Is GDP sexist? What’s that got to do with gender?
If we truly want to create impact, we must take a gender-lens all the time
During the pandemic, when NYTimes gender reporter Alisha Haridasani Gupta was bringing us the crucial news of how the crisis was disproportionately affecting women, she received aggressive messages for “making everything about gender.”
Most humans (including women) might think what’s that thing got to do with gender — for many topics. What’s infrastructure, bathrooms, or GDP got to do with gender? A lot. The most famous example of this is Caroline Criado Perez’s first chapter in her book Invisible Women, which asks: Is snow clearing sexist? Turns out it is.
I recently chatted with Rachel Elsinga, cofounder of gender data platform Equilo. A majority of Elsinga’s work is to connect the dots for her clients — she builds the case, for example, that saving 15 minutes of a woman’s time by increasing hand wash sanitation solutions will actually lead to improved wellbeing and saved healthcare costs for everyone in the community. Or, that building sidewalks and having street lamps on highways doesn’t only increase safety for women, it can save the infrastructure company big $ if they just do it from the very beginning, rather than as an afterthought. If we truly want to make impact, we’ve got to have a gender-lens all the time, says Elsinga.
One of the most mind-boggling stats I read in Perez’s book was that every year, collectively, women spend 97 billion hours waiting in line for, or looking for a bathroom. 97 billion hours! Put that together with Oxfam’s reporting of women’s unpaid work worth $10.8 trillion. That’s (math I can’t do) and a bajillion hours of missed opportunity & paid work missing from the world’s GDP!
Is GDP sexist? Imagine if the men in their fast moving bathroom lines had found 97 billions hours of missed opportunity for men — wowza! If we really are going to stick with $ and GDP as the main success metric of our world, aren’t the world economists and leaders are really hitting themselves in the foot by excluding women? In fact, some recent findings have Bank of America saying that full gender equality could increase the world’s GDP by $28 trillion.
Did reading this make you think about something with a fresh gender lens?
This post is an excerpt from Unconforming: a newsletter about Design for Women. Unconforming goes out every two weeks and also shares learnings from experts, job and other opportunities, examples and articles — all to make an impact in the women’s space. Sign up here to get it in your inbox!
