A Bottom-Line Case for Gender Equality

The nations of the world are making an unparalleled investment in educating girls and young women, an accomplishment worth celebrating, NCS students heard Jan. 19 from a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. Yet, she added, the number of employed women remains flat, suggesting that more remains to be done.

Keeping women from the work they desire are obstacles such as access to elder and child care and discriminatory property rights and inheritance laws, and the governments that remove these barriers will realize a economic bonanza, said Heidi Crebo-Rediker, the featured speaker for the Janet Griffith International Lecture in the Washington National Cathedral.

"It is so much easier to get the attention of senior leaders and policymakers who are looking for that key to growth if you talk to them about this strictly through the prism of their economies, because then it is not just a story about women," said Crebo-Rediker, who previously served the State Department as its first chief economist. "It's a story about growth. And while it should be a story about fairness, that hasn't really worked over the past several decades."

She described the dramatic rise over 20 years in educational opportunities for females, as well as the limited opportunities for employment. "Where are these women in the global economy? Because they're not showing up in the numbers," she said. "Something is holding back all these highly educated women."

These hobbles, which also include taxation policies and infrastructure deficits, amount to a check on a nation's prosperity, Crebo-Rediker said. The research is clear: "Women drive growth when they enter the economy." In the United States, for example, "our economy would be 25 percent smaller without the women that joined the labor force [over the last 40 years]. That's 38 million women who went out and got jobs and created growth."

This has a "transformational effect," she said: "We've seen in countries across the world that when women have control of money, they invest in their kids -- their education, their health." This leads to a better quality of life, which improves economic prospects for all.

As more countries see this, they are encouraging women to work, Crebo-Rediker said. She cited Japan and Rwanda as recent examples, as well as the commitment of the Group of 20 industrialized nations to bring millions more women into their workforce by 2025.

"I am quite optimistic" about the prospect of positive change, she concluded.

The annual Griffith Lecture on international affairs honors the retired NCS teacher who was the first director of the school's international program; Griffith was in attendance for this year's lecture, as were all NCS students in grades 4-12. Since its creation in 1998, the Janet Griffith Lecture has brought distinguished officials to the Cathedral to address NCS students, including through a question-and-answer session and a reception at NCS. We thank Ms. Crebo-Rediker, an NCS parent, for an informative and thought-provoking address.