The Payoff From Women's Rights

Isobel Coleman

From Foreign Affairs, May/June 2004

Summary:  Backing women's rights in developing countries isn't just good ethics; it's also sound economics. Growth and living standards get a dramatic boost when women are given just a bit more education, political clout, and economic opportunity. So the United States should aggressively promote women's rights abroad. And by couching its case in economic terms, it might even overcome the resistance of conservative Muslim countries that have long balked at gender equality.

Isobel Coleman is a Senior Fellow on U.S. Foreign Policy at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Although there is no easy formula for reducing poverty, many argue that educating girls boosts development the most. Lawrence Summers, when he was chief economist at the World Bank, concluded that girls' education may be the investment that yields the highest returns in the developing world. Educated women have fewer children; provide better nutrition, health, and education to their families; experience significantly lower child mortality; and generate more income than women with little or no schooling. Investing to educate them thus creates a virtuous cycle for their community.

Educating women, especially young girls, yields higher returns than educating men. In low-income countries, investing in primary education tends to pay off more than investing at secondary and higher educational levels, and girls are concentrated at lower levels of the education system than are boys. So closing the gender gap in the early years of schooling is a better strategy than promoting other educational reforms that allow gender gaps to remain. Similarly, children benefit more from an increase in their mother's schooling than from the equivalent increase in their father's. Educating mothers does more to lower child mortality rates, promote better birth outcomes (for example, higher birth weights) and better child nutrition, and guarantee earlier and longer schooling for children.

Girls' education also lowers birthrates, which, by extension, helps developing countries improve per capita income. Better-educated women bear fewer children than lesser-educated women because they marry later and have fewer years of childbearing. They also are better able to make informed, confident decisions about reproduction. In fact, increasing the average education level of women by three years can lower their individual birthrate by one child. Studies show that in India, educating girls helps lower birth rates even more effectively than family planning initiatives.

Female education also boosts agricultural productivity. World Bank studies indicate that, in areas where women have very little schooling, providing them with at least another year of primary education is a better way to raise farm yields than increasing access to land or fertilizer usage. As men increasingly seek jobs away from farms, women become more responsible for managing the land. Because women tend to cultivate different crops than their husbands do, they cannot rely on men for training and need their own access to relevant information. As land grows more scarce and fertilizers yield diminishing returns, the next revolution in agricultural productivity may well be driven by women's education.

It is no coincidence, then, that in the last half-century, the regions that have most successfully closed gender gaps in education have also achieved the most economically and socially: eastern Asia, southeastern Asia, and Latin America. Conversely, regions with lagging growth -- southern Asia, the Middle East, and sub-Saharan Africa -- have also lagged in their investments in girls' education. Today, illiteracy among adult females is highest in southern Asia (55 percent), the Arab world (51 percent), and sub-Saharan Africa (45 percent). Simulation analyses suggest that, had these three regions closed their gender gaps in education at the same rate as eastern Asia did from 1960 to 1992, their per capita income could have grown by up to an additional percentage point every year. Compounded over three decades, that increase would have been highly significant.

Giving women more control over resources also profits the community at large because women tend to invest more in their families than do men. Increases in household income, for example, benefit a family more if the mother, rather than the father, controls the cash. Studies of countries as varied as Bangladesh, Brazil, Canada, Ethiopia, and the United Kingdom suggest that women generally devote more of the household budget to education, health, and nutrition, and less to alcohol and cigarettes. For example, increases in female income improve child survival rates 20 times more than increases in male income, and children's weight-height measures improve about 8 times more. Likewise, female borrowing has a greater positive impact on school enrollment, child nutrition, and demand for health care than male borrowing.

These differences help explain why extending microfinance (small-scale lending with little or no collateral) to women has become such a powerful force for development. Mohammed Yunus founded Grameen Bank in Bangladesh -- and launched the microfinance wave -- by reasoning that if loans were granted to poor people on appropriate and reasonable terms, "millions of small people with their millions of small pursuits [could] add up to create the biggest development wonder." Yunus deliberately promoted microfinancing for women for reasons of equity: women are generally poorer and more credit-constrained than men, and they have limited access to the wage labor market and an inequitable share in decision-making at home. But he was also moved by sound economics: women pay their loans back more consistently than men.

Microfinance has been lauded for alleviating poverty in a financially sustainable way. But its greatest long-term benefit could be its impact on the social status of women. Women now account for 80 percent of the world's 70 million microborrowers. And studies show that women with microfinancing get more involved in family decision-making, are more mobile and more politically and legally aware, and participate more in public affairs than other women. Female borrowers also suffer less domestic violence -- a consequence, perhaps, of their perceived value to the family increasing once they start to generate income of their own.

Allowing women to participate in politics also benefits democracy -- and not only because it advances their civil rights. Intriguing new studies suggest that women in power make different policy choices than their male counterparts, with profound implications for the local allocation of public resources and, thus, for development. Esther Duflo, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has examined the impact of a constitutional amendment that India passed in 1993, which requires states to devolve more power over expenditures to panchayats (local councils) and reserve a third of council leadership positions for women. Duflo found that when women are in charge, the panchayat invests more in infrastructure that is directly relevant to women's needs. This is not to say that women's priorities are somehow better than men's, only that they are different and that in countries in which women are neglected, putting them in charge may begin to redress the imbalance.

The research of Steven Fish, a political scientist at the University of California at Berkeley, into why Muslim countries are generally less democratic than other countries reveals other benefits of female political participation. Fish has found that robust democracy is exceedingly rare in societies that display a large gender gap in literacy rates and a skewed gender ratio (usually a marker of inferior nutrition and health care for girls and infanticide or sex-selective abortion). He argues that societies that marginalize women generally count both fewer anti-authoritarian voices in politics and more men who join fanatical religious and political brotherhoods -- two factors that stifle democracy.