehistory (Smithsonian, 2007), where they say, “Most paleoanthropologists make the assumption that men, particularly, are the known representatives of hominid evolution.”

In this book we find mention of the famous footprints discovered by Mary Leaky in Tanzania. One set of prints were larger than the other and the immediate conclusion was that it was a man and a woman. Based on these footprints from 3.6 million years ago, the American Museum of Natural History in New York created a diorama showing “the couple walking through the desolate landscape volcanic ash, the volcano still smoking on the horizon...the female head is turned: she looks slightly alarmed,,,the male is looking forward, resolute, his arm resting (positively or affectionately or both) across her shoulders”. A most romantic scene.

The height of imagination, unfortunately a male dominated imagination. Adrienne Zihlman of the university of California at Santa Cruze has questioned the large-male small-female hypothesis, and suggested that the footprints could have been of a parent and offspring.

A mother could have been leaving the volcano threatened zone with her daughter. Probably the man already escaped, leaving them behind.

The same book mentions another such incident about the pointed fragment of wood found in Clacton-on-the-Sea in England. “It has been interpreted by most scholars as a deliberately fashioned spear point, but it could equally well be the fragment of a 300,000 year old digging stick”. A digging stick would have been used by a woman, and probably made by her, not to kill animals, but to dig up a tuber.

They quote from Sally Mcbrearty and Marc Monitz, of the likelihood that females among the early hominids were most likely to be the tool makers - or at least the most intense tool makers. This suggests that even then men were just lazy idlers, while the women foraged, processed food, reared children and kept the family together. Not only tools, even language may have originated with the women. They needed to communicate with their children. Proto speech could have developed from a ‘vocal patter’ or ‘motherese’.

If Gyna sapiens had not surrendered herself to Homo, this world would have been a really wonderful place for all life forms, not just human beings. Gyna is more sensitive, more concerned about nature, about Mother Earth and all her children. There would have been less wars, need for less weapons of destruction. Because Gyna sapiens would feel the pain of a mother who has to see the murder of her child by another human being. She would have a greater respect for commonly shared resources and wealth and would be frugal in her use, knowing she has to leave it for her children and their children.

It is time for women to claim their due place in society, as a separate being, Gyna sapiens. The superior animal, higher in the evolutionary ladder, more intelligent and fitter than Homo sapiens to survive.

daya@saadhu.com