Gender Bias: Roadblock to Sustainable Development
...true. We have numerous examples to prove this. The connection between malnutrition and the diversion of income by males to personal consumption -- wristwatches, radios, bicycles -- has been found to be a problem across sub-Saharan Africa, in Belize, in Guatemala, in Mexico, and throughout the Indian subcontinent. In a grinding cycle of poverty, women work harder and harder for less and less. Lacking access to education, training, land ownership and credit, their only hope for productivity is to breed more young hands: daughters who are kept out of school to help in the back-breaking, unyielding labor, and sons for status. With local variations, the story is repeated all over the world. How did subsistence farmers and forest dwellers move from models of ecologically sustainable living to ruinous examples? This is complex, and concerns, first, how labor is valued in Western economic terms. Since the cultivation or collection of food directly for the family does not count in those schemes, women's work is not valued. As a consequence, women engaged in such work are seldom granted access to land, credit, or other resources that improve productivity. Next, women have rarely been involved in designing or carrying out development programs. Jacobson writes: "Countless programs to reverse deforestation [in Africa] have failed because their planners did not think to consult village women who are the primary managers and harvesters of forest products in their communities." Worst of all, conventional economic policies directly increase poverty within subsistence economies. In Sikandernagar, India, for example, the Green Revolution actually reduced women's access to cropland and forest resources, forcing them to go farther afield to meet their families' needs. Are there any solutions? No easy ones. Development efforts will have to be reoriented, away from their present overemphasis on limiting women's reproductive capacity and toward improving the status of women, increasing their legal and economic controls over income, household resources, and their own lives. To say that this will put many a cultural nose out of joint is to put it mildly. Gender bias is a worldwide phenomenon, but it is especially pernicious in the Third World, where most of women's activity takes place in the non-wage economy for the purpose of household consumption. In Sikandernagar, for example, women spend one third of their working hours earning wages, but receive less than half the amount paid to men for the same work. Because their cash income isn't enough to buy adequate supplies of food and other necessities (which they are responsible for obtaining one way or another), they must work additional hours to produce these goods from the surrounding countryside. Contrary to conventional assumptions, women are the main breadwinners in a large share of families throughout the Third World. They contribute proportionately more of their cash income to family welfare than do men, holding back less for personal consumption. Gender bias is a primary cause of poverty, because in its various forms it prevents hundreds of millions of women from obtaining the education, training, health services, child care, and legal status needed to escape from poverty. It is what prevents women from transforming their increasingly unstable subsistence economy into one that is not forced to cannibalize its own declining assets. A condition that afflicts every social institution from individual families to international development organizations, gender bias is an enormous stumbling block on the road to a sustainable economy. Rather than working to combat gender bias, however, governments and international agencies have instead exacerbated it by focusing on women's reproductive capacity to the exclusion of their role as producers and partners in the development process. The effective result of today's population policies is to put the onus on women for solving social and economic problems they had little role in creating. Closer cooperation is needed between women's movements in the world's North and South. Without doubt, many of the cultural and economic obstacles faced by women in countries such as Brazil, India, Thailand, and Zimbabwe --lack of land ten...