Vive la Difference! (II)

Gender inequity is an old problem; flexibility might help

What would you say of a mother of four who decides to work as a front-line journalist in high-risk war zones?

This case has caused quite a stir in the UK where on Monday this week Richard Edmonson, the husband of war-zone reporter Alex Crawford, was drawn to write a full page article in defence of his wife's career choices.

Free to Skype at 22:30 my time?

The answer to why at a deep level we struggle to accept such gender-role situations may be found - according to Alberto Alesina and Nathan Nunn of Harvard University and Paola Giuliano of the University of California - in changes that happened before the end of the fifth millennium BC.

Alesina and Nunn recently published a study looking at the impact the adoption of the plough (six thousand years ago) has had on gender differences through history. As The Economist writes, when the plough was adopted, "the fertile region between the Tigris and the Euphrates went from being one that worshipped 'all-powerful mother goddesses' to one where it was 'the male gods and priests who were predominant' (...) Women in ancient Mesopotamia had previously been in charge of the fields and (...) With the advent of the plough, however, farming became the work of men.

(...) Women descended from plough-users are less likely to work outside the home, to be elected to parliament or to run businesses than (those who) descended from hoe-users. (...) Descendants of plough-users are significantly more likely to agree that men should have first dibs on jobs (and) that men make better political leaders. Such beliefs survive immigration: the daughters of immigrants to America are less likely to work if their parents came from a traditionally plough-based society."

Against these deeply rooted beliefs (Western coutries were for the most part plough-users) there has been significant advancement.

Finally, we meet

But there is still a long way to go. A study by Lyons, Schweitzer and Ng surveying more than 23,000 Canadian university students found that "women predict their starting salaries to be 14% less than what men's (...) anticipating their earnings to be 18% less than men after five years on the job." It also found women expect to wait two months longer for their first promotion.

In Asia, home to significant progress (in East Asia 66% of women have jobs), structural change is however lagging behind: "surveys in Japan suggest that women who work full-time then go home and spend another 30 hours a week doing the housework, their husbands contributing an unprincely three hours of effort."

Outside of home there are as well many hurdles that need overcoming, from infrastructural - 62% of Brazilian women, for example, say that they feel unsafe travelling to work - to well-known organisational hurdles such as the burdens associated with motherhood ("childless women in corporate America earn almost as much as men; mothers with partners earn less and single mothers much less.")

The answer is probably long-term, holistic and very complex. This doesn't mean however it shouldn't be tackled.

The corporate world doesn't have a silver bullet either, or at least one your correspondent could unearth. However there are things that can help gender equality move up a notch. In a 2008 study by The Australian Institute of Management "flexible working arrangements" was voted by the 3,180 executives surveyed as the number one measure to support women in reaching senior positions equivalent to their male counterparts.

In time to put the issue to bed

For Crawford to become a foreign correspondent her husband left his job to look after their children. Wathcing her report from Lybia one is drawn to conclude with optimism that flexibility delivers and can be successfully sought both individually and as a couple. Not a sensible angle perhaps for those dual-career parents who want to have their cake and eat it.