10 Ideas that are changing the world - TIME magazine (March 24 2008)

#9 : Women's Work - Tapping the female entrepreneurial spirit can pay big dividends.


When it comes to business, females have always been victims of gender discrimination. The 21st century society's perception of gender roles has been built upon centuries of stereotyping women as incapable of handling business and finance, and thus should be confined to menial household labour, leaving men to put food on the family table. As a result, women all over the world are often denied job opportunities. And that is only the situation in developed countries. In third world nations, women are often completely cut off from the basic human rights of education and proper training, condemning them to the life of an overworked, yet underpaid housewife.

The article I read showed concrete evidence that societies which tend to be more productive where those which gave women opportunities to receive higher education. From the article, "A recent study by the London School of Economics...showed that states in India where women are better educated were also those with higher economic growth rates."

The article continues to describe the efforts undertaken by many countries and organisations to ensure women are able to enter the workforce. One of which is the microfinance movement, where organisations such as Grameen Bank and International Community Assistance lends small sums of money (ie. $100) to thousands of poor women in India as start up capital for their small businesses.

Personally, I support such movements to ensure that women are given opportunities to receive education and jobs. The world we live in today has a highly globalised economy, and a nation leaving out women, which forms approximately 48.8% of the world's population (Source: Wikipedia), from the workforce would result in the nation's economy being unable to keep up with the fast pace of the world.

The stereotype of women as incapable to doing business probably stems from the perception of women as inferior in comparisn to men. However, this is certainly not the case. There are many high-flying women out there, such as Hillary Clinton, who is running in the 2008 United States Presidential Elections, and Mrs Lee Ho Ching, Chief Executive Officer of Temasek Holdings. Indeed, there are more and more women stepping out into the forefront of the economy, thus the world should similarly stop stereotyping them.

However, the problem of women being unable to contribute to the workforce is not much of an issue in developed countries such as Singapore and the United States as compared to developing countries such as Cambodia and India, where a vast majority of women are unemployed. In order to appropriately target the problem, many organisations around the world have therefore financially contributed to these countrie in order to give women a fighting chance of entering the workforce with the necessary education required.

While such foreign aid is undoubtedly beneficial, my personal viewpoint is that the benefiting country may become over reliant on foreign aid. With the promise of millions of dollars from other countries, governments and civil servants may begin to slacken, bringing a country to its knees.

At the end of the day, developing countries counting on foreign aid should treat it as start up capital to build a new economy where women will be introduced into the workforce. Ultimately, each and every nation will have to be responsible to ensure that every of their own citizens, women included, will be able to do contribute to the country's economy. And as a globalised society, we should all adjust our mindsets away from the stereotypes and perceptions of women. Such perceptions stemmed from the way the world lived in the past. However, as we progress economically, we should progress in out mindset too. We should not keep women out of the workforce, but embrace them.

JonTan