The Sex Factor
Page 1
Table of Contents
Cover
Table and Figures
Acknowledgements
Introduction Notes
Part I Prosperity Introduction
Notes
1: Censored: How the West (Supposedly) Got Ahead A Potted History of Growth from the Stone Age to the Present
Five Lessons
Conclusion
Notes
2: Uncensored: The Secret Recipe of Economic Success Que Sera, Sera
Women's Freedom Across the Globe: An (All Too Brief) Historic Tour
Being ‘Me’: The Birth of Individual Freedom for European Women
Women and the Wealth of Nations: The Four Channels
Conclusion
Notes
Part II Inequality Introduction
3: When Did Sexism Begin? The Origins of Sexism: the Three Ps
From Agriculture to Manufacturing
Equality Consolidated
From Farm to Factory
The Twentieth Century
The Future
Conclusion
Notes
4: Income Inequality: What Does Sex Have to Do with It? Poverty and Income Inequality: The Long Term Trends
Rising Inequality in the West: The Standard Diagnosis
Gender Inequality Meets Income Inequality
The Global Sex Problem
Conclusion
Notes
5: Sex Sells: The Body Versus the Brain The Sinful Eve
Feminism Meets Puritanism
The Effect of Sex Workers on Society
The Effect of Society on Sex Workers
Society's Three Hang-Ups
Conclusion
Notes
Part III State Introduction
Notes
6: Marx Versus Markets Marx: The Secret Sexist
Why we Need Markets
The Big ‘But’: Markets can (and Should) be Made to Work Better
Conclusion
Notes
7: Why Women Make Better States Why do Richer Countries have Bigger States?
The Invention of the Modern State
Three Ways Women Helped to Build Today's Most Capable States
Conclusion
Notes
Part IV Humanity Introduction
8: Me, Myself and I: A History of the Individual At the Beginning
The Big Picture: Classical Economics
The Marginal Revolution
Conclusion
Notes
9: Humans Versus Robots: the Behavioural Revolution What Motivates Us?
How Rational and Calculating are We?
Why Behavioural Economics Matters
Conclusion
Notes
10: Economics Meets Feminism The Body
Family
From Family to Dependency
Society
Conclusion
Notes
Conclusion Notes
References
Index
End User License Agreement
List of tables
Chapter 2 Table 2.1 Female average age at first marriage before 1790
List of figures
Chapter 3 Figure 3.1 Gender wage gap in the UK, the USA, Japan, and Germany, 1970‒2016 So…
Chapter 4 Figure 4.1 Global poverty as percentage of population, 1820‒2013 Source: Bourg…
Figure 4.2 Percentage of individuals with inherited wealth on the Forbes 400, 1…
Part III Figure III.1 Government spending as percentage of GDP in the UK, Germany, and t…
Chapter 7 Figure 7.1 Taxes in history: high-tax England vs low-tax China. Centr…
The Sex Factor
How Women Made the West Rich
Victoria Bateman
polity
Copyright © Victoria Bateman 2019
The right of Victoria Bateman to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2019 by Polity Press
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ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-2676-5
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-2677-2 (pb)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Bateman, Victoria N. (Victoria Naomi), 1979- author.
Title: The sex factor : how women made the West rich / Victoria Bateman.
Description: Medford, MA : Polity Press, [2019] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018043360 (print) | LCCN 2018044879 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509526802 (Epub) | ISBN 9781509526765 (hardback) | ISBN 9781509526772 (pbk.)
Subjects: LCSH: Women–Social conditions. | Women–Employment. | Wages–Women. | Sex role–Economic aspects. | Feminism–History.
Classification: LCC HQ1121 (ebook) | LCC HQ1121 .B338 2019 (print) | DDC 305.4–dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018043360
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Table and Figures
Table 2.1 Female average age at first marriage before 1790
Figure 3.1 Gender wage gap in the UK, the USA, Japan, and Germany, 1970‒2016
Figure 4.1 Global poverty as percentage of population, 1820‒2013
Figure 4.2 Percentage of individuals with inherited wealth on the Forbes 400, 1982‒2003
Figure III.1 Government spending as percentage of GDP in the UK, Germany, and the USA, 1880‒2011
Figure 7.1 Taxes in history: high-tax England vs low-tax China
Acknowledgements
Whilst much of my academic life is spent writing in isolation, with a laptop in front of me and a cup of tea to one side, the connections that inspired the words on the pages of this book span the world and life not only within but beyond academia. I have found myself part of a stimulating online global community of academics, including Dr Judy Stephenson, Professor Mark Koyama, Dr Alice Evans, Dr Carolina Alves, Dr Vincent Gelaso and the anonymous economic historian Pseudoerasmus (to name just a few). I have also learnt a lot from ‒ and been touched by ‒ the support I have received through social media from sex workers and sex worker groups when advocating for policy change and de-stigmatization. I have had the pleasure of hosting Professor Julie Nelson and Professor Yana Rodgers, from the United States, and author Kat Banyard at special seminars in Cambridge, and I am grateful that my college is always happy to facilitate such events, along with our annual Women in Economics D
ay, for which I am indebted to Lucy Ward. I would like to thank the many people I've been fortunate to engage with in policy and journalistic circles, along with the Office for National Statistics and the British Civil Service's Exploring Economics group, Gender Equality Network and Women in Economics Network, all of which have graciously hosted my talks. My artistic work and experiences have greatly shaped my thinking about society and the economy, and for that I am forever grateful to Anthony Connolly RP, Jenna Young, Tamsin Sancha, Shelly Bancroft, Leena McCall and Mark Longworth. I have learnt a lot about attitudes towards women and their bodies through my artistic endeavours, attitudes that I see as central to restrictions on women's freedom ‒ and, with it, economic prosperity ‒ across the world. Although academic life is more commonly associated with the spoken and written word, I have found art to be a powerful means of engaging with the world beyond the ivory towers, one that is two-way and bottom-up (as opposed to one-way and top-down).
I am very fortunate to be able to call the Cambridge community home. It is a community that I have found to be unceasingly liberal, open-minded and supportive. Cambridge was the first place I could escape (and question) convention. My College has never insisted that I toe the usual academic line or restrict myself to the standard modes of academic engagement, and I never take the space and freedom that it offers me for granted. I am particularly grateful to Dr Ruth Scurr, Dr Clive Lawson, Professor Sir Alan Fersht, Dr David Secher, Dr Arif Ahmed, Dr Karenjit Clare, Dr Bronwen Everill, The Reverend Dr Cally Hammond and Dr Amy Ludlow, along with many other Cambridge colleagues outside of Caius, and those further afield: Professor Avner Offer, Professor Michelle Baddeley, Professor Deborah Oxley, Professor Bob Allen and Dr Marina Della Giusta. It has been a pleasure to work with George Owers at Polity Books, and I thank him, Gail Ferguson, Julia Davies and all the Polity team for their help, professionalism and expertise, along with three expert anonymous referees.
This book is dedicated not only to my female relatives, past and present, who have all lived much more difficult lives than my own, and without whom I would not be here today, but also to my husband of fourteen years, James. James and I first met in the winter of 1997 at our Cambridge University interviews. I could not do what I do without his unfailing love and support. James understands me more than anyone ever could and always supports me in whatever I choose to do. He keeps me as close to sanity as is possible, gives me strength and lets me fly.
Introduction
Not much more than a year ago, in March 2018, in the British coastal resort of Brighton, I was on a secret mission ‒ one that I'd been planning for a while. I left my dark and dingy hotel room, took the lift downstairs to the conference suite and walked into the gala reception of the Royal Economic Society annual conference (a gathering of some five hundred economists) wearing nothing but shoes, gloves, a necklace ‒ and, of course, a smile.
I didn't choose to appear naked at such an event because it was unseasonably warm (it certainly wasn't), nor due to a lack of suitable outfits in my wardrobe (I have a sizeable collection at home), but because economics has a sex problem. If economists were going to stand up and listen, I knew it would require something more than a short conference speech of the kind I was scheduled to deliver the following day.
Whilst naked protest isn't the usual approach employed by an academic, I do not ‒ as you might have guessed ‒ subscribe to the view that words are the only suitable means of communication. It is, after all, more than five hundred years since Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press. Just because the written and spoken word is the usual means of academic communication, it doesn't mean that we should restrict ourselves to them at all times. When I think about what has most powerfully affected my own thinking as an economist, on everything from poverty and prosperity to capitalism and the state, it is something else entirely: it is art. Whether it be painting, sculpture, theatre or film, art has power, a power that goes beyond words. As a great believer in the power of art, I thought that an artistic statement of the kind long used by feminist performance artists would be a creative addition for a meeting of economists.
My aim was simple: to punch feminism into the centre of economics or at least into the centre of the largest annual gathering of economists here in the United Kingdom. As a feminist and an economist, I'm regularly asked ‘What do feminism and economics have in common?’ The answer is simple: not nearly enough. Despite the many courageous efforts of feminists over the last century or more, feminism seems to have passed economics by. Unlike virtually every other academic discipline, mainstream economics just carries on as normal. As if the feminist revolution never happened. As if women didn't exist. And as if we were still living in a bygone age.
In almost every area of study, economics overlooks sex, gender and women's freedom, including the vital importance of women's freedom over their bodies. As I wandered around the event, chatting and sipping champagne, these issues were an elephant in the room that no single economist could ignore.
It was my body and my choice, and, to quote the famous feminist mantra, personal is political. Nothing ‒ not even the naked body ‒ should be too personal for economists to consider. It is in the most personal aspects of our lives, including those that revolve around women's bodies, that economic outcomes, such as poverty and inequality, are determined. It is in this sense that economics has a sex problem – at least until it takes women's bodies seriously.
In the nineteenth century, economists created an artificial barrier between the public and the private spheres of life. The public sphere ‒ life in the market and in politics ‒ was deemed important enough for economists to study. By contrast, what went on in private ‒ in the home, the family and community ‒ was deemed irrelevant; it was seen as too female and too soft. Even when economists ventured into the personal sphere ‒ as Nobel prizewinning economist Gary Becker famously did1 ‒ it seemed more like a vanity project, one that served to teach non-economists that economics could explain everything else in the world and that society could be reduced down to basic economics. It was certainly not an interdisciplinary project, one of bringing together great minds from different subjects in order to create a whole that was more than the sum of its parts. It was economics (wrongly in my opinion) trying to prove itself to be the ‘king’ of the social sciences.
The artificial wall between the public and the private spheres is long overdue a wrecking ball. After all, how can we understand poverty and inequality without opening the black box that is the home and the surrounding community? It is here, outside of the market, that we can find the roots of many of today's economic problems. The economy simply cannot be understood without also thinking about society, along with psychology, history and philosophy. Yet, disappointingly, whilst the vast majority of other social scientists agree with the statement that ‘in general, interdisciplinary knowledge is better than knowledge obtained by a single discipline’, 57 per cent of economists actively disagree with it.2 Perhaps they have something to fear.
Whilst seeing, as I did, hundreds of economists standing around at a conference sipping champagne might create an illusion that all is well, economics is in fact in one of the most tumultuous periods ever, rebuilding its reputation after the crash of 2008. And ten years on, out there in the real world, the economy stands in a precarious position, facing de-globalization, secular stagnation and the political and social unrest caused by inequality, austerity and deindustrialization. On a good day, I like to think that economics is moving forward ‒ that it is, at least in some areas, undergoing something of a revolution. But not all revolutions have positive results. If economics is to fully get to grips with the latest set of economic challenges, it needs to draw upon new ideas and new voices, embracing experiences that differ from the norm. That includes feminism. Economics needs to embrace the sex factor.
As I will argue in this book, women's freedom ‒ and that includes their bodily autonomy ‒ is central to answering many of the big questions economists
face: Why is the West rich? Why is poverty so stubborn? What are the costs and benefits of free markets? How can economies develop capable and democratic states? And why has inequality increased? As we will see, the economists’ sex problem has even affected their ability to explain boom and bust.
Whilst some are already starting to draw connections between gender and economic outcomes, and a pioneering school of feminist economics has been taking root since the 1990s, centred on the International Association for Feminist Economics (IAFFE), economists still pay far too little attention to gender, as feminist economists themselves note. Although mainstream economics has attempted to incorporate gender in regard to labour markets and wages, though certainly not to the satisfaction of feminist thinkers,3 sex and gender are largely ignored in theories of economic growth, boom and bust, and inequality, whilst the standard assumptions, measures and methods employed by economists are (wrongly) assumed to be gender neutral.4
This failure may in part reflect the fact that women in economics are themselves quite rare, as was indeed apparent at the Royal Economic Society annual conference. There has only ever been one female economics Nobel prizewinner (Elinor Ostrom), and in the United Kingdom and the United States male students outnumber female students by between two and three to one. No wonder feminism has, unlike most other academic disciplines, largely passed economics by,5 or that there is mounting evidence of sexism within economics.6 But it would of course be wrong to assume that every female economist has her eyes open to gender and that every male economist is anti-feminist. As Julie Nelson notes, what needs challenging about economics goes much deeper than a lack of women: the very methodology of economics needs reform. This methodology holds on tight as, unlike most other disciplines, what defines economics is not so much its subject matter as its methodological approach to the world.7 It is an approach that embraces gender bias at its very roots in what is seen as ‘good practice and scientific detachment’.8 Economics has for too long revered independence and denigrated human connections. It has treated emotion as irrational and not worthy of incorporation into economic models. The very things that make human life differ from the robotic assumptions that economists like to make ‒ fertility, family and society ‒ have all been neglected. This doesn't mean replacing economists’ standard assumptions that we are all independent, self-interested and rational with an opposite set of assumptions: that we are dependent, altruistic and emotional. Instead, it means getting to grips with the everyday tensions that can arise between these two polar extremes, and how those tensions, and the way they are resolved, help explain economic outcomes.