Once we were armed with these lessons, we began to make grants that could break down the barriers women farmers faced in getting the improved seeds, fertilizer, and technology—and the loans—they needed to be productive on the farm.
One of the early grants we made was beautifully simple: We wanted to get technical assistance to farmers in rural Ghana, so our partner decided to air a radio show telling women farmers how to grow tomatoes, and they did a lot of research to make sure the show would have the greatest possible reach. They’d decided on radio as the best medium because many people couldn’t read and most people had no TV. Once a week was the right pacing, since it lined up with the pace of new tasks for the growers. Tomatoes were the best crop because they were relatively easy to grow, and they were a cash crop that would also improve nutrition for the family. The last thing they had to figure out was what time women listened to the radio—because if they put the program on when the man controlled the radio, the woman wasn’t going to learn a thing about growing tomatoes.
That’s the kind of thinking that began to take hold in the foundation; people became very tuned in to gender differences and social norms in programs where they mattered. We began the shift in a low-key way, with just a few gender experts at the foundation talking to people who wanted to hear how a gender focus could help them achieve their goals. And they spoke softly. One of the early leaders, Haven Ley, who now is my top policy advisor, jokes that she “worked in the basement for three years.” She scarcely ever said the words “gender equity” or “women’s empowerment.” Instead, she explained to people how paying attention to gender differences would make an impact. “You can’t just come in there and talk about your concerns,” Haven says. “No one cares. You have to figure out what success looks like to people, what they’re scared about failing at, and then you can help them get what they want.”
Progress was steady, but it was too slow for me. People were still speaking softly about gender at the foundation, sometimes in whispers, not quite wanting to come forward. I could see how even some of the strongest advocates were tiptoeing around it, how in meetings they’d raise it but not push it—careful not to say too loudly what they knew to be true.
For an agonizingly long time, I couldn’t give them the lift I wanted to give them. I was watching, but I was not ready. It wasn’t the right time. The foundation wasn’t quite ripe; my command of the data wasn’t good enough. I didn’t have the time to take on a huge new project—I was working hard on family planning. I had three kids at home. I was figuring out equality in my own marriage. There were so many things in the way. But then the moment came and the timing was right. I was ready. I had the conviction, the experience, and the data at hand. The foundation had the staff. So I decided to write an article for the September 2014 issue of Science in which I would set out our foundation’s commitment to gender equity.
In the article, I acknowledged that we at the foundation were latecomers in using gender equity as a strategy. “As a result, we have lost opportunities to maximize our impact,” I wrote. But our foundation would now “put women and girls at the center of global development,” because “we cannot achieve our goals unless we systematically address gender inequalities and meet the specific needs of women and girls in the countries where we work.”
I wrote the article for our partners and for funders and others involved in the work. But principally, I wrote it as a message to everyone who works at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. I felt the need to state loudly and publicly our strategy and priorities on gender equity. It was the strongest lever I ever pulled to direct the focus and emphasis of our foundation. It was time to move out of the basement.
Lifting Each Other Up
Six months after the Science article ran, I took a trip to Jharkhand, a state in eastern India, to visit a grantee of ours called PRADAN. PRADAN was one of the first organizations we invested in after we saw the central role of women farmers.
When PRADAN began its work in the 1980s, its leaders didn’t start with a focus on empowering women; they figured it out as they went along. In the spirit of pradan—“giving back to society”—the group began placing committed young professionals in poor villages to see if they could help out. When the new recruits arrived in the villages, they were shocked to see how the men treated the women. Husbands would beat their wives if they left home without permission, and everyone—even the women—thought that was acceptable. Naturally, these women had no standing in the community: no resources, no bank accounts, no way to save, and no access to loans.
So leaders at PRADAN began talking to the husbands, getting permission for their wives to meet in groups of ten or fifteen to talk about farming. The deal with the husbands was “if you let your wife attend these groups, she’ll increase your family’s income.” So the women began to meet regularly and save their money together, and then, when one of them needed to make an investment, she could take out a loan from the group. When the group got enough money, it would connect with a commercial bank. This helped a great deal with the financial aspects of farming. But the women soon also demanded the same agricultural training the men got. They learned how to identify the seeds and grow the crops that would allow them to feed their families, sell the surplus, and make it through the hunger season.
That was the background of the group, so when I attended a meeting, I was prepared to be impressed, but even I was surprised when the group leader said, “Raise your hand if—before you joined the self-help group—you could grow enough food to last your family the full year.”
Not a single hand went up.
Then she said: “Raise your hand if you had a surplus to sell last year.”
Almost every hand went up.
Empowerment never confines itself to categories. When farming advice and financial support began to make a difference for the women, they started looking for new battles to fight. When I visited, they were lobbying to get better roads and clean drinking water. They’d recently put in an application with the local government for the village’s first toilets. They’d started a campaign against their village’s alcohol abuse problem—calling on the men to stop drinking, pressuring government officials to enforce the laws, and even working with the local women who sell alcohol to help them find new ways to make a living.
And there was another sign of empowerment—the way the women carried themselves. When I meet women who’ve faced heavy gender bias, I often see it in the way they look at me. Or don’t look at me. It’s not easy to unlearn a lifetime of being meek. The posture of these women was different. They stood tall. They spoke up. They weren’t afraid to ask questions, to tell me what they knew, what they thought, what they wanted. They were activists. They had that look. They had been lifted up.
The empowerment approach taken by PRADAN is central to our foundation’s strategy. We help connect women to people who can advise them on farming and connect them to markets. We also help women access financial services so they can save money and get loans. When women get the money for their work deposited into their own bank accounts, they earn more and save more. They also are more respected by their husbands, and that begins to shift the power in the household.
This is the kind of work we’ve been accelerating since I wrote that article in Science, and we’ve changed the foundation so we can pursue it. We’ve hired more gender experts. We’re getting data on the lives of women and girls so the things that matter get measured. And we’re supporting more organizations like PRADAN that take an overt and intentional approach to empowering women. Increasingly, we are seeing the results that come from putting women and girls at the center of our strategy.
Patricia’s Breakthrough
Patricia, the farmer who was planting her seeds on Christmas Day, saw her life changed by the empowerment that came through membership in a group. Let me tell you the rest of her story.
Patricia joined a program called CARE Pathways, an organization that teaches conventional farming tips but
also teaches farmers about equality. The group asked Patricia to get her husband to join the sessions, and she was a bit surprised and gratified when he agreed. In one session, Patricia and her husband were told to role-play their life together at home but to switch places—the wife would play the role of the husband, and the husband would play the role of the wife, just like the exercises I described in the chapter on unpaid work. Patricia got to order her husband around, just as he’d been doing to her: “Go and do this, go and do this, go and do this!” And her husband had to do what she said without complaint.
The exercise opened his eyes. Afterward, he told her he realized that he hadn’t been treating her as a partner. In another exercise, they drew the family budget like a tree, with roots representing their sources of income and branches representing expenditures. They discussed together which roots could get stronger and which branches could get pruned. As they discussed Patricia’s farm income, they talked about her farming supplies, and whether maybe they should be a higher priority.
Patricia told me these exercises changed her marriage. Her husband began listening to her ideas and working with her to help make her farm plot more productive. Soon after the sessions, an opportunity came that made all their decisions pay off.
CARE Pathways, concerned that there weren’t very many quality seeds for the kinds of crops women tend to grow, began working with a local research station to design a groundnut seed that produces more nuts and does a better job resisting pests and disease. They developed a good seed, but they didn’t have nearly enough seeds to supply them to all the women farmers in the area. They first needed to find farmers to grow these seeds into plants that produce more of these perfected seeds. Only after the seeds had multiplied enough could they be sold to other farmers.
This process is called “seed multiplication,” and it requires even more care and attention than typical farming. Only the best farmers are selected to be seed multipliers—and Patricia became one of them. When I asked her how she could produce at the high level needed to be a seed multiplier, she said, “I have a supportive husband now.”
That supportive husband agreed that he and Patricia should take out a loan to buy the improved seeds. That’s what Patricia was planting on Christmas. By the time I met her, she’d had her first harvest. The half-acre plot produced so much that she could supply seeds to other farmers and still plant two full acres of her own the following season, four times what she’d planted the year before. And from that harvest came not only plenty of food for her family but enough income to cover her children’s school fees and also pay for those cooking pots!
Women Are Inferior; It Says So Right Here
Farming is not the only area of the economy that is stunted by gender bias. Recent reports from the World Bank show that gender discrimination is encoded in law nearly everywhere in the world.
In Russia, there are 456 jobs women cannot perform because they’re deemed too strenuous or dangerous. Women there can’t become carpenters, professional divers, or ship captains, to name just a few positions. One hundred and four countries have laws that put certain jobs off-limits for women.
In Yemen, a woman can’t leave the house without her husband’s permission. Seventeen countries have laws that limit when and how women can travel outside the home.
In Sri Lanka, if a woman is working in a shop, she must stop by 10:00 P.M. Twenty-nine countries restrict the hours women can work.
In Equatorial Guinea, a woman needs her husband’s permission to sign a contract. In Chad, Niger, and Guinea-Bissau, a woman needs her husband’s permission to open a bank account.
In Liberia, if a woman’s husband dies, she has no right to her family’s assets. She herself is considered part of his property—and, as people in some rural communities will explain, “property cannot own property.” Thirty-six countries have rules limiting what wives can inherit from their husbands.
In Tunisia, if a family has a daughter and a son, the son will inherit twice as much as the daughter. Thirty-nine countries have laws that keep daughters from inheriting the same proportion of assets as sons.
In Hungary, men on average are paid a third more than women in managerial positions—and this does not violate the law. In 113 countries, there are no laws that ensure equal pay for equal work by men and women.
In Cameroon, if a wife wants to earn additional income, she has to ask her husband’s permission. If he refuses, she has no legal right to work outside the home. In eighteen countries, men can legally prohibit their wives from working.
Finally, discrimination against women is perpetuated not only in laws that exclude women but also in the absence of laws that support women. In the United States, there is no law ensuring paid maternity leave for new mothers. Worldwide, there are seven countries where women are not guaranteed paid maternity leave. The ideal, of course, would be paid leave for any major family health situation, including parental leave for new dads. But the lack of paid maternity leave—and paid parental leave—is an embarrassing sign of a society that does not value families and does not listen to women.
Gender bias does worldwide damage. It’s a cause of low productivity on farms. It’s a source of poverty and disease. It’s at the core of social customs that keep women down. We know the harm it causes and the good that comes from defeating it—so how should we fight it?
Should we fight it law by law, sector by sector, or person by person? I would say “all of the above.” Also, instead of just working to undo the disrespect, we should find the source of the disrespect and try to stop it there.
Discrimination Against Women—Seeking the Source
An infant boy at his mother’s breast does not disrespect women. How does that feeling get hold of him?
Disrespect for women grows when religions are dominated by men.
In fact, some of the laws I mentioned above are based directly on scripture, which is why it is so difficult to undo them. It’s not a standard political debate when an argument for equality is called blasphemy.
Yet one of the strongest statements I’ve seen on the danger of male-dominated religion comes from a man steeped in religion. In Jimmy Carter’s book A Call to Action: Women, Religion, Violence, and Power, he calls the deprivation and abuse of women and girls “the most serious and unaddressed worldwide challenge,” and he lays the principal blame on men’s false interpretation of scripture.
It’s important to remember when taking in Carter’s message that he is a passionate and dedicated lifelong Baptist who has been teaching Sunday School at his Maranatha Baptist Church in Plains, Georgia, since 1981. His life-saving, ground-breaking work over four decades at the Carter Center is a testament to the power of his faith to inspire acts of love. It’s especially notable, then, that Carter would write the following:
“This system [of discrimination] is based on the presumption that men and boys are superior to women and girls, and it is supported by some male religious leaders who distort the Holy Bible, the Koran, and other sacred texts to perpetuate their claim that females are, in some basic ways, inferior to them, unqualified to serve God on equal terms. Many men disagree but remain quiet in order to enjoy the benefits of their dominant status. This false premise provides a justification for sexual discrimination in almost every realm of secular and religious life.”
It would be impossible to quantify the damage that has been done to the image of women in the minds of the faithful as they’ve attended religious services over the centuries and been taught that women are “unqualified to serve God on equal terms.”
I believe without question that the disrespect for women embodied in male-dominant religion is a factor in laws and customs that keep women down. This should not be surprising, because bias against women is perhaps humanity’s oldest prejudice, and not only are religions our oldest institutions, but they change more slowly and grudgingly than all the others—which means they hold on to their biases and blind spots longer.
My own church’s ban on
modern contraceptives is just a small effect of a larger issue: its ban on women priests. There is no chance that a church that included women priests—and bishops and cardinals and popes—would ever issue the current rule banning contraceptives. Empathy would forbid it.
An all-male, unmarried clergy cannot be expected to have the empathy for women and families that they would have if they were married, or if they were women, or if they were raising children. The result is that men make rules that hurt women. It is always a temptation when you’re making rules to put the burden on “the other,” which is why a society is more likely to support equality when “the other” is not just sitting next to you at the table as you write the rules, but actually writing them with you.
The Catholic Church tries to shut down the discussion of women priests by saying that Jesus chose men as his apostles at the Last Supper, and therefore only men are allowed to be priests. But we could as easily say that the Risen Christ appeared first to a woman and told her to go tell the men, and therefore only women are allowed to bring the Good News to the men.
There are many possible interpretations, but the Church has said that the ban on women priests has been “set forth infallibly.” Putting aside the irony of leaving women out of the leadership of an organization whose supreme mission is love, it’s demoralizing that men who make rules that keep men in power would be so unsuspicious of their own motives.
The Moment of Lift Page 17
