[Civsoc-mw] FW: Stats women girls

[Keyboard Boyd Kilembey]

Good question prof. I think we should be careful here. Spending on children
is a narrower scope from spending on the family. I think these claims are
fallacious in many ways even by western standards.

On Wed, 9 Jan 2019, 13:56 Adamson S. Muula, <amuula at medcol.mw> wrote:

> Thank you sharing Diana. I am not sure whether in Malawi we can say the
> same thing, i.e. women spending 90% of their income on their children and
> men spending 30-40%! If anyone has the data, please share. Best regards,
>
> adamson
>
> On Tue, 8 Jan 2019 at 12:27, <cammack at mweb.co.za> wrote:
>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> Elements THE NEW YORKER MAG.
>> The Ghost Statistic That Haunts Women’s Empowerment
>> Kathryn MoellerJanuary 4, 2019 5:00 AM
>>
>> Even when quantitative data are valid, they often produce very limited
>> understandings of the complex realities of the lives of girls and women.
>> Illustration by Mike McQuade; Source photograph by Carlo A / Getty
>> At the World Economic Forum, in Davos, Switzerland, in 2012, the Times
>> columnist Nicholas Kristof asked Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg if the world
>> would look different with greater investments in girls and women. Sandberg,
>> who was already famous for her “lean in” philosophy, said that the world
>> would indeed look different. She explained, “The data is pretty clear that
>> women spend ninety per cent of their income on their children. And men, I
>> think it’s more like forty per cent.” She turned to the former Chilean
>> President Michelle Bachelet, then the executive director of U.N. Women, who
>> corrected her estimation. Sandberg clarified: men spend “thirty to forty
>> per cent.”
>>
>>
>> Over the years, I came across this statistic, again and again, on the Web
>> sites and in the policy documents of the most powerful global development
>> organizations, including the World Bank and United Nations agencies. It is
>> often cited as the key piece of evidence that investing in poor girls and
>> women in Asia, Africa, and Latin America creates a high rate of return.
>> They will supposedly marry later and delay childbearing, and, in doing so,
>> generate economic development, limit population growth, educate their
>> children, improve children’s and women’s health, conserve environmental
>> resources, and control the spread of H.I.V. They will end the so-called
>> cycle of poverty in which individuals, families, communities, and nations
>> get caught.
>>
>> This story was popularized by the Nike Foundation’s viral Girl Effect
>> videos and written into best-selling books, such as Kristof and Sheryl
>> WuDunn’s “Half the Sky” and Greg Mortenson’s now discredited “Three Cups of
>> Tea.” Beyond simply capturing audiences, the idea underlying this statistic
>> has influenced development policies and programs from Liberia to
>> Afghanistan. Development institutions such as the United States Agency for
>> International Development, the Gates Foundation, and international N.G.O.s
>> like care have taken up this view of girls and women as the most
>> responsible economic actors in the household, and have integrated it into
>> their programs on the grounds of both equity and efficiency. (The flip side
>> of this idea is that “third world” men create little value for development,
>> by spending their money on “whiskey and other women,” as Sandberg put it at
>> Davos.)
>>
>>
>> I was first introduced to a version of the statistic a decade ago, when I
>> was a volunteer with the Clinton Global Initiative’s girls and women’s
>> commitment team. During this time, I was a Ph.D. candidate at the
>> University of California at Berkeley, conducting dissertation research on
>> the transnational network of philanthropic and development institutions
>> focussed on girls and women. In the week before the organization’s 2009
>> meeting, I was introduced to Bill Clinton’s speechwriter by my supervisor.
>> The speechwriter wanted me to draft talking points for Clinton on girls and
>> women’s health, economic empowerment, and education, based on statistics
>> that I had been given by another C.G.I. employee. Under the heading “Why
>> Investing in Girls and Women Works,” I found the following: “When an
>> educated girl earns income she reinvests ninety percent in her family,
>> compared to thirty-five percent for a boy.” The Nike Foundation was listed
>> as its source, but from my research on the foundation I had reason to doubt
>> that. Though the foundation collected data to monitor the grantees it
>> funded around the world, it did not conduct the type of research necessary
>> to produce a statistic that could be generalized to all girls and women
>> around the world.
>>
>> But could the statistic possibly be true? With so many powerful people
>> and institutions citing it, it certainly seemed true. If it were, it would
>> reflect the disproportionate burden that some girls and women bear for the
>> well-being of others. I emphasize “some” because the images of girls and
>> women accompanying the statistic in the policy briefs and program Web sites
>> were never of middle- and upper-class white girls and women from the U.S.
>> or Europe—girls and women like me. The images were always of poor black and
>> brown girls and women from Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Thus, if it
>> were true, the purported social and economic return would reflect gender
>> disparities that are deeply racialized in the global imagination.
>>
>> I began searching for its origin. But my research revealed nothing but a
>> peculiar set of inter-institutional citation practices. The State
>> Department cited the World Bank. The World Economic Forum cited the Nike
>> Foundation. The Nike Foundation didn’t cite any study. Neither did the
>> U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization. Melinda Gates has said it again
>> and again, but has never cited a study.
>>
>>
>> In writing this essay, I reached out to some of the institutions using
>> the statistic, as I continued to seek a source. The Nike Foundation
>> spokesperson referred me to a book where she believed the citation was
>> found—a black-and-white book of photography of women around the world,
>> called “Women Empowered: Inspiring Change in the Emerging World.” The
>> citation in the book said “United Nations study,” with no other
>> information. A spokesperson for the Food and Agriculture Organization
>> provided a citation from a 2009 Nike Foundation-funded report by Plan
>> International, which cites a Nike Foundation media document. The F.A.O.
>> spokesperson told me, “Precise figures on this subject do not exist and 90%
>> seems high, especially as there is considerable case-by-case variation by
>> age, family size and composition, type of income and so on.” The World Bank
>> spokesperson said definitively that there was no source, adding, “We work
>> to weed out so-called zombie statistics, such as this one, from use in our
>> reports as they are not based on facts or data.” The World Bank
>> spokesperson said that it would remove the statistic from its Web site.
>>
>> In the past decade, the quest for Big Data has become all the rage among
>> major development institutions. In 2014, the U.N. called for a “data
>> revolution for sustainable development.” In 2016, the Gates Foundation
>> announced an eighty-million-dollar commitment to “close gender data gaps.”
>> In my recent communication with the World Bank, the spokesperson explained,
>> “One of the biggest barriers to closing gender equality gaps between men
>> and women is the lack of data and evidence that make the case for
>> policymakers to prioritize gender equality.” These institutions herald
>> quantitative approaches to produce the most valid and reliable data, with
>> randomized control trials as the gold standard.
>>
>>
>> Yet the ghost statistic should be a cautionary tale. Even when
>> quantitative data are valid, they often produce very limited understandings
>> of the complex realities of girls and women’s lives and the conditions that
>> produce poverty and inequality. These simply cannot be captured by a trial
>> or a survey alone. The Gates Foundation spokesperson, for example, sent me
>> recent studies showing that investing in women is a highly effective
>> development intervention. Among them was Duncan Thomas’s paper
>> demonstrating that, as the spokesperson put it, “maternal income increased
>> family nutrition by 4-7 times more than the income of fathers,” and that
>> “child survival had a highly positive relation to unearned income of
>> mothers, and that the effect is 20 times larger compared to fathers.”
>> Unlike the ghost statistic, these results are reliable. But they don’t
>> simply reveal that “when women have access and control over the household
>> income, they are more likely than men to invest in the health and welfare
>> of their families,” as the spokesperson wrote me. They reveal a shocking
>> depth of gender inequality at the level of the household.
>>
>> The rapid expansion of conditional-cash-transfer and microfinance
>> programs around the world, such as Bolsa Família, in Brazil, and the Nobel
>> Peace Prize-winning Grameen Bank, in Bangladesh, is based on the idea that
>> giving money to women rather than men leads to significantly higher
>> development returns. Yet critical feminist scholars have demonstrated that
>> these programs employ a feminized logic of development that has been shown
>> to shift the burden of development onto poor girls and women, who are
>> expected to solve a laundry list of problems. In her new book, “Unjust
>> Conditions,” Tara Cookson reveals that the conditional-cash-transfer
>> program in Peru had significant “hidden costs” for mothers, who were
>> required to overcome time-wasting barriers to access public services and
>> meet local authorities’ coercive demands. The feminist scholars Ananya Roy
>> and Lamia Karim have similarly demonstrated that popular microfinance
>> programs, such as Grameen Bank, often have adverse effects on the women
>> they intend to serve, including increased debt and domestic violence.
>>
>>
>> For Cookson and Lorena Fuentes, of the feminist research consultancy
>> Ladysmith, “the gender data gap is also qualitative.” Closing it requires
>> engaging with women’s accounts of their own lives and drawing on decades of
>> feminist knowledge about the root causes of poverty and inequality. If we
>> continue creating global-development policies based on the story that women
>> are more likely than men to invest in their families, we will not transform
>> the inequitable gender relations that make these statistics true. We will
>> capitalize on these inequalities—and potentially exacerbate them—for the
>> sake of a development return. As the novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has
>> warned, this is “the danger of a single story,” which produces homogenized
>> portrayals of people, places, and their possibilities.
>>
>> We need to support women and their families, and we also need
>> interventions to transform the patriarchal relations between men and women
>> that enable these statistics to be true. Beyond interpersonal relations,
>> development policies need to address the underlying conditions that produce
>> poverty and inequality. These include unfair global trade policies,
>> insufficient labor and environmental regulations, and systems of corporate
>> taxation that leave poor countries without the resources necessary to
>> invest in agriculture, education, health, and infrastructure. These factors
>> leave girls and women disproportionately responsible for the survival of
>> their families and communities, while transferring the burden of
>> responsibility away from the governments, corporations, and global
>> governance institutions that are largely responsible for the conditions
>> that produce poverty. Only when those root causes are addressed will we
>> have gender justice.
>>
>>
>> Sign up for our daily newsletter and get the best of The New Yorker in
>> your in-box.
>> E-mail
>> Enter your e-mail
>> Submit
>> Will be used in accordance with our Privacy Policy
>>
>>
>> Recommended Stories
>> Daughter of Pakistan
>>
>> One Year of #MeToo: We Need a More Inclusive Language of Abuse and
>> Victimhood
>>
>> The Mothers Most Vulnerable to Incarceration
>>
>> Satire from The Borowitz Report
>> Pelosi Says She Will Skip Trump and Negotiate Directly with Putin
>>
>> Dept. of Public Health
>> Is Marijuana as Safe as We Think?
>>
>> Daily Comment
>> “Vice” vs. the Real Dick Cheney
>>
>> © Condé Nast 2019
>> _______________________________________________
>> Civsoc-mw mailing list
>> Civsoc-mw at sdnp.org.mw
>> http://chambo3.sdnp.org.mw/mailman/listinfo/civsoc-mw
>>
>
>
> --
> Adamson S. Muula PhD, MPH, MBBS, CPH, PGDip (Public Health Ethics), PGDip
> (Global Health), PGD (Palliative Care)
> Professor of Epidemiology and Public Health
> University of Malawi, College of Medicine
> School of Public Health and Family Medicine
> Department of Public Health
> Chimutu Building Room 850
> Private Bag 360, Chichiri
> Blantyre 3
> Malawi
> Email: amuula at medcol.mw
> Cell: +265 884233486
> Skype address: adamson.sinjanimuula
> Publications list: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=Muula
> *orcid.org/0000-0003-4412-9773 <http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4412-9773>*
> Webpage: http://biostat.maths.cc.ac.mw/people/staff/Adamson_S._Muula
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Civsoc-mw mailing list
> Civsoc-mw at sdnp.org.mw
> http://chambo3.sdnp.org.mw/mailman/listinfo/civsoc-mw
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://chambo3.sdnp.org.mw/pipermail/civsoc-mw/attachments/20190109/bc12ee1e/attachment-0001.html>