Some innovations help women more than others
Mar 9th 2010 | From The Economist online
TWO recent innovations have garnered a lot of attention for the way they empower women. One is microcredit, a system of lending to very poor people, the majority of whom are female microentrepreneurs who are thus helped to climb out of poverty. The other is the mobile phone, which among other things has led to the emergence of an army of “telephone ladies” in countries such as Bangladesh, who earn a decent living by buying a phone and renting it out to other villagers.
That said, some innovations have been harmful to women, especially in the developing world. As the cover story of the latest issue of The Economist points out, at least 100m female lives have been lost in recent decades due to “gendercide” in countries such as China, where the number of live male births recorded enormously exceeds the number of live female births. One factor in this has been new technology that allows parents to determine their embryo’s sex early in a pregnancy—and thus to abort females in countries where male offspring are valued more highly. Other innovations also bring more benefits to men than women. For example, women are estimated to be only 25% of internet users in Africa, 22% in Asia, 38% in Latin America and just 6% in the Middle East.
“How can we harness innovation’s power to empower women and promote greater gender equality?” asks a new study by the International Centre for Research on Women. Its authors try to answer this question first by examining eight inventions that they say have helped women dramatically, including village mobile phones and microcredit.
Another example is the birth-control pill: there is a strong case to be made that it has brought more benefits for women than any other invention, although the report does not attempt such a ranking. The automatic washing-machine might give it a close run in countries where it is commonplace, by freeing women from an activity that used to take many hours a week. Instead of studying that, the report instead considers a number of “social innovations”, ranging from land titling in Peru to the successful anti-foot-binding campaign in China, that the authors say have had a massive beneficial impact.
What makes for a successful pro-women innovation? The report says it is usually the confluence of several positive factors. As with all innovation, a good idea is not enough in itself: it also needs a favourable context, including political, economic and social conditions that make the time right for its adoption, and an innovation system that excels at finding and testing good ideas and quickly scaling them up. But the invention must also have an inherent value that compels women to embrace it—such as the power the Pill gave women over the decision to become pregnant.
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