“Her … food, clothing, ornaments, amusements, luxuries [all] bear no relation to her power to produce wealth, to her services in the house, or to her motherhood” Charlotte Perkins Gilman.
My mother (born in 1926) was a powerful personality trapped in a world not of her choosing. This has made me cognizant of women’s issues and what women have to deal with on a daily basis. This is why I think it is so important to consider the feminine perspective if we truly want a Sustainable world. Women bring different perspectives that have been largely ignored, sometimes by misogynistic men, but more often by men who have themselves have been trapped within a male patriarchal mindset that simply disregarded women, and more likely just thought of women as smaller, weaker versions of males. And then the economy places women even further behind. My mother remembered before the mid-1970s having to get my fathers signature to obtain a credit card for the family, and she managed the family’s accounts.
When I first came to the United States, I worked for my soon to be wife as a biochemical research associate in her academic lab. I was asked by several male colleagues if it bothered me to work for a woman. If you had known my mother, you would not be surprised to know that I had never given it a second thought. In my mind women were every bit as capable of men in all endeavors. Several years later as I studied for my doctorate, my advisor was a lone woman in a large School of Natural Resources. Again, I had many men ask me the same question. It was then I began to understand one of the principal barriers to an equitable and sustainable world was to bring ‘invisible women’ out into the light to be seen as major players for a sustainable future.
In 1993, I attended the Eco-Ed conference in Toronto. It was illuminating to see so many non-governmental organizations (NGOs) present, with a large number of women presenting on various issues. I recall one female, Kenyan delegate give a talk about the ‘Women’s world bank (https://www.womensworldbanking.org/).’ She talked about conditions of her life and how she had to empower herself to make a difference in her village when she didn’t have any rights, except those given to her by the men in her village, and how she didn’t even own her own body. I was able to have a short discussion over a coffee and heard how in her country, women lending to women had been so successful that the national banks did a major study to understand how to do a better job in banking and to lessen loan defaults that were a major problem with their male borrowers.
If you think about it, banks and any other monetary institutions have largely ignored women because historically they didn’t have their own money and most of the work they did was unpaid care work as part of their family or community expectations. This problem persists within the national and global economies when we try to measure how well economies are doing. The magic GDP/GNP (see earlier posts using GDP as a search term) are the way of measuring money moving. But that is incredibly subjective as it ignores non-paid household/community work, volunteerism, and bartering, which are common service aspects of global community life; or it was in developing countries before hyper-consumerism took hold and we started paying directly for everything (hence money moving).
As Economics professor Diane Coyle states, “Everyone acknowledges that there is economic value in work [paid or unpaid], it is just not part of the ‘economy’.” The problems in trying to measure non-paid work (mostly done by women) makes the task to collect useful data too daunting, so it is ignored to simplify GDP evaluations. But consider, it is estimated (by economists trying to make the effort) that unpaid work could account for over 50% in developed countries and over 80% is undeveloped countries. So how is the global economy really? It is so much more than just measuring how the monetarily uber-rich invest within the stock-market.
In developed countries, during the 1970s economic hey-day of GDP productivity, the GDP increase was largely a result of unpaid housewives buying appliances, home gadgets, pre-prepared food from the supermarkets, and clothes from clothing stores, when all this was previously done by hand at home. Productivity per se hadn’t actually gone up (except in the factories), “it had just shifted from the invisibility of the feminized private sphere to the sphere that is counted: the male dominated public sphere.” The consequence of this is that, as economist Sue Himmelweit states, is that failing to capture this ‘female data’ is seen by the economic system as a ‘costless resource to be exploited.’ Whenever economic resources are cut to save money, the work done by women suffers as women pay the price for reduced social services that previously helped them.
Women’s unpaid work is more than just caring for family and elderly relatives. It is vital community work that society depends upon. (Think about the Long Friday in Iceland I talked about in the last post.) When tax-based governmental services are cut, the demand for those services doesn’t cease, the women still have to make-do – it isn’t a matter of choice. We need to design our economic systems to collect the data, to take into account female realities rather than ‘male-based confection.’ Green agendas about sustainability rarely consider women or women’s perspectives. To think we can become sustainable without considering 50% of our global population seems a tad illusionary at best.
Since we have so little sex-disaggregated data that tells us about what women are doing, we tend to have a lot of assumptive data or a lot of ‘zombie data’ (Data that is considered wrong but keeps being quoted as real – like urban legends that won’t go away). The problem is that much social funding is based on zombie data with endless male-based assumptions about what it means.
Extensive surveys done after 2010 by the UN and World Bank (600 surveys across 73 countries) determined poverty levels around the world, but with no idea of how genderized poverty may be. Again, the assumption of that men and women suffer poverty equally (e.g., Male versus Female header households), with the nagging problem that the very term ‘poverty’ is not universally understood. This amorphous term has been used to justify claims that poverty is decreasing, but scurrilous governmental accounting practices have simply lowered the point at which poverty is defined to validate zombie data that the economy is doing better.
Assumptions are that all resources are equally shared within a family of small community with equal Standards of Living. It seems a fair assumption on the surface, but digging deeper and collecting sex-disaggregated data would tell us specifically what differences and possibly why women seem disadvantaged than men in poverty related areas as zombie data suggest. The problem exists whether zombie data really is wrong. We don’t collect the data needed to determine that. When data we do have is scrutinized more deeply, we find that female and male spending habits differ greatly with women’s spending focusing more on the family, kids and community.
This simple fact has major implications on how tax systems affect women negatively. Zombie data insists household resources are allocated equally and taxes are levied on that assumption. Now tax systems around the world are anything but fair across social-strata, with less focus on redistributing resources more equitably, and more on lowering taxes on capital, corporations, and high income earners. There are amazing, and lots of, tax loopholes and incentives for the monetary wealthy to avoid and evade tax payments the rest of us have no access to. It’s a faith in the ‘trickle-down’ wealth belief that doesn’t exist, since the wealth-siphon (e.g, see earlier posts 1 and 2) always pulls money from the masses to the already wealthy.
Add to this data, when it is done, actually shows tax systems benefit men because of gender pay gaps and disadvantage women who continue to fill the resulting service gaps. Too often, government (local and up) make up tax revenue shortfalls by enacting higher sales taxes on consumer goods (e.g., Value Added Tax (VAT)). In poverty defined areas (which is about 80% of the world)), with male-dominated households, the women may get an ‘allowance’ on which to run the home, which doesn’t increase when sales taxes go up. Struggling to stay afloat in such situations, women are more likely to deny themselves ‘luxuries’ in favor of their husband’s expectations and children’s needs. In female-dominated households, this is nearly always a given. Male-dominated legislators often determine what are essentials (like food) that are tax-exempt and which are luxuries to be taxed. Women again take a hit here, with many countries that consider female sanitary goods a luxury. And it doesn’t end there, as many male luxuries are blessed as essentials and children’s needs as luxuries, again impacting women negatively as they continue to be responsible for all household things.
The paramount need for non-sex-disaggregated data is needed to ensure that women get a fairer shake of the dice for all aspects of their lives and to counter zombie data triggered by male-default assumptive thinking that continues to justify treating them as lesser males. And to add further insult to injury (literally), a male dominated system that simple assumes a woman is a less robust version of a man, women are more likely to be injured and die from medical systems and even everyday living than men in systems designed for the average male.
To Be Continued ………………………
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