1 | THE DOUBLE X ECONOMY
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.
In my hotel lobby, I felt as if I had stepped back from another dimension. I have been doing fieldwork among the world’s poor for a long time, but I have never observed anything that disturbed me more than what I saw on my first night in Ghana.
I had arrived that afternoon to start a promising project: my team from Oxford would test an intervention to help rural girls stay in school rather than drop out. It was a simple thing—providing free sanitary pads—but definitely worth a try. Retaining girls through secondary school was already known to be a powerful economic boost for poor nations. Educated females add to the quality of the labor supply, as well as its size, which stimulates growth. But girls who complete their education also have their first child later and so have fewer children, which slows the overwhelming rate of population expansion. Educated women also raise their own children differently, insisting they finish school, eat well, and are given adequate health care. These mothers act as a brake on the pernicious cycle of poverty that grips Africa.
But that evening I met someone who showed me what happened when the forces pulling girls out of school also made them run away. These girls in desperate flight produced a downward spiral that radiated danger and suffering for generations in the entire region. That destructive force, I knew, rolled across the world, carrying violence and instability to other countries—because human trafficking is one of international crime’s most profitable activities. My experience that night forever changed the way I thought about my work. And it gave me a sense of urgency that I have never lost.
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. In these pages, I will tell more stories like this one from the shadows of Accra. I will draw on personal experiences from the villages of Africa to the slums of Asia, as well as the boardrooms of London and the universities of the United States. Throughout, I will show how the same plot of economic exclusion repeats itself in each of these places, always with negative impact.
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.”
If the global community chose to dissolve the economic obstacles facing women, an unprecedented era of peace and prosperity would follow. Over the past decade, a small movement has begun, propelled by the intention to do just that—eliminate the barriers. Though its numbers are still few, this women’s economic empowerment movement now has global reach and counts a rising tide of the world’s most powerful institutions among its partners: national governments, international agencies, large foundations, global charities, religious organizations, and multinational corporations.
I have been part of the women’s economic empowerment movement from its beginning. My role began with research that tested ideas for helping women gain financial autonomy. Initially, I worked in rural areas, especially in Africa. I tested my own ideas, as well as those of others, and worked face-to-face with women in different countries and under varying circumstances. I also hosted an annual gathering of women’s economic empowerment specialists called the Power Shift Forum for Women in the World Economy, where people working on this cause could share what they were learning. In 2015, my focus shifted. Though I continue to conduct research in remote areas, I now also participate in high-level policy conversations about implementing global reforms that take me to the capitals of the world.
I am frequently dismayed by what I observe. The national finance ministers who manage the world economy undermine women’s advocates by treating them like a ladies’ auxiliary. The Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) and the G20 may hold a “women’s week” or start an “engagement group” and even put a phrase about women in their communiqués, but they won’t accommodate the distinctive needs of half their citizenry in their plans. They refuse to learn how the exclusion of women hurts their economies or how including women in their national budgeting could bring the growth they so desperately seek. They sideline the Double X Economy on the basis of nothing more than prejudice.
That’s why we need you. By writing this book, I hope to recruit many voices, hands, and minds to the cause of women’s economic inclusion. I propose concrete, reasonable, and effective action. I ask you to join this movement regardless of your sexual and gender identity, race, or origin. I’m reaching out whether you work in a factory, in an office, on a farm, at home, or online. In this book, every time I say, “We should do this…” or “We can infer that…,” I mean all of us.
Why are we only now learning about this shadow economy? There have been two obstacles: an absence of data and a blinkered way of thinking about our exchange systems. Economic measurement focuses on the exchange of money, but much of women’s economic contribution, like household production or farm labor, goes uncompensated. Furthermore, the smallest unit of data we usually record is the household, in which women’s earnings are typically attributed to a male head. For these two reasons alone, our systems do not pick up women’s economic activity most of the time.
To make matters worse, institutions from universities to governments have not generally collected or analyzed data by gender. At the time of the women’s movement of the 1970s, very few females were in academia; as a consequence, no discipline had given women much thought. Over the past fifty years, as women scholars rose in both numbers and prominence, one discipline after another—history, anthropology, psychology, sociobiology, archaeology, medicine, and biological science, to name just a few—was transformed when the simple question was asked, What about the women? But there are a few fields as yet untouched by this wave of intellectual change: economics is one of them. Meanwhile, the absence of consistent gender data has meant that comparing the welfare of women here with those there, or even now with then, has been impossible to do systematically.
The biggest obstacle, however, has been the deep contempt that economists hold for women, which has kept them from taking up the question. Those who manage the cogs and wheels of national economies train in the Ph.D. programs of university economics departments, where they learn to think of the economy as a disinterested machine operating far above the ground where issues like gender exclusion occur. It is also in the universities that economists learn to demean and dismiss women as a class.
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.1
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.2 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.”3
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.4
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.”5 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—a circumstance that the dismal science doesn’t even have the tools to conceptualize. And 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 world economy, a proposition that is as bigoted as it is implausible. So, right at its roots, the global market’s economic philosophy can’t even address half the world’s people. As a female economist writing in the Financial Times warned, “It is just as bad to have mainly male economic research and policy advice as it is to test medicines mainly on men. The results will fail at least half the population.”6
Because of this stubbornness in academia, the data analysis that revealed the Double X Economy’s profile has been done by gender groups within large international agencies, not universities. Early in this century, major institutions like the United Nations Development Programme and the World Economic Forum began comparing measures of women’s status (education, employment, leadership, health, legal rights) with the performance data of national economies.7 Given the basic assumptions of economics-as-we-know-it, they were surprised to discover a striking correlation between gender equality and national economic viability (Figure 1). Where gender equality was high, national incomes and living standards were also high, but where gender equality was low, countries were trapped in poverty and conflict.
At first, people said, “Oh, well, in the poor countries, they have to worry about survival, so it is necessary for the men to be dominant. The rich nations are more comfortable, so they can afford to let the women have more freedom.”8 Yet there was never any evidence that male dominance is necessary for survival. In fact, 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.
FIGURE 1. Each dot on the two graphs shown here represents a country’s Women’s Economic Opportunity Index score as related to either readiness for growth (top) or GDP (bottom). There are approximately one hundred nations shown in each graph; all those for which the data was available were included. In the top graph, the upward-right direction of the dots indicates that more economic freedom for women corresponds positively to national competitiveness, a measure of a country’s readiness for growth. On the bottom, there is a similar pattern between GDP per capita and women’s economic empowerment. These two graphs taken together, showing the “before” and “after” of rising GDP, imply that women’s freedoms have a positive effect on national wealth. Other data has converged to reach the same conclusion.
Sources: World Bank Database for GDP at purchasing power parity; Economist Intelligence Unit for the Women’s Economic Opportunity Index; World Economic Forum for the National Competitiveness Index
In 2006, however, the World Economic Forum’s annual Global Gender Gap Report began framing the economics of gender differently, taking the stance that including women equally in national economies spurred growth and that, without fair inclusion of women, countries would stagnate. The solution for poor countries, therefore, was to emulate the rich nations by embracing gender equality. The lesson implied: it’s not that the rich nations could afford to set their women free, but that setting the women free made them rich.
Still more data has now been generated and further analysis done by the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, UNICEF, and several global think tanks.9 By 2018, all this material had converged to show gender equality positively influencing country wealth and overall well-being, while also showing the negative influences of male economic monopoly. During the same period, smaller practical studies—such as ours in Ghana—examined the mechanisms that produce gender inequality and tested interventions to find “what works” to lift the limits on female participation. Ultimately, our understanding of women’s role in economics changed drastically.
The Double X Economy can be grasped in a way similar to the underground economy, the gig economy, the information economy, and the informal economy. Each of these is an identifiable part of the world system, though none is completely self-contained; all have an effect on the global economy and will play a part in its future, for better or worse. The Double X Economy is an economy composed of women. It has certain ways of doing business, as well as typical products and services. And, while it is as invisible as the underground economy to many, the Double X Economy will affect the future, just as it has the past. The goal for the women’s economic empowerment movement is to make that future better, not worse.
In the beginning of the women’s economic empowerment movement, we usually made the case for supporting the Double X Economy on the basis of the expected boost to economic growth. That strategy appealed to the audience—mostly economists and finance ministers who were interested in growth but unmoved by appeals to social justice for women. Over time, we began to use GDP as shorthand for the magnitude and direction of any large-scale effect when women were included (or not). That is how I will use GDP. I am not suggesting that we should empower women for growth alone. The indiscriminate drive for more growth is a defining feature of patriarchal economics; it should not be our main goal.
The numbers show that the Double X Economy is huge; only resolute blindness causes economists to miss it. To illustrate, if the Double X Economy in the United States were its own nation, that country’s economy would be big enough to join the G7. Women already produce roughly 40 percent of global GDP, and their contribution will soon match that of men. Women produce almost 50 percent of worldwide agricultural output. Despite accounting for half the species, half the national income, and half the food supply, women are nevertheless treated as bit players by economists and policy makers.10
The Double X Economy is also the most reliable source of economic growth. When great numbers of women in North America and Western Europe entered the labor market during the 1970s, they caused an economic upswing that made their countries the powerhouses you see today. The capability that working women have to create prosperity has now been proved using data from 163 countries.11 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 opening of UNICEF’s The State of the World’s Children report in 2007. “No other policy is as likely to raise economic productivity or to reduce child and maternal mortality. No other policy is as sure to improve nutrition and promote health, including the prevention of HIV/AIDS. No other policy is as powerful in increasing the chances of education for the next generation.”12 Yet, despite the known capability of economically enabled women to alleviate distress in poor countries, only the thinnest slice of international aid is aimed at females.
All over the globe, the opportunity cost of excluding the Double X Economy is steep. For instance, the rich nations’ failure to invest in childcare forces millions of women who prefer full-time jobs to work part-time or quit completely, leaving billions in GDP on the table. “The motherhood penalty” is also the single biggest contributor to the gender pay gap. The World Bank estimates that, because of unequal pay, the global economy loses US$160 trillion every year,13 while penalizing the Double X Economy for some of its most important economic work—the cultivation of human capital.
An educated, healthy population is the most valuable resource a modern economy can have. The West, however, has come to see children as private luxuries rather than public assets. Parents must pour money and effort into their children until they can sustain themselves. Once children are grown, they are seldom expected to provide economic support to their parents. So, raising children feels like consumption, not investment. Perhaps that’s why people in rich nations have lost sight of how important each rising generation is to every cohort ahead of them—we all must rely on other people’s children to be our firefighters, police, and construction crews, not to mention the teachers, doctors, musicians, and librarians who make our lives safer and happier.
The Double X Economy lays the groundwork for a positive future by its judicious spending on families and communities. Though the prevailing wisdom everywhere is that women are frivolous consumers who blow their money on clothes and cosmetics, while men are rational and responsible economic beings, evidence reveals this belief to be straight-out gender ideology. Men, as a group, often choose to spend money on their own indulgences, rather than sharing it with their families, even prioritizing expenditures on vices such as alcohol, tobacco, gambling, prostitution, and guns above their children’s education. By contrast, women, as a group, spend first on their families, especially children, and communities. A report by Goldman Sachs’s Global Markets Institute argued that the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, and China) and “Next 11” countries (Bangladesh, Egypt, Indonesia, Iran, Mexico, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Philippines, Turkey, South Korea, and Vietnam) must achieve gender equality in order to create a middle class, which every market economy needs for stability. Goldman Sachs argued that women’s spending money on improving household welfare—nutrition, education, medical care, clothing, childcare, and household durables—is what builds the middle class.14 Research has demonstrated repeatedly that, even in the poorest communities, economically empowering women increases spending on education, nutrition, and health care, strengthening countries in the process.
Despite women’s centrality to our material well-being, the Double X Economy is consistently undervalued. This is because a worldwide conviction persists that females simply deserve less. You can see it, for instance, in the Wage Equality for Similar Work data collected each year by the World Economic Forum.15 In the WEF’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. As you can see in Figure 2, there is no country on earth where the custom is to pay the sexes equally for the same work. A global rule of thumb says that a woman is worth only about 65 percent of what a man is, whatever job they are doing. This prejudice drives women’s subordination in every economic domain.
Copyright © 2020 by Linda Scott