Celebrating women…and gender coalitions

By Dan McCurry

A billion dollars has been spent by the west on overseas development aid; mostly it has been squandered. But just at the point where the west was questioning any further wasted investment, new ideas have been springing up in Bangladesh that have given fresh impetus to economic development, not through top down policies from the western world, but by bottom up policies that the west can support and encourage.

The Grameen bank lends 70% of its micro-finance investments to enterprising women. This is not due to some feminist agenda, but simply because the women repay while the men often don’t. Since those who re-pay are entitled to more credit the figure has simply settled at 70% loans to females and only 30% to men.

It’s a simple business plan. Small loans, typically for cattle and sheep, would previously have been un-commercial, but when a group of lenders come together, the economy of scale is achieved. There are no credit check agencies, the Grameen bank relies on the fact that the group of women know each other and therefore each one relies on the other to settle their debt; they therefore would not admit into their group a person they belief to be unreliable. Brilliant in its simplicity!

Men, on the other hand, tend to lack the maternal instincts of women: when times get tough they walk away from their obligations, while with women those maternal instincts tend to make them stronger.

Another good example of the strength of women in the developing world is the policy of education. NGOs focus education on women rather than men, because women are value added; i.e. they pass on the education to the next generation, creating a cascade of improving standards. Again, this is not out of some feminist motive; it’s a well contested fact that men just don’t reeducate.

There has been argument over the years that men should be better educated because they are the bread-winners, but this is incorrect. Everybody works in the developing world and the facts above of micro-finance support this. Women are simply a better investment.

There is so much hostility to Margaret Thatcher on this blog, but this is political allegiance rather than analytical thought. Her single achievement was to break the glass ceiling allowing others to achieve their ambitions without suffering her indignities.

However, an equally great achievement for the feminist movement under Thatcherism happened somewhat by accident. The policy of encouraging property ownership caused families to take on such large mortgages that the mother in the family had to go out to work in order to make the payments. The financial independence of women in our modern day traces back to that policy.

Whatever you think of Sarah Palin’s views, she shares a similar place in the narrative to Thatcher in the manner in which she presented herself to the public. Margaret Thatcher explained economics by looking into her larder and showing how she keeps the household budget. This presentation of herself as a housewife who could also do a jolly good job as a political leader not only appealed to those who believed a woman should be in the home, but also made her less threatening to those colleagues who were constantly looking for an opportunity to bring her down.

Sarah Palin was brought into the Republican campaign last year when her party realised that the equality agenda had left them long behind, following the sheer excitement and wall-to-wall coverage of the Democratic Primary contest between a woman and a black man. Previously, the Republicans had preferred their political women to raise charity or decorate the White House.

Similar to Thatcher’s housewife, Palin sold herself as a mother, a beauty queen and a tough politician in one brilliant post feminist line: “What’s the difference between a Hockey Mom and a Rottweiler?” Then she pointed to her mouth and said, “Lipstick!”

The reason this quote is more significant to my narrative than anything from Barack or Hillary, is that we know the Democrats would be excited by either a black man or a woman as a president; the difference was in the fact that the right-wing Republicans have been won-over to the argument. They have learned that they have to be a part of the equality agenda if they wish to achieve electoral success.

But there is a characteristic often typical in women and lacking in men that’s worth drawing attention to on this blog in particular:

I’ve always considered that Golda Meir and Angela Merkel did not become leaders of their respective countries by accident. It seems to me that both women became successful in countries that rely on coalitions to form a government. My only surprise is that Tzipi Livni didn’t become leader in the recent Israeli elections.

Women often have the ability to be more pragmatic and willing to compromise than alpha males, who in similar circumstances are likely to be at each other’s throats. Having said that, there are signs that men are learning these lessons from the women.

Here on LabourList, Derek and Alex have made considerable efforts to make this blog inclusive to the party as a whole. Some of the comments to the Harriet Harman piece suggest to me that the commentators would like the blog to be divisive and representative of only one section of the party. It might be worth remembering that Harriet Harman has done more for the socialist movement than all these commentators put together and then multiplied by ten thousand.

Let’s take a lesson from the girls, and be coalition builders not coalition dividers.