Lecture 4.1

Women’s Empowerment

Emmanuel Teitelbaum

Overview

• Discrimination and violence against women
• Labor force participation rates
• Women’s representation

Discrimination and VAW

Relevance

• Instrumental reasons
  • Female labor force participation
  • women’s representation
• Ethical reasons
  • What is development?
    • Growth? Freedom? Participation?
  • Is it development if half the population is left out?

Sex ratios map

Causes of Missing Women

• Female deprivation—girls malnourished (Sen)
  • Tied to cultural factors (caste, dowry, etc)
• Poverty
  • Lower value placed on girls could lead to deprivation
  • However, poor families depend more on girls for labor
• Environmental factors
  • Macro-factors, e.g. climate change, pollution
  • Gestation environment, e.g. Hepatitis B
• Female infanticide, sex-selective abortions

Laws and Regulations

The index measures how laws and regulations affect women’s economic opportunity. Overall scores are calculated by taking the average score of each index (Mobility, Workplace, Pay, Marriage, Parenthood, Entrepreneurship, Assets and Pension), with 100 representing the highest possible score.

Sexuality and Reproductive Freedom

Domestic Violence

Role of Social Institutions

• Social institutions—formal and informal constraints that influence social relations
• Important role for gender because they determine what is deemed acceptable or unacceptable in a society
• OECD SIGI
  • Index of social discrimination
    • Scores on four dimensions combined to create overall score and ranking

• discrimination in the family
• restricted physical integrity
• restricted access to productive and financial resources
• restricted civil liberties

SIGI Map

Source: OECD SIGI

SIGI Discussion

• Go to SIGI Dashboard
• Choose a country
  • Explore overview and four areas of discrimination
  • How does your country rank relative to others in the region?
• Discuss with a neighbor
  • Areas of confusion?
  • Surprises?

Labor Force Participation

What Causes Economic Growth?

Mankiw, Romer & Weil:

\[Y(t) = K(t)^{\alpha}H(t)^{\beta}(A(t)L(t))^{1-\alpha-\beta}\]

where \(Y\) = output, \(t\) = time, \(K\) = capital, \(L\) = labor, \(A\) = labor-augmenting technology (knowledge), and \(H\) = human capital (education and training, e.g. productivity).

Women and Growth

• Women are especially important for \(L\) and \(H\)
  • Constitute half of labor force
  • Serve as primary caregivers
    • Responsible for health and well-being of children
    • Mother’s education directly impacts that of girls
• Important questions
  • Are women educated?
  • Are they able to work?

The Demographic Dividend

Women’s participation in the labor force is especially important in low- and middle-income countries, where the working-age population is large relative to the total population.

The Dependency Ratio

• However, women may be disincentivized from participating in the workforce due to their traditional household responsibilities.
• Dependency Ratio = (non-working-age pop/working-age pop)*100
• Measures the economic burden of those outside of the labor force on those who are working
• Affected by fertility and aging
  • Both bring down women’s LFPR because of women’s caregiving role

Burden of Older Population

Burden of Younger Population

Global Trend in FLFP

So what do the overall trends in FLFP look like? FLFP has been declining over the last 30 years.

FLFP Map

But there are some interesting regional patterns. What do you see in this graph? Do the patterns surprise you?

Development and FLFP

• We might expect FLFP to be monotonically increasing with wealth…but instead we see high levels of FLFP in low-income countries and high income countries, but lower participation in middle income countries, especially in the MENA region and S. Asia.
• Why would this be the case?
• Discuss with a neighbor
• Discuss the sectoral composition of the economy; what do various sectors demand of women?

Women and Agriculture

Total Fertility Rates

Total Fertility Rate (TFR): The average number of children a woman can expect to bear over her lifetime given current age-specific fertility rates - Education important for bringing down TFRs - Gets women into workforce - Breaks cycle of continuous childbearing and child-rearing - In agricultural economies, women are mostly working in the fields and taking care of kids and don’t require a high degree of education, not breaking out of this cycle. - Whereas in industry and service-based economies the incentives are different. - However, patriarchal norms can still hold women, and thus development back. Countries can get stuck in a low-level equilibrium of low labor-force participation that in turn contributes to lower growth.

Women in Politics

Female Political Represenation

Discussion

• Hessani and Fonseca
• Explanations for low representation
  • Which is most convincing?
• Consequences
  • Do women have different preferences and priorities?
  • Do women make different policy choices?
  • How do women improve the quality of institutions?
  • What are some differences between developing and wealthy nations?
• Women’s empowerment
  • Are there spillover effects?