Two Worlds, Same Story: Female Education Around the Globe

Tonight at 7PM Eastern Time, I will give a talk under the auspices of Circle of Women at Brown University. The topic is female education, from a global perspective. Usually, a topic like that is actually approached from the point of view of the rich nations looking at poor countries, and the point is what can be done about the barriers to girls education, especially at the secondary level.

As I have argued in The Double X Economy, however, the circumstances of women in the economy, including their access to resources like higher education, has been similar around the world. You can see it, if you step back. Looking at the pattern of women's achievement in the last fifty years, it is easy to see that women in both worlds have been experiencing a similar narrative, but it also only takes a quick look to see that some regions are rising more slowly than others.

What I will try to show is that the conditions that spin and perpetuate that trajectory have been fundamentally the same: an orchestrated exclusion, in both education and economics, that aims to keep women ignorant, docile, dependent, and therefore subordinate. The primary means has been forcible marriage, at an early age, and the childbirths that seem to inevitably follow. All these factors result in serious damage to societies everywhere.

Please join us tonight by zoom. The link is https://brown.zoom.us/j/97985498727 and the passcode is 97985498727.

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