By Jim Harding
During the recent World Economic Forum in India a panel on achieving equality for women was broadcast by BBC. The panel included an Indian woman who is CEO of Pepsi Cola and another who heads the biggest bank in India. They promoted meritocracy, where women with the same qualifications as men get an equal chance of being hired. And discrimination against women, as child bearers and male dependents, has hampered such equality of opportunity, and this should change.
One panelist was the male head of Nissan, where women have gone from 1% to 5% of the company’s management. Even with this 500% improvement (beware of statistics), the situation confirms just how patriarchal is the corporate elite that shapes the world’s economy. The two Indian women on the panel are the exceptions that prove the rule.
One woman who said “women are a fantastic force which needs to be tapped” wasn’t endorsing democratizing the economy. Nissan’s CEO commented that women on his management team enhanced the interior design of their vehicles, to which the Indian bank chief replied “I know, I bought one of your vehicles because it had a place for my handbag”.
This is about market share, not equality between men and women. Marketers have long known that a car’s “sex appeal” can compensate for a sense of male powerlessness and increase sales. As some women get larger disposable incomes they are targeted as prospective customers, and women’s influence in the board room will likely make cars more comfortable.
What has already been achieved by creating a lucrative car culture among men can certainly be done with women; just as there is now success marketing sex-inducing drugs for boomer men alienated from the aging process, after years of targeting women with products to better measure-up to commercially promoted images of beauty. Both men and women are equally susceptible to commercial-fed vanity, but is this what we mean by equality?
EQUALITY, WEALTH AND POWER
The panel never discussed the distribution of wealth or the environmental or health effects of corporate products, e.g. diabetic-inducing “junk-food” beverages. Nothing was said about the role of the auto industry in creating climate change. Or, that while a few more women are on corporate boards, there is a worldwide feminization of poverty. India’s rural women remain at the very bottom as the income divide increases from India’s booming economy.
Saskatchewan women remain a larger part of those living below the poverty line, and they are much less involved in significant economic policy development. The twelve persons appointed to the Uranium Development Partnership (UDP) were all men. All four senior executives from Cameco and Trans-Canada, and the company they co-own, Bruce Power, and the French nuclear giant Areva, were men.
Would it have made any difference if a woman was on the panel? I won’t say it never matters, for Ann Coxworth of the Saskatchewan Environmental Society was appointed to a Sask Power review in the 1980s, and her expertise on energy conservation influenced the recommendations. But it’s not difficult to find a woman who will be compliant with corporate interests. If there was parity of women with men and these women represented a broad range of community interests, it would matter. However, when corporations appoint women to management they aren’t looking for alternative perspectives unless this enhances the bottom line. As one woman on the World Economic Forum panel said, “it’s ultimately about the success of the business.”
THE OTHER BOTTOM LINE
But there’s another bottom line; though women make up half the human race they receive far less than half of the world’s income. In some regions women who get paid for their work (and many don't) earn as little as one-fifth of what men get. If you doubled, tripled, quadrupled the percentage of women in corporate management, their high individual incomes wouldn’t make a sniff of a difference to this huge mal-distribution. If women wait for equal participation in corporations to bring overall equality they will be waiting forever. A corporation committed to unsustainable economic growth would increase the income gap between haves and have-nots whether run by men or women.
Equality of women is at least two-dimensional. Of course more equality of opportunity throughout the existing economy is worth pursuing.
So is the reduction of violence against women in the workplace. But we will never achieve the kind of social development that strengthens families and communities and protects eco-systems unless the economy shifts course. For women to get a fair share of the world’s wealth will require a redistribution of power, not a few more women on corporate boards that continue to serve the bottom line. And as more women have gotten into politics and government we have seen some priorities change. Nordic countries have the most women in government, and their per capita spending on the military is the smallest and on social development is the largest. Male-run oil states, the kind Prime Minister Harper seems to emulate, are the opposite.
Women like Gro Bruntland, past Prime Minister of Norway and head of the UN’s Commission on Environment and Development that coined the term “sustainability”; or India’s female scientist Vandana Shiva, who works with peasant women in non-profit community agriculture, won’t be invited to sit on a World Economic Forum panel. Their participation in society is about changing the way we “do business”. And many women know this. Women make up 80% of the on-the-ground leadership in Canada’s environmental groups. Polls show women are most concerned about environmental health, and, when you break down opinion polls by gender you find that women oppose nuclear power. We’ll have to go deeper than panels that showcase women who manage corporations to understand the importance of sustainability to gender equality.
Next time I’ll look at whether Saskatchewan’s recent Throne Speech embraces sustainability.
Jim Harding is a retired professor of environmental and justice studies who resides in the Qu’Appelle Valley. His website is http://jimharding.brinkster.net
Originally published in RTown News, December 4, 2009