[Civsoc-mw] FW: Stats women girls

Thu Jan 10 11:22:09 CAT 2019

They do actually, vehemently agree. Its a Moral decay

On Thu, Jan 10, 2019 at 11:11 AM Adamson S. Muula <amuula at medcol.mw> wrote:

> And of course, even when men spend on beer and women (for buying sex
> presumably) we cannot say that such investments do not have positive ripple
> economic effects in the society!
>
> adamson
>
> On Wed, 9 Jan 2019 at 15:27, Keyboard Boyd Kilembey <kkilembe at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> 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.
>>>>
>>>>
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>>>>
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>>>> © Condé Nast 2019
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>>>
>>>
>>> --
>>> 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
>>>
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
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>> _______________________________________________
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>
>
> --
> 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
>
>
>

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