Gender Equality: Leave it to Evolution?

Female empowerment is an important human rights issue as well as an important economic issue. In policymakers’ quest to reach the UN Millennium Development goal of empowering women, much can be learned from the example of female empowerment in the West.

Research (hat tip: World Bank Poverty and Growth blog) linking gender equality and economic growth suggests that economic growth increases women’s rights (not the other way around). Historically, as economies developed, the men in the societies began to increase the rights given to women. Tim Worstall of the Globalization Institute Blog asserts that the reasoning for this finding is Darwinism. He points out that men eventually conclude that it is in their best interest to find mates who are more viable in an increasingly competitive society. Furthermore, Matthias Doepke and Michèle Tertilt assert that evolutionary thinking compels fathers to increase women’s rights in an attempt to boost the societal and evolutionary success of their daughters and granddaughters.

Darwinism contests that women’s rights will occur naturally with economic growth, which impacts the policy needed for female empowerment. Worstall asserts that “the policy prescription is clear, we can stop having conferences on feminism and development and just get on with the development: the feminism will naturally and inevitably follow.”

Though this plan seems to be logically and strategically sound, its assertion that change will occur naturally and slowly over time brings to mind Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” in which he says:

“Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts of men… and without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation. We must use time creatively, in the knowledge that the time is always ripe to do right.”