Super Model!--Part 1

Mapping the Women’s Economy

What is The Women’s Economy? What does it consist of? What does it involve? How can we begin to think about it not as a derivative of what works for men but as its own model? 

Oooh, it’s too real! I love these questions and if any of them have been bouncing around in your mind, first, we might be soulmates and second, it’s your lucky day because I have visual aids! 

Before we begin let’s tackle a bit of front matter: 

1. The Women’s Economy is both a current state and a future state. The current state refers to what we observe when we look at women as economic actors within our existing systems. The future state embraces what could be if we design systems for women’s success. The models I’ll be sharing refer to the current state because: 

   • No one’s done that yet. 

   • We need to know where we are before we can determine where we’re going.

   • Mapping the current state of The Women’s Economy can show us possibilities for collaborating and open our eyes to components of the economy we may not have recognized previously. 

2. There is no monolithic understanding of women or women’s experiences. I’ll tackle this more fully in a later post but for now, this is a placeholder and reminder to all of us. Can we move forward with our models of The Women’s Economy given what we perceive as the absence of one overlapping experience of womanhood? Yes! Also: trick question. 

There is one overlapping experience of womanhood: inequality, albeit to different degrees based on intersectionality. As Linda Scott, Emeritus World Chair for Entrepreneurship and Innovation at the University of Oxford notes, women are unequal to men in every country in the world and across all groups (race, ethnicity, education levels, religion, etc); investing in women economically is, therefore, a path to reaching women across all segments of the population. As a side note, I use the term “woman” instead of “female” to include all people who identify as women no matter their biological sex.

Modeling the Women’s Economy 

I’d like to dedicate this model to the more than two-thirds of the global employed population making a living in the informal economy. And a special shout out to the women. According to the OECD, the percentage of women workers in the informal economy outweighs the percentage of men workers in 28 out of 39 countries for which such data is available. In Kenya, for example, 83% of the workforce is employed in the informal economy and 86% of those informal workers are women. 

The informal economy--often called the shadow economy--is the portion of economic activity that is untaxed, unmonitored, and unregulated. Workers in the informal economy are not protected by the state and are therefore susceptible to mistreatment and abuse. As you can imagine, women are more vulnerable to abuse and have less recourse than men to address this abuse, even within the wild west of the informal economy. 

The informal economy is a substantial component of The Women’s Economy, not only because, in many countries, women are the informal economy, and are more likely to be victims of abuse within the informal economy, but because care work--the penultimate of unmonitored, nay, unseen and ignored informal work has always been considered the natural work of women. When we pull a policy thread in the formal economy, it has repercussions for the Stranger Things-like “Upside Down” of the informal economy. And when we advocate for improvements for women in sectors of the formal economy, we can’t ignore the informal economy. 

As you can see in this model, I’ve included both the formal and informal economy. Within the formal economy, I’ve identified the sectors pertinent to women’s economic success. You can’t have economic power as a woman when you regularly receive substandard medical attention, for example, or live in a world where your health concerns are dismissed based on your gender-derived second-class citizenship. These sectors are interconnected; if we want to facilitate women’s economic success, we can’t do so without addressing barriers to women’s health, or women’s ability to access reliable, safe, transportation and move freely. Such interconnection reveals opportunities for collaboration among sectors, not simply in service of women’s economic success, but the benefit of each sector individually as well. Mobility allows women to access health resources and in turn, the health of women affects the caregiving landscape as families age. These sectors cannot operate in isolation. Seeing them as pieces of women’s economic success and The Women’s Economy offers opportunities for invention and intervention in overlooked areas and encourages us to transcend silos. We can further break these sectors down into distinct industries to more fully explore possibilities for collaboration. 

Within the informal economy, I include the areas in which women are most likely to work. Care work and entrepreneurial/small business activity have a formal and informal presence and often the line between them is blurry for women. Existing regulations and processes in these areas may be punitive, barely effective, or outright dismissive of women (think the 98% ineffectiveness of VC funding when it comes to women or the staggeringly low wages afforded to care workers). 

Finally, just as the sectors of the formal economy are tied to one another, the work areas in the informal economy are also tied to the sectors of the formal economy. The safety sector, for example, shapes women’s lives on both sides of the economy and if it is not secured in the informal economy, it is not a guarantee in the formal economy, either. Similarly, improvements in formal economy sectors like the financial and banking sector and the care work sector will help lift women out of dangerous conditions within the informal economy.