Women's Leadership: Pressing for Real Change in Finance and Sustainable Development

Policy Paper

Women's Leadership: Pressing for Real Change in Finance and Sustainable Development

A Presentation to the Korean Women’s Development Institute

October 22, 2010
Nancy Alexander

Abstract

This paper describes the need for women’s rights to be realized in the four world economies:

  1. the financial or speculative economy which is primarily a male domain;
  2. the real economy where goods and services are traded and where women are ghettoized in certain sectors, earn less than men; and often work part-time;
  3. the informal economy which employs 70% of the workforce in the developing world and is disproportionately female, poor and vulnerable; and
  4. unpaid household workers, who are almost exclusively women.

As women exercise more leadership in corporations and communities, they are shifting the focus from short-term profits to long-term sustainable human development. To ensure that women rise to political and economic power in a transformative way, we must nurture and share a vision of how to rectify four imbalances which threaten our collective future:

  1. The power of the speculative economy over the real and informal economies, which has created high levels of economic volatility and inequality;
  2. The power of financial and economic capital over environmental capital, which has led to phenomena such as global warming that endanger the survivability of the planet;
  3. Increasing returns to capital relative to labor as well as the failure to recognize unpaid labor by women in households; and
  4. Imbalances among the surplus-rich emerging market countries; the high deficit, industrialized countries; and marginalized, low-income countries.

By impoverishing workers and consumers, these forces diminish the global demand for goods and services needed to rebalance the world economy. By privatizing gains and socializing losses (including through the IMF and World Bank), the financial industry is crippling the role of the state. At present, many countries, including Western industrialized ones, can no longer afford to provide public goods, including resources for curbing global warming or basic services (e.g., health care, education, water). On one level, the challenge is to stop the financial industry from buying so much influence over elected officials that democratic processes in many countries can no longer represent citizens’ interests. On a deeper level, the challenge for women is to claim their power in political and economic spheres. Inequality is both a cause and a consequence of unjust economies and global imbalances. Gender equality is not a women’s issue; it is a human issue. It is also our best hope for galvanizing political leadership and mobilizing public support for sustainable human development.

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