89 Lambrecht (2013), p. 28.
90 Roberts (2016).
91 Most notably Boserup (1970).
Part II
Inequality
Introduction
In the last two chapters, I argued that women's freedom was vital to the rise of the West, and that, therefore, increasing women's freedom will similarly be key to building prosperity in today's poorest economies, as well as pushing prosperity further in the West. In this next part of the book, I'd like to begin by asking: can we rely on women's freedom (and with it prosperity) to naturally increase over time? Sadly, as we will see, we cannot. We will take a historical tour from the Stone Age to the modern day to see how women's freedom can retreat as well as improve. Somewhat paradoxically, whilst women help growth, growth doesn't always return the favour, as we will see happened with Britain's Industrial Revolution. The lesson is that women need to be forever on guard.
Having considered the historic path of gender equality, we will then go on to consider why gender inequality is relevant to another much talked-about form of inequality: income inequality. Typically, economists consider income inequality as entirely independent of gender inequality. But, as we will see, income inequality cannot be addressed without keeping our eyes open to gender.
The recent rise in income inequality began not long before I was born, and born into a family that was most definitely situated on a lower rung of the ladder. Where I grew up in northern England, people survived by living on the dregs left behind by the rest of society. Everything had a value; nothing was thrown away. As a treat, my grandparents would take me to the local market to buy a magazine. However, these were not the kinds of magazines that you could purchase from a local newsagent; they were well-thumbed out-of-date magazines, presumably bought second-hand from the local doctors’ surgeries. From a nearby stall, you could also buy bags of misshapen and broken biscuits – local people didn't waste money on the neatly packaged versions available in supermarkets. As my grandparents explained, ‘t’is all same once in t’belly.’ However, even these market offerings were sometimes too expensive. Instead, my grandfather and I would walk along the canal to an old red-brick cotton mill, then owned by a local biscuit manufacturer, to queue at the back gate where you could purchase the bags of biscuits at the cheapest possible price.
As a young child, this way of life was perfectly normal. However, as I grew up, I realized that somewhere someone else must have been buying the neatly packaged and pre-sorted biscuits and fresh off-the-press magazines. Otherwise, how would we be able to get our hands on all of the leftovers? It was only once I left the north, aged eighteen, to study at the University of Cambridge that I came into contact for the first time with the ‘someone else’, the people who actually shopped in places like Marks & Spencer every single week.
Whilst I began my march up the social (or, more accurately, academic) ladder, most other people I knew were, unfortunately, left behind, including many of those closest to me. Mine was an unusual story; it was the exception and not the norm. At the opposite end of the spectrum were friends and family who left school pregnant and never took their GCSEs. I have no delusion about life: it can be very tough, even in our supposedly rich western economy.
However, despite the issue of ‘class’ attracting growing attention, gender is the missing element. This was something I realized for myself at the age of fourteen, when my parents separated, leaving my mum to care for and financially support myself and my two younger sisters. It was at this point that things became particularly tough, when we missed meals and turned to charity shops. Gender is the elephant in the room; it is difficult, if not impossible, to fully address the issue of income inequality without also facing up to gender inequality.
In the final of these three chapters, we will consider an aspect of inequality that has so far gone under the radar: inequality between women who monetize their bodies and those who monetize their brains. It's an inequality that affects some of the poorest women in our society, and one that is being tackled in precisely the wrong way. As we will see, underlying this inequality are strong social taboos, ones that the Enlightenment together with the nineteenth-century cult of domesticity contributed towards. Society needs to fundamentally transform the way it thinks about both sex and women's bodies if this important but overlooked aspect of inequality is to be addressed. The benefits on offer go well beyond improving the lives of sex workers: the same taboos that serve to sideline sex workers are also those that keep women ‘in their place’ more generally in society. That includes the notion that women's bodies are the root of sin.
In sum, if we want not only a richer economy but also one that is more equal than at present, enhancing rather than decreasing women's freedom is the place to begin.
3
When Did Sexism Begin?
In the first part of the book, I argued that women's freedom is vital to the creation of economic prosperity. Today, the global gender gap, a catch-all measure of gender inequality, contained in the World Economic Forum's Gender Gap Report, stands at 32%, meaning that 32% of the gap between men and women in the dimensions of health, education, the labour market and political representation remains to be closed.1 However, we tend to think that the course of human history will move us onwards and upwards, that all we have to do is wait. In the United States, for example, and as Claudia Goldin has documented, the wage gap declined from just over 50% in the late nineteenth century to just over 40% by 1930. It then stagnated and began to fall further in the 1980s to not much more than 15% today (Figure 3.1).2 But, as we will see in this chapter, patriarchy and the associated gender gap has in fact been on the ascendancy as often as it has been on the decline. Rather than being on the side of women, history has often been against them, and economic growth has not always been their friend.3 Why gender equality has moved backwards as well as forwards over time is the subject of this chapter, and it has an important lesson for the present day: gender equality should never be taken for granted.
Figure 3.1 Gender wage gap in the UK, the USA, Japan, and Germany, 1970‒2016
Source: OECD (https://data.oecd.org/earnwage/gender-wage-gap.htm#indicator-chart)
The Origins of Sexism: the Three Ps
We tend to assume that for most of history women have been oppressed and that it is only in the last century that advances have been made. We are more used to asking ‘When will sexism come to an end?’ than ‘When (and why) did it begin?’ However, according to the anthropologist Melvin Konner, author of Women After All, our hunter-gatherer ancestors experienced much greater gender equality than we might at first imagine.4 Nature, he argues, grants women, not men, the advantage: women are destined to be dominant in the natural state of the world.
So, you might wonder, when did it all start to go wrong for women? The answer is, perhaps paradoxically, with a great technological and institutional leap. Ten thousand years ago, between 10,000 and 6,500 BC, something big happened: the Neolithic revolution. ‘Mankind’ began to settle down and farm the land. In the words of Konner, this was the time when ‘men killed men and seized women or enslaved both’. However, he wasn't the first to draw attention to the significance of this period of history for its inequalities which still persist to this day. The idea has a long pedigree. Although he might not be instantly recognizable as a feminist, Friedrich Engels, the famous supporter and compatriot of Karl Marx, wrote a whole book on the matter, one which he titled The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State.5
Engels was born into a relatively privileged family in Germany, but when he began to show left-leaning tendencies, his father sent him off to work in Manchester, England, in the hope that it would shake him of such feelings. As it turned out, and much to the dislike of his family, Engels's Manchester excursions achieved the very opposite. Living amongst the working people of the mills and factories made him even more, not less, sympathetic to the cause of working people. Whilst Marx was busily blaming capitalism for the divide
that seemed to have opened up between rich and poor, Engels turned instead to the divide between men and women.
Engels argued that the hunter-gatherer state was one of primitive communism, one in which everyone was equal and people worked cooperatively to achieve common goals. Men and women might have carried out different tasks to aid subsistence with, for example, men doing the hunting and women collecting other types of foodstuff, but they made equal contributions to the tribe's survival nevertheless, and were recognized for doing such. However, the egalitarian nature of society started to change as the hunter-gatherer existence gave way to farming.
What was key for Engels was that farming brought ownership.6 Here, Engels's particular focus was on livestock, such as cattle. In the way that Marx saw private property as being at the root of wealth inequality, Engels saw private property as being at the root of gender inequality. He argued that only men could stray from the home to herd and look after livestock, whereas women needed to be close to the homestead for the purpose of looking after small children – after all, in those days, before modern birth control, many women were regularly pregnant or lactating. Engels reasoned that the rights of ownership came to be vested in men. In his own words, women ‘became the slave of his [man's] lust and a mere instrument for the production of children’.
Engels's explanation of the roots of gender inequality still lives on today, albeit in a slightly different form and with a less Marxist twist. Although Engels's own focus was on private property, more recent research suggests that it was the more general transition from a hunter-gatherer system that opened up the possibility of gender inequality. However, sexism did not arrive equally everywhere. The degree of inequality that emerged was highly dependent on local conditions, both geographic and technological, which in turn affected the types of agricultural technologies that were adopted.
If there is one particular technology which appears to have had significantly adverse effects on women, it is the plough, a machine which worked to the advantage of muscle power. The plough – which required significant human strength – was, according to economic historians, the enemy of womankind. Countries with a longer history of using the plough still fare worse today when it comes to gender equality indices. Examining over 1,200 ethnic groups, Alberto Alesina, Paulo Giuliano and Nathan Nunn have found that regions which made greater use of the plough in the past are those where gender differences are greatest today. History casts a long shadow.7
Barbara Smuts has an alternative to the technologically driven explanation of the battle between the sexes, but which similarly relates to the Neolithic revolution.8 Smuts argues that patriarchy was an evolutionary response to the fact that the mother of a child can always be known but the father cannot. This uncertainty created an evolutionary advantage for men who sought to monitor and restrict the freedom of their female partners. In other words, with sex came a desire for control, a desire that enabled men to make sure that their own genes – and not someone else's – were safely passed on. This control only became feasible as society shifted away from hunter-gatherer communities to settled agriculture, at which point subsistence was no longer dependent on women's freedom to move about to collect foodstuff.
Whether it's through the birth of private property, the plough or paternity (what I would sum up as the three ‘Ps’), the first big technological revolution for mankind did not exactly work out well for women.
From Agriculture to Manufacturing
Whilst settled agriculture closed a door, it also opened a window: it enabled the development of manufactured goods. When life was nomadic, people were continually on the move, which meant that belongings needed to be kept to a bare minimum. Once we settled down in one place, this constraint was lifted, ushering in a whole series of technological developments which led to the production of textiles, pottery and metal ware. These included the handloom and the spinning wheel. If muscle power was what first gave men an advantage in the field, technological developments in the realm of manufacturing began to erode this advantage. However, where a patriarchal culture had already become deeply rooted, it would take centuries until this change in technology was capable of bringing women on board.9 And one of the key ways in which patriarchal culture was consolidated for so long was through the development of the state.
As agriculture advanced, and as towns developed, so too did the state. The fact that settled agriculture meant that people stayed in one place enabled the development of fixed states.10 Towns and cities also needed governance and, naturally, it was not always of a modern-day democratic nature. Patriarchal family structures provided a model of governance for the first political institutions; a state that was similarly autocratic and domineering. These political institutions in turn affected the way family members saw one another, the extent to which it was the ‘norm’ to see others as equal or to bow to those in power. Political structures and the family fed back on one another. It was therefore in the parts of the world that first ‘advanced’ technologically speaking ‒ undergoing the Neolithic revolution early on ‒ that patriarchal family structures began to take hold.11 Outside of the three main centres of civilization ‒ the Middle East, the Indus Valley and China ‒ a more equal family structure, one which embedded a reasonable degree of equality for male and female members and had its roots in simpler times, prevailed. This included Western Europe.
Equality Consolidated
The early backwardness of Europe was, it turns out, to the advantage of women. The Black Death in the middle of the fourteenth century consolidated these early ‒ more gender equal ‒ foundations. The population of Europe declined dramatically, by between one third and one quarter, making it one of the most significant shocks in history. The result was a shortage of workers, in response to which male wages rose and employers were left on the lookout for alternative sources of labour. The power balance between landowners and labourers moved in favour of the latter, reducing inequality within the economy. This period of labour shortage meant new opportunities for young people, changing the bargaining power between parents and the younger generation. This had a particularly large effect on young women: teenage girls now had the ability to financially support themselves. This economic freedom dramatically changed women's lives and with it the structure of families. The nuclear family was born.12
With their new-found economic freedom, young women could choose whether, who and when to marry (free from parental interference). As we saw earlier, they entered into the workforce and waited to marry until they found someone of their own choosing. Since neither party could be forced into marriage and, instead, chose their partners of their own accord, it was a marriage of equals. However, people now had to wait to marry. The other side of the coin to choosing one's own partner in life was setting up your own independent marital home upon marriage. Couples therefore had to save up and wait before getting married, meaning that the average young couple did not marry until their mid-twenties. Smaller families were the inevitable result, which, as we saw earlier, helped to boost the economy in a number of different ways.
The Black Death also consolidated women's empowerment in another surprising way: by turning us into meat eaters.13 The labour shortages resulted in higher wages, which enabled us to purchase more meat. In response, farmers began to shift away from crops and towards animal husbandry. The plough lost its dominance. In the United Kingdom, the share of economic value in farming created by raising animals as opposed to growing crops rose from 47 per cent in 1270 to 70 per cent by 1450. New job opportunities opened up in the agricultural sector for female labourers.
Of course, the changes to women's power did not come without resistance. Men responded by trying to restrict women's freedom, such as limiting where they could work, what professions they could join, their rights to borrow and spend ‒ and even what they could or could not wear.14 Changes in the structure of the family had the potential to empower women but the extent to which they were capable of doing so also depended on institutional
structures that existed outside the home.15 Where, for example, women's entry into formal and skilled employment was restricted by the existence of guilds and the power of the law, as was the case in Germany and France though less so in Britain and the Netherlands, women's progress from the home into the public sphere was limited ‒ until, that is, institutions outside of the home began to take their lead from the increasingly equitable family structures.
From Farm to Factory
Women already accounted for a surprising third of the labour force in Britain in the first half of the nineteenth century.16 However, as with the first giant technological leap of mankind, this period of revolutionary technological advance began to hurt rather than help women. Whilst the cotton mills of Manchester provided new income-earning opportunities for women, 58 per cent of cotton industry workers being female,17 the ‘factory girl’ was certainly not representative of women more generally in the economy. Rapidly expanding heavy industries like coal mining and iron and steel relied largely (though not solely) on male labour. This was a marriage of muscle and capital, one that is perhaps best summed up by the murals of Thomas Hart Benton that graced the walls of the New School of Social Research in New York. Farming became increasingly mechanized, and women and children up and down Britain were made unemployed. Cottage industry ‒ manufacturing conducted within the homes of villagers ‒ was out-competed by dark satanic mills, reducing the opportunities for women in the countryside to supplement their income from farming.
Women's work became concentrated in areas such as domestic service and clothing.18 Not only were the opportunities for women to earn declining, unpaid work demands within the home were on the rise. Perhaps in part due to changes in the labour market, women began to marry sooner. The average age of first marriage for women fell from 25 to 23. With it, fertility rose.19 This was a baby boom, old style: more pregnancies, more breastfeeding and more drudgery.
The Sex Factor Page 9
