The Sex Factor

by Victoria Bateman

  Through globalization, whether directly, such as via immigration, or indirectly through trade, the rapidly expanding global labour supply has become increasingly accessible to western businesses. With it, western wage growth has suffered,54 putting an end – at least for now – to the high-wage growth and high-productivity growth equilibrium in the West. Productivity growth, economic growth, investment rates and wage growth have all suffered as a result, and inequality has widened. Individual western governments have turned to minimum or ‘living’ wages as a means to support the standard of living, but they do not have the power to tackle what is really a global problem: a world awash with people.

  Rather than restricting immigration or raising trade barriers, we need to resolve the problem at source. If women have agency – if they have control over their bodies – they will, at the ground level, make fertility choices that will help keep their own families away from poverty and so will prevent population growth from undermining wages throughout the wider economy. For a woman to have control over her body, economic empowerment is vital: providing women with opportunities to become educated, to join the workforce and to be represented in political decisions, including about, for example, birth control. Rather than being a pawn to be ‘married off’ at a young age, destined to produce child after child, women who have an ability to support themselves financially are able to take control of their lives. They have the financial freedom that allows them to stand up to early marriage and can go out into the world and build an independent life, determining for themselves whether, whom and when to marry. Women's wombs then become their own. By acting in their own self-interest, women will, without knowing it, aid the wider (global) economy.

  The room for improvement is significant. In comparison with the Britain of old, and according to UNICEF, the proportion of women aged 20‒24 who were married by the age of eighteen stands at 41% in West and Central Africa, 38% in sub-Saharan Africa and 30% in South Asia.55 Asia is home to a half of all child brides; one-third of all child brides live in India.56 Globally, one in five girls marry before they are eighteen.57 Once married (and indeed before), many of the world's poorest women lack access to reliable birth control, as the United Nations Family Planning Agency has documented, something that is becoming more of a problem in light of the global gag rule.58 It's hardly surprising, therefore, that 44% of global pregnancies are unintended.59

  An important exception in the modern developing world, and one that helps to prove the point, is China. In 1980, China was home to more poor people than anywhere else in the world. However, since 1981, 680 million people have been lifted out of poverty, and the proportion of those living in extreme poverty has fallen from 84% to under 10%.60 This has been the single most important development in lowering global poverty and global income inequality over this period. According to standard accounts, globalization and market liberalization are responsible. However, women's fertility must surely play a role. By taking steps to restrain population through its ‘one-child policy’, the Chinese state managed to overcome a population problem that has blighted the standard of living throughout history. Along the way, it freed women to work outside the home, increasing their economic independence and challenging traditional gender roles. Such a policy has, however, come at a high price in terms of restricting choice and ‘missing women’. Government attempts to directly control population have a murky history, including forced sterilizations of some of the world's most marginalized and poorest women. Such policies are abhorrent and could never be recommended by any freedom-loving economist. European history provides a much better path, one in which rising opportunities for women ‒ starting in the labour market ‒ transform the family system and allow women themselves to take control of their bodies.

  Economists have expressed deep concern about the way in which a slowdown in population growth may harm the economy,61 and the newspaper headlines like to deliver messages like ‘the choice to be childless is bad for America’.62 This ignores the fact that population growth has too often reflected women's lack of freedom, pregnancies that they would have rather avoided. It also fails to acknowledge the fact that population growth has been built on women's hard labour, both reproductively and in terms of unpaid care. Although a slowdown in population growth clearly creates a challenge in terms of an ageing population, in the much longer term equitable and environmentally sustainable growth can only be delivered if we give women freedom to take charge of their own fertility. Whilst fertility rates have been falling in recent years, we still have a long way to go until women's bodily autonomy becomes a reality for all women, and, given recent policy moves, we need to be very careful that we don't move in the wrong (as opposed to right) direction.63

  Conclusion

  The words of the Nobel prizewinning economist Robert Lucas neatly sum up what economists once thought of inequality: that ‘of the tendencies that are harmful to sound economics, the most seductive and … poisonous is to focus on questions of distribution.’64 They argued that lowering inequality would mean taxing the very people who produce the economy's growth, blunting their incentives to work hard and produce. Rather than worrying about inequality, economists argued that governments should instead place much more focus on economic growth ‒ that a rising tide would lift all boats, and that if the pie was getting bigger, we wouldn't need to worry as much about how it was distributed. However, in the West, we have now witnessed both rising inequality and a slowdown in economic growth. In the United States, economic growth was 2.23% per year between 1950 and 1980, falling to 1.67% per year from 1980 to 2010, and across the world growth averaged 3% during the 1960s and 1970s, compared with half this rate, only 1.4% per year, between 1980 and 2009.

  Economists are now starting to highlight the ways in which rising inequality might be costing the economy.65 Economic history also suggests a link between the two, with periods of simultaneous economic expansion and declining inequality gaining scholarly attention. The Black Death of 1348‒51, which wiped out around a third of the European population, has been a particular focus. By making peasants scarce, it also made them more valuable (at least in the case of male workers66), reducing inequality. The resultant higher wages for men and greater labour market opportunities for women have been argued to have fed through to affect the economy in numerous ways, culminating in the Industrial Revolution. They brought about a radical change in society, resulting in greater freedom for women, smaller and better educated families, higher savings and better political institutions. All of these changes added up to a sizeable stimulus to the economy. Greater equality and high – not low – wages helped ignite the fires of economic growth in history. This is not to deny that cheap labour existed, as was the case with female relative to male labour, but to suggest that labour scarcity created the possibility for both economic growth and falling inequality. In the twentieth century, we also find falling inequality and rising growth occurring alongside one another. By this point, the state had begun intervening to ensure higher levels of education (as documented by Claudia Goldin for the United States67), along with better funding for science, and health care for all. However, as Teresa Amott and Julie Matthaei also argue, the buoyant times and tight labour markets of the post-Second World War era created a scarcity of labour that gave underprivileged groups the bargaining power to push for an end to discriminatory practices. This is, of course, the period which is well known for both the civil rights and the feminist movements.68 By contrast, periods in which the economy was doing less well, such as during the 1920s and 1930s, and since 2008, when labour was in excess supply, led groups of privileged workers to put up barriers against others on the basis of gender and race in the former and against immigrant workers in the latter and through to the present. Throughout the twentieth century, the welfare state was only a part of this much wider story and, as we will see later in the book, increased gender and racial disparities in clear, if often under-discussed, ways, trading class inequality for gender and racial in
equalities.69

  Based on history, it is certainly possible to see how events or policies that lower inequality could have beneficial consequences for the economy. However, as we have seen in this chapter, rising inequality and the slowdown in economic growth in the West also reflect a common underlying cause: the lack of freedom of women not only in the West but also in many poorer parts of the world. Until that lack of freedom is addressed, there is a natural limit to what more standard left-leaning inequality-reducing policies can achieve. As Zillah Eisenstein has astutely pointed out:

  Pope Francis has gained enormous popularity by focusing on the excesses of capitalism, the horrors of poverty etc. while fully endorsing patriarchal choices for girls and women in terms of their reproductive lives and health. The very person promising to limit inequality cocoons them into misogyny. It is a well-known and documented fact that the world the pope condones, one without contraception or abortion, is a world with more poverty.70

  Inequality can only be tackled if we stop focusing on class alone71 and if we also think beyond a single economy, widening our outlook to the globe. Resolving inequality requires more than ‘workers of the world unite’: it requires women of the world being entitled to their own bodily autonomy, along with a fairer distribution of the caring labour that results. Nancy Fraser has suggested that we need to move beyond the post-male breadwinner phase of ‘universal breadwinners’ to a new phase of ‘universal caregivers’, one that expects everyone to be involved in both work and care.72 Without them, there would be no economic future. Importantly, not only will getting this right deliver more equitable growth, it will also help us to achieve more sustainable growth, growth that is not undermined by the continual environmental damage that occurs from the population expanding at a rate with which the planet cannot cope.

  Notes

  1 Piketty (2014).

  2 Milanovic (2016); Scheidel (2018).

  3 Kuznets (1955).

  4 Piketty (2014); IMF (2017).

  5 Roser (2016).

  6 Hammar and Waldenström (2017).

  7 Roser (2016).

  8 Roser and Ortiz-Ospina (2018).

  9 Ibid.

  10 UNU-WIDER, World Income Inequality Database; Coontz (2014).

  11 Milanovic (2013), p. 11 (Fig. 4).

  12 See Wood (2018) for a summary of the literature and debate.

  13 Acemoglu et al. (2016); Autor, Dorn, and Hanson (2013, 2016); Pierce and Schott (2016).

  14 Ibid.

  15 Acemoglu et al. (2016).

  16 Milanovic (2013).

  17 Wood (2018); Helpman (2017). Though increased use of technology may be a response to greater international competition (Wood 2018: 8).

  18 Acemoglu (2002): 781‒2.

  19 Goldin and Katz (2008). Also see Chetty and Hendren (2018a,b); Chetty et al. (2016); Chetty et al. (2014).

  20 Goldin and Katz (2008), p. 325.

  21 Frey and Osborne (2017).

  22 Bukodi et al. (2014).

  23 Atkinson (2001). Rodrik (1997) argued that globalization made it ever more difficult to tax the rich.

  24 Stiglitz (2015).

  25 Lindert (2017), pp. 1, 4.

  26 Piketty (2014).

  27 Geier et al. (2014).

  28 Quoted in Geier et al. (2014).

  29 Haskins, Isaacs and Sawhill (2008), see esp. ch. 5.

  30 Woolley (1993): 487; Haddad and Kanbur (1990).

  31 Freund and Oliver (2014). For historic trends in the United States, see Edlund and Kopczuk (2009) and Boushey, de Long and Steinbaum (2017), pp. 381‒3 (tables 4 and 5).

  32 Chant (2008).

  33 Kramer et al. (2016).

  34 https://www.one.org/us/take-action/poverty-is-sexist/

  35 Harris (2017).

  36 Strober (1984); Goldin (1990), ch. 3; Hegewisch and Hartmann (2014); Humphries (1995), p. xxxiii.

  37 Kessler-Harris (2001, p. 6, 2015). On the earnings penalty in care, see Budig and Misra (2010). More generally, Sen (1987); Folbre (2004); Gammage, Kabeer and van der Meulen Rodgers (2016).

  38 Ferrant, Pesando and Nowacka (2014); Bryson (2016), pp. 264‒7 provides a summary of the ‘care and capitalism’ literature.

  39 ILO (2018).

  40 Bearak et al. (2018).

  41 For more discussion, a good place to start is the 2015 inequality special issue of the journal Gender and Development. See e.g. Kabeer (2015).

  42 Even once we take on board the increasing tendency for richer men to marry richer partners, without changes in women's earnings, inequality would still have grown 37.8 per cent faster (Duke 2015). Coontz (2014).

  43 Greenwood et al. (2014).

  44 Sawhill (2014).

  45 Ibid.

  46 Ibid.; Rodgers (2018).

  47 Kramer et al. (2016).

  48 See, for example, Chetty and Hendren (2018a,b), Chetty et al. (2016), Chetty et al. (2014).

  49 Lewis (2009); O’Connor, Orloff and Shaver (2009); Elson and Cagatay (2000); Daly (2005); Balakrishnan, Heintz and Elson (2016).

  50 Wiesner-Hanks (2015); Folbre (1991); Kessler-Harris (2001), pp. 7‒11.

  51 This section largely draws on Bateman (2016d).

  52 Nangle (2015), pp. 5‒6; Goodhart, Pradhan and Pardeshi (2015).

  53 Allen (2009).

  54 Goodhart, Pradhan and Pardeshi (2015).

  55 UNICEF (2014).

  56 Ibid.

  57 Ibid.

  58 Wang (2016); UNFPA (2017); Rodgers (2018).

  59 Bearak et al. (2018).

  60 World Bank data.

  61 Goodhart and Erfurth (2014); Lu and Teulings (2016).

  62 Siegel (2013).

  63 In some western countries, fertility has fallen to well below replacement level, something which has been connected to the burden of unpaid care placed on women.

  64 Lucas (2004).

  65 See, for example, Stiglitz (2015); Semuels (2016); IMF (2017).

  66 Humphries and Weisdorf (2015).

  67 Goldin (2008).

  68 Amott and Matthaei (1991), pp. 319‒20, 346.

  69 Pateman (1988); Amott and Matthaei (1991), p. 354; Pedersen (1995, 2018); Kessler-Harris (2001); Esping-Andersen (2013); Cooke (2011).

  70 In Geier et al. (2014).

  71 A point best noted within the intersectional literature. See Hill Collins and Bilge (2016) and Amott and Matthaei (1991).

  72 Fraser (2013b).

  5

  Sex Sells: The Body Versus the Brain

  Nothing divides feminists more than capitalism. Except, that is, for the monetization of women's bodies, whether for modelling, for milk (as wet nurses), for surrogacy ‒ or for sex. And the two are not entirely unrelated: if there is one thing that can help explain why so many women have an underlying discomfort with the market, it is the marketization of women's bodies. With sex work labelled the oldest trade, markets and sex seem inseparable. In this chapter, I therefore want to highlight a neglected form of inequality: inequality between women who monetize their brains and those who monetize their bodies. It is an inequality that has so far gone under the radar, one that isn't even measured. And, whilst we're more used to focusing on inequalities between men and women, this inequality, in what we might call the body versus the brain, drives inequalities between women themselves. As I will argue, present policy in many western countries ‒ one of attempting to end demand for sex work ‒ is tackling it in precisely the wrong way.1

  The Sinful Eve

  For centuries, in fact ever since Eve supposedly tempted Adam, women's bodies have represented sin. In the middle of the fourteenth century, in the Italian town of Siena, an antique statue of Venus was torn down and destroyed by order of the authorities, the town's misfortune having been attributed to its supposed sinful nature. Before long, fragments of the statue were being secretly buried in enemy towns in the hope of bringing similar bad l
uck to Siena's rivals. Even today, when women uncover too much of their bodies ‒ or attempt to make money from them ‒ it is often seen as inappropriate and shameful. They are commonly labelled ‘trashy’. Despite its ubiquitous presence in western art from the time of Botticelli's Birth of Venus, the female body remains a taboo, both its naked presence ‒ in revealing clothes or for protest ‒ and its monetization.

  Society's discomfort with women's bodies is something I have experienced personally. When giving a public lecture at the launch of a new research forum in London in 2017 on the topic of society in the 1960s, I chose to address the audience in a cutting-edge piece of feminist fashion by designer Jenna Young. It was a sheer black bodysuit that was designed to raise questions about women's bodies. I thought it would be an interesting test of how far society had come in terms of women having the freedom to do whatever they want with their own bodies, thereby fitting neatly with the theme of my lecture. Soon afterwards, I noticed that the accompanying lecture given at the same event by a well-respected male colleague, who wore his usual suit, had been made available online. Mine had not. I was subsequently told that two female attendees had complained that what I did was inappropriate: that I was objectifying myself. They claimed to be feminists. Unlike his, my message never escaped the room.