New Facts on the Gender Gap From the World Bank

This article by Sudeep Reddy, posted online from the September 18, 2011 Wall Street Journal, highlights the World Bank’s most recent statistics on the gender gap, it includes data on wealth, wages, mortality and education. With the data presented in the article it can be observed that despite decades of progress women in developing countries still face large inequalities. The article indicates that these inequalities still exist because of a variety of barriers, which include poverty and ethnicity. The message of the article is that countries that create better opportunities for women can increase output per worker, which increases productivity. This article relates to today’s lecture on women’s participation in the labor force. Today’s lecture focused on women’s labor force participation trends, and what caused these trends to occur. In lecture the main cause of the quiet revolution was proven to be new contraceptive technology. In processing this information I began to ponder whether contraception technology could be classified as one of the barriers listed in the article. If so then efforts to distribute new contraception methods in developing worlds would not only reduce poverty (a listed barrier in the article) but would also help close the gender gap and would ultimately give women more incentive to pursue long term careers, which would increase the output per worker and the productivity of the developing countries economy. If my initial thoughts are correct. This would kill two birds with one stone. So why isn’t it happening?

If you want to see the statisitcs here is the web address: http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2011/09/18/new-facts-on-the-gender-gap-from-the-world-bank/