Gender

Gender inequality and empowerment of rural women

By: Daniela Romero*

Gender inequalities are the result of the historical persistence of systems and of structural discrimination and exclusion factors. In the specific case of women, exclusion is a multi-dimensional issue which leads to precarious situations for women in the conditions and their actions in economic, social and political spheres (Moreno and Anderson, 2015: 169-171). The sexual division of labor, as a structural reality, is one of the main bases for this exclusion, and, in general, for generating inequality and injustice, mainly of an economic nature, affecting women. Across the globe, in general, women earn less than men, as it is more likely form them to work independently and in unpaid family jobs. Besides this, they are more prone to performing low-productivity activities and working in the informal sector, with less likelihood of mobility towards the formal sector than men (World Bank, 2012). Read More »

The importance of the gender approach in interventions aiming at rural development

By Daniela Romero*

Since the 1990s, the gender approach has been included in the debate of international conferences and in government policies and programs around the globe. In addition, this has led to the emergence of many women’s organizations that promote use of the concepts of the approach from both an activist and scientific perspective. Despite this, gender conditions and relations that vulnerate the lives of many women are still present in a diversity of contexts, particularly rural ones, where conditions of inequality and poverty persist. In this sphere, beyond rhetoric, social projects have not been able to deal with and/or go sufficiently deeper in the structural aspects that perpetuate such conditions. It is thus necessary for the new interventions to incorporate the gender approach in a more active way, fostering the transformation of gender relations from within the family, starting with the men and women themselves, identifying their individual and collective skills, interests and aspirations (Rodríguez, 2015). Read More »

Open and hidden gender inequality

By: Lykke E. Andersen*

Economists distinguish between open and hidden unemployment, and I think it is possible to introduce a similar distinction in the area of gender inequality.

I will define open gender inequality as that which is reflected in all the traditional gender indicators, such as gender gaps in school enrolment, gender differences in labour market participation rates, gender pay gaps, etc. I would usually have referred to the World Bank’s World Development Indicators for such data, but they have been updating their website, and I can’t find anything anymore. The United Nations system for SDG indicators is even worse. Instead, Our World in Data has vastly improved, so that is my new go-to site for all kinds of development statistics, including gender inequality data (https://sdg-tracker.org/gender-equality).

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The vicious circle of gender inequality in Economics

By: Lykke E. Andersen*

There has been a lot of focus lately on the extreme levels of gender inequality in economics (e.g. Economics is the most dismal of sciences in terms of gender inequality). According to the IDEAS/RePEc ranking of more than 50 thousand economists in the world, only 19% of registered economists are women, and they are much rarer than that among the top ranked economists (https://ideas.repec.org/top/#authorscountry).

Typically, there are only about a handful of women among the top 100 economists in any particular country. In the Netherlands there is just 1, in the United States 3, in Canada 4, in Sweden 5, in the UK, Germany, Norway and Italy 8, and Denmark seems to hold the record with 10. (Do let me know in the comments below if you find a country with more than 10 women among the top 100 economists according to RePEc, because I didn’t check the countries with names that were too unfamiliar to me).

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Economics is the most dismal of sciences in terms of gender equality

By: Lykke E. Andersen*

While the World’s education systems currently favour girls and women across most of the World (1), with 112 women enrolled in university for every 100 men worldwide (2), this educational advantage has yet to translate itself into more lucrative and prestigious positions for women. This is particularly so in the economics profession.

Only one woman has ever been awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics (Elinor Ostrom in 2009), whereas in Physics there are 2 female Nobel Prize winners, in Chemistry 4, in Medicine 12, in Literature 14, and 16 women have been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize (3).

That women have trouble rising to the top in the economics profession is also reflected by the fact that there are currently only eight countries in the World in which the highest ranked economist is a woman (4). In at least three of those cases, however, the female researcher does not actually live in the country, but is rather affiliated with an institution in the country, while currently living in another country (5). Thus, only five countries in the world has a top economist, who is both female and actually lives in the country: Bolivia, Burkina Faso, Tanzania, Trinidad and Tobago, and Uganda. In contrast, there are 120 countries in which the top ranked economist is male (see Map 1). For the remainder of the countries, no data was available, as no economists at all had registered at RePEc.

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Death penalty versus castration: A thought experiment

By: Lykke E. Andersen*

Stories about sexual violence against girls and women are common in the Bolivian news, but recently the stories have escalated to such hideous levels that the Vice-President of Bolivia has announced a referendum on whether to re-institute life-in-prison and death penalty in Bolivia (1).

For example, last Sunday, one of the guards of the “Defence of Children and Adolescents” facility in La Paz was caught in fraganti sexually violation two under-age girls who had come to the facility because they had suffered abuse (1).

The day before, a step-father and step-grandfather were jailed in Cochabamba for sexually violating and killing a baby girl, who had not even turned two (2).

A couple of weeks before, the President of the Municipal Council of Tapacarí (Cochabamba) was physically and sexually assaulting one of the female members of the Council, and a friend of the woman was trying to stop the assault when the Mayor arrived. But instead of helping the two women, the Mayor exclaimed “Why haven’t you raped these horny whores yet? Rape them and throw them in the river.” (3)

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Equal pay for unequal work: A gender analysis of productivity at INESAD

By: Lykke E. Andersen*

At INESAD there is no gender discrimination in salaries. But there ought to be. As I will show in this blog, women at INESAD are on average about four times more productive than men.

Admittedly, it is a small sample. We are currently only six senior researchers at INESAD: Two females and four males (we recently lost one female to Panama). Junior researchers come and go, and for administrative and support staff it is difficult to measure productivity, so in this blog I will focus on the productivity of the six current senior researchers who were all salaried staff at INESAD during the last three calendar years (2014-2016). All of them have a Ph.D. in Economics from a foreign university many years ago (except one, who didn’t bother to finish and defend his Ph.D.-thesis, because he (correctly) perceived that it would not add to his earnings potential).

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On Gender Equality in Education

By: Lykke E. Andersen*

According to The World Bank’s World Development Indicators, there are now more or less an equal number of boys and girls enrolled in primary and secondary school around the World. The worldwide Gender Parity Index has been going up steadily over the last several decades, reaching 99 girls for every 100 boys in 2014, and at this rate of change we would have reached parity last year. This is due to dramatic improvements in girls’ enrolment in Africa and Asia. In Latin America and the Caribbean, in contrast, there have been more girls enrolled than boys already since the early 1980s (see Figure 1).

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If we could measure poverty by gender, what would we find?

By: Lykke E. Andersen*

Poverty is usually measured at the household level, and since there is pretty much the same number of women as men in each household, poverty rates have almost by definition been identical for men and women. This fact, however, has not prevented thousands of articles from claiming that “poverty has a female face” (1). The perception that women are more likely to be poor is almost universal, despite the lack of empirical evidence.

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Father’s Day and teenage pregnancy in Bolivia

Lykke Andersen

By: Lykke E. Andersen*

Fertility rates have been going down all over the World much faster than most people realize. Fertility rates in Bolivia, for example, have come down from 6.5 babies per woman in 1971 to 3.2 in 2013, which is typical of developing countries (1).

This evolution made me suspect that the problem of high teenage pregnancy in Bolivia perhaps has already solved itself, and that I don’t really have to worry about becoming a grandmother anytime soon.

However, a quick look at the latest Bolivian population census (2012) indicates that teenage pregnancy is still very common. Seven percent of all 15 year olds already have a child, and this share increases to a whopping 49 percent for the 20 year olds, many of which already have 3 children (see Table 1).

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