Maddy Dychtwald - Influence: How Womens Soaring Economic Power Will Transform Our World for the Better

I n the village of Kampala in Uganda, Joan Ahimbisibwe, an HIV-positive mother of three, recently bought a piglet. For most of her life, Ahimbisibwe has lived on less than $1 a day, which is not enough to feed her family, let alone buy the school uniforms necessary to send her children to schooland certainly not enough for a lucrative investment like a piglet. Then Ahimbisibwe started making beads out of recycled magazine paper with a group of other women in her village. When two women in Colorado, Ginny Jordan and Torkin Wakefield, started a nonprofit called BeadforLife, which sells the beads at private parties and on the Internet, Ahimbisibwe started making $5 or $6 a day, about what a Ugandan policeman earns.

With her newfound financial stability, Ahimbisibwe saved enough money to buy her pig, which she raised then resold at a nice markup. With her profits, she moved her family into a storefront complete with mattresses, a big step up from the mud hut in which theyd been living and where theyd slept on the ground. Through the storefront, Ahimbisibwe sells vegetables and sugar, upping her earnings yet again. Ahimbisibwes daughter is now in private boarding school, which means that her chance of escaping the vicious cycle of African poverty has just changed forever.

Ahimbisibwes adult life so far is the story of one womans rising, and its the story of women helping women. Most of all, its an illustrative account of twenty-first-century female economic emancipation, an emancipation more fast-paced and far-reaching than any the world has seen before.

Around the world, from developing nations like Uganda to economic giants like the European Union and the United States, women are finally starting to control their economic destinies and those of their families. Take Sara Wood, thirty-eight, who grew up in the Deep South in the United States as the daughter of struggling Louisiana farmers. One of five siblings, including a brother who died young, Sara didnt see many paths she wanted to follow. Many of the girls in her town were knocked up and headed for the altar by the time they graduated from high school: She didnt know any women with high-earning careers, let alone with lives that didnt revolve around their children and depend, utterly, on their husbands. Today, after managing product development for several technology start-ups, Wood earns more than she ever dreamed possible, owns multiple properties on two continents, and supports her two children, whose father makes less than one-third of what she does. Wood wasnt saved from her narrow, small-town existence by anyone but herself. No prince swept in and brought her back to his castle. Wood built her position in the world through her ability to function, and function highly, in the marketplace. Hers is also a twenty-first-century story of economic emancipation.

Limerick, Ireland, when Anne Fleming was growing up in the seventies, was a place of pink slips and beer in the afternoons. No one expected to get rich, especially not little girls. The women Anne knew were moms; the professional women were teachers and nurses. Today, Anne lives in Dublin, where shes a high-level financial advisor to one of Irelands biggest investment companies, negotiating multibillion-dollar deals. She drives a BMW convertible and already has enough in savings to retire and live comfortably for the rest of her life. Although she thinks shed like to get married one day, she hasnt yet and feels no pressure to do so. If anything, she worries about finding a man who can keep up with her.

If Anne had been born even ten years earlier, its doubtful she would have taken such a path. It probably wouldnt have crossed her mind that such a future could be hers. Would she have gotten the MBA that gave her the skills to get her job? Would it even have occurred to her to explore a career in finance? And if it had, what are the chances the marketplace would have allowed a place for her?

Its not that success equals monetary riches; Id be shallow indeed if that were my point. What Im talking about is economic emancipationwomen around the globe becoming financially powerful enough to stand on their own two feet and tip the worlds power balance, starting with home life, extending to work life, and finally affecting general society.

This twenty-first-century phenomenon is on par with other remarkable human leaps forwardincluding other great moments of progress for women, such as women achieving the right to own property, to vote, to leave an unhappy marriage, to get a higher education, and to control their own reproductive systems. In many ways, what is happening now is a bigger breakthrough than any one of those others; as if those essential rights have intertwined and grown upward like so many morning glories, so that this new, taller flower can burst openan essential bloom that couldnt exist without all that came before, and one toward which all those steps were, ultimately, aiming: freedom from dependence, the chance for real power, and the opportunity to influence the workings of the world.

This narrative is not a feminist treatise. These are just facts. This is simply history, the logical outcome of the last hundred years and all the hundreds of years that came before that. Its hardly an exaggeration to say that for all of recorded history, women have basically been second-class citizens in a male-dominated world. And its not ideology to assert that the status of women is changing. What were seeing nowexponential gains toward self-sufficiency, soaring education rates, mass economic empowerment around the worldare facts. They are history rushing forward. Nothing more, nothing less.

Until the last few years, the massive entry of women into the paid workforce seemed important mostly because it was a victory for social justice. Only recently has another, even more significant implication of womens success become clear: The health of the global economy now demands that women realize their full potential as economic participants. This transformed world, where women hold economic power equal to mens, is inevitable not only because its fair and just (which it is), but because human economic success now depends on it. In the coming decades, countries that harness womens economic power will win; those that fail to do so will lose.

In the past few years, prominent economists and policy makers have abruptly woken to the fact that womens equality in the workplace is not a womens issue but a serious factor in global economic competitiveness. In Geneva, for example, the World Economic Foruma global group of influential economists and policy makerslaunched a comprehensive annual Global Gender Gap Report in 2006. The report, developed by the WEFs Global Competitiveness Network, looks at gender economic equality as a serious factor in determining a nations economic success. Every annual Global Gender Gap Report since the first full issue in 2006 has found a direct connection between a countrys ability to tap the skills and talents of women and its economic success. According to the 2007 report, A nations competitiveness depends significantly on whether and how it educates and utilizes its female talent.

In every country in the world, half of the potentially available human resources are women, points out Saadia Zahidi, associate director and head of constituents for the World Economic Forum. If that half is not educated or not healthy, theyre unlikely to be channeled into the economy in the most effective way.

All of this makes an obvious kind of common sense: What happens when a country actively suppresses half its populations economic contributions? It gets half the ideas, half the labor, half the productivity. No country can afford this kind of waste. As journalists Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn make clear in their important 2009 book, Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide, the appalling and routine violation of womens human rights around the world undermines the economic power of entire nations. A mirror image to that argument is also becoming clear: When countries treat women equally to men and make it possible for both genders to have families and careers, national economies prosper.