Lean in: A call for (female) guest bloggers

Andi called me out the other day for a slightly skewed gender distribution of guest bloggers. I like to think of myself as a feminist, so before I post yet another guy (tomorrow), do any female readers want to write something?

Some suggested style guidelines:

Keep it short (though up to 800 words ish)
Keep the words and sentences short
Go heavy on data, charts, and references
Go heavy on tenuous links to celebrity or scandal (think buzzfeed)

Keep it tightly focused on my narrow areas of interest and expertise (ahem, absolutely anything even vaguely related to absolutely any part of development and/or economics)

My blog reading list is also relatively light on women - suggestions there are also welcome.

Bad Graphics

This is a guest post by Sean Fox at the LSE

This infographic, which came to my attention a few weeks ago on International Women’s day, has been on my mind because it is one of the WORST visual presentations of data I have seen in years: 

So what? Well, it contains information on an interesting and important topic (attitudes about domestic abuse) in a UN report. It should inform. Instead it confuses and distorts the facts. It violates almost every rule outlined in the bible of infographics, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information by Edward R. Tufte. Let me just name a few.

1. It looks like a quasi-pie chart. As such it implicitly suggests to the viewer that the slices represent portions of a whole. They do no such thing. They represent survey responses from a relatively small and arbitrary selection of countries around the world. 
2. The sizes of the ‘slices’ do not correspond to the numbers they purportedly represent. Just compare the Rwanda slice to the Vietnam slice. Huh?? 
3. It uses multiple colours. This is a great way to pack more data into a small space, but in this case the colours actually contain no information at all. They’re just randomly assigned. More visual confusion.
4. It uses a lot of ink to represent a small amount of data. Rule number 1 of good info graphics is to maximise the data/ink ratio. Less is more. 

So, how should it have been presented? There are many better ways, but a very simple one, which took me about 5 minutes in Excel is this:



While the first figure confuses the brain and obscures the significance of the data, this simplified version immediately throws up all kinds of interesting questions. Why do the women of the post-Soviet nations of Serbia, Georgia and Kazakhstan seem to have some of the lowest tolerance for domestic abuse in the world? How is it that the women of Jordan, which has a relatively liberal and modernising king and a female role model in the politically active and globetrotting Queen Rania, seem to largely accept domestic violence? What accounts for the wide gap in attitudes between women in the East African nations in Ethiopia and Rwanda? Is it due to “culture” or government policy and discourse?

These are interesting and important questions that are revealed by a simple improvement in the presentation of the data.

Come on, UNICEF. You can do better.

What are the barriers to work for women in developing countries?

Bob Rijkers and Rita Costa have a really interesting recent paper looking at gender differences in rural employment in developing countries, something I've been thinking about a lot in Rwanda over the last 3 months. In Rwanda the government has an ambitious goal to increase off-farm employment, and if this goal is to be reached there needs to be a big shift in female employment. Young women are currently much less likely to start their own businesses than men, and more likely to get "stuck" at home or running the family farm. 

Bob and Rita document that in Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Indonesia, and Sri Lanka, women are also much less likely to establish a rural non-farm business, and that the businesses they do establish are less productive.

The reason that the businesses are less productive is not down to education or access to capital, but the sectors that these businesses are in. And this is where their quantitative story ends. They conclude that "Collecting panel data would help us better understand the causal mechanisms underlying the patterns documented in this paper and would permit a richer representation of the dynamics of rural labor markets"

But actually I think some qualitative work could get you a lot further a lot faster on those crucial policy questions of why women are less likely to start a business and why, when they go, it is in a less profitable sector.

An American who worked in Rwanda for several few years told me that teenage girls often aren't allowed out of the house as much as boys, for both security reasons and that they have more housework duties. Which means they get less exposure to the people and places around them, and less chance to think about what kind of market opportunities there are out there.

I also think that there is a strong cultural element around gender norms and what kind of work is acceptable for women. The New Times in Kigali tells the story of Nadine, one of only four female moto drivers in a city where there are hundreds. She quit tailoring because it didn't make enough money, and now driving a motorbike taxi she takes home enough to pay for rent, school fees, and childcare.

Naturally, challenges have come her way, the biggest being lack of support from some of her relatives who insist she is in a male field. 

“Nobody in my family approved of my choice to be a motorcyclist. In fact, they accused me of being a prostitute because I was joining a ‘male’ job. It was hurtful and discouraging but I decided to go with it anyway,” she narrates.

Presumably actually there is loads of sociological / anthropological research out there on this, anyone got any ideas? In England it took a world war for women to finally get access to "male" fields. What will it take to achieve such a cultural shift in developing countries?

The Girl Effect?

It turns out, it's complicated.

"Our analysis in this paper has highlighted several possibly important patterns in gender-based inequalities in the four study countries [Ethiopia, India (Andhra Pradesh), Peru, and Vietnam]. The most important of these is that there is no common thread that can be used to characterize gender inequalities across these different countries or indeed even across different dimensions of child well-being in the same country or across different ages. 

we find no evidence of a common narrative of gender bias that is valid across all four countries and all dimensions; recognition of this heterogeneity in the patterns of inequality is, in our opinion, of central importance to effective policy-making, i.e., policy-making that is targeted toward reducing the specific biases that do exist in different contexts."

From a new paper by Stefan Dercon and Abhijeet Singh

If you beat my sister, I’ll beat yours

Hanan Jacoby and Ghazala Mansuri on a solution to domestic abuse in Pakistan:

watta satta, which often involves a brother-sister pair marrying another such pair from a second household, comes with mutual threats: A husband who treats his wife badly can count on his brother-in-law doing the same to his sister. That mechanism allows two sets of parents to have leverage over how their daughters are treated.

World Bank Working Paper 4126, soon to be in the American Economic Review

How to combat gender-based violence (Congolese heroes edition)

Mama Muliri responded to the threats by going to Lubutu herself and facing the tribal leaders eye to eye. As promised, they met her brandishing machetes and guns. They chanted threats, and they threw rocks at her. Still, she stood her ground, told them about the new constitution passed in 2006, and how the law now differed from the tribal customs. She demanded that they comply with the law, and asked them to attend a HEAL Africa conference on conflict transformation.

Daily Kos, via TexasisAfrica

Foolproof Job Application Questions

A friend was asked this on the standardised online job application form of a major international organisation:

What is your level of interest in fighting poverty and reducing gender inequality?

• Low
• Medium
• High

Er….

Happy International Women's Day

Randomisation, Microfinance, and Female Empowerment

All in one paper!

New in World Development (Ungated here) Nava, Ashraf , Dean, Karlan and Wesley, Yin find that

“using a randomized controlled trial, we examine whether access to and marketing of an individually held commitment savings product lead to an increase in female decision-making power within the household. We find positive impacts, particularly for women who have below median decision-making power in the baseline, and we find this leads to a shift toward female-oriented durables goods.”

Shame that it is difficult to interpret the size of the effect because the dependent variable (for decision-making power) is an index based on whether the respondent, spouse or both decide on 9 different decisions.

Tampons for development?

A new paper by Emily Oster and Rebecca Thornton sheds some doubt on the importance of menstruation as a barrier to girl's schooling.

Policy-makers have cited menstruation and lack of sanitary products as barriers to girls' schooling. We evaluate these claims using a randomized evaluation of sanitary products provision to girls in Nepal. We report two findings. First, menstruation has a very small impact on school attendance: we estimate the impact at 0.4 days in a 180 day school year. Second, improved sanitary technology has no eff ect on reducing this gap: treatment girls were no less likely to miss school during their period. Claims that menstruation is a barrier to schooling are overstated and modern sanitary products are unlikely to a ffect educational attainment.

As a nerdish aside, this is a great lesson in the importance of working out, and stating upfront, the SIZE OF THE EFFECT. Rather than leaping on a statistically significant relationship and drawing conclusions from there, it is really simple but perhaps not done often enough to consider just how big the effect is in real terms, and in this case draw the opposite conclusion that although an effect is statistically significant it is also tiny, and therefore economically insignificant.

Here is Emily at TED challenging what you think you knew about HIV/AIDS.

New evidence against the Summers hypothesis on gender and innate scientific aptitude

""in those countries where more people held stereotyped beliefs about gender and science, girls tended to under-perform at science relative to boys."

Psychology Research Digest Blog

Central Equatoria State Police at it again

After a number of Sudanese girls were arrested and beaten in Khartoum earlier this week for their "provocative clothing", it seems the Juba authorities are not about to be outdone, despite Salva Kiir telling them to stop this nonsense the last time they tried it. Today a girl from my office was beaten for wearing trousers. Being a clued in government employee she went straight to the Ministry of Internal Affairs (central government, above the state government who run the police) to register a complaint. Hopefully someone will sort them out.

Tim Harford

I just came across an interesting stat in "The Logic of Life":

every year that women [presumably in the US] delay having children increases their lifetime earnings by 10%.

That seems like a huge effect.

The research (which I haven't read) is by Amalia Miller at www.virginia.edu/economics/miller.htm