Revisioning
the Economic Rules:
Empowering
Women and
Changing the World
By
Riane
Eisler, TFF Associate
Riane Eisler's speech at the
World's Women Forum July 29, 2004 in Barcelona,
Spain.
It is a pleasure and an honor being
here with you today - with so many women and men
dedicated to creating a better future by empowering women
worldwide - a cause I have been passionately committed to
for over three decades, as a scholar, author, and
activist.
We are all aware that women must
become economically empowered. We need equal access to
education, well-paying jobs, credit; we need to change
laws and customs that discriminate against us simply
because we were born female. But - and this is what I
want to focus on in the short time we have together today
- we need more than that. If we are to change the
shameful fact that worldwide the mass of the poor and the
poorest of the poor are women and their children, we not
only need a bigger share of the present economic pie. To
use a women's metaphor, we have to bake a new economic
pie.
So I want to invite you to join me,
to join me in something we hear a great deal about: in
thinking outside the box, outside the box of conventional
economic systems, whether capitalist or socialist, and
begin to envision and help create a new economic system -
economic measurements, models, and rules that no longer
are conceived without taking into account the female half
of humanity; indeed, without taking into account the
humanity of either men or women; an economic system that
takes into full account the real value of the most basic
and important human work: the work of caregiving - of
caring for children, the sick, the elderly - work without
which there would be no workforce, work without which
none of us would be alive - work that has traditionally
been relegated to women, and is still considered
inappropriate for so-called "real men," work that must be
taken into full account if we are to stop being on the
periphery, if we are to become truly economically
empowered.
And I am going to propose to you
that this is doable: economic systems are human
creations, the move into the postindustrial economy
offers a window of opportunity for us to re-examine and
re-define what is and what is not productive work; and we
women must take leadership in this redefinition, not only
for ourselves as women, but for the sake of us all -
women, men, and children.
About
Me
I am going to start by telling you
a little about myself and my work, because as we used to
say in the 1960s when I first became involved in the
women's movement, the personal is political. Change
begins with changes in personal consciousness, which then
become the basis for group action. I can attest to this
from my own life. For much of my early life, and even
after I was trained in both social science and law, I had
no consciousness of something many of us are today
acutely aware of: that we have all been brought up to
devalue women and the stereotypically feminine. It was
not until the late 1960s when, along with thousands of
other women in the United States, I awoke as if from a
long drugged sleep, that I became aware that problems
that I had thought were just my personal problems were
actually social problems - problems stemming from the
systematic subordination and devaluation of women.
When I became conscious of this, I
jumped into the women's movement. I started the first
center in the U.S. on women and the law, testified at
hearings to change property laws, drafted new laws,
worked to change want ads that were then segregated by
sex, with all the good jobs under help wanted men and all
the dead-end helper jobs under women. I taught the first
classes at UCLA in what was later to become Women's
Studies: classes on the legal and social status of women.
And of course I worked for the Equal Rights Amendment to
the U.S. constitution, wrote a mass market book on it -
and then was appalled when it was defeated, this simple
amendment that just said that equality under the law
shall not be denied or abridged by the federal or state
governments on the basis of sex.
Now, that defeat, which mobilized
for the first time the rightist-fundamentalist alliance
that is so powerful today in the United States - a
regressive alliance that came together over an issue that
most progressives to this day still categorize as "just a
women's issue" - marked the beginning of a major
regression. It marked a retreat from progressive
political and social policies and the beginning of a
strong backlash against women's rights - a backlash that
continues to this day, with many of the gains we made
during the 1970s reversed or in danger of being reversed,
for example reproductive freedom, without which we cannot
realistically speak of freedom for women.
So it became evident to me that to
achieve real and lasting progress, we have to go deeper
than changing laws - laws are important, but they can be
repealed with the stroke of a pen. We have to change the
culture. We have to change the larger system of beliefs
and the key social institutions - from the family,
education, and religion to politics and economics. So I
returned to my original training as a social scientist,
particularly as a systems scientist, and embarked on the
multidisciplinary, cross-cultural, historical research
for which I am known today - research reported in books
such as The Chalice and The Blade1 (which is I am happy
to say now in 20 languages, including Spanish, under the
title El Caliz y la Espana2), research that shows that
empowering women - personally, socially, and economically
- is not only essential for women, but for us all - for
women, men, and children, for creating a more equitable,
prosperous, peaceful, and sustainable way of life. It
shows that the way a society structures the roles and
relations of the female and male halves of humanity is
not, as we are often told "just a women's issue" - that
is, a secondary issue to get to after the so-called "more
important" issues have been addressed; it directly
affects every social institution - it affects the family
(whether it is democratic or authoritarian), education,
religion; it affects politics and economics - and it
directly affects the governing system of guiding values.
Empowering Women
and Building A More Just and Caring World
Specifically, cultures where women
have higher status and more political and economic power
are also cultures where social and economic policies give
more support to traits and activities such as caregiving,
nonviolence, empathy - traits that are stereotypically
considered feminine. And I want to emphasize that when I
say stereotypically, I mean just that. This is not
something inherent in women or men. Some men are caring
and nonviolent. Some women are cruel and violent. We are
talking about gender stereotypes we inherited from
earlier times when society was based on more rigid
rankings of domination - beginning with the ranking of
the male half of humanity over the female half - a
domination system that has caused, and continues to
cause, enormous suffering.
Making leaders and the public at
large aware of this fact - that
what is good for women is good for the
world - is one of the most
important and useful strategies for moving forward for us
- for moving so-called women's issues to where they
belong: from the back to the front of the social and
political agenda.
And we have empirical evidence that
this is so. A statistical study using data from 89
nations my colleagues and I did for the Center for
Partnership Studies, the organization I direct, compared
measures of the status of women with quality of life
measures, such as infant mortality, human rights ratings,
and percentage of the population with access to health
care. We found that the status of women can actually be a
better predictor of quality of life than Gross Domestic
Product (GDP), the conventional measure of a nation's
economic development.4 For example, Kuwait and France,
had identical GDPs, but infant mortality, one of the most
basic measures of quality of life, was twice as high in
Kuwait, even though GDP was the same. Similarly, the GDP
of Finland and Singapore were almost identical. But the
maternal mortality rate in Singapore, in which the status
of women was much lower than in Finland, was more than
double that of Finland, a society where, as in other
Nordic nations, women have made strong gains.
Raising the
Status of Women - and Changing the World
Nordic nations such as Finland,
Sweden, and Norway are particularly interesting in
connection with what happens as women make strong gains.
In a very short time during the 20th century these
nations changed from poor, famine-ridden countries to
prosperous, creative economies.7 Why? Because their
policies give value and fiscal support to the
stereotypically feminine work of caregiving. Consider
that measures such as universal healthcare, childcare
allowances, elder care, and paid parental leave helped
produce the higher quality human capital that transformed
them into highly prosperous nations. These nations also
always rank on the top of the U.N Human Development
Reports. Even beyond that, Finland was second only to the
much wealthier United States in the 2003 World
Competitiveness ratings.0 And of course women in the
Nordic nations occupy a far higher percentage of
political leadership positions than anywhere else in the
world: they are between 30 and 40 percent of the
legislatures.
And as I said, as the status of
women rises, the value system changes. These nations also
pioneered the first peace studies courses, they pioneered
laws against physical punishment of children in families,
in other words, nonviolence, empathy; they pioneered a
strong men's movement to disentangle male identity from
violence, and they also pioneered what we today call
industrial democracy; team work in factories rather than
turning human beings into mere cogs in the industrial
machine.
None of this is
random or coincidental. It is part of a cultural
configuration characteristic of what I call the
partnership rather than domination model: a configuration
in which the higher status of women is central.
Because what happens is that as the
status of women rises, so also does the status of traits
and activities stereotypically associated with the
feminine: soft rather than hard values, empathy, caring,
nonviolence - and men then find it more possible to
embrace these values without feeling threatened in their
status.
What We Can
Do
So what can we do to use this
information?
First, we need to raise
consciousness of leaders and the public at large that the
traditional male-superior, female-inferior model of
relations is an obstacle to a more generally prosperous,
equitable, and peaceful world. It is a mental map
children learn early on for equating difference,
beginning with the basic difference between woman and
man, with inferiority and superiority, with dominating or
being dominated- a mental map that can then be applied on
the basis of race, religion, ethnicity, or any other
difference.
Ironically, this is something that
those trying to push us back recognize. Be it Hitler in
Germany, Khomeini in Iran, the Taliban, or the
Rightist-fundamentalist alliance in the United States,
recognize, these people give top priority to "getting
women back into their traditional place - which is of
course a code word for a subordinate place. We must
persuade more progressive leaders to also recognize this.
And of course the study I just told you about, Women,
Men, and the Global Quality of Life, which can be
obtained from the Center's website at www.partnershipway.org
is a good tool for this.
And of course what this study shows
is what we are here looking at: that economics cannot be
understood, or effectively changed, without attention to
other core cultural components - and that a central
cultural component is this construction of the roles and
relations of the female and male halves of humanity.
Now this is urgent, because as long
as women are devalued, so also are those traits and
activities stereotypically associated with women -
caregiving, nonviolence, empathy - the very traits and
activities we urgently need for a better future, indeed,
in our age of nuclear and biological weapons, if we are
to have a future at all.
Second, we need a systemic
approach. For example, if we are serious about empowering
women, we must change entrenched traditions of violence
against women and children worldwide. This too is an
issue I am deeply committed to through the Spiritual
Alliance to Stop Intimate Violence coordinated by the
Center for Partnership Studies - and alliance that brings
a strong, and until now shamefully missing, moral voice
to this pivotal issue - an issue that is foundational to
ending war and terrorism, as it is by witnessing or
suffering intimate violence that children are first
trained for using force as a way to impose their will
when they grow up.
Third, we also need to think
systemically about economics. And as I said, this means
thinking outside the box of the old economic models,
whether capitalist or socialist, and develop new economic
rules that give visibility and value to the
stereotypically feminine work of caregiving.
We are appalled that the first
thing that gets cut is funding for health, education,
welfare - in other words, funding to care for people. The
Structural Adjustment Policies of the International
Monetary Fund even demanded this, with disastrous human
and economic results for debtor nations. But notice that
while we are told we don't have enough money for this,
there always is enough money for weapons, wars, and
prisons - for controlling, hurting, and killing people,
rather than for nurturing, empowering, and yes, caring
for people.
And this is directly related to the
systemic devaluation of women and the work of caregiving.
This devaluation has shaped the economic models and
rules. And indeed as long as these rules and models are
in place, we women will remain on the periphery. Already
women are in the U.S. quitting high paying corporate jobs
because of the double burden of women, of the difficulty,
indeed almost impossibility, of balancing jobs with
caregiving responsibilities at home. The media then tell
us women should return to their "natural" place in a
male-headed family. But returning to a dependent and
subordinate place is not the answer. The answer is
what we are discussing here: developing rules, models,
and measures that give visibility and value to the
activities that nurture and support life - whether
performed by women or men.
A first step toward this new
partnership economics is changing how we measure
productivity.
Today GDP counts activities that
take life and destroy our natural habitat - coal burning
and cleaning the environmental damage it causes; selling
cigarettes and the medical costs and funeral costs of the
health damage they cause. These are put on the positive
side of GDP. But not only do these measures put negatives
on the positive side: they do not include the unpaid
caregiving work primarily performed by women in the
"informal" economy, be it in their homes, or in their
communities as volunteers - even though these services
contribute most to everyone's social well
being.
And of course
what is not counted is not considered in making economic
policy. We have to change this!
Consider that not only are caring
activities in the informal economy not counted in GDP but
that in the formal economy, in the labor market,
professions that involve caring - such as childcare,
primary school teaching, professions until now largely
composed of women - are paid significantly less than
those that do not involve caregiving - such as plumbing
and engineering. So in the United States, people think
nothing of paying plumbers, the people to whom we entrust
our pipes, $50 to $60 per hour, but childcare workers,
the people to whom we entrust our children, only $10 or
15 an hour. And we demand that plumbers have some
training but not that all childcare workers have
training.
Now none of this
is logical - it is actually pathological. We must change
it.
Economic
Inventions that Recognize the Value of Caregiving
Work
We can change it. Because just
about everything involved in our economic life is a human
creation. It's an invention &emdash; from stock exchanges
and sweatshops to banks and social security. We already
have a few economic inventions that give monetary value
to caring and caregiving. Parental leave for both mothers
and fathers, specially paid parental leave, flexible work
options. But we need many more. Companies that provide
paid parental leave can be supported by public policy
through matching local, state, and federal grants.
Companies that provide employees with childcare and/or
parenting classes can be given tax rebates. These are all
sound investments in our future.
Indeed, they are investments in a
successful postindustrial/information economy - an
economy in which high quality capital is the most
important capital. This economy requires people able to
learn, relate, work in teams, solve problems flexibly and
creatively. And this high quality human capital is not
just produced in universities or through job-training.
Findings from psychology, and more recently neurobiology,
show that the quality of human capital is, to a much
greater extent than has been recognized, shaped by the
quality of childcare and early childhood education.
So, yes, the shift into the
postindustrial era offers us a window of opportunity to
revalue what is and is not productive work. Consider, for
example, that it is deemed natural to have
government-funded training to teach soldiers to kill, and
to provide publicly-funded pensions for soldiers. But
government-funded training and pensions for those who
perform the work of caring for children is still a rarity
- even though high-quality caregiving is essential for
children's welfare and development, even though without
it there would be no labor force - and even though there
is today solid scientific data on what kind of childcare
fosters or inhibits human development.
So the issue when it comes to what
society supports is not one of money; it is one of social
and economic priorities - of what is or is not really
valued.
Consider the huge government and
social costs associated with child abuse and neglect.
Consider the problem of violence - from escalating
warfare and terrorism to murder, rape, wife battering,
and child abuse. Yet social investment in education for
childcare, in high quality childcare centers, and other
investments that could help cut through these cycles of
violence are still low fiscal priorities.
We must change
this! And we can change this by taking leadership -
taking leadership for ourselves as women and on behalf of
men and children as well.
There is much more I would like to
share with you, but we are short of time and I hope we
can continue this conversation in dialogue. Also, I
should say you can get more information about all this
from the Center for Partnership Studies website,
www.partnershipway.org.
Six steps for
systemic change
I want to close by focusing again
on six levers, six interventions, for fundamental
systemic change:
1. Demonstrate the social and
economic benefits of policies that support caregiving,
and their urgent necessity in the postindustrial
age.
2. Employ a systemic approach,
including a concerted campaign to end violence against
women.
3. Envision and create a
partnership economics that no longer devalues women and
stereotypically feminine traits and activities, such as
caregiving, nonviolence, and empathy.
4. Change economic measurements
such as GDP to include the work of caregiving
stereotypically relegated to women
5. Develop, support, and
disseminate partnership economic inventions such as paid
parental leave that give visibility and value to
caregiving - whether it is performed by men or
women.
6. Expand women's role in
policy-making and form alliances to work together with
one another, as well as with men - locally, nationally,
and internationally.
This is a time of enormous
opportunity. We as women have an unprecedented, historic
opportunity to take leadership in forging new economic
models, rules, and practices. We must do this for
ourselves, so we can have better lives, so we are no
longer on the periphery, so we have economic models,
rules, and measures that don't put us at such a
disadvantage, that don't put caring men at such a
disadvantage.
We certainly must do this to end
the shameful fact that women and children are the mass of
the poor and hungry worldwide - and this is the only way
to really change this. We must also do it to build solid
foundations for the more sustainable and humane future we
so want for all of us - for ourselves, for our male
partners and colleagues, and above all for our children
and for generations still to come.
Indeed, when I come to a conference
like this, with so many wonderful women, and men who
understand that real partnership between women and men is
key to a better world, I know that we can, and we will,
succeed. I thank you.
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