Women and Economic Development

Among the natural resources which can be called upon in national plans for development, possibly the most important is human labour. Since the English language suffers from a certain weakness in its ability to describe groups composed of both male and female members, this is usually described as 'manpower'. Without a productive labour force, including effective leadership and intelligent middle management, no amount of foreign assistance or of natural wealth can ensure successful development and modernisation.

The manpower for development during the next quarter-century will come from the world's present population of infants, children and adolescents. But we have no assurance that they will be equal to the task. Will they have the health, the education, the skills, the socio-cultural attitudes essential for the responsibilities of development?

For far too many of them the answer is no. The reason is basic. A child's most critical years, with regard to physical, intellectual, social and emotional development, are those before he reaches five years of age. During those critical formative years he is cared for almost exclusively by his mother, and in many parts of the world the mother may not have the capacity to raise a superior child. She is incapable of doing so by reason of her own poor health, her ignorance, and her lack of status and recognition, of social and legal rights, of economic parity, of independence. As M. Pierre Emeric Mandle of UNICEF (the United Nations Children's Emergency Fund) has stated: 'She has been educated to submission; she is not regarded as a separate and complete human being.' How can such a non-person raise a superior child? The best she can do is maintain the status quo, and the status quo is not good enough for development.

One essential factor has been overlooked or ignored. The forgotten factor is the role of women. Development will be handicapped as long as women remain second-class citizens, uneducated, without any voice in family or community decisions, without legal or economic status, married when they are still practically children, and thenceforth producing one baby after another, often only to see half of them die before they are school age.

We can enhance development by improving 'womanpower', by giving women the opportunity to develop themselves. Statistics show that the average family size increase in inverse ratio to the mother's years of education -is lowest among college graduates, highest among those with only primary school training, or no education. Malnutrition is most frequent in large families, and increases in frequency with each additional sibling. Birth order is important too. In a study conducted in India by Dr. C. Gopalan, malnutrition among the first three children of a family was about half as prevalent as among those with a birth order from four to six. Illegitimacy and prematurity are more frequent among school dropouts than among girls who complete their education. Both conditions have an adverse effect on the health and development of the child, the first for social reasons, the lack of stable family environment, and the second primarily because of the reduced resistance to disease and infection of the premature infant.

In recent years much attention has been given to the relationship between early malnutrition and retarded mental development. Dr. Mark Hegsted of the Harvard School of Public Health and Dr. Michael Latham of Cornell University have both cautioned against the over-simplification of assuming that malnutrition is the sole, or principal, cause of retardation, or that it can be avoided or mitigated solely by improved nutrition. However, many of the other factors contributing to mental retardation, such as poor child-care and hygiene and the lack of social and emotional stimulus, also relate to the intelligence and education of the mother. The principle seems established that an educated mother has healthier and more intelligent children, and that this is related to the fact that she has fewer children. The tendency of educated, upper-class mothers to have fewer children operates even without access to contraceptive services, as was noted in Western Europe before the turn of the century.

I f we examine the opportunities for education of girls or women in the less developed countries we usually find a dismal picture. In some countries the ratio of boys to girls in secondary schools is more than seven to one. In Afghanistan, Turkey and Tunisia most sizeable towns have some sort of-dormitory or pension where boys from a village may live while they attend high school. There are few or none for girls. Even at the primary school level, especially in rural areas, the n umber of boy students greatly exceeds that of girls.

What happens to the girls? Often they are kept at home to look after younger siblings and to perform a variety of domestic chores. Their education is not perceived as in any way equal in importance to that of boys. When an illiterate, or barely literate, girl reaches adolescence, she has little or no qualification for employment, even if her community provides any opportunity for employment of women, so the solution is to get her married as soon as possible, with the inevitable result that she produces children 'too soon, too late and too often'. With no education she is hardly aware that there is any alternative. In a study made in Thailand, it was noted that the educated woman marries later and ceases childbearing earlier than her less educated counterpart. But the uneducated village woman is so chained to her household by the necessities of gathering fuel, preparing food and tending children that she is very difficult to reach, even if health services, nutrition education, maternal and child health centres are available in her community.

She cannot understand what they are intended to do. Not only does the lack of education among women make the dissemination of nutrition education difficult, it appears also to be a major obstacle to campaigns for family planning. It is significant that one of the more successful family planning efforts has been in Korea, where literacy is over 80 per cent. Thailand, Singapore, Hong Kong and Taiwan have also had more satisfactory results than, for example, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Bangladesh, India or Indonesia, where a large proportion of the female population is illiterate.

The educational level of women is significant also because it has a direct influence upon their chances of employment; and the number of employed women in a country's total labour force has a direct bearing on both the Gross National Product and the disposable income of the individual family. Disposable income, especially in the hands of women, influences food purchasing and therefore the nutritional status of the family. The fact that this additional income derives from the paid employment of women provides a logical incentive to restrict the size of the family.

It is debatable whether reduction in family size is a precondition for female employment, or female employment is a precondition of reduced family size. That is a chicken and egg speculation. It is a fact that they are associated phenomena, whether the relationship is causal or not. Professor David McClelland of Harvard University has pointed out that 'it is impossible to name a single country in which the economy has developed rapidly over a long period without the women having been to some extent liberated from their traditional domestic tasks, and without their having been permitted to play an important role in society, particularly in the labour market.'

Until women are given the opportunity to become 'separate and complete human beings', their own potential for productivity is wasted, and they will tend to perpetuate in their children those characteristics which are least conducive to development. Viewed in this light the education of women and the improvement of their social, economic, legal and political status become more than the focus of an emotional crusade for human rights. They must be acknowledged as a prerequisite to national development and given a high priority for strictly practical reasons. (Margot Higgins: War on Hunger).