Capitalism, Ecology and the Official Invisibility of Women
Sunday, 29 December 2013 09:05By Chris Williams, Truthout | News
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When it comes to the world economy, what you "see" is not usually what you get - especially when it comes to gender. Capitalism has fueled a world in which women are rendered invisible and saddled with the majority of labor. They are responsible for two-thirds of all working hours, produce 50 percent to 90 percent of the world's food and 100 percent of the world's children. Yet, for all this, they receive only 10 percent of the world's income and own less than 1 percent of the world's property. As a result, women make up 70 percent of the world's poor.
Moreover, gender violence is more of a threat to women's health than the sum of traffic accidents and malaria. Often, when women are "seen," they are seen as simply bodies, to be manipulated in ways that lead to profit. In a very real sense, as people, women are invisible.
Stephen Lewis, the former UN Secretary-General's Special Envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa, wrote in his 2006 book, Race Against Time, that the World Bank, the UN and other international organizations repeatedly emphasize the need for greater and more effective action to counter gender inequality to achieve sustainability and other economic goals - but continue to work contrary to that type of action. Lewis wrote, "There is no greater emblem of international hypocrisy than the promise of women's rights."
More recently, Elizabeth Arend, programs coordinator at Gender Action, has documented the "alarming gap" between the World Bank's "rhetoric and reality." Apart from ignoring issues of unequal access to land, credit, technical inputs, education, decision-making power and the extra demands of child care and other domestic commitments, "the bank's declining support for rural agriculture disproportionately harms poor women, who constitute the majority of small-scale farmers and play a critical role in growing, processing and preparing food."
While gender inequity is expressed and felt differently in the Global North and South, the phenomenon is self-evidently universal in scope, even as it varies by region, race and class.
Dominant media have supplied a number of "solutions" to this inequity, all of which emphasize women changing their ways.
Writing in The New York Times, novelist Stephen Marche, noting that housework overwhelmingly remains the purview of women, suggests there's a simple answer, which puts the burden of change on women themselves - don't do it:
"The solution to the gender divide in housework generally is just that simple: don't bother. Leave the stairs untidy. Don't fix the garden gate. Fail to repaint the peeling ceiling. Never make the bed."
According to Jonathan Chait, writing in New York magazine, the underlying reason for the continuing disparity in housework is simple. Cleaning makes women happy because they like cleaning:
"[A] possibility that probably explains a big part of the gap: Women in general just have higher standards of cleanliness than men do. People who care a lot about neater homes spend more time cleaning them because that makes them happy."
Thus far, mainstream attempts to document and analyze economic gender disparities tend not only to blame women, they tend to assign women dated "essential" characteristics that frame the disparities as permanent.
Capitalist Social Relations, Gender and "Brain Chemistry"
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