The Woman Effect
Dismantling patriarchy in all forms, including misogyny, white supremacy, other race-based supremacies, heteronormativity, imperialism, autocracy, and colonialism, is critical to achieving transformational social, gender, racial, and economic justice. Humanity’s survival through the formidable challenges ahead depends on achieving wide-scale social stability and securing peace within and among nations. Gender equality is the social salve the world desperately needs.
The Global Women’s Funding Movement coined a term to explain this phenomenon—the “Woman Effect.” Today, it may be called the “Feminist Effect.” It’s the correlation of transformational social healing and democracy strengthening that happens with gender-inclusive feminist approaches to critical issues and opportunities. For example, national security is moored to women’s rights. The more significant the gender gap between the treatment of men and women in a society, the more likely a country is to be involved in war. Countries that oppress women are typically the ones to instigate conflicts and wage higher levels of violence when in them. Conversely, countries with protections from gender-based violence are vastly more secure in myriad ways, whether the issue is food security, risk of terrorism, or the peaceful resolution of disputes with other nations.
Women’s voting rights, reproductive and LGBTQIA+ rights, women’s and girls’ access to education, legal equity, freedom from violence, and widespread economic independence all took tenacious women’s movements, some persisting for a century, to achieve progress. Massive gender justice victories have only ever been won by the insistence of women’s and feminist movements, as described in the next section of this chapter.
The World Economic Forum, in its review of economic research spanning centuries 1500–1900, uncovered a relationship between women’s independence and the strength of economies.
In their article “Gender equality isn’t just moral—it’s also good economics,” researchers Alexandra de Pleijt and Jörg Baten report: “The empirical results suggest that economies with more female autonomy became (or remained) superstars in economic development. Institutions that excluded women from developing human capital, such as early marriage, prevented many economies from being successful in human history.”
In other words, gender equity is often linked to rapid economic growth. For example, Botswana had the highest GDP growth rates in recent decades after reaching its highest rates of women’s equity.
Gender justice is a reliable indicator of the health of a democracy. Established in 2000, the Community of Democracies (CoD) is a global inter-governmental coalition comprised of the Governing Council Member States that support adherence to common democratic values. CoD Member States work together to identify global priorities to advance and defend democracy. In 2017, they commissioned a detailed survey of the existing empirical literature and discovered that democracy and gender equity have a symbiotic, mutually reinforcing relationship. Researcher Ted Piccone writes:
[H]igher levels of gender equality are strongly correlated with a nation’s relative peace, a healthier domestic security environment, and lower levels of aggression toward other states. Strategies to strengthen democracy and human rights, therefore, should emphasize women’s empowerment, accountability for violence against women and girls, and closing the political and economic gender gap. The link between democracy and domestic tranquility only holds if an increase in gender equity accompanies democracy. Peace, of course, matters to every culture in every country. Women, however, have an added interest in seeing peace prevail since they are increasingly the casualties of war.
Tomorrow learn about: The Power of Autonomous Feminist Movements