Instant Genius - Prof Linda Scott: Why is there still economic inequality between men and women?

Episode Date: October 26, 2020

In this week’s episode of the Science Focus Podcast, we talk to Professor Linda Scott, an expert in women’s economic development and Emeritus DP World Chair for Entrepreneurship and Innovation at the University of Oxford. Her book, The Double X Economy, has been shortlisted for the Royal Society Science Book Prize 2020. In it, she argues that when we economically empower women, we all succeed. Linda tells us about her work in women's economics, why the number of women joining the workforce is slowing down, and her idea for an '80 per cent Christmas' to close the gender pay gap. Subscribe to the Science Focus Podcast on these services: Acast, iTunes, Stitcher, RSS, Overcast Read the full transcription [this will open in a new window] Listen to more episodes of the Science Focus Podcast: Caroline Criado Perez: Does data discriminate against women? Pragya Agarwal: When does bias become prejudice? Why aren't there more women in science? Angela Saini: Is racism creeping into science? Robert Elliott Smith: Are algorithms inherently biased? Matt Parker: What happens when maths goes horribly, horribly wrong? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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to learn more. You're listening to the Science Focus podcast from the BBC Science Focus magazine team. With the UK's best-selling science and technology monthly, available in print and in several digital formats throughout the world. Find out more at sciencefocus.com or look out for us in your app store. Hello and welcome to the Science Focus podcast. I'm Sarah Rigby, online assistant at BBC Science Focus magazine. In this week's episode, I'm talking to Professor Linda Scott, an expert in women's economic development and emeritus DP world chair for entrepreneurship and innovation at the University of Oxford. Her book, The Double X Economy, has been shortlisted for the Royal Society Science book prize 2020. In it, she argues that when we economically empower women, we all succeed.

So thank you for talking to me today. Happy to be here. So first of all, what exactly is the double X economy? So I coined the term the double X economy to describe and denote the global economy of women, which has a very distinctive pattern of inequality in every country of the world and is held in place by the same mechanisms in every country in the world. And so women around the world share this same experience of struggling with economic exclusion. And that is, that's what I call the double-ex economy. Okay. So I think to me, the most obvious example of this would be the gender pay gap. and this has been talked about a lot in the UK in the last few years.

And there seem to be quite a few people who don't quite believe that it exists or that it's a problem. How would you go about convincing someone that it really exists? Right. Let me just first say that, yes, most people's first experience or most primary experience with the double-x economy is the gender pay gap. So it's a very important topic. But it's also very important to say that the double-x economy includes a full 360-degree exclusion of women, so it's exclusion from capital and credit and all kinds of other things besides pay. There's been a very destructive meme that has floated around for the last maybe, I would say, 10 years that says the gender pay gap is a fiction. This is based on disingenuous, I would even go so far as to say dishonest.

or perhaps incompetent, mismanagement or manipulation of databases about pay. And where in, people say, well, when we controlled for this, this, and this factor, the gender pay cap didn't exist. And therefore, if women would just not do X, Y, and Z, they would be paid equally. In other words, there's no sex discrimination going on here. If women would just learn to behave more like men, they would deserve to. to be paid the same. Okay, now the problem with this is that the variables they control for are the very items that reflect and enforce gender inequality in the first place. And so this is why

I don't understand why any reputable vehicle would publish a study like this. It's just not good practice at all. But of course, there are lots of people out there that want to push out a meme that says, you know, gender pay gap is a fiction because they're trying to defend male dominance. And it's important to understand that. And if I may, I find that people often can understand this better with an analogy. And even though it's drawn from the U.S., most people are aware enough of our racial issues that they kind of get that. All right. So in America, black men are paid less than white men. Now, if you had a bunch of statisticians or economists who came around and said, well, you know, That's not really true because when you control for residents in disadvantaged urban zip code or number of arrests or time spent and employed, we find that in fact, black men and white men are paid the same.

Therefore, there's no such thing as racism in America. If black men would just act like white men, they wouldn't have a problem, right? Well, we'd be horrified by a thing like that. It wouldn't be good science because the very things they've controlled for, are the things that reflect and enforce racism in America, right? But we would also ask ourselves a question, what is up with these people that they even want to say this? What is their motivation?

Why are they pushing this bigotry out on us? Okay, and we need to be saying the same thing about this meme about the gender pay gap because it is completely false. And other forms, there are lots of ways to measure the gender gap and pay worldwide. Lots of different people do it, lots of different ways, and all of them, all of them come out with the same conclusion. is that there's a pay gap. So why is there a pay gap?

There is a pay gap because women are generally seen to deserve less across the whole double-ex economy. So we see them cheated and shortchanged on pay, but also, for example, by customers in a business or suppliers in a business, or by bankers when they apply for credit or investors when they apply for funding. And so it goes right across the economy

that the world economy and world culture that women just simply shouldn't get as much. And in fact, that women shouldn't even be interested in money, that it's somehow immoral or selfish for women to want money. So that's really what this is about. It's not about deserving less. It's not about being, you know, less competent or any of the rest of it.

It seems that one of the factors that affects this is when a couple decides to have children, the woman is disproportionately affected in terms of future career development. Is that right? Oh, absolutely, yes, that's true. Although increasingly we are also seeing an impact on fathers. And it's not nearly as much as the impact on mothers.

But it reflects what I think is truly behind what we're calling now the motherhood penalty. Motherhood penalty is a phenomenon that is well-established and demonstrable across nations, and that is this practice of paying women less and holding them back in their careers, regardless of their performance, as a result of motherhood. And it's really more, it's not so much that motherhood is the reason as it is, it's the means. It's the justification for holding them back, right? and pushing them out.

We see this especially in the pandemic, right, pushing them out of the workforce by virtue of the fact that child care is made highly costly and not sufficiently available, right? So this causes them to be pushed out and is often considered somehow justified and rational on the part of employers, which is an even necessary. natural, you know, neither one of which are good reasons. They're just not valid. So that actually reminds me of something that surprised me in your book, one of many things that surprised me in your book, was the statistic that in Western Europe and North America, the number

of women in the workforce is actually, it's sort of leveling off. It's not rising anymore. do you think that's to do with, as you just said, rising child care costs, or do you think there's other reasons behind that? There are a couple of things. I would say the main reason for both the unequal pay and the flattening of the curve on female labor force participation are due to insufficient child care. And Britain, in particular, has been singled out for this. It is a particularly bad problem in Britain. And the thing that is really ironic about it is that it causes these countries to hurt themselves, right, by wasting investment and by holding back their GDP. Female labor force participation is without question the most reliable way to increase economic growth. And holding back your women is crazy. It would pay for itself, honestly, it would pay for itself in GDP if the British government got serious about child care.

And so, you know, this is a problem. The other thing is that in Britain, as in the rest of Europe, you've got about 30% more women in higher education than men. And this has been true for a very long time. Women also do better in school and they get more degrees. and yet they have this societal burden that people keep loading on to them, like some kind of antique impetus, right? And that means that the nation is plowing, tax money, scholarships, all kinds of cash, investment, and families, right, money into educating these women

and not letting the investment pay off. It's like building a road system and not letting anybody do. drive on it. It's just foolish. So we've got all these highly qualified women who can't contribute to the GDP. Right. Yeah, it's nuts. So one thing that I've heard said a lot is that the reason that women aren't reaching the highest levels in these high paying careers like finance or business is that women are somehow, you know, not cut out to be for those sorts of jobs. What would you say to that? Yeah.

So this is a bad problem. This belief that keeps getting pushed out. And this is why so much of the book is reliant upon updated science. It is because we have, in particular, two false, allegedly scientific claims that float around and are used against women. and one, that it is somehow natural for them to be second-class citizens and particularly natural for them to withdraw from life as mothers. And neither one of those things are true. And then the other is this kind of notion of cognitive superiority in particular,

so that their brains just are, you know, defective. There is no performance or neuroscientific evidence to support that notion, none. Zero. Zip. It is a falsehood. There was a time when there was a theory of testosterone in utero making a difference in boys' brains. It never went anywhere, but the idea stuck with the public. And that's because this idea that men are better and need to be better is very tenacious in its hold on the public. But we know now, so for example, on a macro level, test scores. have closed, particularly in Britain. The gap, gender gap, has been closed for a long time, 20 plus years. And we also know that it varies much more by other things than it does by gender. But in particular, it changes over time. It has changed over time by admitting girls to hire math classes, for example.

I mean, somebody should have thought of that. And it actually varies by gender equality directly. that in countries where there's high gender equality, women perform high on math, and when there's low gender equality, they perform low. None of this could occur if this were a biologically hardwired difference. You could not have that kind of variation. And in addition, the neuroscience at this point has completely moved on to a notion of building synapses, the connectome, which is the sort of overall pattern of the synapses,

That is how we learn and how we carry acquire or lose skills through life. And this was the statistic that I wanted to bring forward here is that actually when we're born, we only have about 6,000 genes available to start creating those synapses, but we have to make 100 billion of them in order to function normally as adults. So that is what the difference is. You'll only have enough to make about 10% of that 100 billion when you're born. So everything else about what you know and can do is acquired by learning, right? So this idea that, I mean, it's just, it's old-fashioned poppycock.

It's just folklore. It's just not true. May I add one more thing about that? Yeah. One of the things that I noticed this a lot in Britain, in British documents, even those produced by the government, which is shopping. The idea that women don't do STEM, they don't study STEM in university, right? All right, this is balderdash. Okay, it is unbelievable to me.

The only way you can say that is if you define science, the S in STEM, in a way that excludes all natural biological sciences and medicine. You can only make that claim if you're going to exclude all of those sciences, which we can all agree, I think, are science. Okay, because in those fields, women dominate. And if you include those, then the male advantage disappears. Right. So it's total baloney. And it's wrong of major institutions, which we see all the time, perpetuating that nonsense. It's harmful. Wow. Right. So good to know that, you know, there's nothing biologically stopping me from, you know, succeeding in business. But if I did want to start a business, what problems would I face that, say, a man with the same level of qualifications as me wouldn't?

Okay, so this is another thing that is uniquely problematic in Britain is the idea that you can't do anything differently for women without disadvantaging men, okay? And yet, because of the history of the advantages that men have had, those have piled up into extreme advantages in the present moment. All right. So if you want to start a business, for example, a woman is immediately disadvantaged because she will not have as much access of it. capital. Now, you can trace this directly to legal and financial practices in British law that predate written laws, okay? So that, for example, up until the end of the 19th century, women were not allowed to own land in Britain. And that was the main store of wealth. And so that has rolled up into this huge advantage control over capital that men have. Women still to this day in Britain only own 13.7% of the land. That's less than the global average, which is almost 19%. So it's huge,

the capital disadvantage. And unless you take intentional steps toward evening that out, it's never going to happen. It's never going to happen. They're not going to be equal. You have the same kind of problem with prejudice of the banks against women loaning the money for business loans. So it's really pervasive. That's what I mean about. We need to look beyond equal pay and labor to understand this. Now, I don't just want to talk about developed countries. So there's also talk a bit about developing countries.

So what specific economic problems would women in developing countries face? Right. Okay, so as you know, this is actually most of my own initial work was. And I mean, I've done it a lot since with the statistics and the science, but most of my career has been spent in very poor, poor nations in their poorest areas among the poorest women. And this was what got me started on this idea of, is this a global issue? Because whether I was in Bangladesh or Ghana, I was seeing the same pattern of economic exclusion. and I couldn't understand why it was so much the same from place to place.

And this is now something that I would say the women's economic empowerment community, which is kind of an international force at this point, that we all have noticed this, that despite our expectations, it's the same. So what you see in these remote areas is that the women can have capital, they can't own land, have no property rights, but they also can't control their earnings. So if they make money, they have to turn it over to their husband or father. And they can't have a bank account so they can't save. So they have literally no economic resources of their own.

And what this does is that it makes it possible to utterly control them. They are literally dependent on men for food and shelter. This in turn gives the men the freedom and permission to treat them in a very hostile way. They basically treat them like slaves. They're brutal in terms of domestic violence. And it's here where we can really see that the economic exclusion is just as important as legal ramifications, the legal system, because it's the economic disempowerment that allows a lot of that to go on and that keeps women from being able to claim even the legal rights that they have. There's a quote in your book that I like quite a lot.

You said, women's economic empowerment is the best available weapon against poverty. Could you just tell us a bit more about that, please? Yeah, yeah. This is something that is also pretty well established, and I would call attention to any listeners to the UNICEF State of the World's Children report in 2007, which is, I think, to this day, one of the best summaries of what we know, even though we've gone another 15 years, right, almost in adding more evidence.

But it's basically, it is mostly because of the way that women spend their money, that it makes such a big difference. If they have money and the freedom to decide how to spend it, they inevitably spend it first on their children and next on their broader family and then in their communities. They actually spend last on themselves, which is actually I think a problem. But we know that from an economic development perspective, that is to say, a poverty-fighting perspective, that some of the most important things that you can do is, for example, to keep children in school, particularly girl children. And if the mothers, who usually are responsible for that, whether they have the means or not, if the mothers can pay the children's school fees and expenses, those kids will stay in school.

We need for those children to grow up healthy and strong. their mothers will make sure they have nutritious meals and if at all possible medical care. And the fathers just don't. And I'm sorry to say that, but they just kind of don't. Some do, but the typical practice, unfortunately, is to put that on the women in those very poor and remote areas. So if we want to fight that poverty, yes, get money in the hands of the mothers. That is the number one thing to do. And once they have money, they need somewhere to put it.

So could you tell us a bit about how access to bank accounts could help women living in poverty? Right. So I just actually finished a three-year study for the Gates Foundation where we, that's what we did. We got women bank accounts, mobile bank accounts. And it was really, it did increase availability for all kinds of positive expenditures toward school fees, but also purchasing productive assets and things like that. And it did make a very big difference. It also, though, we think what we've discovered here

is a practice of what I've termed defensive spending. It's being able to, or defensive savings, sorry, being able to put aside things for the possibility that the husband will leave or that you will need to leave, which both of those happen a lot. and that saving for a rainy day kind of thing, being able to deal with a child who gets sick, for instance. These things allow not just the women and their children,

but the families as a whole to weather the ups and downs of agricultural life, which are considerable. So, yeah, it's really important. So why do women in poor countries struggle to have access to bank accounts? Okay, so women, around the world have been excluded from the financial system, I would argue, since it was invented. It has been set up to exclude women. And that's, you know, in a way you can see the relationship if they couldn't own wealth, which they couldn't, and they couldn't keep their own earnings,

which they couldn't, even in the Western countries up until very recently. You know, how were they going to have assets to invest in the financial sector? Now, in truth, what has happened over time and has been encouraged more and more lately is that women develop their own informal systems of saving and lending, but it obviously is not of the scale of the financial system. So what that means is that it has only been since the 60s and 70s that women in Europe and North America have been able to have bank accounts because they were not allowed to have them. They had to have their husband's permission or they couldn't have them at all. All right. And so that is still the case. in the developing countries now.

And so even if the law in that country says the women can have their own bank account out in the far out districts, right? People still don't know that. And so the bankers won't open an account if the woman goes in there. Or they'll do something like notify the elders of her community, who in turn tell her husband, your wife is up into bank account, get your house in order, you know. And so it's just, it's, yeah, it's hard.

It's not easy to get them banked. And you've done a lot of work in developing countries, with, you know, different ways to help women economically. And there was one case study which I found really interesting, which was helping women to sell Avon makeup and Avon products. Could you tell us a bit about this, please? Yeah, this was something, this was a, actually a project of my own invention, though I was successfully, I was able to get Avon's

cooperation. They did not pay for it and they did not in any way trying to interfere with it. And the reason I did it was because I had done a history that include women in the modern economy in America. And at the time that the modern economy got going, businesses like Avon's made it possible for particularly married women in rural areas. which is, you know, where the bulk of the problem is in the developing world today to earn money. So I wanted to see they were able to just do also to provide a community with them, sense of confidence for them. It was really quite positive. And so I wanted to see whether or not that same approach could be used in developing countries today.

And so I contacted Avon and got permission to study their operation in South Africa. And it was remarkable because we were comparing it to the microfinance schemes that were so popular 10, 15 years ago that were so much part of the news. And it was substantially more effective and less risky for the women than the microfinance staff was. They didn't go into debt spirals because the Avon system doesn't allow that. They have a better possibility of success with these products than selling, for example, produce. or curios, yeah. Can you just briefly explain what microfinances? Yeah, okay, so microfinance is something that was supposedly invented by Muhammad

Eunice in Bangladesh in the early 2000s, okay? And it basically is where banks give very, very small loans to the very, very poor and who then use it supposedly to make businesses. Now, from the beginning, Muhammad Yunus will tell you that, or has said many times, that he didn't intend to empower women with this. But from the beginning, it was women who got these loans. And it was women who provided the innovation, okay? Because microfinance loans have extremely high rates of interest.

I've heard of them as high as 100%. And there have been loans shark since money was invented, right? People loaning to the poor at astronomical rates. The difference here is that these banks were willing to loan to women. And in a country like Bangladesh, where women were not allowed to have credit, this was a very big deal. And so what happened was, is they would take the credit and they would invest it and they would make businesses go. They did it in groups, like the informal systems I was talking about before women's savings groups are called. And they would make investments.

They would make decisions together and they would tool their funds. And they would make money that they could then spread out to the whole membership. and it turned out that they had like a 98-99% loan repayment rate, which is very high. And banks have a tendency to assert without evidence that women aren't good customers for banks, but in fact it turned out they were very good customers. So it was quite successful, but the problem was, is that the interest rate is still very high. And so it could be extremely risky for the women. Right. Okay. So back to Avon.

What is it about selling Avon products that was so useful for women in poverty? It was so different to, say, you know, making products themselves to sell or just buying things and selling them on. Yeah. Okay. So they can buy things or make things to sell. But if you're driving around the roads in South Africa, for example, you will see women along the side of the road at card tables or sitting on blankets. And it will be whatever vegetables are in season. So literally for a mile on the road, you'll see everybody's selling avocados.

Right, right? And it's out there in the heat and everything perishes and everybody's selling exactly the same thing. So as a result, you get a lot of avocados that go in sold so that you see that the women don't make any money, but also that a lot of food goes to waste. Right. All right, so there's a food security problem involved here as well. With the handicrafts, the problem is that traditional handicrafts are. are all about making the same objects the same way.

So you get the same kind of deal, blanket after blanket of the same stuff. There's no variation. And also there is the danger and discomfort of sitting out on the side of the road, right? It's hot and there's a lot of rape on the side of the roads in Africa, right? It's not a safe thing to be doing. And the women don't find it a very dignified thing to do either.

So the Avon stuff, but to any other kind of business requires from capital, Well, Avon, like for Microfinance is used for, Avon, basically you can start up out of your purse or your closet, okay? And you do not have to sit out on the side of the road. You do it in group events or going door to door. People sell it within their own communities, but actually Avon encourages them, and we found that they do go out and sell outside their communities. But it's done in a much more fluid way, not like just sitting out on the roadside. And it provides them with a different kind of product. to sell that is high quality and reliable and has a lot of repeat purchase. And they sell products

for men and women and children. So it has a very wide appeal. And they make a very, very good margin on it. And they can grow their businesses to be quite large and actually make quite a lot of money. And we found actually that the women, we only studied poor black women in Africa, South Africa, and that they could make, after 16 months in the system, they could make enough to support a family of four, except they couldn't cover the whole rent. So they would have to have some other kind of income or share. We found that most of them shared households with other women. So it's really quite, it's very low risk for them. Now, in the developed world, there is a lot of concern about Avon and complaining among ex-Avon representatives because of

of it's actually because women use their credit cards to finance their inventory. Avon does not do that, okay, but they use their credit cards and women do tend to use their credit cards to finance business because they don't have access otherwise to capital. And this causes them to have a credit issue. And you've traveled to a lot of different developing countries for your work. What have you seen or learned there that has surprised you the most? Well, initially, it all surprised me, right? Initially, I was freaked out. Every time I went someplace new, it was just, you know, so grim.

Eventually, at this point, I'm not easily surprised. I'm not easily surprised. Recently, I'll tell you two things that was surprised me. One is in this project that I did with the Gates Foundation or for the Gates Foundation, we did counseling, family counseling on finances. And as a result, we learned that the husbands were, we knew that they were not sharing financial information with the wives. And as part of this, they did, they had to share information with the wives or they chose to. And we found that they were basically not contributing to the household, and that all the household expenses were going to, were being supported by the women on very meager and risky earnings.

and the men were basically blowing everything they had on beer. It was astonishing. And I knew that I've been working in Uganda's where it's where. I've been working in Uganda more than a decade. I knew they drank a lot of beer. Everybody knows they drank a lot of beer. But the amount of it, the amount of money that was going to it was shocking. It was in some cases equal to the average household income.

So that surprised me. The other thing that is, I don't know surprise is exactly the right word, but concern, maybe more, yes, shock, is what's going on in Eastern Europe right now? The backlash, the populist backlash and repression of women's rights that's going on in Eastern Europe right now is a historic turn and it's scary. It's the kind of thing that could lead to a total, total backslide. And that is frightening. and I think that's a new development that many people are not aware of. It's really scary.

Right. So what do you think are the next steps for governments, say, in Eastern Europe, that you would like them to do to support women economically? Right. I think that the answer to as far as the outward-facing international aid part is to allocate more of the international budget that they are. already have to women, we know it's more effective than the way they spend their money the rest of the time. And yet the women only get a tiny slice of international aid budgets and Diffid,

by the way, in particular, has been a leader, but spends a penny compared to whatever else they spend. So that would be the first thing. In terms of the internal, their own citizens, I think that they need to start taking it seriously, that they are violating the rights, the basic rights of half their citizens by not enforcing the equality law. They more than have their citizens citizens if you include male minorities. But from a gender perspective, this is half their citizens and they're just looking the other way. And I actually think that in Britain is particularly bad. And particularly bad in the sense that the government has not looked in the mirror sharply enough and to say,

what is it about the way we've construed this system that keeps women from being able to be equal? And I would say the positive discrimination doctrine is the number one problem. Now, I've talked about this a lot in the book. There's a whole chapter, in fact, on the failure of equal pay, and it compares what happened in Britain to what happened in the United States. And, yeah, there's a lot of things the British government could do. And actually, the failures have been pretty uniform across the United States. all the developed nations. So it's basically women are not paid enough because the governments don't have the will to make sure that they have equal enforcement under the law.

And if I or one of our listeners decided that I wanted to do something to support women's economic development, what could I do? Okay, so I propose kind of a radical idea in the book and I call it the 80% Christmas. I absolutely think of a work. You have to start I'm thinking about where do women wield power? The place where women wield most power in the world economy is in consumer purchasing. And they virtually totally control it. On average, I was saying the development is 75% of consumer purchases are made by women. All right, it's also important to understand that a significant part of GDP comes from retail purchasing, from consumer purchasing. It's really quite a high number. Some places as high as 70% of GDP comes from

that. And that most of that comes in the last two months of the year in those countries where Christmas is celebrated. And so that means this is like the vulnerable underside of the economy is Christmas shopping. I mean, who knew, right? And so I propose that what people do, and they can do it as a grassroots effort, it would be very simple, really. It would be no more difficult than the women's March as we've seen, to say, okay, we're going to spend 80% less on Christmas this year than we did last year, or in this case, probably 80% less than what we have budgeted or what we can spend. And we're going to keep doing that every year until the gender pay gap is closed. Now, I would argue that we can all afford to spend a little less on Christmas and that a 20% reduction isn't very much. I figure I could do it just by putting more fruit in the stockings and buying cheaper wine. All right, you can just, you can do it, right? And nobody even has to know that you're doing it, right? And it's not like striking where it's so public and there can be retaliation.

Nobody even has to know you're doing it. But we would know because the retail sales for Christmas shopping are measured like week by week. And if the women announced they were going to do this, I promise it would get people's attention. Retailers in particular. So what would the ongoing effect of that be? How would that help to close the gender pay gap? Yeah, I think that the problem is that women have not used the one power they have and they have not otherwise had power to force governments to step up

and be honorable about enforcing the equality laws. And they have to realize that things like marches, you know, really they make a big splash, but mostly they don't have, most of the time they don't have much of fact. Strikes do not address the situation. for women. And so they need to do something else. And I think that if people could see that they actually had the power to squeeze the economy where it hurt, all right? I mean, that's what strikes are about, right? It's to say, okay, we're going to stop the trains here until you do something about this. Okay, all right, so we're going to stop Christmas. Well, we're not going to

stop it, but we're going to make it a lot less profitable, right? Okay. And we're going to keep doing it until you figure this out. Really, and it holds their feet to the fire. It flexes muscle that women have not flexed and that they do have. So I do think it would have an impact. Now, in the book I've also suggested that it would roll around the globe as, for example, the 80% Lunar New Year, 80% Duwali, 80% Ramadan, 80% Hanukkah. And that would have them going pretty much 24-7-3-65.

it would be a statement, and I think you would get some attention. And in terms of women's economic development, what gives you hope for the future? Well, it gives me hope for the future several things. One is that we now have all this data that show without question that gender inequality is not a fiction. And we also, as I explained in the book, have the data to show that it is extremely damaging, not just in terms of holding back growth, but in terms of causing violations of rights, causing hunger, there's causing human trafficking.

I mean, it just has a lot of really bad impacts. And so I think that helps us to argue for why it's important to do something about it. I think that's really important. I think for that reason, there are a lot of major world institutions now that have been, you know, committing some resources and attention to it, and that is not something the women's movement has ever had before. So that's great. I think the main thing that causes me hope is the sea change that we've seen in men's attitudes.

In the Western countries in particular, I'm just more familiar with that data. And in Britain in particular, all the surveys show something in the neighborhood of 75, 80% of the men are on board with gender equality, right? It is no longer appropriate to be trashing men as a group on this. Instead, we need to allow them to be our allies and advocates. And I have a lot of hope because of that. That's huge. We did not have that 50 years ago. That's a big accomplishment.

Thank you for listening to this episode of the Science Focus podcast. That was economist Professor Linda Scott. Her new book, The Double X Economy, is out now. In the latest issue of BBC Science Focus magazine, we uncover the psychology of resilience, what keeps our minds healthy, and how to cultivate mental toughness. We also look into what your heart rate variability says about your mental health and get a scientist's guide to life on brewing the perfect cuppa.

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