What is the 1% meme solution?

What is the point of the instant-publishing blogosphere if it doesn’t produce results?

Six weeks ago I wrote about this old thing:

“While women represent half the global population and one-third of the labor force, they receive only one-tenth of the world income and own less than one percent of world property. They are also responsible fortwo-thirds of all working hours.”

And I explained, in a supportive way, that this is not true, wasn’t true at the time it was invented, and shouldn’t be part of the modern feminist lexicon anymore.

Yet, even though the truth is now out there, the meme is still out there, too. The insulation between our echo chambers must be too good. There’s a hole in the knowledge-space continuum.

Specifically, you can find this thing repeated in these places — and many others:

• undp.org: “…Yet some 75 percent of the world’s women cannot get bank loans because they have unpaid or insecure jobs and are not entitled to property ownership. This is one reason why women comprise more than 50 percent of the world’s population but own only one percent of the world’s wealth.”
• un.org. “Women comprise more than 50 percent of the world’s population, but they own only one percent of the world’s wealth, United Nation statistics say.”
• womenaid.org. Women “earn a tenth of the world’s income and own a hundredth of the world’s property.”
• womenforwomen.org. Women “only earn 10 percent of the income and own 1 percent of the property).”
• Trust.org: “Women own just 1 percent of land in the world, according to UNDP.”
• unifem.org: “…earn 10 percent of the income and own 1 percent of the property…”

Risks women share, more and less

What is the basis for women’s global unity?

The other day I discounted the idea — expressed in the myth of women owning less than one percent of all property in the world — that women share a universal propertylessness. “If global feminist unity is to be had,” I said. “It won’t be built on a shared poverty experience.” One person commenting on the Huffington Post retorted: “The shared experience of women is patriarchy.” And she challenged me to produce a “gift-wrapped statistic that might make people think twice about gender inequality.”

I don’t have it. But for discussion, consider maternal mortality. I have previously shared the worldwide trend (except in the U.S.) toward reducing maternal mortality — the deaths of women related to pregnancy and childbirth. For every 10,000 live births in the world, 260 mothers still die.

This isn’t a risk all women face, since many have no pregnancies or births, but it’s something that is unique to women (more so even than rape). It is at least a potential risk women have in common.

In reality, however, the risk is so unevenly distributed as to virtually undermine its universality. In Sub-Saharan Africa, among all women, one out of every 31 women is estimated to die from maternal causes; in Western Europe that number is one-in-8,800. That is partly because African women have more children, and partly because they are more likely to die during each pregnancy or birth.

Those numbers are from a new data sheet published by the Population Reference Bureau. They estimated the lifetime chance that a given woman would die from maternal causes (factoring in both birth rates and risks of death). I’ve converted those to deaths per 10,000 women, by world region:

As is the case with wealth, statistically anyway, the women of the richest countries have more in common with their male peers than they do with the women at the bottom of the scale. So this isn’t the gift-wrapped statistic for global feminist unity based on shared personal risks. But do people need to experience the same hardships in order to unite against them?

Stop that feminist viral statistic meme

That thing you might have heard, about women’s work, income and property ownership — it’s not true. (And yes, I really am a feminist.)

If you’re a feminist you’ve probably seen this. You may have even repeated it: verbally, on your blog, on a flyer, on Twitter, in your book or an academic article. It goes something like this: “While women represent half the global population and one-third of the labor force, they receive only one-tenth of the world income and own less than one percent of world property. They are also responsible for two-thirds of all working hours.”

That’s how it appeared in 1984, on page one, in Robin Morgan’s introduction to the classic collection called Sisterhood Is Global: The International Women’s Movement Anthology. That’s more or less how it was tweeted by untold numbers of people a quarter-century later, on #IWD 2011 (a.k.a. International Women’s Day). And that’s how it was graphically presented in a slick Google video promoting IWD events this year.

But that wasn’t where it started, of course.

Where did it come from?

I don’t know what it is, but some concepts come to mind: meme, virus, legend. I’ll just call it it.

Usually, it is repeated without real attribution. But there are three bonafide sources offered by real scholars.

1. A report called “World Conference of the United Nations Decade for Women: Equality, Development and Peace,” from 1980 (U.N. buffs might call it A/Conf. 94/20); or to the “Programme of Action” that emerged from Copenhagen. That Copenhagen document was released under the name of Kurt Waldheim, who (before his Nazi past was revealed) was Secretary General to the United Nations at the start of the U.N.’s 1975-1985 Decade for Women. This is not the true source.
2. The footnote from Morgan herself says: “Statistics from Development Issue Paper No. 12, UNDP.” Produced under Decade-for-Women impetus, this was titled “Women and the New International Economic Order” (I’ve placed a copy here). Unfortunately, this is just a restatement, without substantiation. It is not the true source.
3. The Copenhagen report contains a footnote to a 1978 edition of a Decade-for-Women-inspired journal published by the International Labour Organization, called Women at Work (1978/1). This, I now believe, is the true source.

The Women at Work reference, the oldest of the three, occurs in an editor’s introduction. Unfortunately, the sum total of what it provides is this:

A world profile on women, using selected economic and social indicators, reveals that women constitute one half of the world population and one third of the official labour force; perform nearly two-thirds of work hours; but according to some estimates receive only one-tenth of the world income and possess less than one-hundredth of world property.

There is no information on the indicators used or their sources, or what is meant by “some estimates.” That is where the trail goes cold — the oldest source, completely unsourced.

Krishna Ahooja-Patel

However, in 2007 Krishna Ahooja-Patel, the editor over whom’s initials that editorial appeared, published a book called Development Has A Woman’s Face: Insights from Within the U.N.” In that book she attributes the formula to herself, and offers an unsourced sketch of the methods used, “based on some available global data and others derived by use of fragmentary indicators at the time, in the late 1970s.”

The figures used for the formula were: women were 33% of the world’s formal workforce, and they were “only on the low income level in the pyramid of employment,” where — even in those lowly jobs, based on data from “several countries” — they earned 10% to 30% less than men. Therefore, “one could assume that women’s income is only one-third of the average income of men.” Since they were one-third of the workforce, and earned one-third as much as men, their total income was .33 * .33, or 11%. (She rounded it down to 10%.) In short, a guess based on an extrapolation wrapped round an estimate.

What about the dramatic conclusion, that women “possess less than one-hundredth of world property”? She offers only this explanation: “if the average wage of women is so low, it can be assumed that they do not normally have any surplus to invest in reproducible or non-reproducible assets.” Hence, less than 1%. That’s it. In fact, she adds, “In reality the figure may be much lower.”

Source? “Various UN Statistics.”

Who knows?

These things are hard to measure, hard to know, and hard to explain. Setting aside the problem that the data didn’t (and still don’t, completely) exist to fill in the numbers in this famous sequence of facts — the first and perhaps greatest problem is that we can’t easily define the concepts, which is part of the feminist problem. Even in 1970, how could women own only 1% of property, when most women were married and in many countries had at least some legal claim to their families’ property? Similarly, what claim did women who worked in homes and fields have to their husbands’ cash incomes? And what about socialist countries (which were a big deal back then), where a lot of payment was in the form of in-kind transfers, and where various forms of collective ownership were pervasive?

Underneath it all, the universal problem of accounting for unpaid, and underpaid, work. (This was one of the core insights that inspired the Decade for Women, and fueled its most progressive elements.) And so on.

So it’s too simple to say the famous facts are wrong. The burden of proof is not on us (me) to show they are wrong, but rather to point out that they were never demonstrably true, so we shouldn’t use them. (I’m not sure the truth will set you free, but I’m pretty sure this won’t, either.)

As an exercise, though, consider one of the facts. With a combination of arithmetic and basic knowledge of a few demographic orders of magnitude, it’s straightforward to conclude that, whether or not women only received 10% of the world’s income in the 1970s, they receive more than that now.

Here: In the U.S. in 2009, the 106 million women who had incomes averaged $29,700 each. I think that’s $3.2 trillion. The whole world’s gross domestic product — a rough measure of total income — is $58.1 trillion. So, it looks to me like U.S. women alone earn 5.4% of world income today. Ballpark, but you see the point.

One of the potential negative consequences of this is also one of its attractions: The claim that, for all women do, they own virtually nothing, is a call to global unity for women. But it is undermined by the fact that a large number of women are — lets face it — rich. So if global feminist unity is to be had, it won’t be built on a shared poverty experience.

Why?

Why is this thing, which never had many legs to stand on, so pervasive even today, 33 years after it was devised? It has been used by legislators in South Africa, international universities, feminist NGOs, journalists, humanitarians, activists, sociologists, economists — and, amazingly, UN organizations such as UNIFEM and UNDP, speaking today in the present tense.

There is a great, much longer story here, that I hope I have forestalled investigating by getting this much off my chest. It has to do with access to information; and deference to, and cynicism about, statistical authorities — in the context of statistical and demographic (sorry to say) illiteracy; the relationship between feminism and science; and even the role of Twitter in social movements.

And debunking it won’t hurt feminism.

Janet W. Salaff (and the feminists China helped make)

The sociologist Janet W. Salaff has passed away at age 69, according to her department in Toronto and her mother’s hometown paper.

I did not know her, but I am very familiar with a single article she published in 1973, shortly after completing her PhD at Berkeley. In that paper, published in Population Studies, she reported in highly technical terms on the dramatic declines in mortality experienced in post-revolutionary China. She challenged the common perception that health and mortality statistics from local medical teams and journals were not trustworthy, and she showed that China had achieved in less than a quarter century what the U.S. had done in about 100 years — drastically reducing mortality through public health innovation. Their approach was massive application of low-technology, labor-intensive public health campaigns to educate the public as well as prevent and treat common sources of illness and death. It was cheap and quick, and highly effective.

Here is what she found about child mortality in the capital city of Beijing in less than 10 years, for example:

There is a historical context to that work, and her career, that is unique and worth contemplating. At the time, a cohort of (mostly) female feminist demographers and social scientists were breaking into Western academia. (I previously wrote about one of them, Valerie Oppenheimer, who passed away in 2009.) As they were entering the academic scene, China was making such dramatic progress — especially in the fields of public health, education, and women’s rights — that a number of them were motivated to research and publish on the changes underway.

As they matured and their research developed, their analysis became critical of Chinese family and gender politics, but the tone of their work was worlds apart from most of what one reads today — which usually casually attributes Chinese progress to post-1980 reforms, or dismisses its health and education progress in light of human rights abuses that accompanied (or followed) that era. (Most people seem not to know, for example, that birth rates already fell dramatically — with beneficial effects on women’s health and gender inequality — before the “one-child” policy, which introduced new levels of coercion to the family system.)

Some of the flavor of that time is evident in a review essay that Salaff published in Contemporary Sociology, on three books from 1983: The Unfinished Liberation of Chinese Women, 1949-1980, by Phyllis Andors (who died at age 50 in 1992); Women, the Family, and Peasant Revolution in China, by Kay Ann Johnson, a professor at Hampshire College; and Patriarchy and Socialist Revolution in China, by Judith Stacey, now at NYU. Salaff described the set of books as “sober reflections of how a complex development  process  both  limits  and  enhances women’s status,” and provided a balanced, theoretical description of the issues and controversies raised.

I would include in this rough cohort several other women I don’t know. Ruth Sidel, now at Hunter College, wrote a series of books: Families of Fengsheng (1975), Women and Child Care In China: A Firsthand Report (1976), and The Health of China (1983). In Britain, Delia Davin, now an emeritus professor at Leeds, started her career teaching and translating in China in the 1960s; she wrote, Woman-work: Women and the Party in Revolutionary China (1976). Elisabeth Croll, who got her anthropology PhD studying China in 1977 and wrote Feminism and Socialism in China (1978), and died in 2007.

A number of these women moved away from studying China. Their recent contributions include Sidel’s Unsung Heroines: Single Mothers and the American Dream (2006), and Stacey’s Brave New Families: Stories of Domestic Upheaval in Late-Twentieth-Century America (1998). Davin and Croll, along with Salaff herself continued to study Asia. Salaff’s most recent book was Hong Kong Movers and Stayers: Narratives of Family Migration in 2010 (with Siu-lun Wong and Arent Greve). From an academic life-course perspective — or the sociology of sociology — it is interesting to see where this early work led them. I imagine them as being imprinted by the experience — though I’ve never discussed it with them.

It is hard to remember (or imagine) now how different it was to be a student in the social sciences when there was such an active debate and analysis of socialism as a legitimate alternative mode of social organization — and especially in the context of gender inequality. Today’s first-year college student was born after the Berlin Wall and Tienanmen Square. But maybe one of today’s graduate students will write the history of the Western feminist academics who cut their teeth, and tested their ideals, on the Chinese revolution.

Janet W. Salaff

Pastiches in family style

I don’t agree we live in a postmodern world or society. It gives modernity too much credit for coherence, and the present too much credit for incoherence. I’m OK with postmodern to describe ways of thinking, though.

Anyway, except for that term, I like Judith Stacey’s description of families “these days”:

I used the term postmodern family … to signal the contested, ambivalent, an undecided character of our contemporary family cultures. … Like postmodern culture, contemporary Western family arrangements are diverse, fluid, and unresolved. Like postmodern cultural forms, our families today admix unlikely elements in an improvisational pastiche of old and new. The postmodern family condition is not a new model of family life equivalent to that of the modern family; it is not the next stage in an orderly progression of stages of family history; rather the postmodern family condition signals the moment in the history when our belief in a logical progression of stages has broken down. Modernization narratives about “the family” … once portrayed Western family life steadily evolving toward a more democratic and progressive form. Rupturing this self-congratulatory and reassuring logic, the postmodern family condition incorporates both experimental and nostalgic dimensions as it lurches forward and backward into an uncertain future. (p. 7-8)

I like her writing.

Anyway, I still haven’t see this show:

Women, marriage and health insurance

The Center for American Progress has a nice report on the health insurance barriers unmarried women face by Liz Weiss, Ellen-Marie Whelan and Jessica Arons. A good report to use for class, including specific policy recommendations. They offer lots of evidence to document how

unmarried women are uniquely challenged in obtaining and maintaining health insurance. They rarely have the option to get insurance through another person and generally have less income to pay insurance and health care costs. What’s more, married women are vulnerable to changes in marital status that could affect their coverage.

I’m struck by how much more dependent on state coverage single women are than married women. Maybe Catharine MacKinnon would say patriarchy uses the state to keep women alive while they are temporarily outside the care/supervision of a man (and his employer’s patriarchy-enabling health care). On the other hand, maybe this reveals the modern state’s role as protector of women from men’s control, because it opens up the possibility of escaping the marriage system.

Here’s the breakdown:

Good issue for feminism: how women are more dependent on men than the wage gap itself would suggest.