The Sex Factor
Page 2
I myself used to think that economics was gender neutral. It is only with time, and after years of thinking and research, that I've been able to identify for myself numerous areas of economics in which economists’ neglect of sex and gender has come at great cost: the cost of truly understanding and confronting the problems our economy faces. And this, therefore, forms the subject matter of this book.
In part I, I begin by outlining the standard narrative of how the West grew rich, condensing the latest thinking down to five key takeaway lessons – lessons that are relevant to rich and poor countries alike but which, as we will see, also contain significant holes. In the process, I will show how women have been airbrushed from history, and with it from our thinking about the causes of economic prosperity. Little wonder, therefore, that we still find it difficult to answer the question: ‘How did the West get rich?’ Whilst women are commonly seen as passive beneficiaries of the process of economic growth, I instead treat them as active agents. Drawing on history, I go on to argue that women made the West rich: that feminism began before, not after, the seeds of prosperity were sown. To understand why so many countries are poor, we need to delve into the home – into the ‘private’ world beyond politics and the marketplace.
Part II turns from prosperity to inequality. Having seen its importance for prosperity, chapter 3 considers whether we can rely on women's freedom to naturally improve over time ‒ or whether it can also, sadly, retreat. As we will see, much like income inequality, gender inequality moves in a wave-like fashion. It has, in fact, got worse (rather than better) for much of history, and ‘economic growth’ in the form of technological change cannot be guaranteed to move it in the right direction.
Chapter 4 argues that without greater progress in regard to gender equality, it will be impossible to address the recent rise in income inequality. Gender equality is necessary for both increasing the size of the economic pie and ensuring that it is more equitably distributed. I outline the all too often neglected links between income inequality and gender inequality and offer a new explanation for the rise in inequality in the West: a global sex problem resulting from women across the world having too little control over their bodies. The implication is clear: inequality in the West cannot be addressed until women's bodily freedom is placed on the right trajectory. At present, access to birth control cannot be guaranteed.9 Globally, almost one in two pregnancies are unintended10 and more than 200 million women who would like to avoid pregnancy lack access to modern birth control methods.11
My consideration of inequality concludes in the final chapter by highlighting a neglected form of inequality, one that is focused on inequalities between women: between those who monetize their bodies and those who monetize their brains. It is an inequality which not only divides feminists but which, as we'll see, some feminists are actively contributing towards through their policy recommendations in regard to sex work. Whilst it means confronting a major social taboo, no one who takes social justice seriously should be ignoring sex workers. The ultimate question is this: If we can make money from our brain, why shouldn't we also be able to make money from our bodies? Isn't it hypocritical and intellectually elitist to suggest otherwise? Sex work is the perfect example of how social attitudes, even when well intentioned, can seriously harm the most vulnerable women.
Part III of the book moves on to consider the most defining political debate that has hung over economics since the time of Adam Smith: markets versus state. I look at whether gender equality and the equitable prosperity it helps to deliver are best served by the market or by the state. In the first chapter, you can find both a feminist attack ‒ but also a feminist defence ‒ of the market. As we will see, wherever you find yourself on the political spectrum, feminist thinking has a lot to offer and in a way that can transform policy on the ground, improving the everyday lives of women and, at the same time, boosting the economy. As we will also see, whilst feminists may disagree on the optimal combination of market and state, they are united in the suggestion that we need to bring a third sphere to bear on the debate: that life exists outside of the market and beyond the purview of the state, and that this literal ‘economic no man's land’, for better or worse, holds the keys to understanding and improving economic outcomes. In the second of the part's two chapters, I turn to the state and highlight the way in which women's freedom helped to positively shape the western state, making it more democratic and more capable, ultimately enabling a more conducive (albeit not perfect) relationship between the market and the state and, with it, greater prosperity. Needless to say, further such gains still remain up for grabs, something we must remember in light of the recent growth slowdown in the West. If economies at home or abroad want to get the best of both worlds ‒ of both market and state ‒ women's freedom can take them a long way.
The final part of the book (part IV) asks: Why have economists neglected women (and their bodies) for so long? What is it about economics that leads economists to ignore sex and gender and, more generally, to dehumanize the economy? It goes to the root of the matter by looking at the common assumptions made by economists: that we are all rational, self-interested and calculating beings; that we are all, in other words, robots. Sex and gender do not exist. This part begins by considering how economics came to make those assumptions, and then goes on to see why these assumptions face increasing criticism for their lack of ‘humanity’, as popularized by behavioural economics. I argue that economists’ failure to incorporate real human characteristics has left them not only incapable of properly explaining everyday economic phenomena such as poverty and boom and bust but is itself indicative of a sex problem within economics – that a ghost of machismo hangs over the discipline that has made economics reluctant to change. The final chapter shows that behavioural economics both goes too far and not far enough. It argues that we need to incorporate three additional elements ‒ the body, family and society ‒ within the core of economic thinking. Doing so is not ‘soft’, as the ghost of machismo would have us believe. It is vital.
Throughout the book, I will be drawing on (a lot of) history. History is crucial to understanding the economy, albeit that is something not always appreciated by economists themselves. You will therefore find included in this book a brief history of prosperity, a history of gender inequality, a history of the state and a history of the individual. We will span vast periods of time ‒ from the Stone Age to the Industrial Revolution. You might want to fasten your seat belt!
Whilst I am proud to declare myself a feminist, I should note that nothing divides feminists more than capitalism, though sex work comes a close second. Both debates are tackled in the course of this book, and I will refrain from sitting on the fence. As someone who has seen the dark side of society ‒ its tendency to enforce conformity and to punish those who deviate from the norm ‒ I will not be suggesting, as Marxist feminists do, that we should be disposing of the market. Markets, as I will argue, have provided women with a release from society and have in fact been central to building women's freedom. That does not, however, mean that markets are perfect, as we will see. But it does mean that the state and society can sometimes deliver far worse outcomes. That is no more clearly the case than in regard to sex work: the way in which society stigmatizes sex workers; and the state chooses to enact laws that make life more difficult for women who choose to monetize their bodies, unlike those who monetize their brains. Women's bodies are the battleground we face today, a battleground that does not disappear by covering them up and ignoring them. And it's why I have absolutely no shame when it comes to protesting naked.
Join me in this book as I knit together my two great passions: economics and feminism, hopefully in a way that brings new light to bear on each.
Notes
1 Becker (1981); Grossbard (2006).
2 Fourcade, Ollion and Algan (2015).
3 Humphries (1995), p. xxvi‒xxvii; Ferber and Lowry (1976).
4 Harding (1986); Bordo (1986); Nelso
n (1992); McCloskey (2008).
5 Ferber and Teiman (1981); Nelson (1992): 122; Pujol (1998), p. 2.
6 Summarized in Tankersley and Scheiber (2018).
7 Humphries (1995), p. xiv.
8 Ibid.; Nelson (1992).
9 Wang (2016); UNFPA (2017); Rodgers (2018).
10 Bearak et al. (2018).
11 UNFPA (2017).
Part I
Prosperity
Introduction
Perhaps the most fundamental question economists face is why are some countries rich and so many others still poor? Why is average yearly income in the United States (measured in international dollars) close to $59,532 a year but not so far away, in Guatemala, average yearly income is only $8,150, whilst in Pakistan and Sudan it is even lower, at $5,527 and $4,904 respectively? The differences are stark.1 What would take a year for someone to earn in Pakistan could be earned in not much more than a month in the United States. Whilst money certainly isn't enough to make us happy, the fact that so many people risk their lives attempting to cross the Mexican border or clambering on board boats owned by unscrupulous people traffickers destined for the European coastline is clear enough evidence that the gap in prosperity matters.
It seems that the greatest determinant of whether we live a long and comfortable life or a short disease-ridden one threatened by hunger, is little more than where we are born. As the economist Branko Milanovic shows, at least 66 per cent of the differences in people's income worldwide is explained by the country in which they live.2 It is often not our capabilities, work ethic or drive that has the greatest effect on our standard of living but where, by the luck of the draw, we first entered the world. Those of us born in countries like the United States and Britain have literally hit the jackpot.
Looking to history helps us understand how we got to where we are today, and, when doing so, one particular event has long stood out: the Industrial Revolution. The Industrial Revolution took place in Britain in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, spreading to continental Europe and the United States in the course of the nineteenth century. Ever since, western incomes have travelled along an upward trajectory, albeit with some bumps along the way. The result was a big divergence in economic fortunes between ‘the West and the rest’.
At the centre of Britain's Industrial Revolution was the area in which I grew up in cold and wet northern England: Manchester. Whilst Manchester is perhaps best known internationally for football (admittedly, my family were keen Manchester United fans and, as a result, I was dressed in red rather than baby pink as a child), it is in fact the Industrial Revolution for which it truly deserves fame. This was a time at which the city became known as ‘Cottonopolis’, and my grandparents and their grandparents before them all earned a living working in cotton mills in or on the outskirts of Manchester. When I was growing up in the 1980s, my grandmother bombarded me with stories of an age that was by then rapidly vanishing – and, of course, of the difficult lives of my female ancestors. Deindustrialization was setting in and Manchester had long passed its peak – industrialization and cotton manufacture had spread overseas, so that many of the cotton mills in which my family had worked had fallen silent. However, the evidence of earlier success was clearly visible in the landscape, which was scattered with imposing red-bricked mills, with chimneys that reached high into the sky, most of them in a dilapidated state of disrepair, with smashed windows and crumbling brickwork and the occasional sound of children ‘exploring’ the derelict stairwells. Some of these industrial mausoleums found a new use as warehouses and, by the time the 1990s were in full swing, as blocks of New York-style loft apartments (with prices well out of the reach of the former cotton workers). With the factory doors firmly closed, some of my aunts and uncles moved to work at the other end of the ‘cloth trade’, on the production floors or in the design studios of expanding British fashion labels or in small couture houses. Britain's early industrialization was clear in every aspect of my early life, as it is in the fashion conscious and stylishly dressed Britain of today.
Why Britain successfully industrialized, and, with it, how Europe and indeed the West became global economic leaders, were questions I could not help but ponder from a young age. However, when I took to the books to find the answers, I found accounts almost purely of men – of the famous male engineers, entrepreneurs, scientists and inventors whose statues, cast in bronze, basked in sunshine in the centres of our big cities (including my home town). It left me wondering: where were the women who, I knew from my own family stories, had, for example, filled the cotton mills and who were so clearly central to the development of the Industrial Revolution? And what about the generations of women before them who, unlike those in many poor countries today, seem to have had a much greater degree of freedom than popular narratives would have us believe? Why was all the focus on men's lives when what seemed to me to be the greatest difference between ‘the West and the rest’ was women's lives ‒ women's freedom?
The answer is, of course, that women's freedom is all too often seen as a by-product of growth, rather than as an underlying driver. We assume that history is made by men and that what's going on in women's lives is just a sideshow: that men create prosperity and women simply benefit from it. Not so in this book.
In the first of the two chapters that follow, I bring together the work of many different economic historians to present a summary of thinking about how the West grew rich. We will see what this research has to offer but also identify a number of holes ‒ holes that are a direct result of leaving women out of the picture. We will see that whilst big debates now rage about the causes of the Industrial Revolution, the different sides are united in one vital respect: their neglect of women. As things stand, we cannot explain ‘how the West grew rich’ – and it's in no small part because we are ignoring the elephant in the room. In the second chapter, I therefore delve into the lesser-told story of the Industrial Revolution – the story of how women made the West rich, and not just during the Industrial Revolution itself but by sowing the seeds of growth many centuries beforehand.
I should say from the start that this is not a story of a small handful of female scientists and entrepreneurs who defied expectations and broke the mould3; it is a story of the everyday woman. That includes women like my great-great-great-grandmothers. As we will see, through the decisions they were able to make about work, family and fertility, the average woman was just as instrumental to the creation of economic prosperity as were the more famous male figures known to us today. Understanding this secret story of how the West grew rich is crucial to understanding why so many countries remain poor today ‒ and what needs to change.
Notes
1 World Bank GDP per capita figures for 2017, available at https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.PP.CD
2 Milanovic (2015).
3 Wiesner-Hanks (2015), ch. 4.
1
Censored: How the West (Supposedly) Got Ahead
In the words of the Nobel prizewinning economist Robert Lucas, ‘once you start thinking about growth, it's hard to think about anything else.’ The unassuming little number that represents the economy's rate of economic growth could not be more powerful. Whilst a growth rate of just 2‒3% a year might seem marginal, compounded over decades it has the power to transform economies and improve lives. With a starting income of just US$1,000, a growth rate of 1% a year would see that income rise to more than US$1,600 after fifty years. However, edge that growth rate up to 3%, and in fifty years’ time you would instead be four times richer. Increase it even further to 5% a year, and your income would be more than ten times the initial figure. If we can unlock the black box that holds the recipe of economic growth, we have the keys to bring about untold improvements to the lives of millions of people across the world today. The stakes are high.
Unsurprisingly, economic growth has mesmerized economists (and it certainly has always had my attention). Open any economics ‘growth
theory’ textbook and you will find a whirlwind depiction of all of the time and energy that goes into modelling the process of growth, together with proofs of which factors do (or do not) matter. However, as I found out in my student days, much of this work is mathematical, with little connection to the world today – or to our longer-run history. Whilst technically it is impressive, it is lacking in context. Assumptions are made that can lead us to ignore important causes of growth, and some causes of growth are simply left out because they cannot be easily quantified. History can tell us so much more.
Hence, in this chapter, I want to consider the whole ocean of existing historical evidence in an effort to shed light on the process of economic growth. As we will see, the creation of prosperity is much more complex – but also much more interesting ‒ than any mathematical model could ever capture. However, big gaps in our knowledge remain, gaps that, as we will see, are the result of a gender blindness in the way economists approach the past.