Gender and Development
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Gender and Development

The Economic Basis of Women′s Power

Samuel R. Cohn, Rae Lesser Blumberg

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Gender and Development

The Economic Basis of Women′s Power

Samuel R. Cohn, Rae Lesser Blumberg

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About This Book

Drawing from the leading scholarship in the field, Gender and Development: The Economic Basis of Women?s Power helps students develop a foundational understanding of the significant role that gender plays in developing societies. Award-winning scholars Samuel Cohn and Rae Lesser Blumberg have carefully selected and edited a collection of readings that encourage students to think critically about the economic power (or lack thereof) of women, and apply key concepts and theory related to gender and current development issues. From women's participation in labor markets to their financial autonomy and purchasing power, these readings enable students to explore the economic implications of female power and the importance of women's strategic indispensability.

Key Features:

  • Distinguished scholars in the field offer students distinctive personalized points of view that extend the study of women's power, gender, and development in new and interesting directions.
  • A wide range of countries/regions, perspectives, and issues is explored to enable instructors the flexibility to introduce students to a variety of key concepts in a manner that works for their classrooms.
  • Analysis of the cause and effect of women's power offers students insights on the inter-relation between gender and development.
  • "Guide to the Book" provides students with context for understanding gender and development, as well as introduces students to the key theories that they will explore throughout the book.

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Chapter 1 “Power of the Purse”: The Importance of Women’s Economic Power: Why Women’s Economic Power Is Absolutely Essential

Globally, countries are losing $160 trillion in wealth because of differences in lifetime earnings between women and men.
— World Bank, May 30, 2018
The increase in female employment in the rich world has been the main driving force of growth in the last couple of decades. Those women have contributed more to global GDP growth than has either new technology or the new giants, China and India.
The Economist, “Forget China, India and the Internet: Economic Growth Is Driven by Women” (Special Report: The Importance of Sex), April 12, 2006 (16)
The central thread in this book is about the causes and effects of women’s economic power, defined as control of economic resources—income, wealth, credit and/or assets such as real property, land, livestock, stocks and bonds, and the like.
Women’s economic power matters not only because power is the key to gender equality but also because we argue that when it comes to gender equality or inequality, it’s the most important of the five main types of power: political, force/violence, economic, ideology, and information/education. It’s also the only one of those five types that varies for both women and men from near 100% to near 0%, although there are many more male than female cases of near-total economic power. But there are no cases where women have full 50/50 equality or better in any of the other four types of power. Here are two empirical cases of extreme economic power:
  • In Colonial North America, the women of the six tribes of the Iroquois Confederation controlled essentially the entire economy: land, crops (which they cultivated), and the storehouses where food was kept. It gave the Matrons, the women leaders, the power to nominate male chiefs, as well as to recall them and nominate a replacement; the Matrons also could veto a military expedition by not giving the men the stored trail food needed. Men and women also had equal power in the religious sphere. There is no mention of any wife beating or violence against women (Brown 1970, 1975).
  • In today’s Afghanistan, men control almost all the wealth. A study by Grace (2005:16) found that men owned more than 98% of the land—in a country that is about three fourths rural. The dominant ideology views women akin to property and “not quite human beings.” Overwhelmingly, women wear near-identical face-covering burqas with no individual touches when they go out lest they be recognized and harmed by disapproving men (Blumberg 2016b). UNIFEM estimates that 87% of Afghan women face abuse and violence (UNIFEM 2006; Khan 2012:2). Yet, via a U.S.-promoted quota system, women are 27.7% of members of Parliament (Inter-Parliamentary Union 2018). Some are brave and speak out, but none wield any real clout.
Another reason that women’s economic power is important is that it—and the greater gender equality it fosters—spurs the best kind of development: not merely economic growth but also improved human well-being. Conversely, its absence is linked to the worst kind of development, including violence and armed conflict, as well as malnutrition and ill health of children and their mothers (Blumberg 2016a).
So, what causes women to attain economic power? This is the key question. It is one thing to explain the adverse treatment of women by claiming they lack economic power; it is another to explain how women can gain economic power so they can increase gender equity.

The Two Primary Causes of Women’s Economic Power

There are many ways women can acquire economic power. Most fall into one of two broader categories, however: “strategic indispensability” (Blumberg 1984) and “strategic alliances.”1
Strategic indispensability. Strategic indispensability is the essence of power (Pfeffer 1981). Being indispensable gives a worker a credible exit threat. If the worker leaves, the organization cannot go on without her. Lady Gaga is essential to a Lady Gaga concert. You can replace a roadie or a bass player but not the main attraction. If Lady Gaga is unhappy and threatens not to go onstage, the show will not go on. Lady Gaga’s strategic indispensability makes it likely she will get exactly what she wants.
Hirschman (1970) made this argument compellingly in Exit, Voice and Loyalty. If management does something that workers don’t like, the workers have a choice of exit, voice, or loyalty. They can leave, they can protest, or they can suck it up and take it. Voice (protest) works only if acting on the exit threat would actually hurt management. If the firm can operate perfectly well with replacement workers, the exit threat is meaningless: the workers have no power to force significant change in policy or practice.
Strategic indispensability is particularly important for women’s economic power. To be indispensable, women must work in key production activities. That is the prerequisite (Blumberg 1984). To transform their work into economic power, the activity has to be important and valued. The women cannot be easy to replace. Could the society or the power elite do without female production? If the answer is “not easily,” women have crucial strategic indispensability and, with it, some level of economic power.2
Strategic alliances. Power is not strictly based on one’s own resources. Victories are won by coalitions of people working together. Having powerful allies matters. If women receive the support of key gatekeepers and power holders in society, they can leverage this assistance into women’s victories. If every significant societal actor favors male domination, the women are outnumbered and outflanked. Regardless of their own resources, they are likely to lose.
Resource mobilization theorists make this argument compellingly. Tilly (1988) and McCarthy and Zald (1977) argue that the success of protests depends on whether elite forces contribute resources to the cause. Wealthy sponsors can donate money. Government officials can provide parliamentary votes, favorable administrative decisions, victories in court, or protection from police repression. Moral authorities and celebrities can provide publicity or can frame women’s case in a manner that increases public approval. Movements with sponsors win. Movements without sponsors are crushed. Comparable arguments are made in the literature on organizational power where worker autonomy and access to decision making are linked to alliances with key outsiders (Pfeffer 1981).
In today’s world, what kinds of resources are necessary to get strategic indispensability? The most common resources are money, property, and skills. In some cases, availability to work makes one indispensable when no one else is available.
What kinds of people must one connect with to get strategic alliances? Economic gatekeepers matter. Women in business, from micro to large-scale, need alliances with customers, vendors, and lenders. If male, they may have strong preferences on gender issues, including whether or not they will do business with women. The state is of fundamental importance, too. If the law is biased against women, then regulators, the police, and even customs officials all can hamper women’s economic activities. Moral, cultural, and religious authorities also can create or destroy public support for women.

The 10 Supporting Causes of Women’s Economic Power

There are many ways to obtain strategic indispensability and strategic alliances. You probably can think of a dozen right now. We propose five determinants of women’s strategic indispensability and five of strategic alliances. These 10 undergird women’s economic empowerment. It is easy to demonstrate their importance in helping women solidify their economic power in numerous empirical settings in both the Global North and Global South.
Here is a brief overview of how the 10 factors listed in Table 1.1 work.
Table 1.1
Table
  1. Absence of patrilineal inheritance. Patrilineal inheritance is inheriting property or money strictly between males, especially from father to son. Wives and daughters are intentionally bypassed. Cutting women off from inherited assets weakens them economically.
  2. Absence of patrilocality. Patrilocality is having women go to live with their husband’s family when they marry. When women are forced to live exclusively with their husband’s family, surrounded by his male-side kin, contact with and support from their family of birth typically plummets or disappears. This leaves them with no allies in a marital dispute. Everyone else in the household and his relatives will support the husband.
  3. Absence of non-irrigated (“dry”) plow agriculture. Men have been far more likely to use the plow than women, given that human- or animal-drawn plows require considerable upper-body strength and, biologically, men have roughly one half more. In dry plow agriculture, plowing the earth to plant the seeds may be seen as the single most important phase of the food production process. In these cases, men, not women, have strategic indispensability and male power is high. In fact, women have little role from plowing to harvest. The next section adds more detail. (Blumberg’s chapter gives a fuller treatment of dry plow agriculture; Blumberg 2004b, 2009 offers more detail on points 1, 2, and 3.)
  4. Labor scarcity. Keeping women out of powerful positions requires that there be enough men available to fill those powerful positions. When men are either scarce or insufficient to meet rising demand and alternative labor forces (e.g., male migrants or even robots) are not readily available, there are jobs that will go undone unless one allows women to do them. Scarcity of men can come from warfare when men leave their homes to fight distant battles. It can also come from men migrating to other places. Such male absence often leaves the women to handle all the normal business at home (although sometimes older men who stay behind can prevent women from gaining economic autonomy). Overall labor scarcity can come from economic expansion or business booms. These scenarios increase women’s prospects for becoming strategically indispensable.
  5. Access to human capital. Human capital is economic jargon for skill. Human capital generally comes from education and work experience; good health and nutrition also enhance it. In a modern industrialized economy, skilled jobs pay more than unskilled jobs. Having human capital is essential to attaining positions of responsibility and status.
  6. Commercialization of women’s home-based production/enterprise. Prior to industrialization, most people lived on farms and produced the bulk of goods at home. When industrialization comes, some of that work can become valuable in the market. If women make textiles or art objects or do market trading—and are lucky enough to have that sector take off—they can find themselves in a lucrative niche in the economy.
  7. Absence of male preference by controllers of capital or sales. It is hard for women to become economically powerful if men won’t do business with them. If credit institutions and banks won’t loan to women, then the only businesses with significant assets will be those controlled by men. If strategic buyers won’t negotiate with women or buy their products, then marketing and dealmaking will be male monopolies.
  8. Women’s economic organization. Women can make alliances with each other to increase their mutual power. Female business associations, cooperatives, trading groups, traditional rotating savings and credit groups (especially among traders in sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia), as well as informal cooperation among women in business, all increase women’s economic power relative to men. Microfinance institutions, too, often prefer women as microloan clients because they usually repay better than men.
  9. Favorable balance of nondiscriminatory versus patriarchal noneconomic institutions. Women need societal support if they are to attain positions of power. To the extent the government or the law is antifeminist and discriminates against women, women seeking power will face legal and political obstacles. The same applies if religious organizations, schools, or the mass media are patriarchal, discriminating, and antifeminist. Under those circumstances, women will face hostile public opinion, as well as organized resistance from gatekeepers enforcing traditional moral codes.
  10. Absence of armed conflict near women’s homes. War and violence close to home foster male control over women. Women who want positions of power must be able to go about their business. If the streets are unsafe, women either must stay home or find armed male escorts if they wish to go out. Limited mobility severely constrains what women can do on their own behalf. In warlike conditions today, power devolves on those people who carry guns. Disproportionately, gun carriers tend to be males.
Now we consider these points in greater detail, illustrating their operations with examples from the empirical literature, including studies of gender and development.

Absence of Patrilineal Inheritance, Patrilocality, and Non-Irrigated Plow Agriculture

We consider the first three factors together: absence of (1) patrilineal inheritance, (2) patrilocal residence for newlyweds, and (3) a farming system based on non-irrigated plow agriculture. We do so by looking at the opposite side of the coin: When all three factors are simultaneously present, women’s position falls to its geographic and historic low point. Caldwell (1982) described a “patriarchal belt” stretching across the Middle East/North Africa (MENA), as well as much of South Asia and (pre-Revolutionary) China, based solely on patriarchal kinship. (Note that this encompasses Muslim, Hindu, and Confucianist areas.) The “patriarchal belt” also led to a “patriarchal bargain” (Kandiyoti 1988) whereby women accepted being largely confined to the home, acting submissively and with propriety, in return for male support and protection. With no importance in dry plow agriculture or way to earn income, what else could they do?

Patrilineal Inheritance

When men receive most or all inheritance in a patrilineal kinship system, including of crucial resources such as land in rural areas, women have to create their own livelihoods by alternative means—or end up in highly subordinated positions. Conversely, when patrilineal inheritance is absent, women’s chances for greater equality rise.
Patrilineal inheritance is prevalent de facto, if not de jure, in the following world areas:
  1. The “patriarchal belt” delineated by Caldwell (1982)—MENA, much of South Asia, and (pre-Revolutionary) China. It has long traditions of this—for example, half-share inheritance for women under Islamic Sharia; male inheritance in Hindu-majority India, where there are still problems despite legal changes; and in pre-Communist China.
  2. Sub-Saharan Africa, where 75% of ethnic groups have a male-dominated kinship/property system (Elondou-Enyegye and Calves 2006). Presently, in rural areas among these groups, there still is considerable de facto male inheritance of land even in nations where a land law has been passed giving women rights to inherit it. Mainly, this is because the legal code has yet to be scrubbed of remaining “customary law.” In contrast to the “patriarchal belt,” however, most of those African women long have been important in horticultural cultivation (see the section on “Horticulture”), as well as in trade. These pursuits have given most of them the ability to earn—and control—income on their own, even if they don’t inherit. Where women do control income, especially in West Africa, which has the strongest, longest traditions of female entrepreneurship, women and men keep “separate purses” (Hill 1969; Treas 1991); that is, neither husband nor wife knows what the other is earning—which protects women’s income from possible male designs.
This leaves much of the world (Europe, the Western Hemisphere, Southeast Asia, and Australia/New Zealand) with less patriarchal modes of transmitting property and wealth.

Patrilocality

Women do better in economic and well-being terms when they have allies. This is easiest where patrilocal residence is absent. Some nonpatrilocal groups (mostly in sub-Saharan Africa) have full matrilineal descent, inheritance, and postmarital residence.3 Most nonpatrilocal peoples of the world, however, have bilateral kinship: mother’s and father’s kin are given fairly equal weight, although different groups may lean toward male or female kin to varying degrees. A female tilt is called matrifocality (women favoring women relatives, preferring to live near them, and exchanging help from childcare to making ends meet). In today’s Global South, bilateral kinship with a matrifocal tilt is found mainly in the Caribbean and Southeast Asia. In both regions, women have long-standing traditions as market traders.4...

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