Economic Woman

Gendering Inequality in the Age of Capital

Frances Raday

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781317281313
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

The author introduces the concept of economic woman and makes her visible in duality with and opposition to the exclusive model of economic man. Economic man has epitomized neo-liberal capitalism, which embraces competition and maximization of profit, resulting in a steep increase in economic inequality. The book demonstrates that women's inequality is a crucial factor in economic inequality, which cannot be fully understood without relating to women's situation, and that economic woman cannot thrive in the conditions of economic inequality created under global neo-liberalism.

Emphasising the international human rights guarantees of women's right to equality in all fields of life, the author documents woman's increased participation in political, public, financial and corporate institutions, employment and entrepreneurship, with some women reaching high profile positions. Nevertheless, using global data, she reveals that economic woman lags behind, with a severe economic power deficit, an unfulfilled promise of equal employment opportunity, a gendered impact of poverty and barriers to gender equality in the family. The book analyses the trap of women's increased burden of breadwinning in the context of discriminatory laws and practices, infrastructural failures and policy gaps, which preempt achievement of gender equality in economic life.

The book is intended for the general reader, academics, students, policy makers and NGOs. It shows economic woman at a global crossroads between a universal paradigm of gender equality and pervasive barriers to equal economic opportunity. The author demonstrates that tackling gender inequality, restoring welfare priorities and reducing economic inequality are inextricably linked. Human rights and governments have a vital role to play in addressing them all, to create a sustainable economic infrastructure for the lives of women and men.

Part I Economic Power

Wealth and income inequality have harsh implications for women, given their thin representation at the pinnacle of the economic hegemony and their heavier concentration lower on the value chain. Since the 1980s, macroeconomic policies and corporate and financial governance, at the international and national levels, have, as said in the Introduction, produced a dramatic increase in inequalities of wealth and incomes. Personal wealth inequality has been on the rise in most countries with higher rates of return on capital than average economic growth.¹ Income inequality has increased dramatically in North America and Asia; moderately in Europe; and stabilised at an extremely high level in the Middle East, Africa and Brazil.² The gendered repercussions of economic inequality call for greater attention to the need for policy interventions to empower women, both in participation in economic decision-making and in the substance of policy.

In analysing the current situation, there is a dearth of systematised data. Mapping the extent of women’s power at the macro level of economic policy making is a difficult task, as the locus of economic power is highly fragmented, spread over a diversified institutional canvas: international agencies, parliaments, governmental bodies, corporations, entrepreneurial actors and cooperatives. It is considerably more challenging than charting women’s political participation through numbers in executive and legislative bodies or their formal employment status through labour market participation figures and wage returns. The best that can be done is to present a collage of women’s activities in various sectors of economic power in decision-making. The picture that I will show emerging from this collage is one of severe underrepresentation of women and a severe lack of gender-sensitive policy-making mechanisms throughout the centres of economic power.

Women have not yet achieved significant access to macroeconomic power in the political, corporate and financial worlds. Although there are growing numbers of women who have broken the glass ceiling into economic leadership and power, they are still a small minority and have not reached a critical mass of economic policy makers which can influence policy at the macro-level. Women hence play almost no role in formulating the neo-liberal economic policy which has adversely impacted their lives.

Economic policy making has not prioritised the issue of gendered impact. This holds true for both public and private bastions of economic power. Women’s empowerment in economic leadership is, although an essential condition for mainstreaming and promoting gender-sensitive policy, not, in and of itself, a sufficient condition. Adoption by all policy makers of a gendered perspective in macroeconomic policy is essential. This entails integrating a dual world view of men’s and women’s life experiences and differing socio-economic needs. It requires the addressing of issues such as the integration of the care economy, regulation of the informal labour market, improving the regulatory conditions for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), the economic potential of education for girls, the costs of violence against women and of restrictions on women’s reproductive health and rights. It would highlight the non-sustainability of extreme inequality, both general and gendered.

Focus on the particularly low level of women’s participation in economic policy making is a newly emerging area. In 2014, the WGDAW drew attention to this as an area of pervasive discrimination against women which had been largely neglected in the UN agenda on business and human rights.³ Many of its recommendations on the subject were incorporated into that year’s Human Rights Council’s Resolution on ‘Elimination of Discrimination Against Women,’ in which the Council called upon institutions of global economic governance and business to promote women’s equal access to decision-making positions and processes.⁴

Analysis of the reasons for women’s underrepresentation in economic decision-making is of course part of the general understanding of the patriarchal framework of society and pervasive discrimination in appointments and promotion within institutions. However, we must address the particular challenges in this crucial area of economic policy making as regards both the exceedingly low numbers of women participating, specifically at focal points of economic power as compared with other areas of decision-making, and also as regards the lack and even delegitimisation of gender-sensitivity in the substance of economic policy and in organisational behaviour. This delegitimisation of gender-sensitivity is consonant with a premise that economics is an objective science which is blind to irrelevant characteristics such as race and gender. In both the arena of economic leadership and of entrepreneurship, the discriminatory results belie the theoretical egalitarian premise.

1 Economic leadership

DOI: 10.4324/9781315641874-5

Economic leadership is dispersed through the political establishment and the financial and corporate worlds. The mélange of public and private leaders at the World Economic Forum annual meeting in Davos demonstrates this graphically. In the political establishment, the level of women’s participation does not guarantee an equivalent or proportionate level in the wielding of economic decision-making power within the political institutions. Nor, indeed, is the level of women’s political participation necessarily an indicator for the level of their economic leadership at the corporate level. In the Nordic countries, women have long achieved as much as 40in political and public representation, but as of 2014 only 3of 145 Nordic large-cap companies had a female chief executive.⁵ In Germany, too, led by Angela Merkel, whose cabinet was 35female in 2014, only 7of the executives among its top companies were female.⁶ This disconnect has been observed conversely in China, in a research finding that there is a significant positive correlation between economic development and the economic status of women in China, with women well represented in senior management but not between economic development and the political status of women, where women are severely underrepresented at the top levels of central government.⁷

Hence, we shall look at women’s politically-based economic power and their corporate-based economic power separately.

Politically based economic power

Political leadership is key to macroeconomic policy making and there is a crucial deficit in political women leaders’ economic power. Women leaders in parliaments and governments lag severely behind in economic decision-making positions, at the international and national levels.

The near universal inclusion of women in the vote and in parliamentary membership has been hailed as the gendering of democracy or the cosmopolitanisation of feminism, “albeit in a slow and sporadic way.”⁸ Nevertheless, it is important to note that the gendering of democracy is still far from complete. The global average for women members of national parliaments, reached its highest-ever level in 2017 at 23.5%,⁹ which still averages less than a quarter of legislators. The introduction of gender quotas in the political arena has been indicated by the CEDAW Committee and the WGDAW as a required method for achieving de facto equality for women’s parliamentary representation and removing structural barriers that women face in the electoral process. Quota systems have been introduced by law in a growing number of countries, particularly countries with low levels of economic development, and have resulted in higher levels of political representation of women, with spectacular success for example in Rwanda, which reached a level of around 60of women members of parliament after a genocidal civil war devastated the country.¹⁰

As regards top leadership in government positions, women are visible but remain scarce. According to UN Women, as of October 2017, worldwide there were 11 women serving as Head of State, and 12 serving as Head of Government, and as of January 2017, the number of women globally who were government ministers was 18.3%.¹¹ Lack of financial resources may play a part in keeping women out in the political election process for leadership positions. For instance, in its visit to the United States in 2015, the WGDAW noted that the potential for women political candidates has been severely curtailed by their virtual exclusion from the funding networks for candidates’ election campaigns, which are dominated by men.¹²

Furthermore, it is abundantly clear that still in our times discriminatory stereotypes against women in power play a very significant role in keeping highly qualified women out of top political office. Women who reach positions of power are frequently exposed to misogynistic attacks both by political leaders and the public. The misogynistic campaign in 2016 against Hilary Clinton as presidential candidate in the United States is a pertinent example.¹³ Another example is the brutal misogynistic backlash in Australia against Prime Minister Julia Gillard, who reacted to this onslaught in the Australian parliament in 2012 by calling on the leader of the opposition, Tony Abbott, to resign.¹⁴

Even those women who have achieved political power lag behind in economic decision-making positions, at the international, governmental and parliamentary levels. At the international level, we find Christine Lagarde, who after being the first women in any of the G8 countries to be a Finance Minister (in France), also became, in 2011, the first woman to head the International Monetary Fund (IMF), breaking the previous male monopoly and furthermore surviving in the position despite a corruption prosecution against her in France. As the head of the IMF and again at Davos in 2018 she advocated that empowering women can be an “economic game changer.”¹⁵

In international economic institutions leadership, Lagarde remains one of the few exceptions rather than the rule as regards women holding powerful economic power positions. In 2016, the number of women in the international financial and trade institutions remained thin on the ground. The IMF had only one female executive director out of 24 and six female alternate executive directors out of 30.¹⁶ The World Bank has never had a female president and had four female executive directors out of 25.¹⁷ The WTO, although 45of its professional staff were females, noted that the number of women chairing WTO bodies, panels and working groups is considerably lower than that of men.¹⁸ And the World Economic Forum (WEF) had one woman out of nine members of the managing board and 17 women out of 49 members of the executive committee.¹⁹

At the governmental level, women prime ministers are, of course, endowed with formal power to direct economic policy. However, at the ministerial level, where women constitute 18.3of all government ministers globally, their inclusion does not usually endow them with economic decision-making power: the most common portfolios for women ministers are environment, natural resources, energy, social affairs, education, family and women’s affairs, with very few women ministers for finance and budget or economic affairs.²⁰ In 2017, UN Women and the International Parliamentary Union (IPU) reported that out of 1,237 portfolios in 186 countries women held only 38 portfolios in finance, budget, economy and development, which amounts to about 3of ministerial positions in direct economic decision-making.²¹ In Canada in 2015 and France in 2017, where gender-parity cabinets were appointed to the delight of feminists, their delight was tempered by the fact that the women ministers were appointed to portfolios with inferior resources and power.²²

A few of the women ministers have expressly advanced gender-sensitive policies. An example is Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala of Nigeria, who served as Nigeria’s Finance Minister twice (seven years in total) between 2003 and 2015. She ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• series
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• illustrations
• Abbreviations
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Introducing Economic Woman
• Part I Economic Power
• Part II The Sale of Human Capital
• Part III Gendered Poverty – Revisiting the Feminisation of Poverty Paradigm
• Part IV Family Economics
• Concluding Chapter – Economic Woman at a Crossroads
• Index