Revisioning the economic rules: empowering women and changing the world

Abstract

To build a sustainable, equitable, and peaceful future, “women’s issues” must be at the front of the social agenda. A statistical study of data from 89 nations shows that raising women’s status is key to a better quality of life for all. In addition, as women’s status rises, so does fiscal support for the stereotypical “women’s work” of caring for children, the elderly, and people’s health - whether done by women or men - work essential for the “high quality capital” needed for the postindustrial/knowledge economy. Creative leadership can change economic models, measures, and practices to take into full account the value of this most essentialwork.

Bibliography

Riane Eisler, David Loye, and Kari Norgaard, Women, Men and The Global Quality of Life (Pacific Grove, CA: Center for Partnership Studies, 1995).

The nine measures we used to assess the degree of gender equity were: the number of literate females for every 100 literate males; female life expectancy as a percentage of male life expectancy; the number of women for every 100 men in parliaments and other governing bodies; the number of females in secondary education for every 100 males; maternal mortality; contraceptive prevalence; access to abortion; and based on measures used by the Population Crisis Committee (now Population Action International), social equality for women and economic equality for women. The thirteen measures used to assess quality of life, were: overall life expectancy; human rights ratings; access to health care; access to clean water; literacy; infant mortality; number of refugees fleeing the country; the percentage of daily caloric requirements consumed; Gross Domestic Product (GDP) as a measure of wealth; the percentage of GNP distributed to the poorest 40 percent of households; the ratio of GDP going to the wealthiest versus the poorest 20 percent of the population; and as measures of environmental sensitivity, the percentage of forest habitat remaining, and compliance with the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species. When we explored the relation between the gender equity and quality of life variables with descriptive, correlational, factor, and multiple regression analyses, we found a strong systemic correlation between these two measures. These findings were consistent with our hypothesis that increased equity for women is central to a higher quality of life for a country as a whole, and that gender inequity contracts the opportunitiesandcapabilities, not only of women, but of the entire population. The link between gender equity and quality of life was confirmed at a very high level of statistical significance for correlational analysis. 61 correlations at the .001 level with 18 additional correlations at the .05 level were found, for a total of 79 significant correlations in the predicted direction. This link was further confirmed by factor analysis. High factor loadings for gender equity and quality of life variables accounted for 87.8 percent of the variance. Regression analysis, also yielded significant results. An R-square of .84, with statistical significance at the .0001 level, provided support for the hypothesis that gender equity is a strong indicator of the quality of life.