There always has to be one person who spoils the party for everyone by pointing out the emperor has no clothes. That’s me, I’m afraid, here to tell you almost all of International Women’s Day is a waste of time, counter-productive, even.
No, despite my looks, this doesn’t mean I am against gender equality. Rather, I mean that most of the world has got things the wrong way around.
For example, it’s often noted that female education, gender equality more generally, is associated with economic development. This has the merit of being entirely true. Thus, the argument goes on, we should be pressing for female education, gender equality more generally, the output of which will be economic development.
Sadly, this doesn’t have the merit of being true. Rather, it is economic development which leads to gender equality.
Two and only two examples of this. The aim and purpose of life is to produce grandchildren — those who don’t believe in that evolution stuff do tend to belong to religions which make much the same point about being fruitful and multiplying. In true poverty (aka earning $1.90 a day, something 10 percent of humanity still suffers in), which most of humanity has endured for most of world history, this requires that a woman be pregnant or lactating for almost her entire fertile life. Seven to 10 pregnancies wasn’t unusual in the histories of our own now-rich societies, while two is the norm today. Those fertility rates out there in that poverty are falling from those similarly high levels to our own as more children survive, thus it’s necessary to have fewer.
When a woman is to spend her adult life in nothing but childrearing, what’s the economic point of education in anything other than childrearing? Yes, of course, I get the cultural, the liberty, the human fulfillment arguments, but what’s the economic case? Note that things which aren’t economic tend not to happen in human societies.
Economic development lowers the child death rate, lowers the desired fertility rate, and thus makes female education economic — at which point it happens.
Similarly, think about work in a truly poor society. What’s being hired is essentially muscle mass — something women tend to have less of than men, thus the gender division of labor. Men labor for money in the marketplace, women labor solely in the household. Again, I get all the reasons why we don’t desire this assignation, but it is the economic one that will happen in the absence of automation and machinery (a useful definition of a poor society being one without automation and machinery).
The great change of the latter 20th century was the irruption of women into the paid labor force. A glorious and wondrous thing, it was and is economic liberation for our sisters. But it is my insistence that the economic growth doesn’t come from that irruption, it’s economic growth which allows it. Only once work is not reliant upon muscle mass, only once it is brains not brawn which is being paid for, can women compete on an equal basis. Or, given most men’s thought processes, women then compete from a position of advantage.
Which means that we’ve got to get this issue right. We can and should argue for women’s liberation simply because it’s right. But we cannot argue that it leads to economic growth — it doesn’t, it’s a result of it. Therefore, to argue for that liberation is to argue for more capitalism and free markets — neoliberal globalization, that is. For that’s what has made our sisters free — women in the rich world today are the freest, richest, best-off women that have ever existed in human history. So, why not do more of what we can see works?
Tim Worstall (@worstall) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a senior fellow at the Adam Smith Institute. You can read all his pieces at the Continental Telegraph.
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