photo by Sabin Gratz '98
Factoring in women
Promoting the wisdom of gender equity worldwide
UVM economist Stephanie Seguino’s message to the managers of developing economies in Asia, Africa, and elsewhere—including the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund—is unconventional and often visibly unpopular: She urges them to support gender equity through their macroeconomic policy initiatives. The associate dean of the College of Arts and Sciences is a passionate advocate for the poor and marginalized, but she’s also a pragmatic academic who argues that self-interest alone creates ample reason for factoring gender into broad economic policy. Done right, Seguino argues, gender equity can boost growth, improve children’s health, and reduce political tensions worldwide.
Along with a group of like-minded feminist economists, she is not only pursuing gender-influenced economic studies but also disseminating her work directly to a diverse audience of academics and politicians, linking rigorous research with grassroots concerns and the people with the power to make a difference. The idea, she says, is to translate and legitimize the “hopes and desires and reality that people live every day into a language that policymakers can understand.”
Vermont Quarterly talked with Seguino about how her message is received, the free-trade dogma that masks the truth about women’s lives, and ways to balance equity with growth.
I’m struck by a story you tell about a trip to an economic conference in Vietnam, and how your talk on gender inequality was the only one to stir an important official to speak.
I said economic growth in East Asia has been on the basis of wage discrimination against women, and it’s been at the cost of gender equality, and the process of growth has been stimulated by exploited women because they have very little power in society, very few job options, and so they’re an attractive source of cheap labor to produce cheap exports. I presented the evidence for the rest of Asia, and I said that what you need to do is take steps to ensure that you have a growth process that makes it possible to have economic growth along with equity. And the response of the director of the Vietnamese Academy of Social Sciences was: “We have so many problems here, why should we prioritize gender? Isn’t this really of lesser importance?”
How did you respond?
I said that the reason that it’s important for any government to take account of gender is that women have primary responsibility for care of children. All of the research shows us that a better distribution of income in the household, that is, increased income for women in the household, increases women’s bargaining power, and the result is that more income is invested in children’s well-being and less on luxury goods like gambling or cigarettes or alcohol. And in the longer run for economic growth, what that means is a more productive, well-socialized workforce. So promoting gender equality is not just good for women—it's actually in the society’s interest.
How typical is the director’s attitude in the developing world?
I think it’s really consistent with the fact that, although most governments might pay lip-service to gender, they don’t see addressing gender inequality as central to their program of promoting economic development. Much of the research suggests that promoting gender equality is not just about benefiting a particular group, but it actually has spillover effects to the rest of society and its growth potential. It’s a long-term education process to get policymakers to see this.
What accounts for the resistance?
One of the hardest parts of doing this work is when you find yourself in a public forum and you argue that men spend their money on luxury goods and women spend their money on children; very frequently men are offended by that. I think they interpret that as though you’re implying they don’t take care of their children. And so one of the ways that I’ve begun to talk about this is to talk about male norms of masculinity, that men are in some sense required to spend their money in this way in order to maintain their social status as males. They would be ridiculed or marginalized if they didn’t spend time at the rum shop, if they didn’t use household money, for example, in buying drinks for others, those kinds of gifts that cement male friendships and secure social status. In some sense men also are prisoners of these norms and stereotypes in the way that women are prisoners of female norms and stereotypes. But I think that that’s the harder ground to break. I think if you present it in such a way that you don’t pathologize men as being unconcerned about their children, but rather emphasize that they too are prisoners of these gender norms, it’s easier to hear and it maybe creates some way for us to move forward.
Supporters of free trade and liberalization argue that the growth benefits women. How does your work challenge that?
One argument is that if you promote economic growth, the increased resources will automatically trickle down to women. Therefore you just liberalize trade and investment and deregulate and privatize and so forth. The research I did was to look at the effects of economic growth on gender equity and wellbeing. And what I found is that there’s no relationship, in fact, there’s maybe a negative relationship between the two. Mostly because economic liberalization actually puts women in a weaker bargaining position with their employers. That is because firms are much more mobile now, and they can play off vulnerable workers in one community against another. So, what we find in the process of globalization is not so much that women benefit from all of the new export jobs, but rather that a corporation like Nike could say, ‘You know if you workers in Sri Lanka don’t want to work for these wages of fifty cents a day, then we’ll just pick up and go to Costa Rica….’ Women are most likely to be employed in the types of jobs for which firms can make a credible threat of this kind—and as a result they have less bargaining power to raise their wages.
The process of globalization and liberalization means that not only can corporations pit workers against each other, they can pit governments against each other. So countries are lowering their taxes in order to attract these now mobile firms, but what resources then do they have to fund social safety nets like public health, for example, or education, or infrastructure in water projects? Very often, those cuts in government spending hurt women much more than they hurt men, because it’s women who go collect water, it’s women who take care of the sick. The economic research shows very clearly that if you invest in women you raise societal well-being quite dramatically, because women provide the bulk of unpaid labor—labor that is, nevertheless, necessary for society, and most importantly, worker productivity.
How do you improve the position of women without jeopardizing growth?
My approach to this is you can promote equity and growth simultaneously. Here’s an example: One of the most universal things you see now is women stuck in labor-intensive, dead-end, export-factory jobs. Women produce these cheap shoes that you see coming from China, for example. If you try to raise the wages, firms will relocate. How do you solve that conundrum?
What has to happen is that you have to invest in helping firms become more efficient and more productive so that they can lower their costs and they will be able to afford higher wages for women. How do you do that? One is that you have government programs that help businesses develop technologically. Instead of exploiting their workers, they could perhaps learn what new technologies there are, get loans to adopt them, and get funding to invest in their women workers to raise their skill level to be able to utilize the new technology. So you get out of this low wage/low productivity trap. But very frequently it requires providing both carrots and sticks for firms to treat women in that way. And that requires an important role for the government in helping manage the economy… by promoting high-wage industries, not export industries that are based on cheap labor.
A lot of persuasion must come into this…
We’re really beginning to challenge the fact that, number one, globalization is good for women, and ask, if globalization isn’t good for women, if it actually disempowers women or continues their disempowerment, what policies can you adopt that would promote women’s empowerment and be consistent with economic growth? And the reason why this is such a hard issue is that it goes against all the current rhetoric about globalization that says government is bad, regulation is bad, leave corporations free to do what they want to do. And we’re finding that liberalization of trade and investment and financial flows promotes inequality. We, therefore, have to go back to the drawing board and figure out how to use government to discipline not only workers but also discipline businesses—to behave in such a way that ratifies higher wages for low-wage workers.
You’re heavily involved with the International Working Group on Gender, Macroeconomics and International Economics, a group of experts that not only studies economic problems from a distinct perspective, but also gets that knowledge out of the confines of academia.
We’re bringing together researchers from all over the world to begin to integrate gender into macroeconomic theory, into trade theory, and into economic-growth
theory. Gender has been considered a micro-level, local problem, but never a macro-level problem.
Each summer we hold a knowledge-networking workshop that’s a two-week intensive, and I mean intensive, program that starts at eight in the morning and goes to ten o’clock at night or so for two solid weeks. The people that apply to this program are primarily people in policy, research, or government organizations that work on planning; for example, last year there was the minister of finance from Laos, a Mongolian finance minister, people from the Nigerian government, from the Argentinean government.
So you’re getting to speak to the people that you want to.
Yes, it’s really quite extraordinary. It’s a long process to educate people to think differently about the world. They then become sensitized to it, and they go back to their governments and their ministries and they begin bringing up these issues and gender inequality begins to get more attention in terms of government programming. One of the major things that’s come out of that is gender budget audits. To do these audits, you examine government budgets and you analyze the differential impact on women and men of expenditures and taxes. Very frequently, of course, budgets are entirely skewed towards military and elites…. Investing in potable water, for example, is good for society, and it really dramatically improves women’s ability to spend time earning income that could benefit children’s well-being. So these gender budget audits are a tool to sensitize people to priorities so governments will shift their spending in a way that promotes equity. There’s tremendous excitement about it. People feel like it’s a breath of fresh air that there is economics being done that has real-world applications and is addressing really serious problems from a different approach.
(for UVM staff)