The Status of Women and World Order

Why isn't the whole world developed?

Why is the world so polarized? Why are some nations poor and others rich? Why are some places organized and others disorganized? What is the controlling variable of global polarization?

Acemoglu and Robinson have argued that economic and political arrangements of nations are the key. Some nations got trapped in a vicious feedback loop between exclusionary or corrosive economic and political institutions; while others rode up a virtuous feedback loop between inclusive economic and political institutions. Sure, but what then explains why some got stuck in the good loop and others in the bad loop?

Moreover, if their theory is right, we shouldn’t see such a marked structure: how could it be that, with one or two exceptions, almost all nations in Africa and South Asia got stuck in the bad loop, before and after decolonization, and regardless of the variation in the strategies pursued by elite coalitions? If domestic economic and political arrangements are the key to success, then over fifty years since decolonization, at least a small handful of the more than fifty countries in Africa should’ve made it to the virtuous path. But none did. Something doesn’t add up.

The diagnosis of midcentury intellectuals (and unreformed present-day economists) was that industrialization was the key to success. You did whatever it took to industrialize, and then you’ll be rich and powerful like Europe and Japan. To this end, a hundred nations attempted to prosecute the consensus strategy among intellectuals: one was supposed to achieve industrialization by import-substitution, financial repression, and encouragement of productive investment. This attempt by postcolonial elites was a universal failure; although they did not throw in the towel until the 1990s.

Only in East Asia did emerging nations find any success. Four small states — Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, and Hong Kong — followed the Japanese in a ‘flying geese’ formation. The one big state to make it halfway was, of course, China. At any rate, the export-oriented variant of postwar developmentalism seemed to only work in East Asia. Why could it not be replicated anywhere in the southern half of the globe?

Clearly there was some blockage. Despite strenuous efforts by postcolonial elites desperate for modernization, something was blocking the way. What was it?

The old racialist explanation could not be entertained, given the intellectual discipline of antiracism. At any rate, it was never a serious contender because biology is a constant and so cannot explain why some societies suddenly take off. Racialism “explained” Chinese stasis by the low “racial quality” of the Chinese population. Having thus been “used up”, it could not then be mobilized to explain Chinese dynamism. (One can go further back and ask: if European genes were the key to the miracle, then why was Europe a backwater for most of written history?) More generally, any particularist theory of global polarization that traces dynamism and stagnation to temporally unchanging variables, could not possibly work for the obvious reason.

A different blockage was identified by cultural particularism, which posited that cultural rigidities — persistent attitudes towards leisure and work, time-preference and savings, fertility behavior and life history strategies, prudent and imprudent risk tolerance, etc — were the source of the blockage.

While these arguments may been convincing as a proximate theory, they could not explain why, given the ex ante expectation of great variation in these variables, some macroregions (Europe, northeast Asia, and the Anglo-Saxon settler colonies) as a whole broke through, while other macroregions, again as a whole, did not. Something was knitting a variety of cultural conditioners tightly together in a highly-structured way, so that they all seem to move together. If a people were industrious, you could bet they were also saving for the future, making prudent decisions about risk-taking, about fertility, about life history etc; and vice-versa.

What explaines this extraordinary covariation of all the conditioners identified by scholars?

The most obvious hypothesis to explain this sort of extraordinary covariation is a common cause. The reason why all these proxies covary so strongly is that they are ultimately under the control of a single factor. That would also explain Krugman’s “It theory” (when you’re “it” you grow, otherwise you don’t, no matter what you do). But what could this controlling variable be?

Emmanuel Todd argued that family structures were the decisive conditioner of societal success and failure. Cultural norms regarding coresidence of parents with adult children (nuclear, stem, communitarian depending on whether no sons, the eldest son, or all sons, respectively, are expected to live in the father’s home), parental authority (authoritarianism vs individualism), cousin marriage (exogamous vs endogamous), inheritance (egalitarian or inegalitarian), and the status of women were highly persistent and rigidly structured, he argued. (See here for a deeper dive into Todd’s family systems.)

Some aspects of family structures were less decisive than others. For instance, societies with both nuclear (Danish, Anglo-Saxon) and stem families (German, Japanese, Korean) were equally advantageous. Similarly, primogeniture was not so decisive, since there are plenty of rich societies that do not share this Anglo-Saxon character. Others were rather more important. Endogamy (Islam), and especially, polygny (Africa), made things quite difficult, if indeed not impossible.

The most important character of them all — and this is consistent with a great deal of modern scholarship — is the status of women. Basically, societies featuring a high status of women are either already rich or getting there; while societies featuring a low status of women are more or less blocked as a whole. Simply put, the status of women contains the strongest signal of modernization potential. This is because the status of women is the master variable that controls all the mediators between family structures and social dynamism. The purpose of this note is to document global patterns in this master variable and some causally downstream outcome variables of interest.

We obtain data on the status of women by country from the Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace and Security. We construct our feature by standardizing, rotating and adding up six odd features that contain a signal on the status of women in the world’s nations. Our feature has been standardized to range from zero (Afghanistan) to one (Norway). The first table displays the averages for the globe’s macroregions. Since we’re interested in broad cultural regions, the Anglo-Saxon settler colonies have been folded into Europe, and North Africa into the Middle East. We shall unpack these later in this dispatch.

The rank ordering of macroregions is revealed to be Europe, East Asia, Southeast Asia, Latin America, Southern Africa, East Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia. Only 2% of Europeans say women should not work; 47% of South Asians do. Intimate partner violence is higher in Africa (perhaps due to the family instability endogenous to polygny, evident in extremely high divorce rates), but the gap between South Asia (17%) and Europe (4%) is very significant.

The next table displays Spearman’s correlation coefficients between our feature and some outcome variables of interest. With the exception of urbanization, all other coefficients are close to 0.7, meaning that fully half the variation in all these outcome variables is explained by our single factor model.

So, there’s a lot of signal here. But we’ll save the econometric investigations for a later dispatch when we shall explicitly test Todd’s hypotheses. For now, I just want to document the basic global patterns in these variables. We begin with the macroregions.

Eastern Europe, where the status of women is as high as East Asia, and despite being considerably poorer than Europe and East Asia, has vitals that are closer to these privileged regions. The fertility rate of all three is below 2, where all the other regions are well over 2; the infant mortality rate in all three is in single digits, whereas all other regions are in double digits. Eastern Europe also has the highest number of physicians per capita.

Importantly, South Asia and the Middle East are ranked below Africa by our measure. This is consistent with Todd’s theory, which expects the “vertical” three generation family that prevails between Morocco and Bangladesh to be even less conducive to dynamism than the polygny structure of family arrangements in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Let’s dig deeper into the regions. The most advantaged region according to our signal is northern and western Europe. Already by 1800, Todd reminds us, north-central Europe (Scandinavia, Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland) had higher literacy rates than England. Indeed, in his telling, European dynamism is more evident in this cultural revolution than the so-called industrial revolution in northern England.

In Mediterranean Europe, the status of women is lower than the North. Unsurprisingly, the region is half as rich and a bit less heathy; although it is as far along in the fertility transition.

The Anglo-Saxon settler colonies, with their inherited family structures, are as advantaged as northern Europe. The US is somewhat of a laggard, but not by much in most vitals. American exceptionalism is revealed by the alarming fact that American life expectancy is about four years lower than other Anglo-Saxon countries, even though the United States is considerably richer.

The East Asian region, although it has otherwise completely different family structures, also features a high status of women (0.79 vs. 0.87 for the Anglo-Saxons, and 0.91 in northern Europe). Fertility rates here are considerably below replacement. Infant mortality is lower than the Anglo-Saxon countries but higher than Europe. China is still considerably poorer, but it is not far in key vitals from its regional peers.

Interestingly, Eastern Europe is comparable to East Asia in key vitals. These countries are also post-fertility transition societies. Ukraine is a laggard in income and health, but it already has the lowest fertility rate — so it occupies the position that France occupied in nineteenth century western Europe. Worryingly, the status of women in Ukraine (0.62) is lower than in its neighbors (0.74), and especially its northerly neighbors (~0.80).

On Russia’s other flank, the mean score is close to Ukraine’s. Even though Armenia and Azerbaijan may be poorer, but they both feature a relatively high status of women and life expectancies. With a score of only 0.42, Turkey is the laggard of the region in terms of the status of women.

The other middling region is in the other hemisphere. In Latin America, Haiti stands out with a score of just 0.38 (Cf. 0.59 in the Dominican Republic). It also has the highest fertility rate, the lowest college enrollment rate, the highest infant morality, the lowest life expectancy, and, unsurprisingly, the lowest per capita income. Todd’s explanation of Haitian exceptionalism (which is totally inconsistent with postcolonial theories since Haiti was the first colored colony to break free from the octopus grip of Europe) is the persistence of African polygny. Interestingly, Bolivia’s score is second only to Argentina’s, suggesting considerable potential for dynamism for this poor, landlocked country.

In Central America, Nicaragua stands out for featuring the highest status of women, despite having the lowest per capita income in the region. In general, given the middling scores, we should expect the Latin American region to do moderately well.

The final region that can considered part of the “semi-periphery” of the world economy is Southeast Asia. Here the scores are similar to Latin America. The predominantly Muslim countries of the region feature a lower status of women than their regional peers. Although, as we shall see, the maritime Islam of Island Southeast Asia is very far removed from the more patriarchal forms found in the Middle East and South Asia.

We now move to the truly disadvantaged regions where the blockage has proven basically insurmountable. South Africa sits right on the global mean; all other countries in Africa feature a relatively and absolutely lower status of women than all the regions of the semi-periphery. It is also further along in the fertility transition and richer than other countries in the region. Somewhat peculiarly, life expectancy in South Africa is lower than in Kenya (AIDS?). Elsewhere in Africa, the fertility transition has barely begun and infant mortality rates are an order of magnitude higher than in the core.

Israel does not belong in the Middle East. It has a status-of-women score in the same ballpark as the United States or France. It is also extraordinarily rich and urbanized compared to all other Middle Eastern powers. However, its fertility rate is very far above the replacement rate, making it quite unlike the rich world which it otherwise resembles in all vitals.

Intriguingly, the status of women is lower in Iran than Saudi Arabia — a very counterintuitive finding. Digging deeper, we find that 15% of Iranian women are employed, whereas 20% of Saudi women are. There’s also much more significant legal discrimination against women in Iran, relative to KSA. And 38% of men say women shouldn’t work in Iran, compared to 26% of Saudi men. Iranian women are somewhat more educated, however. Still, it seems that we may have been misled by the extraordinary dynamism of the Iranian professional class. The Saudis may be further along than the Iranians in their “cultural revolution.”

The most disadvantaged region by our measure is South Asia. Sri Lanka is the progressive of the region, with a score comparable to Island Southeast Asia. Unsurprisingly, it has the lowest infant mortality rate, the highest life expectancy, and the highest per capita income. India, the giant of the subcontinent, home to 18% of humanity, is a catastrophe for women. It ranks 161 out of the 170 nations by our status-of-women measure. The infant morality rate here is 30, ten times as high as northern Europe. Sri Lankans live 7 years longer, even though their per capita income is only a third higher than those of the Indians.

But even the catastrophe of India pales in comparison to its Muslim neighbors. By our measure, Bangladesh and Pakistan rank just above war-torn Syria, Iraq, Yemen and Afghanistan. In Pakistan, infant morality rates are an order of magnitude higher than Sri Lanka, and twice as high as India.

This has been a long dispatch, so I won’t belabor the point. The status of women is the master variable that controls world order. It explains the otherwise inexplicable patterns of global polarization. And it forces us to pay attention to the persistent structures that continue to block advance in the third world. I am now convinced that no industrial revolution or take-off is possible until there’s a real cultural revolution that transforms attitudes and behavior at the roots.

You can find my dataset here.