Professor Linda Scott - The Double X Economy: The Epic Potential of Empowering Women | A GUARDIAN SCIENCE BOOK OF THE YEAR

A s the car whirled through the unlit streets of Accra, my heart pounded. The driver explained the scenes moving past us, his voice full of rage and sorrow.

Hundreds of homeless adolescent girls moved like shadows in the night. Some were half-naked, bathing in buckets because they had nowhere private to go. Others slept in piles. They run from the villages, the driver said. Their parents want to sell them to a man they dont know, to be a wife who must work like an animal by day and submit sexually by night. They run to the city, believing they can escape.

Many had pregnant bellies or were holding infants. Rape was a fact of daily life in the villages, he said, but these streets were no safer. We have a generation growing up, from birth, on the street, the driver said in anguish. They will never know a family or a community. How will they learn right from wrong? What will happen to Ghana when these children become adults?

Many girls worked in the markets carrying shoppers purchases in baskets they balanced atop their heads, but some fell into prostitution. Still others became trapped in a nightmare of ancient stature: the slave trade that still emanates from West Africa and feeds the vast crime rings of the world.

In my hotel lobby, I felt as if I had stepped back from another dimension. I have been doing fieldwork among the worlds poor for a long time, but I have never observed anything that disturbed me more than what I saw on my first night in Ghana.

I had arrived that afternoon to start a promising project: my team from Oxford would test an intervention to help rural girls stay in school rather than drop out. It was a simple thingproviding free sanitary padsbut definitely worth a try. Retaining girls through secondary school was already known to be a powerful economic boost for poor nations. Educated females add to the quality of the labor supply, as well as its size, which stimulates growth. But girls who complete their education also have their first child later and so have fewer children, which slows the overwhelming rate of population expansion. Educated women also raise their own children differently, insisting they finish school, eat well, and are given adequate health care. These mothers act as a brake on the pernicious cycle of poverty that grips Africa.

But that evening I met someone who showed me what happened when the forces pulling girls out of school also made them run away. These girls in desperate flight produced a downward spiral that radiated danger and suffering for generations in the entire region. That destructive force, I knew, rolled across the world, carrying violence and instability to other countriesbecause human trafficking is one of international crimes most profitable activities. My experience that night forever changed the way I thought about my work. And it gave me a sense of urgency that I have never lost.

The unlikely truth that equal economic treatment for women would put a stop to some of the worlds costliest evils, while building prosperity for everyone, is at the core of this books argument. In these pages, I will tell more stories like this one from the shadows of Accra. I will draw on personal experiences from the villages of Africa to the slums of Asia, as well as the boardrooms of London and the universities of the United States. Throughout, I will show how the same plot of economic exclusion repeats itself in each of these places, always with negative impact.

An unparalleled influx of data since 2005 reveals this reality: a distinctive pattern of economic inequality marks the female population of every nation, each with the same mechanisms holding the disadvantages in place. Everywhere, the barriers to womens economic inclusion reach beyond work and salary to encompass property ownership, capital, credit, and markets. These economic impediments, combined with the cultural constraints usually imposed on womenlimited mobility, reproductive vulnerability, and the ever-present threat of violenceform a shadow economy unique to females: I call it the Double X Economy.