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By Isobel Coleman
Over the last several decades, it has become accepted wisdom that improving the status of women is one of the most critical levers of international development. When women are educated and can earn and control income, a number of good results follow: infant mortality declines, child health and nutrition improve, agricultural productivity rises, population growth slows, economies expand, and cycles of poverty are broken.
But the challenges remain dauntingly large. In the Middle East, South Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa, in particular, large and persistent gender gaps in access to education, health care, technology, and income -- plus a lack of basic rights and pervasive violence against women -- keep women from being fully productive members of society. Entrenched gender discrimination remains a defining characteristic of life for the majority of the world's bottom two billion people, helping sustain the gulf between the most destitute and everyone else who shares this planet.
Narrowing that gulf demands more than the interest of the foreign aid and human rights communities, which, to date, have carried out the heavy lifting of women's empowerment in developing countries, funding projects such as schools for girls and microfinance for female entrepreneurs. It requires the involvement of the world's largest companies. Not only does the global private sector have vastly more money than governments and nongovernmental organizations, but it can wield significant leverage with its powerful brands and by extending promises of investment and employment. Some companies already promote initiatives focused on women as part of their corporate social-responsibility programs -- in other words, to burnish their images as good corporate citizens. But the truly transformative shift -- both for global corporations and for women worldwide -- will occur when companies understand that empowering women in developing economies affects their bottom lines.
The majority of global population growth in the coming decades will occur in those countries where gender disparities are the greatest and where conservative religious traditions and tribal customs work against women's rights. As multinational corporations search for growth in the developing world, they are beginning to realize that women's disempowerment causes staggering and deeply pernicious losses in productivity, economic activity, and human capital. Just as many corporations have found that adopting environmentally sensitive business practices is not only good public relations but also good business, companies that embrace female empowerment will see their labor forces become more productive, the quality of their global supply chains improve, and their customer bases expand. They will also help drive what could be the greatest cultural shift of the twenty-first century.
BENEFITS PACKAGE
In 2006,
In India, as in many other countries in South and East Asia, the heavy burden of dowry payments and/or patriarchal traditions make parents prefer male children to female ones. The spread of GE's portable sonogram machines to clinics across rural India brought low-cost fetal sex screening to millions -- which meant that parents could now easily abort unwanted girls. Although in 1994 the Indian government passed a law prohibiting sex-selective abortion, the problem persists. In some parts of the country, as many as 140 boys are born for every 100 girls. Comparing the cost of an abortion to a future dowry, abortion clinics lure customers with advertisements warning that it is better to "pay 500 rupees now, save 50,000 rupees later." Because abortion providers have continued to flout the 1994 law, in 2002 the Indian government amended it to make the manufacturers and distributors of sonogram equipment responsible for preventing female feticide.
To protect its ultrasound business and avoid legal damages, GE created a series of training programs, sales-screening procedures, and post-sale auditing processes designed to detect misuse, and it also put warning labels on its equipment. Nonetheless, GE was caught off-guard by the media campaign launched by Indian activists, who accused it of enabling female feticide. Before long, GE realized that if it hoped to continue to dominate the country's ultrasound market, it would have to confront the low status of women in Indian society. It met with activist groups and launched a poster campaign to change attitudes about women's rights. At the same time, it began to fund education for girls and to sponsor a hip, young Indian female tennis star as a progressive role model.
As often happens when the private sector gets involved in the touchy subject of women's rights in the developing world, the case of GE in India was disappointingly reactive. Too often, companies act only after they face a public relations problem, whether being charged with female feticide or with hiring underage girls in sweatshops. Perhaps it is not surprising that multinational companies tend to approach the topic gingerly and belatedly, given the cultural sensitivities regarding women in many emerging markets and the fact that the senior management of local subsidiaries is often overwhelmingly male.
Slowly, however, attitudes are beginning to change. Partly in response to shareholder demands, some companies are becoming increasingly proactive regarding women's empowerment. In addition, investors have put more than $2 trillion into socially responsible investment funds, which weigh both financial returns and societal impact. Although supporting women's rights is not yet a primary concern of most such funds, it is becoming an increasingly high-profile component of the larger social justice agenda that dictates how and where socially responsible investment funds invest. Meanwhile, the rise of female senior managers, board members, and CEOs in Western companies is also raising the profile of women's rights in the global corporate agenda.
Nike is one company that has decided to take a proactive approach to women's empowerment. Having been regularly hit in the 1990s with accusations of relying on sweatshop labor abroad, Nike instituted an elaborate inspection system to root out the worst labor practices among its suppliers. Along the way, it realized that many of its overseas factories were overwhelmingly staffed with female workers, meaning that the problems of oppressed girls and women -- including a lack of education and access to health care, child marriage, vulnerability to HIV/AIDS, human trafficking, and domestic violence -- were its problems, too. In 2004, the company created the
In 2008,
The company's CEO, Lloyd Blankfein, says that the program is a way of "manufacturing global GNP," which, in the long run, is good for Goldman. Early assessments in the press indicate that graduates of the program have seen increases in the revenues of their businesses and have hired more employees, thus growing local GNP and raising the economic stature of women. The 10,000 Women program is also funding new teachers and curricula to educate future generations of female entrepreneurs in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East. Just as governments and international development organizations have realized that empowering women is much more than a human rights issue, leaders in the private sector, such as
RANI THE RIVETER
A 2009
One example of how a corporation can simultaneously expand its business and empower women is Hindustan Unilever, India's largest consumer goods company. It launched its Shakti Entrepreneur Program in 2000 to offer microcredit grants to rural women who become door-to-door distributors of the company's household products. This sales network has now expanded to include nearly 50,000 women selling to more than three million homes across 100,000 Indian villages. Not only do these women benefit from higher self-esteem and greater status within their families, but they invest their incomes in the health, nutrition, and education of their children, thereby helping lift their communities out of poverty. Hindustan Unilever, for its part, was able to open up a previously inaccessible market.
Training women as local distributors of goods and services is important, of course, but so is incorporating women-owned businesses into global supply chains. As giant retailers such as
Similarly, there are signs that
It is ironic, of course, that
Interestingly, one organization that seems to understand the power of using its supply chain to further women's economic empowerment is the U.S. military. In Afghanistan, the United States has made strengthening the role of women in Afghan society a central element of its counterinsurgency strategy. To this end, the U.S. military is experimenting with setting aside some contracts for Afghan women entrepreneurs to supply uniforms for the national police and army. Initial results in the fall of 2009 were disastrous, however: proposals came back with mistakes and with product samples in the wrong color, fabric, and sizes. In response, the U.S. military has held several training courses to educate Afghan businesswomen on how to meet quality standards and navigate the complicated "request for proposal" process. It is too early to tell if any women-owned companies will be able to fill large military orders -- the minimum is for $300,000 worth of goods -- but according to news reports, the women who have participated in the program say that the experience has been invaluable.
ATTITUDE ADJUSTMENT
Companies that are interested in women's empowerment -- whether driven by corporate social responsibility or by business strategy -- now have more tools and support available to guide their investments than ever before.
Governments in emerging-market countries are beginning to understand that to be competitive, they will need to respond to the growing demands of the global economy regarding women's empowerment. For example, in 2008, Morocco retracted its reservations about the
THE FIVE-POINT PLAN
Five principles should guide the efforts of those corporations that are just now beginning to consider women's empowerment as a strategic aspect of their emerging-market operations.
First, success must be defined and measured appropriately. Success cannot be reduced to the types of metrics now familiar in Western corporate suites, such as how many women are in senior management positions. Instead, corporations must track the most basic information about their female employees, suppliers, and customers in emerging markets. For example, do their female employees have access to financial services so that they can actually control their incomes? Do they have identity cards that allow them to be counted as citizens? Do they need a male family member's permission to work? Since obstacles to female empowerment differ across regions, companies should rely on local market studies and work-force surveys to identify the relevant issues for corporate growth in each market.
Second, although donating money to women's empowerment initiatives is a good start, incorporating such objectives into actual business practices is even better. Bringing female farmers into the global supply chain probably has the most potential in this regard. In sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, for example, although farm labor is more than 70 percent female, women tend to focus on subsistence crops rather than cash crops, a sector that men still dominate. Using women to increase sales also holds great possibility, as the experience of Hindustan Unilever shows. Even sectors that employ a low percentage of women, such as the extractive industries, could target women-owned businesses for support services, such as catering, laundry, office cleaning, and transportation.
Third, companies should concentrate on providing skills and resources to female entrepreneurs and business leaders. For some firms, this could mean expanding their financial services to female clients -- not just credit but savings products, too. Or it could take the form of supporting an existing local organization that helps women obtain access to health care, identity cards, or property rights. Leadership training, as well as secondary and university education, is central to developing the next generation of female business leaders and managers.
Fourth, even though companies are understandably wary of being associated with controversy, they cannot deny that they have an interest in the outcome of conflicts taking place over the role of women in many developing countries. Important and growing markets, such as Indonesia, Nigeria, and Pakistan, are home to protracted debates between moderates and extremists. Such thorny subjects as child marriage, domestic violence, and women's access to reproductive health may seem off-limits to corporations. But consider just one example: rapid population growth in Nigeria, already Africa's most populous state, will strain the country's resources and threaten its stability, thus jeopardizing substantial Western investments. Similarly, decades of research have shown that societies with a disproportionately high number of men -- as is the case where families prefer male children to female ones -- are less stable and more prone to violence, which hinders economic growth.
Fifth, corporations should not try to reinvent methods that have already been perfected by others simply to appear innovative and committed. Instead, they should look to partner with the many excellent nonprofit organizations that have been working on issues of women's empowerment for decades. Organizations such as
Closing the gender gap and improving women's rights in the Middle East, South Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa may take many generations, but the benefits will be huge -- not only for the individual women and their families but also for global markets. As companies seek new sources of revenue in emerging economies, they will find that gender disparities pose an obstacle to doing business. The sooner the private sector works to overcome gender inequality, the better off the world -- and companies' own bottom lines -- will be.
Available at Amazon.com:
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Empires of Mud: Wars and Warlords in Afghanistan
At War with the Weather: Managing Large-Scale Risks in a New Era of Catastrophes
© Foreign Affairs
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