_ Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;} Looking at antenatal care stats for health facilities in Ghana always puts my problems into perspective (OMG my avocado is not ripe!!).  Some highlights from the records I looked at today:

Birth years of women attending ANC:  The oldest was born in 1970, the youngest in 1999.

Educational attainment of women attending ANC: Most have no school; only one had been to high school.

How women attending ANC got to the clinic: Women come by walking, tro tros, bicycle, riding on the back of motos, and canoe.  In today’s data, the extreme athletics award goes to a woman, 8 months pregnant, who walked 180 minutes to get to the clinic.

Eliot Spitzer writes that the state of American men's tennis is a metaphor for the state of the U.S. economy. The article isn't well executed-- he makes a detour into causation vs. correlation just to take a dig at deficit hawks.  (Maybe we wouldn't have a demand problem now if we hadn't been spending beyond our means for years and years??) His final point is somewhat valid though-- America is less dominant in tennis and in the world economy because other nations have made gains, and the competition is stiffer, and that's a good thing.

What I take from this is that it is no longer the default that white American men will stay on top. (Spitzer glaringly fails to analyze the state of American women's tennis.)  Neither a Grand Slam trophy, nor a big screen TV and two cars, are the inherent right of an American man. Like everyone else in the world, if we want to succeed, we need to make ourselves competitive.

This weekend, after a delicious dinner, some friends and I visited a rooftop drinking spot in Osu. As I slowly drove my motocycle into the crowded parking lot, a man reached out, put his hand on my leg, and slid his hand up my skirt as I went by on the moto.  It took me a moment to register what had happened, and by that time, I had passed the group of men, and wasn’t even sure who had done it.  After fuming for several minutes, I joined my friends, had a double whiskey, and did my best to forget about the incident and enjoy the rest of the night.

As I write this, several days later, I am still furious—furious with the man, but more furious with myself for failing to give the man any disincentive to repeat his actions.  The options were many: yell at the man; report him to the police; hit him; run over his foot with my moto; or in my most vengeful fantasy, castrate him with my moto keys.  Why didn’t I do any of these things?  It wasn’t that I am incapable of standing up for myself.  For the most part, it was simply because I wasn’t quick enough to react, but riding away had its advantages:  I wasn’t physically hurt, I got out of a potentially harmful situation quickly, none of my friends had to be involved in a mess, and I was able to move on and continue my night.  It’s hard to imagine a better outcome had I chosen to confront the man—but at what cost did this efficient short-term result come? What does it take to prevent this type of behavior?

Minor physical assault and sexual harassment is not uncommon in Accra.  My recent experiences include:

·         A man grabbing me around the waste and pull me away from my friends to try to get him to dance with me at an outdoor dance spot.  I peeled him off of me and started yelling at him; another Ghanaian intervened and convinced him to leave us alone.

·         A man repeatedly came up to my friends and me in a dance club and rubbed against us, even though we were not dancing.  After asking him three times to stop, I told him to “F-k off” and shoved him.  He drunkenly fell on the ground and then went away.

·         A man on the street grabbed my hand as I was walking by him one evening and would not let go.  I dug my keys into his wrist as I twisted my hand free.  He let me go on my way.

Let’s be frank—women face these types of encounters everywhere.  I have a close friend in New York for whom catcalls are a humiliating but regular part of her daily commute.  She has experimented with every type of reaction I can think of: anger, humor, honest conversation, and simply ignoring it.  Nothing seems to make a difference.  Is a man with a key gouge on his wrist less likely to try to grab a woman’s arm than one who got away unscathed?  

The truth is, I don’t think any reaction from a victim of harassment is enough disincentive to put a stop to this behavior.  To be an effective deterrent, punishment must come from broad society.  Men who sit on steps and catcall in New York City should face the disapproval of the grandmother next door and the scorn of the respectful men who pass by and see them as the boys they are.  Men who assault women in Accra bars and clubs should be unwelcome in those spots, and those who grab women on the streets should be ostracized by other vendors there, who face lost business when women avoid those spots.  In some cases, this happens.  Too often, it doesn't. As long society fails to punish men for this behavior, a they will continue to bet that victims won't punish them either.

The project manager on my project is now assisting with a village savings and loan project, and told me some interesting things about working in Bawku, a region in Ghana where violence has broken out between two tribes, the Mamprusis and the Kussassis.

According to my colleague (a Ghanaian), in the first century, the Kussassis, who were traditionally farmers but not fighters, asked the Mamprusis, who were known as warriors, to come to move to their land.  In exchange for protecting the area, so the Kussassis could farm in peace, the Mamprusis were given the chieftaincy in the region.  The agreement has held for centuries, and in Ghana’s system of parallel democratic and traditional governments, the Mamprusis still hold the chieftaincy, although they are far outnumbered by the Kussassis.  The democratically elected official for the region is Kussassi.

Several years ago, the Kussassis became unhappy with this arrangement, demanding the return of a Kussassi chief.   Violence broke out between the tribes.  Despite interventions by the central government, including curfews and prosecution of those perpetrating violence, the situation has remained tense.  The Mamprusis control Bawku’s city center while the Kussassis control the surrounding land and villages, and members of the two tribes cannot safely visit the other’s territory, although visitors from other tribes or countries are safe.  

This situation has posed difficulties for the IPA survey team in the region, as they are trying to collect data in both tribes’ territories.  It is crucial that surveyors be hired locally, so they have knowledge of the area, culture, and languages.  Since young men on motorcycles have been responsible for much of the violence, the Ghanaian government has recently banned all men in the region from traveling on motorcycles --the chief form of transportation for IPA surveyors.  

Enter the ladies.  IPA surveyors are overwhelmingly male, as it can be difficult to find women with top educational qualifications and a willingness to take on the physically demanding work.  In Bawku, the project manager was successful in finding half a dozen qualified women with motorcycles to fill out the ranks of IPA surveyors in the region.  Women are not subject to the ban, and can legally ride motorcycles to visit respondents.  The team includes women of both ethnic groups, to enable IPA to work in both territories and with respondents of both tribes.  The field manager, who will oversee the survey team in that region, is a women of mixed descent, half Mamprusi and half Kussassi, and can safely work in either tribe’s territory. 

I wish the team the best, and hope that they will demonstrate both the ability of women to be exceptional surveyors and the possibility that people of these two tribes can work together toward common goals.

Donald Marron recently bloggedabout a new economics paper on gender arbitrage by multinationals in South Korea. The idea behind gender arbitrage is that discrimination in hiring against a particular group, like women or minorities, creates opportunities for non-discriminating employers to hire talented people for a lower wage. When non-discriminating employers take advantage of this, it should eventually erase the gap in wages between the disadvantaged group and the rest of the labor market. This paper found that multinational corporations have been able to benefit from discrimination against women in the labor market that drives down wages for educated women.  In Korea, working women earn only 63% of what working men do. (Not all of this is due to discrimination.) The paper found that among multinationals, a 10 percentage point increase in the number of women in local management positions led to a 1 percentage point increase in return on assets.  Marron points out that the fact that companies that hire more women have a hire profit margin means that there is still room for more arbitrage-- implying that discrimination is still resulting in lower wages for women compared with men who have the same skills and abilities.

As unfortunate as it is that women in Korea are being paid less than they are worth, from the perspective of both women and employers in northern Ghana, this is an enviable problem.  In Ghana as a whole, about 20% of adult males have secondary education or higher; only about 10% of adult females have that level of educational attainment (source: GLSS 5), and the gender gap is most pronounced in the Northern Region.  Traditional views of gender roles still prevent girls from having access to education at the same rate as boys.  (Girls may also have a higher opportunity cost of education: girls are often more economically valuable than boys, because they can assist with child-rearing and food processing, or work as maids, at an age where boys are still too young to be much help with farm work.)  The result of this is that it is difficult to find qualified female candidates for jobs requiring a high level of education.

This is especially apparent to employers like me, who actually have a bias in favor of female employees.  Since the majority of the respondents in my survey were female, I wanted to hire female surveyors because they are more likely to put female respondents at ease.  Despite actively recruiting female candidates, posting notices encouraging women to apply, and asking the field managers to try to achieve a balance in the number of male and female surveyors we hired, we received few applications from female candidates, and less than a quarter of the surveyors we hired ended up being female.