By Professor Chirantan Chatterjee
“When women and girls rise, their communities and their countries rise with them” – Michelle Obama
As we roll into September 2024, most of the 64 countries with elections pending this year have now gone through their democratic processes, and something interesting is happening around the role of female leaders and feminist progress in the results to date.
Bangladesh which started off this cycle earlier in January, now stands in August with its student protests, many hundreds dead, and its re-elected woman leader Sheikh Hasina having had to escape the country with an interim government now in power. June and July 2024 brought us results also from India, Mexico and South Africa, where it seemed millions voted crying for justice and equality. Mexico incidentally also voted for its first woman leader in 200 years.
In about 60 days though on November 5, another most consequential election is going to unravel in the Western hemisphere, that in the United States. Going by the statements made in the Democratic convention in Chicago and the twists and turns this election has already revealed, will it be able to make a statement on something else raging contemporaneously around the world – the status of women’s empowerment as it stands in the Anthropocene?
Given the usage of the word mother, 12 times in her speech, Michelle Obama in her DNC speech this past couple of weeks, seems to be laying out a clear answer to this question. While she talked about mothers in general and their sacrifices for future generations (her mother’s, Kamala Harris’s mother’s, mothers of everyone around the world) implicitly she was also talking about intergenerational benefits essentially hinting at the Plough Hypothesis earlier elaborated by Danish economist Ester Boserup.
Boserup and others have in past scholarly work discussed how when agricultural societies adopted the plough, patriarchy got more entrenched and embedded because of the physical power required to operate a plough. Alberto Alesina and co-authors have now also empirically tested this hypothesis, finding supportive evidence along with other researchers. But as mechanization and services have diffused around the world transforming agriculture and also agricultural societies at large to knowledge societies, these patriarchal norms brought about by the plough have been reversing too in the last hundred years, in rich and poor societies. This is also illustrated by the Feminization-U hypothesis which argues that with economic development female labor force participation initially declines (when mothers are sacrificing for their daughters like Michelle Obama or Kamala Harris) but ultimately rises over time.
But does it? And is the rise hassle free or does it require decades of back and forth with resistance from incumbents? The answer is obvious as we look even today at the US elections where the fight for abortion rights continues with the Roe vs Wade judgment and aspersions are being cast on women for not having children (given the demographic pressures of slowing fertility in Western societies). Even utterances like childless cat ladies are getting normalized.
Thus, the rise of the U and the decimation of the plough seems still a work in progress. No wonder Michelle Obama, Hillary Clinton, Jill Biden, all of them, have had to send out cautionary statements recently that while this seems like a page-shifting moment for women’s empowerment in the US with the Harris-Waltz presidential bid, the job is only half begun and not done till the elections are over in November and perhaps even after that one will have to be on the watch. They will all know very well given the burnt fingers with Hillary Clinton’s 2016 election bid.
Meanwhile, as the Chicago convention unfolded, justice and women’s empowerment discussions have been raging across India, another populous democracy with the horrific Kolkata murder and rape case. It is now being deliberated in its apex court in a jury full of men of black coats at the Supreme Court of India. DW.com has reported in May 2024 that India as per some recent NCRB (National Crime Records Bureau of India) crime statistics have witnessed 90 reported rapes a day.i The country also seems to have a habit of pushing things under the rug on women’s harassment and far too easily forgets its rapes, BBC reported some 12 years back in a 2013 article.ii Thus, while the recent case is inspiring protests around the country with a Reclaim the Night call (inspired perhaps by the feminism movement of the 1970s from Leeds in the UK), the battle to decimate the plough continues in jerks and fits, with the verdict and India’s status in women’s empowerment still quite unclear. As a senior doctor chimed to me privately recently, ‘more women doctors will now try to leave India and as parents of a young daughter, frankly, I am quite scared.’
Electorally too, evidence on the unfinished journey of women in India is now clear. In the 2024 elections, Times of India reported that from 1957 to 2024, the number of women contesting general elections have increased only to 10% from around 2.9%. Its two main parties, BJP and Indian National Congress gave tickets only to some 16% and 13% women candidates in the 2024 elections. India has right now in 2024, only 1 elected women provincial Chief Minister, and compared to 2019, the number of elected women MPs in 2024 fell to 74 from 78. In fact, women’s representation in India in its parliament is still abysmal, only about 14%, compared to 46% in South Africa, 35% in UK and 29% in the US, TOI reports.iii
Thus the 2024 unprecedented election year globally is telling us essentially that the tussle continues not just for justice or equality for the marginalized generally and those ravaged by inequality living after the pandemic and war years. It is also ending up being the battle for women’s empowerment be that in the US, or in Mexico, even in South Africa or India. Noticeably even the far-right rise in the EU and France witness the rise of women leaders whether that be Georgia Meloni in Italy or Marine La Pen in France.
With all of this, what then might be the future of rights, nights and ploughs for women worldwide? While it would be inappropriate to speculate with a reductionist frame of mind, one can hazard a bit of a guess that the rising part of the Feminization-U will see one of three options globally.
First, we may see an aggressive rise of the U with changes ushering in given a Harris Presidency or very sharp punitive laws on women’s empowerment in India. Second, we may also see what essentially will be the slow pace of fast change; the U will continue on its indolent cadence, some changes in regulation will usher in, some shifting status quo for women will occur in politics like in Mexico, and perhaps grassroots women’s entrepreneurship will also contribute to shifting the equilibrium with microfinance worldwide and particularly in the Global South.
There may also be a third more morbid option – the danger of the inversion of the U to an inverted-U where women, leave their respective geographies with no hopes for empowerment; notice how women in droves are leaving the Talibanized society in Afghanistan today for better pastures.
A final remaining piece in this U and inverted-U debate may also be the response from men and the debates on how innovation shapes economic development tomorrow around the world, especially if there are gendered biases in AI algorithms and its concomitant productivity effects in societies both in the Western and Eastern hemisphere.
Writing this article as a man, knowing well organizational directions of travels having worked in US, India and now UK, I can only admit that we should be ready here for a distribution of responses from men; some more embracing, other more abhorring – causing potential complications on the journey of the U and the plough.
Maxim Gorky once wrote in Mother addressing Pavel, “It begins not in the head, but in the heart.” Michelle Obama’s call to action – “don’t just sit, do something” borrowing from Kamala Harris’s mother – resonates deeply in a related vein.
The unfinished journey of reclaiming nights and decimating ploughs requires collective effort, empathy, and a willingness to challenge the status quo and invert societal norms. Will we as societies worldwide rise to the occasion given the US elections of 2024? The clock ticks after the Democratic convention speeches in Chicago as we wait and watch.
About the Author
Professor Chirantan Chatterjee is a Professor of Development Economics, Innovation and Global Health at the Department of Economics, at the University of Sussex Business School. He is also a Visiting Professor at the MIPLC, Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition at Munich, Germany and a Visiting Fellow at Hoover Institution, Stanford University.
