A #MeToo Oktoberfest for women around the world

Robert Frost, started his poem October with these words: O hushed October morning mild, Thy leaves have ripened to the fall; Tomorrow’s wind, if it be wild, Should waste them all. And thus it seems the October of 2018 has started, especially for women around the world. If you talk to veterans around the world today, you will probably witness a tone of sadness. I have certainly done so both back in India and in US these last couple of years, noting that in all likelihood the world is going from worse to yuck. But, make a mental note for the week of October 1 to 5, 2018, and these names - Nadia Murad, Christina Blasey Ford, Donna Strickland, Gita Gopinath, Amy Finkelstein. In no particular order and only among many unknown others. Without restating and repeating their courage, sacrifices and accomplishments, maybe, just maybe, one can be hopeful reminding global veterans that all may not be lost.

Associatedly, we also have the me-too wave sweeping the world be that in the West or the East, and what might be the long run implication of that for gender diversity in social, political and economic norms, are worth contemplating as well. Where do gender norms come from in the first place? Economists Alberto Alesina, Paola Guiliano and Nathan Nunn try to answer this question in their seminal 2013-paper. They start with first noting that female labour participation has been varying across countries of the world and in 2,000 it was at 90.5 per cent in Burundi and at 16.1 per cent in Pakistan. They also went on to test Esther Boserup’s hypothesis (which she wrote about in her 1970 work) that gender role differences have their origins in different forms of agriculture practiced traditionally around the world. 

Indeed, Alesina and co-authors find that descendants of societies that traditionally practised plough agriculture, today have lower rates of female participation in the workplace, in politics, and in entrepreneurial activities, as well as a greater prevalence of attitudes favouring gender inequality. In a companion 2011 paper enigmatically titled Fertility and the Plough, Alesina and his co-authors provide evidence that the form of agriculture traditionally practised—intensive plough agriculture versus shifting hoe agriculture—affected historic norms and preferences about fertility; in addition showing that these norms persisted affecting modern world’s observed fertility. 

Meanwhile, other research has also demonstrated that in this regard there also seems to be a role of globalisation. A 2013-paper by Chinhui Juhn and co-authors shows with Mexican data that tariff reductions through the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) caused new firms to enter the export market, update their technology and replace male blue-collar workers with female blue-collar workers. Closer to home in India, Eliana Carranza’s 2014 paper shows that higher relative female employment in agriculture improves the ratio of female to male children in districts that have a smaller fraction of loamy relative to clayey soils, because deep tillage is possible in loamy but not in clayey soil textures, reducing the demand for labour in agricultural tasks traditionally performed by women.

Few thoughts immediately arise with the above findings. Could there be negative externalities from changing global gender norms, let’s say in its implications from delayed fertility and childbearing for women? How are men reacting to these changes across countries be that in business, government and society? Do women like this pivot themselves and being stereotyped under a me-too wave? Could there be unintended consequences of me-too with organisations hiring less women as a colleague recently thought-experimented? How about a call for disclosure of time varying company level diversity data by financial regulators like SEBI? In equilibrium, what would be the nature of the new normal for gender participation in global societies and how will civilization look as a result? Some of these questions are answered in the follow-ups on the research by Alesina et al in 2013. The paper in 5 years, since its publication, collected close to 800 citations with researchers from economics and public policy, history, politics, international relations, epidemiology, gender studies and demographers among others carrying forward the inquiry. Also, global thinkers like Yuval Noah Harari have come up with their own explanations as well on changing gender norms in their books like Sapiens. So trying to proffer answers with one sentence summaries for what is a complex issue might be naive. 

That said, lest it be forgotten easily, let’s go back to pausing and celebrating the first week of October 2018 and admire the courage of an unknown Yazidi woman, a California professor, a Canadian physicist, a middle-class Indian girl, selected as a chief economist of the International Monetary Fund or a MacArthur genius grant winner (also an MIT professor and previously a Bates Clark media winner). They may not like this week to be called their Oktoberfest. Most likely they would want to remain gender-agnostic assiduously continuing their own work in changing the world. Yet, Robert Frost noticing tomorrow’s wind in his grave may ponder in optimism on women restoring and re-nourishing our future. 

The author is a faculty member at IIM Ahmedabad, where he holds the ICICI Bank Chair in Strategic Management. He is a 2018-2019 recipient of the W Glenn Campbell and Rita Ricardo Campbell National Fellow award at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University.