1.3 Gender and Development

Note the difference between the terms gender and sex. Gender indicates how a particular social group defines the differences between the sexes. Sex refers to the biological category of male or female but does not indicate how males or females may behave or identify themselves. Gender definitions and accepted behavior for the sexes can vary greatly from one social group to another. Here we consider gender.

For women, the historical and modern global gender picture is puzzlingly negative. In nearly every culture, in every region of the world, and for a great deal of recorded history, women have had (and still have) an inferior status. Exceptions are rare, although the intensity of this second-class designation varies considerably. On average, females have less access to education, medical care, and even food. They start work at a younger age and work longer hours than males. Around the world, people of both sexes still routinely accept the idea that males are more productive and intelligent than females. The puzzling question of how and why women became subordinate to men has not yet been well explored because, oddly enough, few thought the question significant until the last 50 years.

In nearly all cultures, families prefer boys over girls because, as adults, boys will have greater earning capacity (Table 1.1) and more power in society. This preference for boys has some unexpected side effects. For example, the preference may lead to fewer girls being born; eventually there will be a shortage of marriageable women, leaving many men without the hope of forming a family. Currently, there is concern in several Asian societies that the scarcity of young women could lead to antisocial behavior on the part of discouraged young men. 6. WOMEN STILL LAG BEHIND MEN IN TOP BOARDROOM JOBS

Gender Roles

Geographers have begun to pay more attention to gender roles—the socially assigned roles for males and females—in different culture groups. In virtually all parts of the world, and for at least tens of thousands of years, the biological fact of maleness and femaleness has been translated into specific roles for each sex. The activities assigned to men and to women can vary greatly from culture to culture and from era to era, but they remain central to the ways societies function. Indeed, increasing attention to gender roles by geographers has been driven largely by interest in the shifts that occur when traditional ways are transformed by modernization.

There are some striking consistencies regarding traditional gender roles around the globe, and over time. Men are expected to fulfill public roles, while women fulfill private roles. Certainly there are exceptions in every culture, and customs are changing, especially in wealthier countries. But generally, men work outside the home in positions such as executives, animal herders, hunters, farmers, warriors, or government leaders. Women keep house, bear and rear children, care for the elderly, grow and preserve food, and prepare the meals, among many other tasks. In nearly all cultures, women are defined as dependent on men—their fathers, husbands, brothers, or adult sons—even when the women may produce most of the family sustenance.

Because their activities are focused on the home, women tend to marry early. One quarter of the girls in developing countries are mothers before they are 18. This is crucial in that pregnancy is the leading cause of death among girls 15 to 19 worldwide, primarily because immature female bodies are not ready for the stress of pregnancy and birth. Globally, babies born to women under 18 have a 60 percent greater chance of dying in infancy than do those born to women over 18.

Typically, women also have less access to education than men (globally, 70 percent of youth who leave school early are girls). They are less likely to have access to information and paid employment, and so have less access to wealth and political power. When they do work outside the home (as is the case increasingly in every world region), women tend to fill lower-paid positions, such as laborers, service workers, or lower-level professionals. And even when they work outside the home, most women retain their household duties, so they work a double day.

Gender and sex categories can be confusing in matters such as the extent to which physical differences between males and females may affect their social roles. On average, males and females are equally strong and durable, but women’s physical capabilities are somewhat limited during pregnancy and nursing. However, from the age of about 45, women are no longer subject to the limits of pregnancy, and most contribute in some significant way to the well-being of their adult children and grandchildren, an important social role. A growing number of biologists suggest that the evolutionary advantage of menopause in midlife is that it gives women the time and energy and freedom to help succeeding generations thrive. This notion—sometimes labeled the grandmother hypothesis—seems to have worldwide validity (Figure 1.11). Certainly, grandfathers can play nurturing roles, but they tend to not be involved in intimate care; and women tend to live 5 years longer than men.

FIGURE 1.11 The grandmother hypothesis. In every culture and community worldwide, grandmothers contribute to the care and education of their grandchildren. This quality has played an essential role in human evolution. A grandmother in Xian, China, helps her toddler granddaughter learn to walk. Courtesy Tim Graham/Getty Images

Perhaps more than for any other culturally defined human characteristic, significant agreement exists that gender is important, but just how gender roles are defined varies greatly across places and over time.

Traditional notions of gender roles are now being challenged everywhere. In many countries, including conservative Muslim countries, females are acquiring education at higher rates than males. Although it will take females a while to catch up, eventually, acquiring education should make women competitive with men for jobs and roles in public life as policy makers and government officials, not just as voters. Unless discrimination persists, women should also begin to earn pay equal to that of men (Table 1.1). Research data suggest that there is a ripple effect that benefits the whole group when developing countries pay attention to the needs of girls:

• Girls in developing countries, who get 7 or more years of education, marry 4 years later than average and have 2.2 fewer children.
• An extra year of secondary schooling over the average for her locale boosts a girl’s lifetime income by 15 to 25 percent.
• The children of educated mothers are healthier and more likely to finish secondary school.
• When women and girls earn income, 90 percent of their earnings are invested in the family, compared to just 40 percent of males’ earnings.

Considering only women’s perspectives on gender, however, misses half the story. Men are also affected by strict gender expectations, often negatively. For most of human history, young men have borne a disproportionate share of burdensome physical tasks and dangerous undertakings. Until recently, mostly young men left home to migrate to distant, low-paying jobs. Overwhelmingly, it has been young men (the majority of soldiers) who die in wars or suffer physical and psychological injuries from combat.

This book will return repeatedly to the question of gender disparities because they play such a central role in the potential for a brighter future in every country on Earth.

1.3.1 Development

The economy is the forum in which people make their living, and resources are what they use to do so. Extractive resources are resources that must be mined from the Earth’s surface (mineral ores) or grown from its soil (timber and plants). There are also human resources, such as skills and brainpower, which are used to transform extractive resources into useful products (such as refrigerators or bread) or bodies of knowledge (such as books or computer software). Economic activities are often divided into three sectors of the economy: the primary sector is based on extraction (mining, forestry, and agriculture); the secondary sector is industrial production (processing, manufacturing, and construction); and the tertiary sector is services (sales, entertainment, and financial). Of late, a fourth, or quaternary sector has been added to cover intellectual pursuits such as education, research, and IT (information technology) development. Generally speaking, as people in a society shift from extractive activities, such as farming and mining, to industrial, service, and intellectual activities, their material standards of living rise—a process typically labeled development.

The development process has several facets, one of which is a shift from economies based on extractive resources to those based on human resources. In many parts of the world, especially in poorer societies (often referred to as “underdeveloped” or “developing”), there are now shifts away from labor-intensive and low-wage, often agricultural, economies toward higher-wage but still labor-intensive manufacturing and service economies (including Internet-based economies). Meanwhile, the richest countries (often labeled “developed”) are lessening their dependence on labor-intensive manufacturing and shifting toward more highly skilled mechanized production or knowledge-based service and technology (quaternary) industries. As these changes occur, societies must provide adequate education, health care, and other social services to help their people contribute to economic development.

Measuring Economic Development

The most long-standing measure of development has been gross domestic product (GDP) per capita. GDP is simply an economic measure that refers to the total market value of all goods and services produced in a country in a given year. A closely related index that is now used more often by international agencies is gross national income (GNI), the total value of income in a country. When GDP or GNI is divided by the number of people in the country, the result is per capita GDP or GNI. This book now uses primarily the GNI per capita statistics.

Using GNI per capita as a measure of how well people are living has several disadvantages. First is the matter of wealth distribution. Because GNI per capita is an average, it can hide the fact that a country has a few fabulously rich people and a great mass of abjectly poor people. For example, a GNI per capita of U.S.$50,000 would be meaningless if a few lived on millions per year and most lived on less than $10,000 per year.

Second, the purchasing power of currency varies widely around the globe. A GNI of U.S.$18,000 per capita in Barbados might represent a middle-class standard of living, whereas that same amount in New York City could not buy even basic food and shelter. Because of these purchasing power variations, in this book GNI (and occasionally GDP) per capita figures have been adjusted for purchasing power parity (PPP). PPP is the amount that the local currency equivalent of U.S.$ will purchase in a given country. For example, according to The Economist, on January 14, 2012, a Big Mac at McDonald’s in the United States cost U.S.$4.20. In the Euro zone (those countries in the European Union that use the Euro currency), the very same Big Mac cost the equivalent of U.S.$4.43, while in India it cost U.S.$1.62. Of course, for the consumer in India, where annual per capita GNI PPP is $3280, this would be a rather expensive meal. On the other hand, at $4.20, the Big Mac would be an economy meal in the United States, where the GNI per capita PPP is $45,640, or in the Euro area, where $34,000 is the average GNI PPP per capita (see “Big Mac index,” at http://www.economist.com/node/21542808).

A third disadvantage of using GDP PPP or GNI PPP per capita is that both measure only what goes on in the formal economy—all the activities that are officially recorded as part of a country’s production. Many goods and services are produced outside formal markets, in the informal economy. Here, work is often traded for in-kind payments (food or housing, for example) or for cash payments that are not reported to the government as taxable income. It is estimated that one-third or more of the world’s work takes place in the informal economy. Examples of workers in this category include anyone who contributes to her/his own or someone else’s well-being through unpaid services such as housework, gardening, herding, animal care, or elder and child care. Remittances, or pay sent home by migrants, become part of the formal economy of the receiving society if they are sent through banks or similar financial institutions—because records are kept and taxes levied. If they are transmitted “off the books” (perhaps illegally), such as via mail or cash, they become part of the informal economy.

There is a gender aspect to informal economies. Researchers studying all types of societies and cultures have shown that, on average, women perform about 60 percent of all the work done, and that much of this work is unpaid and in the informal economy. Yet only the work women are paid for in the formal economy appears in the statistics, so economic figures per capita ignore much of the work women do. Statistics also neglect the contributions of millions of men and children who work in the informal economy as subsistence farmers, traders, service people, or seasonal laborers.

A fourth disadvantage of GDP PPP or GNI PPP per capita is that neither takes into consideration whether these levels of income are achieved at the expense of environmental sustainability, human well-being, or human rights.

Geographic Patterns of Human Well-Being

Some development experts, such as the Nobel Prize–winning economist Amartya Sen, advocate a broader definition of development that includes measures of human well-being. This term generally means a healthy and socially rewarding standard of living in an environment that is safe and sustainable. The following section explores the three measures of human well-being that are used in this book.

Global GNI per capita PPP is mapped in Figure 1.12A. Comparisons between regions and countries are possible, but as discussed above, GNI per capita figures ignore all aspects of development other than economic ones. For example, there is no way to tell from GNI per capita figures how quickly a country is consuming its natural resources, or how well it is educating its young, maintaining its environment, or seeking gender and racial equality. Therefore, along with the traditional GNI per capita figure, geographers increasingly use several other measures of development.

FIGURE 1.12 Global maps of human well-being.

The second measure used in this book is the United Nations Human Development Index (HDI), which calculates a country’s level of well-being with a formula of factors that considers income adjusted to PPP, data on life expectancy at birth (an indicator of overall health care), and data on educational attainment (see Figure 1.12B).

The third measure of well-being used here, the United Nations Gender Equality Index (GEI) is a composite measure reflecting the degree to which there is inequality in achievements between women and men in three dimensions: reproductive health, empowerment, and the labor market. A high rank indicates that the genders are tending toward equality. Ranks are from most equal (1) to least equal (146) (see Figure 1.12C).

Together, these three measures reveal some of the subtleties and nuances of well-being and make comparisons between countries somewhat more valid. Because the more sensitive indices (HDI and GEI) are also more complex than the purely economic GNI PPP per capita, they are all still being refined by the United Nations.

A geographer looking at these maps might make the following observations:

• The map of GNI per capita figures (see Figure 1.12A) shows a wide range of difference across the globe with very obvious concentrations of high and low GNI per capita. The most populous parts of the world—China and India—rank medium-low and low, respectively, but sub-Saharan Africa ranks the lowest.
• The HDI rank map (see Figure 1.12B) shows a similar pattern, but look closely. Middle and South America, Southeast Asia, China, Italy, and Spain rank a bit higher on HDI than they do on GNI; several countries in southern Africa, as well as Iran, rank lower on HDI than on GNI, thus illustrating the disconnect between GNI per capita and human well-being.
• The map of GEI rank (see Figure 1.12C) shows some strange anomalies, with certain high-income countries, such as the United States (47) and Qatar (111) ranking far lower on this index than on HDI. Meanwhile, China (35), which once had a reputation for gender discrimination and has a medium-low GNI, ranks 12 points higher than the United States on the GEI scale, in the same category with New Zealand (32) and Ireland (33).

Sustainable Development and Political Ecology

The United Nations (UN) defines sustainable development as the effort to improve present living standards in ways that will not jeopardize those of future generations. Sustainability has only recently gained widespread recognition as an important goal—well after the developed parts of the world had already achieved high standards of living based on mass consumption of resources accompanied by mass pollution of environments. However, sustainability is particularly important for the vast majority of the Earth’s people who do not yet enjoy an acceptable level of well-being. Without sustainable development strategies, efforts to improve living standards for those who need it most will increasingly be foiled by degraded or scarce resources.

Geographers who study the interactions among development, politics, human well-being, and the environment are called political ecologists. They are known for asking the “Development for whom?” question, meaning, “Who is actually benefiting from so-called development projects?” Political ecologists examine how the power relationships in a society affect the ways in which development proceeds. For instance, in a Southeast Asian country, the clearing of forests to grow oil palm trees might at first seem to benefit many people. It would create some jobs, earn profits for the growers, and raise tax revenues for the government through the sale of palm oil, an important and widely used edible oil and industrial lubricant. However, these gains must be balanced against the loss of highly biodiverse tropical forest ecosystems and the human cultures that depend on them. Not only are forest dwellers losing their lands and means of livelihood to palm oil agribusiness, valuable knowledge that could be used to develop more sustainable uses of forest ecosystems is lost when forest dwellers are forced to migrate to crowded cities, where their woodland skills are useless and therefore soon forgotten.

Political ecologists are raising awareness that development should be measured by the improvements brought to overall human well-being and long-term environmental quality, not just by the income created. By these standards, converting forests to oil palm plantations might appear less attractive, since only a few will benefit at the cost of widespread and often irreversible ecological and social disruption.

Human Impact on the Biosphere

Concerns over the sustainability of development grow out of increasing awareness that we humans are profoundly impacting the ecosystems we depend on. This is nothing new. From the beginning of human life, in seeking to improve our own living conditions, we have overused resources, sometimes with disastrous consequences. What is new is our awareness of the scale of human impacts on the planet, which can now be found virtually everywhere. In fact, geoscientists have recently identified a new geologic epoch, called the Anthropocene, which is defined as the time during which humans have had an overwhelming impact on Earth’s biosphere. Just when the Anthropocene began is under debate—some say it was as long as 10,000 years ago.

People have become increasingly aware of the significant environmental impacts that humans are causing; this awareness has prompted the development of numerous proposals to limit damage to the biosphere, defined here as the entirety of the Earth’s integrated physical systems, with humans and their impacts included as part of nature. Societies have become so transformed by intensive use of Earth’s resources that reversing this level of use is enormously difficult. For example, how possible would it be for you and your entire family to live for even just one day without using any fossil fuels for transportation, home heating and cooling, food buying and cooking? Intensive per capita resource consumption is now so deeply ingrained, especially in rich countries, that with just 20 percent of the world’s population, the rich countries consume more than 80 percent of the available world resources.

Increasingly, human consumption of natural resources is being examined through the concept of the ecological footprint. This is a method of estimating the amount of biologically productive land and sea area needed to sustain a human at the average current standard of living for a given population (country). It is particularly useful for drawing comparisons. For example, about 4.5 acres is the worldwide average of the biologically productive area needed to support one person—this would be one individual’s ecological footprint. Because of the lifestyle in the United States, one person’s ecological footprint averages about 24 acres, about 18 in Canada, and just 4 acres in China. You can calculate your own footprint using the Global Footprint Network’s calculator, at http://tinyurl.com/6d2wyl4. A similar concept more closely related to global warming is the carbon footprint, which measures the greenhouse gas emissions a person’s activities produce. To calculate your family’s carbon footprint, use Carbon Footprint’s calculator, at http://tinyurl.com/2el2j5.

Because the biosphere is a global ecological system that integrates all living things and their relationships, it is important to raise awareness that actions in widely separated parts of Earth have a cumulative effect on the whole. Figure 1.13 shows a global map of the relative intensity of human biosphere impacts. The map includes photo insets that show particular trouble spots in South America (Figure 1.13E, F), Europe (Figure 1.13A), South Asia (Figure 1.13B), and Southeast Asia (Figure 1.13C, D).

FIGURE 1.13 Photo Essay: Human Impacts on the Biosphere Humans have had enormous impacts on the biosphere. The map and insets show varying levels of these impacts on the biosphere as of 2002. The depictions here are derived from a synthesis of hundreds of studies. High-impact areas are associated with intense urbanization. Medium-to-high-impact areas areas are associated with roads, railways, agriculture, or other intensive land uses. Low-to-medium-impact areas are experiencing biodiversity loss and other disturbances related to human activity. For more details, go to www.whfreeman.com/pulsipher.
1.13a Courtesy Patrik Stollarz/AFP/Getty Images, 1.13b Courtesy Massoud Hossaini/AFP/Getty Images, 1.13c Courtesy China Photos/Getty Images, 1.13d & 1.13f Courtesy NASA, 1.13e Courtesy Mario Tama/Getty Images