Читать книгу Financial Adulting - Ashley Feinstein Gerstley - Страница 37

Inequality has a real cost. Linda Scott, a professor emeritus at the University of Oxford and author of The Double X Economy, coined the phrase “Double X Economy” to address the systemic exclusion of women from the financial order (all over the world). Linda says “gender inequality causes poverty” – so it's not only the missed economic opportunity; “there's hunger that's attributable to this, there's war, there's disease. There's all types of terrible things.”¹⁹

I had the incredible opportunity to interview Linda for this book and she talked about the cost of not focusing on women, and gave the specific recent example of the pandemic Shecession of 2020.

DEFINITION: The Shecession (from the Skimm) is the economic downturn that disproportionately affected women. Especially women of color. Not only are women more likely to work in hard-hit industries like hospitality and leisure, but many left their jobs due to lack of childcare.

From Linda:

From an economic perspective, those who run the world's economies are chasing growth (they want the economies to grow). Right now governments are trying to recover from the economic impact of the pandemic and for the most part they've ignored the special needs of women. It has been manifestly evident throughout the pandemic that women are suffering to a different degree and for different reasons than men, and obviously will need different solutions. And rather than deal with those needs, they are being pooh-poohed and set aside.

It's pretty ridiculous because on average, in the global economy, women contribute just under 40% of GDP and in the United States they contribute at least 40% of the GDP20 and make up more than half the workforce. In 41% of families, women are the primary breadwinner. And if women decided to form their own country, they'd immediately be big enough to join the G7 (the world's seven largest developed economies). When you're trying to kickstart an economy it doesn't make sense to ignore women!

Women are the world's most valuable wasted resource.

Linda's book starts with the Gloria Steinem quote, “The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off.” Yep. Feeling that. But Linda shares some concrete actions we can take. We'll get to those shortly!

Women's Economic Opportunity and GDP

Each dot on the graph shown here represents a country's Women's Economic Opportunity Index score as related to GDP. There are approximately 100 nations shown in the graph; all those for which the data was available were included. In the graph, the upward-right direction of the dots indicates that more economic freedom for women corresponds positively to GDP per capita. Other data has converged to reach the same conclusion.

Sources: World Bank Database for GDP at purchasing power parity; Economist Intelligence Unit for the Women's Economic Opportunity Index; World Economic Forum for the National Competitiveness Index.

DEFINITION: Gross domestic product (or GDP) is the most common method to track an economy's health. GDP represents the value of all the goods and services produced over a specific period of time within a country. A recession is measured as two quarters of negative GDP growth.