Income & gender equality

Sometimes, it's the little words that reveal so much. I was struck by Phil's response to Rashida Manjoo's claim that sexism is worse in the UK than elsewhere. He writes:

I didn't for one moment think that the UK's sexism problem was worse than other developed nations.

Hold on. What's that word "developed" doing here? Why judge the UK only by comparably rich nations? Is Phil presuming that sexism is worse in poorer nations?

If he is, he's right - up to a point. My chart plots gender inequality, as measured by the WEF's gender gap, against GDP per head. You can see that there's a positive correlation in the chart; it is 0.36 for all 134 countries, but 0.52 if we exclude middle east countries who tend to have high oil revenues and poor gender equality scores. Sure, some poor countries score well for gender equality - such as Mozambique or the Philippines - but generally, Phil's presumption is correct. Poor countries are generally sexist ones.

The evidence here, of course, isn't just cross-sectional. It also exists in time-series; western economies are much richer than they were 100 years ago, and gender equality has also improved in this time; women at least have the vote now.

Why is there this correlation? There are three possibilities:

 - Gender equality actually promotes economic development. There's good evidence (pdf) that educating girls (pdf) has a high pay-off in poor countries, perhaps by enabling them to better control fertility (pdf) and child mortality. And one study has found that "countries with higher shares of women in parliament have had faster growing economies" - probably because large numbers of female parliamentarians are a sign of other enlightened policies.

 - Poverty and gender inequality have a common, third, cause. If men are wedded to traditional ways of treating women, they are likely also to be disposed to other traditional ways of life which are hostile to development.

 - Development creates equality. As Ben Friedman and Deirdre McCloskey have shown, richer people tend to be more civilized ones. Yes, western bankers and CEOs are bastards, but they're vastly better than the Lord's Resistance Army or Boko Haram.

I draw two inferences from this. One is to support a point made by Diane Coyle in GDP: A brief but affectionate history. She says that although GDP is not a meaure of welfare, it is "highly correlated with things that definitely do affect our well-being." It would be rash to assume that none of the correlation between gender equality and income was due to causality from income to equality. Maybe one reason we need growth, especially in poorer countries without oil, is to improve the odds for women.

Secondly, there's a question here. The evidence shows that prosperity and gender equality go together. So why shouldn't this be true for other forms of equality? Why are women so unusual?

Comments

[Metatone]

Well, surely women are "unusual" in that they are around 50% of the population?

As such, the difference between them being largely excluded from the (skilled) workforce or not has a big impact on economies.

Big enough even for economists to notice.

[Dave Timoney]

In answer to your closing question, because women can inherit wealth.

In a society where women can (while unmarried) own property, and law and custom allow some independence over their choice of husbands (or an acceptance of spinsterhood), it is in the interests of men to cultivate pro-female attitudes.

This is easily diverted into sexist forms, e.g. the praise of femininity and the maternal (cf Kate Middleton), but it does open up space for the toleration and respect of women's interests.

[chris]

@ Metatone - the poorest 50% of all people are also around 50% of the population, and are also largely excluded (by virtue of lack of skill) from the skilled workforce.

[patrick]

The three possibilities you list are not exactly mutually exclusive (or at least 1 and 3 are not - I'm too tired just now to decide whether I think 2 precludes 1 and 3 also being true.).

[chris]

@ Patrick - thy're not supposed to be exclusive, Different mechanisms can coexist.

[Rob]

You could add to your list of possibilities that developed countries are more likely to experience (or have experienced in the course of becoming 'developed') tight labour markets, which create strong incentives to allow and encourage women to work. Once the cultural shift has happened, it can't easily be reversed. WWI and post-WWII full employment policies did that for Britain, but poorer countries have not yet experienced anything similar.

[quixote]

Why is women's equality different? Aside from being by far the largest disadvantaged group, they're also usually the last to get rights. By that time the social change has to be deep and pervasive enough to be meaningful.