The Downside of Focusing on Women and Girls

Yesterday was International Women's Day and there were many articles and blog posts championing the idea that anti-poverty philanthropy should focus on women and girls (see, for instance, Mary Ellen Iskendarian's post for The Conversation). Like many ideas in poverty alleviation before it, the "women first" approach has been increasingly captured by overly simplistic thinking about the poor and anti-poverty programs — with easily foreseeable, and already evident, negative consequences. 

What could possibly be wrong with focusing aid programs on women and girls? 

First, many of the arguments made in favor of a focus on women and girls — such as the idea that men spend money only on themselves while women spend money on their families — are rooted in the fallacy of essentialism. This fallacy attributes the results of context and culture to the core nature of people. There is a far better explanation for spending patterns of men and women, rooted in understanding how families everywhere negotiate over household income. In most societies men are the primary income earners; they distribute the income to their wives for particular purposes, usually including buying food and caring for children. Being human, the male income earners unsurprisingly feel that they should be able to enjoy some of the fruits of their labor. 

When women become the primary income earners, we should expect to see the same spending patterns evolve over time. And that's exactly what we do see. In India and Cote D'Ivoire, researchers have seen that as women gain control of their income they do indeed spend more on themselves. The Indian study, one of the few high quality studies of microcredit extended to women, found no increase in household spending on clothing, food, or education.

Second, the marketing pitch for focusing on women and girls increasingly is stereotyping men in the effort to combat the stereotyping of women. As Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo write in their forthcoming Poor Economics, if we want to make an impact on global poverty we have to stop painting the poor, women or men, as cartoon characters. The "women first" movement increasingly relies on caricatures of virtuous women and deadbeat dads. I'm especially concerned because the nature of global poverty today means that the men in these caricatures are black and brown, calling to mind racialist theories of the past even if that is by no means intended. 

Consider the undeniable costs of a caricatured bias toward women. David McKenzie's research in Sri Lanka, Mexico, Brazil and Ghana has shown that urban male entrepreneurs typically earn far higher returns from microfinance than women do (in Sri Lanka average returns on capital for women were 0%, for men 10%). If we are trying to fight poverty, shouldn't we at least consider what strategies are most likely to raise household income the most? 

Does that mean that we should not focus on women and girls? Of course not. We should focus on women and girls. But we need to base the focus on the fact that women and girls are marginalized — and therefore empowering them can have significant benefits — not because they are women and girls. That may seem to be just a matter of semantics, but it is far from that. By defining programs in terms of the wrong criteria we create institutional inertia that will inevitably continue to pour resources into an area long after it is no longer appropriate. Just look at affirmative action programs in the United States that continue while a flood of research shows that the important distinction to deal with is class not race (though of course the two do overlap). 

A focus on the marginalized, regardless of their sex, ethnicity, location, or other essential characteristics will do far more to combat poverty than a blind focus on women and girls.

(Source: http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2011/03/whats_wrong_with_focusing_on_w.html)