More equity between men and women can boost an economy. But that doesn't mean that men will go along with the change
Gender has become and indispensable word in discussions of economic development. Most major international organizations have special units devoted to women's issues. And many of these have generated studies showing that investments in women yield high returns in productivity, child health, and family welfare. But discussions of gender usually have been compartmentalized, with little impact on broader studies of development. "Engendering" economics---examining the role that gender plays in economic life" could lead to a better understanding of the role that social institutions play in development.
Much of the research on gender focuses on the causes and cures of bias. Explanations for the nearly universal favoring of men and unequal treatment of women generally fall into one of two categories. The first is a women-in-development approach that treats bias against women as something to be remedied by better incorporating them into the market economy. According to this view, there are differences between men and women in traditional agrarian economies partly because men have greater physical strength and partly because such economies encourage high fertility rates that force women to depend on male support. Social institutions then reflect and enforce male dominance.
As development and change increase the importance of mental skills over physical strength and encourage a decline in fertility, male dominance becomes less efficient for the society. While traditional cultural norms might impede an adjustment, bias will gradually disappear since a reduction in sex discrimination improves the overall efficiency of the community.
A second approach, gender and development, is less optimistic. It emphasizes the persistent, structural character of gender inequality. Incorporating women into the development process isn't enough. The process itself must be modified. But that modification will be resisted by men because it will mean a redistribution of income and power that reduces menÕs disproportionate share of income and leisure.
Both positions could be usefully reinterpreted using the concepts of the new institutional economics.* This body of theory provides a way to think about how distributional coalitions---societal groups defined by their common interests---shape the evolution of social institutions, which in turn influence individual decisions. Recast in these terms, the women-in-development perspective would judge social institutions to be evolving toward an efficient, optimal end, despite imperfections and lags in adjustment. In the long run the institutions providing the most efficient solution will prevail. But institutionalist theory recognizes that social institutions may also serve the interests of particular groups. Obstacles to social change are not merely a manifestation of lagged adjustment; they often reflect active resistance by powerful groups that may be willing to forgo greater efficiency in order to remain in a dominant position. The women-in-development perspective may thus be unduly hopeful.
At the same time more attention to the new institutional economics could encourage gender-and-development theorists to move beyond documenting inequality and begin looking at its functional implications. Male collective action has led to the development of social institutions that give men important advantages in control over property, income, and labor. Unpleasant as the political implications may seem, hierarchy and inequality may serve economic functions by lowering the costs of transactions and solving coordination problems. An appreciation of the complexities of gender-based conflict offers an explanation of why women may not always favor cultural modernization and may in fact endorse fundamentalist forms of resistance to it. Under certain circumstances women's groups may correctly judge that they have more to lose from male-dominated modernization than from male-dominated tradition.
Property rights. Why have social systems based on male control of property emerged in many different countries and prevailed, unchallenged, for long periods? Part of the answer may lie in the institutional logic linking relationships between men and women to those between parents and children. In traditional patriarchal regimes landownership gave fathers leverage over children and allowed them to expect at least some benefits in the form of labor contributions and support in old age. Although this system intensified the economic incentives for coercive forms of control over women, it also provided an implicit rate of return for women's reproductive labor. Men who abused or neglected the mothers of their children (or their children) lowered their own economic welfare.
But with the shrinking of farms and the increase in individual employment, these incentives break down. Men have less to gain from children's labor. Maximizing fertility thus becomes a less attractive economic strategy, and family commitments become more costly. As a result the negative distributional consequences of male property rights become more salient: women have less bargaining power within the family and lower economic welfare outside it. Thus we see women in many countries engaging in collective action to enhance their rights to land.
Family law. The institutional framework of family rights has implications for both economic and demographic decisionmaking. In particular, the welfare of women and their children is shaped largely by their claims on the income of fathers. Such claims are formed by explicit contracts (defined by law) and implicit contracts (defined by social norms). Historically, these contracts were defined largely by men and gave them important benefits. Most family law was forged during an era in which children provided some economic benefits to fathers. But economic development raises the cost of having children, and reduces the benefit, by requiring more education, increasing childrenÕs economic independence, and providing alternative old-age support systems. And although development leads to lower fertility rates in the long run, the adjustment is neither swift nor even. In the interim these changes may be extremely costly to women because prevailing family laws provide them with little protection. Women thus face a paradox: the same aspects of development that increase their economic independence as individuals may increase their economic vulnerability as mothers.
Collective efforts by women to revise family norms to enforce parental responsibility are under way. But the theory of distributional coalitions leads us to expect that women's groups seeking reform will meet considerable resistance from men. And this is in fact what we have seen.
The labor market. Gender-biased employment policies can be analyzed in the same terms as policies relating to property and family rights---as an outcome of a distributional conflict. Several institutional factors promote a wage gap between men and women. Because women have inferior property rights and weak claims on fathers' and husbands' assets, they are compelled to accept lower-paying jobs. Large wage gaps characterize labor markets worldwide: on average, women earn only 60Š70% as much as men---a gap that would be even greater if wage data included women engaged in unpaid family work. Part of the difference can be explained by differences in education, themselves a result of discriminatory public policy. But increased access to education does not close the gap. Presumed to have less labor force commitment than men, women are often limited to low-skilled jobs where high turnover is acceptable.
Because women are disproportionately concentrated in part-time and intermittent work, they are less likely than men to receive benefits based on wage employment, such as social security. Even when they are eligible, women who pay the same taxes as their male peers receive lower benefits. Programs are skewed to transfer more income to men than to women. Family allowances, for example, provide male workers with an additional stipend for a dependent wife, but do not provide female workers with extra to pay for childcare.
It is sometimes suggested that women simply have a greater preference for childcare or that gender differences in preferences account for gender differences in wages. That might be true. But individual preferences are partially shaped by social norms that are strongly influenced by the coalitions that hold power in a society. As women gain collective power, they are likely to challenge the social norms that are costly to them.
* For more details, see Nancy Folbre, "Engendering Economics: New Perspectives on Women, Work, and Demographic Change," a paper presented at the 1995 Annual Bank Conference on Development Economics, World Bank, Washington, DC, May 1-2.