- September 17, 2014
- 9:18 am
- Serhat Cicekoglu
- no comments
Women @work
Emily Erdman, a junior student at Quinlan School of Business joins our blog as a guest author. Her blog will focus on gender discrimination and its effect on Enterprise Risk Management. Please join us with your comments.
Men and women have been stereotyped for years. Culturally, men have been perceived as the “bread-winner” and women as the “homemaker.” While males were seen as the ones who put in long hours farming the field or in the office, females were expected to make a home for their family. These sort of outdated philosophies lead to enormous implications, stemming from these forced gender roles, including mis-allocated of talent and skills in the work place and therefore a displaced economy.
As was touched on in the previous blog in this series, gender discrimination does not only affect women, but whole industries, and entire economies. In this blog we will take a look into women in agriculture, as well as women in corporate positions to exemplify this.
Let’s take a closer look into women and agriculture first. According to the Forum for Agricultural Risk Management in Development, smallholder farms, which by definition is “a piece of land rented or sold to a farmer by county authorities for purpose of cultivation,” are most commonly run by women. These smallholder farms yield the majority of food that we later consume. However, these women are constantly oppressed with financial barriers and unable to increase to full output due to these monetary strains. According to the World Bank, land is on average the largest domestic asset to families. In Brazil women make up 11% of land-owners, 27% in Paraway, and a measly 5% in Kenya. Many countries in Asian and African countries even have laws that prevent women from acquiring land rights- including that women cannot get a land title without her husbands permission. Legislation is the largest barrier to this issue.
Another example we can look at to represent the risk in gender inequality in agriculture is the report Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture: What Role for Food security in Bangladesh? by Esha Sraboni, Hazel J. Malapit, Agnes R. Quisumbing, and Akhter U. Ahmed. The authors inquire as to how Bangladesh, a seemingly growing and developing country, can experience food scarcity; the simple answer is the discrimination of women. According to this report, in developing nations women in agriculture compose 43% of the labor force. They also confirm that women’s capability to produce large outputs and make enough money to support their family is severely restricted due to lack of necessary inputs and limited land rights.
The report Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture: What Role for Food security in Bangladesh also shows that when women are able to contribute monetarily they are in turn given more power in the household- specifically, purchasing power for the family. Diets for those households that have women providers have a higher percentage of “caloric diversity” than those who did not, meaning the families where the mother’s had more purchasing power, had more nutritional diets. Women who are more financially independent are consequently given more purchasing power for their family, and often allocate more of their resources to feeding their children.
According to the World Bank Report, Gender Equality and Development, women owned small and medium businesses are making considerable advances. In Kenya, women own approximately 48% of all small and medium enterprises, which is estimated to account for about 20% of GDP. Between 2000 and 2004 alone, that number grew 43% for Vietnam, and in Morocco 8% from 2000 to 2007. What about the corporate level? Corporations are beginning to catch on that seeking female employees not only broadens the talent search, but also improves their appeal to customers. Policies like “equal opportunity” programs and others help the corporation’s public image.
I refer to a very interesting article by Victor W Hwang of Forbes.com, Are Feminine Leadership Traits The Future of Business? In this article, Hwang suggests that maybe the characteristics that have been perceived as “feminine,” and often times, inferior, are exactly what big business needs to thrive and grow. Hwang calls upon his colleague, Janet Crawford for her expert opinion and research she has invested herself in for a new workshop called “The Surprising Neuroscience of Gender Inequity,” which looks at the science behind gender equality.
Creativity, interaction, and innovation are some of the many feminine features that seem to be just what businesses are looking for to support advancement. Thus leading to Whang’s next question, consequently, why are so many corporations controlled by men who exhibit and seem to value the opposite of these feminine characteristics- and how does this weaken their businesses and economies? We must be careful when defining “feminine” traits. Crawford explains that both genders can display feminine traits, however it is more common, scientifically for women to express more of these traits. Crawford explains that the current standard for advancement in business favors masculinity- not to suppress women, but simply because men are the one’s who have primarily been in charge from the beginning and exhibit these characteristics more so.
When asked what could be done to combat this issue Crawford gave four suggestions: “One, raise awareness of implicit bias and create programs to combat it. Two, change the conversation. This is a business issue, not a just a women’s issue. Three, depolarize the issue and enroll men in the gender equity movement. And four, create workplaces that recognize and reward both feminine and masculine leadership styles.”
Women are a dynamic feature to many industries and subsequently economies. To be industry and economically efficient, gender discrimination must be combated. Please stay tuned for our next blog in this series, which will examine risk management with respect to women and education.