What Are Nice Girls Like Us Doing
at a Place Like This?

by Ellen Hoffman

The questions they ask aren't always different than those asked by men. And quite often their solutions will be the same. So why are so many women so impassioned about their inclusion in political and economic decision making?

While most women (and men) at the decision-making level will state emphatically that having women "at the table" isn't an automatic road to truth, beauty, or justice in the world, they say women's presence does make a substantial difference in the way problems are addressed at a host of different levels.

"While there may not be anything inherently gender based about the perspectives that women bring to the table, I do believe women have the tendency to expand the debate a little further — to address issues more specific to what's happening to women, children, and communities," says Laura Liswood, co-founder and vice chair of the Council of Women World Leaders. "Too often women are at the grassroots level and therefore not heard at the institutional levels."

This point was brought home to Jim Wolfensohn, president of the World Bank, very early in his tenure when, in 1995, he attended the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing. According to Jan Piercy, executive director for the World Bank in the United States, who was also in attendance, "The delegates were very outspoken about the inadequacies of current policies when it came to issues of gender, and Jim was really struck by the vehemence of the criticism.

"Women from throughout the world were saying, 'The World Bank is a uniquely powerful institution vis-a-vis poor countries of the world. And while you may say you believe in supporting gender issues, you're not translating this into the way you lend and the way you conduct your policy dialogue with governments. You must understand that if you don't make gender a core issue, you are tacitly endorsing the exclusion of women. You may care about growth of societies — you're building roads and financing water systems, but that is not gender-driven policy. The story of poverty is the story of women in societies the world over. They are the last to gain the benefits of economic progress and the first to lose them. If you don't address this, you cannot say you are committed to the reduction of poverty.' Jim was just blown away by all this."

Kim Campbell, Canada's first female prime minister (1993) and incoming chair of the newly formed Council of Women World Leaders based at the Kennedy School (see sidebar), has been one of the strongest spokespersons for female representation at the highest levels of government and finance. "By involving women, you just get a more complete picture," says Campbell. "And a world organization cannot afford to make policy without that full picture — without knowledge of the impact of decisions on the entire population. This can't happen if half of the population is not fully represented in these discussions. It's like trying to walk on one leg.

"When someone once asked me how I felt about being the first female justice minister in Canada, I remember saying that the only thing better would be to have been the tenth. We want to make the notion of women as heads of government — or sitting around the table as economic policymakers — natural and ordinary rather than a novelty. We are not exotic. Women are not a minority group. We are more than half of the world's population, and we should not be pressing our noses against the glass. We should be in there."

Because of the differences in the lives they lead, women often bring a different point of view even to seemingly gender-free issues. Take for instance the experience of a female journalist who had just returned from Kosovo, and was reporting to the National Security Council. According to Campbell, by talking to the women of the region, the journalist had learned that there was a terrible food shortage resulting from the Serbs taking food out of Kosovo stores and placing them instead in Serb stores. The Council had been totally unaware of this situation.

One of the key differences most often mentioned when discussing gender issues is women's greater responsibility in most societies for nurturing, for dealing with children's early development, and for a family's health and nutrition. According to Piercy, studies have shown that in the micro-financing environment, when women take out loans and begin to have access to discretionary income for the first time, you frequently see immediate changes in the family's well-being: children enroll in school, get inoculated, and become literate. But when men gain access to money through these same programs, you don't see the same result; you don't see that clear correlation to an improved standard of living.

Increasingly it has been shown that investing in women — liberating that economic potential — contributes significantly to the capacity of a society to become more economically resilient. Worldwide, women who used to have almost no access to capital, now make up the majority of borrowers from micro-finance organizations. And what is so impressive is that these women not only have repayment rates of 80 percent and higher in many of these programs — much higher than conventional borrowers — but many, even the poorest, are also able to save. And even in Indonesia and Thailand, countries hard hit by the current Asian financial crisis, micro-finance institutions, most notably BRI in Indonesia, are remaining viable, with these borrowers repaying their loans.

This does not mean to imply that women aren't being severely and disproportionately hurt by the Asian crisis. "We do know that women are the dominant number of those being thrown back into poverty by this crisis," says Piercy. But these numbers are difficult to document because the majority of women working in Asia, and throughout the world in developing countries, are in the "informal sector," small-scale, unregistered enterprises and home employment that produce goods such as clothing, footwear, or sporting goods like footballs or soccer balls.

According to Martha Chen, a lecturer in public policy at the Kennedy School, with the Asian crisis we are looking at between 10 and 15 million people who are newly unemployed. But because these people are living in poor and developing countries where there are few safety nets, they aren't really unemployed, but rather are scrambling to make a living one way or another in the informal sector.

"Our best guesstimate is that anywhere from one-third to one-half of the global workforce (people who are economically active, not unemployed), are in the informal sector," says Chen. "In low-income countries, we estimate that some 85 percent of the workforce is in the informal sector. And more than half of those people, probably somewhere between 60 and 80 percent, are women."

With globalization of the economy, the trend is toward increased subcontracting and informalization. "Even before globalization of trade and investment, the share of women in the workforce was increasing. One could argue this is all for the good. But the other aspect of this is that the 'femininization' of the workforce means you also get a lot of 'informalization.' Most women are not moving into the formal sector of secure, well-paying jobs," says Chen.

Chen stresses that the attention now being given to the difficulties of women in the world economy is due to the international women's movement. "Women activists and women scholars have done all the hard, empirical work first just to prove how much women were working, and second, to explain what the division of gender role means for the economy. The challenge now is to translate that knowledge into programs and actions."

And while much work is needed to document and better understand women's role in the world economy, there seems to be a consensus that women in leadership roles help to accelerate the inclusion of gender concerns in a wide range of economic and development discussions. According to Piercy, getting women into leadership roles is essential for continued progress. She points out that Hillary Rodham Clinton is one of the strongest voices in the world today for advocating gender issues. "I've seen her in Beijing, in Africa, and in Asia. She's been all over the world, to some of the poorest countries, and focuses on economic empowerment with an extraordinary impact. She's using her standing to open doors for women."

But Piercy goes on to explain that important "door opening" is also frequently accomplished in more informal, almost incidental ways by women who are "already there."

"When I went to China about two and a half years ago for the World Bank, one of our meetings included a very impressive young woman. When I later had dinner with the finance minister, I teased him a bit about China being so aggressively egalitarian with respect to gender, but having no women assistants or advisers in the executive director's office of the World Bank. Two months later when I returned to the World Bank office in China, I was surprised to see the young woman I had met earlier walking down the corridor. She had just been posted as an assistant to the Chinese executive director. When I expressed my delight, she said she had me to thank for my conversation with the finance minister."

So, it would appear as though increasing the visibility and power of women at the top will gradually help ensure true opportunity for women at all strata of society: that one proven way to change the culture, to overcome existing barriers, is just to be there.