Where is America on Women’s Empowerment?
America’s laggard position on maternity leave is appropriate fodder for late night comedy, but there are other ways, such as affirmative action policies, in which the US has led the world on women’s empowerment.
These days, a pat answer is used to explain women’s disadvantaged status in the US: “Only two countries are left in the world that don’t provide paid maternity leave, Papua New Guinea and the United States.” You can hear this quip from politicians and comics alike. The audience always groans with recognition and laughs.
But Americans don’t seem to know much else about how they measure up to other nations on women’s rights. Indeed, they often seem to assume they are the only country with a problem. Or they mistakenly believe that there is no problem at all.
After the speech I gave at the UN last spring, which was loaded with graphs about women in various regions, a surprising number of people said to me, “Do you have data like that for the United States?”
No other country takes its own temperature as often as America does. You can find out who among Uncle Sam’s children folds, rolls, or crumples their toilet paper, if you really want to know. These folks measure everything. So, yes, of course there’s data and lots of it. Soon after, when I was invited to give a talk to a group of aspirant female MBAs in New York, I decided to speak about where the US stands in the global landscape.
I began by sketching the broad strokes of a picture that is now well accepted among global data wonks, but is often news to the ordinary citizen:
We have nation-level data about the status of women that we did not have, say, ten or fifteen years ago. Those data show quite clearly that every country in the world has a gender problem, including the United States and Papua New Guinea, but also Western Europe and the former Communist countries.
Women, as a class, are disadvantaged in every economic domain in every nation, whether you are looking at the informal versus the formal employment or at business ownership or access to capital.
Economic development is positively correlated with gender equality to a striking degree. Analysis also shows that gender inequality is correlated with the worst forms of suffering: early death, disease, conflict, human trafficking.
It is now commonly accepted, among those engaged with economic development worldwide, that including women equally in a nation’s economy contributes massively to prosperity, by both increasing growth and reducing costly suffering.
None of this is particularly controversial. Denying these findings is like saying climate change doesn’t exist: you have to ignore heaps of data, as well as the opinions of experts.
Female subordination seems to be rooted in centuries of exclusion from the money system as a whole. To fully grasp the situation, one must look beyond a single dimension (such as unequal pay) to all the systemic constraints that, when they come together, cause women to be economically excluded. It is important to recognize the historical pattern, stretching back thousands of years, in which women consistently have been barred from controlling wealth. Women’s exclusion is not a local phenomenon. During the long stretch of time since the invention of money, the occasional exception only proves the rule: whether you are looking at Hindus or Visigoths, women have been forbidden to inherit wealth, own property, sign contracts, get credit, have bank accounts, and even work for pay.
American women began their quest for equality earlier than their sisters in many other countries and have had more success in some ways. But many rights my US compatriots now take for granted were only recently won and their disadvantaged circumstances still bear the clear imprint of past exclusions very similar to those now facing women in less developed countries.
You can see right away that there is a strong relationship between “Women’s Economic Opportunity,” a composite score created by the Economist, and National Competitiveness, a score calculated by the World Economic Forum. Many items we do not normally think of as “economic opportunity,” such as reproductive rights and protections against violence, are included in The Economist’s index. I will try to illustrate why some of these issues are a matter of economics in this post.
Consider, for instance, that women bear a disproportionate burden of unpaid work in every country. The expectation that they will put in long hours and never ask for remuneration is the first, and most basic, exclusion. This requirement also rather conveniently makes it hard for them to hold down a paying job. That fact is just as true in San Francisco as in sub-Saharan Africa. Indeed, as OECD’s 2012 survey of the economic status of women made very clear, the lower earnings among women worldwide, both in employment and entrepreneurship, are largely attributable to the unpaid care burden they usually bear. Precisely because it is unmonetized, care work is generally not considered to be “real work” at all, even though estimates of its value are as high as 30% of GDP across OECD countries. Indeed, the whole body of economic thought tends to treat women’s work in the home as “unproductive,” as Nancy Folbre’s brilliant book, Greed, Lust, and Gender thoroughly documents.
In some cultures, women are not allowed to work for pay or, if they do, they must surrender their earnings to a husband or father, who has legal rights over any income they might generate and who often controls their every movement. Practices like purdah effectively bar women from working outside the home. Unsafe public spaces similarly work to constrain mobility and, therefore, earning power. All the constraints on earning, especially when coupled with an “obligation” to long hours of unpaid work, tends to keep women from having much money which, in turn, makes them dependent upon men.
The horizontal black bar marks equality with men. In the US, as in Europe, women are enrolled in tertiary education at much higher levels than men. And, they are more likely to occupy the professional and technical jobs that require advanced skills. But they are a smaller percentage of the overall workforce. And they have even fewer numbers in leadership posts, whether in the public or private sector. What we are seeing here is a waste of the real money that US society puts into educating women–yet one more way in which gender inequality hurts America as a country. Note, however, the pattern in the Middle East. While the percentage of women in tertiary education is higher and the translation into employment and leadership shows a steeper decline, the overall pattern of wasted resources and lost opportunities is the same. I figure this information discredits two American myths. First, there is the one that says Muslims are fundamentally different when it comes to women. Then, there is the one that says all you need is educational opportunity and fairness will do the rest.
Cloistering women was commonplace in America in earlier centuries, though it is not now. Women won the right to control their own earnings in the latter part of the 19th century. But unsafe commutes are still the order of the day in the US—and still act to discourage females from activities that would improve their earnings or advancement prospects like, for instance, working late or socializing with clients or colleagues. (Exclusion from networks is consistently cited as a reason for both women’s lower pay and their lesser success as entrepreneurs.) Until the 1970s, jobs were gender-segrated in America: even the want ads in the newspapers classified jobs for women or men. The better jobs—that is, the jobs that required education, paid well, and had advancement or supervisory prospects—were unabashedly set aside for men. Putting an end to this exclusionary practice was a major victory for the American women’s movement in the Second Wave.
However, even though women can now hold the same jobs as men, they are still paid less for the same work and they still advance less often. A large sample study conducted by the American Association of University Women found that recent female graduates were paid 18% less than their male counterparts, even when controlling for the major topic of study. What’s behind this gap is a belief that women’s pay needs to be discounted for the expectation that females will have children and many will eventually drop out of the labor force. This position is invoked even though (1) most women coming out of college are single and childless, (2) most mothers of young children work, and (3) many statistics now show that young American men, as well as young women, want more family-friendly arrangements at work, including paternity leave. The female grads are paid less because they possess the biological potential to procreate, regardless of their actual intentions or individual fertility. Thus, the women do not get the chance to make choices; they are automatically dumped into the procreation bin. Then, since the US workplace makes it so difficult for mothers to work, the entire system circles around to force those who do have children to sacrifice careers and, thus, justifies the unequal pay enforced at the outset.
The black columns represent the percentage of entry level management jobs given to women by the 100 top employers in each country. The magenta bars are the percentage of women in the total company workforce. In the back, the peach-colored bars are the percentage of women in the national workforce. Importantly, the women in all these countries are significantly better educated than the men. Notice that the US has quite a bit better record than any of the other countries, all of which offer paid maternity leave.
Here is where the argument about maternity leave comes in. Many Americans assume that women advance more often and are paid more equally in countries providing paid maternity leave. It is not true. There is some reason to believe, as I have documented in blogs here as well as for the World Economic Forum, that the requirement to pay maternity leave may have hurt women in those countries—and that the continuing belief that women belong at home (minding babies and obeying their husbands) is actually the more meaningful barrier. Indeed, OECD has presented data showing that the best predictor of women’s economic equality in any country is whether the citizens believe jobs belong to men first and women second.
