Women’s rights are ‘smart economics,’ World Bank says

Empowering women is “smart economics,” the World Bank says in a report whose message resonates with white-collar workers like unemployed Chilean investment adviser Fanny Contreras, who said gender discrimination may make it harder to find the job she wants.

“In the area of financial services, there are some jobs that are exclusively for men like currency trading desks and analysis departments,” 36-year-old Contreras, who would like to be a trader, said in a Sept. 16 telephone interview. “Men apply for jobs that in theory are more thought-based, but I don’t see it that way.”

Labor-market restraints that women like Contreras say they face may also hold back Chile’s development, according to the World Bank report released yesterday. The study, which looks at the progress of gender equality around the world, says it’s in countries’ economic interest to increase women’s opportunities because that in turn raises productivity and improves children’s futures.

Over the past 30 years, women’s life expectancy has increased, along with their access to education and to the labor market, according to the report. At the same time, their mortality rate is higher in poor countries due in part to dangerous child births and preferences for male children, while women work also in less profitable industries and have less say in household and society, it said.

“We will not release the full potential of half of the world’s population until globally we address the issue of equality,” World Bank President Robert Zoellick told students in Washington last week.

Global workforce

While the share of women in the labor market has increased over the past decades to reach 40 percent, it has not translated into equal employment opportunities or equal earning, the Washington-based World Bank said.

In agriculture, where 43 percent of workers are women, they operate smaller plots of land, which rarely belong to them, the report showed.

In Kenya, only 5 percent of registered landholders are women. Improving their property rights in Burkina Faso would increase households’ farming output by 6 percent by reallocating resources such as fertilizer, the bank estimates.

Less than one in two women of working age is employed in Chile and the country “is losing out on a major source of wealth and development by not opening doors wider to women,” Carolina Schmidt, the women’s service minister said in a Sept. 16 phone interview.

Work, family

Balancing work and family is one of the country’s major challenges, Schmidt said. The government wants to change labor laws that have companies help bear the cost of daycare, making women more expensive to hire, she said.

Contreras, the jobseeker, says she has felt the concern she might go on maternity leave from some potential employers.

“They ask things about your personal life: Do you have a boyfriend? Do you want to have children?” she said. “They disguise it like they’re trying to get to know you better, but the question is still asked.”

Countries’ income growth alone doesn’t automatically improve women’s conditions, according to the report. Gender gaps in productivity and earnings are difficult to narrow because they can be rooted in social norms, such as the amount of work at home women do relative to men, it said.

In some countries, the idea of women working has yet to make its way into society. In Jordan, where 17 percent of women between the age of 20 and 45 years work compared with 77 percent of men, the World Bank is running a pilot program of short-term wage subsidies and skills training to give companies a chance to hire young female graduates and overcome their prejudices.

Young graduates

To enroll the young graduates from community colleges, their fathers and brothers had to be reassured it was safe, said Tara Vishwanath, who manages the program.

One of the participants “got a job in a little school,” she said in a phone interview. “Even though she got permission from her father, her brother came for a week, looked around the school to see and made surprise visits to make sure she was there.”

There’s room for progress in developed economies as well. Across the street from the bank in Washington, the International Monetary Fund has set some goals to increase the share of women in the organization, IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde told a conference last week.

If the first female leader of the IMF has a say, Contreras may have better chances of getting a trader’s job. Lagarde, who works with a board of directors where men hold 23 out of the 24 seats, has said she is in favor of more gender balance in the financial sector.

“I have seen trading rooms and I might upset a few boys,” Lagarde said. “A more balanced environment is better for more thinking, more rationale behind decisions.”