What’s the Management End Game? How the Fate of First World Women Matters to Third World Women Entrepreneurs. 

The Third Billion Campaign, an initiative of La Pietra Coalition, is uniting the corporate engagement arms of OECD strongarms— Accenture, Booz & Company, Ernst & Young, and the World Bank, to name a few— to educate and empower female entrepreneurs in undeveloped companies. And it’s clear from research and news that parity is an absolute necessity in most of The Third Billion’s target communities. But do we have a clear idea of the paradise we lead these women toward? 

The globalization of recent decades has shown the world just how crucial massive population segments can be when they are integrated into the global economy. China and India are the two most obvious examples. But the third less obvious demographic that’s gotten lost in the wash of economic analysis is a very simple one: uneducated and unempowered women. These women exist all over the world—even in the United States.

In the United States, it’s become clear that to some degree—whether because of the Recession or because of normal growth phenomena—that the parity of women has hit a plateau. This year’s World Economic Forum, despite its outreach efforts to include more diversity, consisted of only 16% women.  Less than 20 of the Fortune 500’s CEOs are female. But there are bright spots: for instance, the majority of the World Bank’s directors are female. And while the worldwide average is around 15%, Rwanda, a country whose genocidal history has put its civil rights in jeopardy in the last three decades, has a Parliament that’s more than 50% female.

Amidst the plateauing progress and its ensuing ennui, women like Sandra Taylor the director of La Pietra Coalition are upholding a spark of hope that has ignited a global fire. “The evidence is clear,” she says. “women are the emerging market with the greatest potential for accelerating global economic growth over the next decade. Investing in women will transform their lives and lead to prosperity for their families, their communities, and for business globally.”

Several amazing women stood alongside Sandra last week to announce the launch of the Third Billion Campaign. Dina Powell, President of the Goldman Sachs Foundation and head of GS Corporate Engagement, as well as Beth Brooke, Global Vice Chair of Ernst & Young, and Pierella Paci, the Manager of the World Bank’s Gender & Development group, were among them. Dina spoke passionately about the United Nation’s 8 Millennium Goals, saying that “the answer to all of these goals have to do with women.” She spoke of Goldman Sach’s 10,000 Women initiative, which to date has trained 6,000 women and given them the resources to begin their own economic enterprises. But her goals are bigger than giving 10,000 women a microloan and sending them on their way.

“How do you take women from the platform where they’re running small businesses to the point where they’re creating 10, 20, 50—or 1,000—jobs?” Dina asked the small group assembled to celebrate the launch of The Third Billion. Dr. Victoria Kisyombe, a 10,000 Women trainee and the founder of Sero Lease & Financial Corporation in Tanzania, gave a moving reply: “Women may have all the same rights as men in many countries, but because of customs and traditions, women and girls find it difficult to establish ownership of tangible assets. This limits them. When women help women, it unleashes the 50% that isn’t vocal.”

Women Helping Women 

The world of female beauty is a competitive one—we’ve seen that even just this week in Gisele Bundchen’s instinctual response to Tom Brady naysayers.The transition for women from solo players in the marriage marketplace to team players in a business environment hasn’t always been an easy one.

But the perspective shift—from one where women instinctually compete with one another across all parameters even where there’s no tangible goal to one where women advocate for one another and sponsor one another’s successes—has been invaluable. According to the World Bank’s recent Women, Business & the Law report, gender disparity decreases significantly in workplaces where a top manager is female:

(Women Business & the Law, 2012)

This effect is clearly related to goodwill between females within a business. But goodwill is hard to track in a database. Formal structures are what we have the power to monitor, and the World Bank report took a close look at the rights of women in economies worldwide by referencing these formal structures, both legal and economic, and the ways in which they affect their success.

To analyze the legal rights of women worldwide, the World Bank carved out 21 different actions that lend depth to an analysis of female parity—and whether women can legally perform these 21 things in the same way that men can is the basis of their study:  

- applying for a passport - traveling outside the country - traveling outside the home- getting a job or pursuing a trade or profession without permission - signing a contract - registering a business - being “head of household” or “head of family” - conferring citizenship on their children - opening a bank account - choosing where to live - having ownership rights over moveable property - having ownership rights over immoveable property - having inheritance rights over moveable property - having inheritance rights over immoveable property - working the same night hours - working in the same industries - enjoying the same statutory retirement age - enjoying the same pensionable age - enjoying the same tax deductions or credits - having their testimony carry the same evidentiary weight in court - being able to initiate legal proceedings without permission 

To give you an idea of the scope of the problem of female parity in the world: 

Of the 45 legal differentiations described by the World Bank report to denote the legal rights of women across economies, no economy imposed all equally for both married and unmarried women. None of the 24 economies that impose ten or more legal differentiations is in high-income OECD, or Eastern Europe and Central Asia or Latin America and the Caribbean. 38 economies in total have no legal differentiations of the type measured by the study.

High-income economies have on average fewer differentiations than middle- and low-income economies, indicating that as an economy matures, it affords its females more civil and legal rights. However, these differentiations do not disappear as income levels rise. In fact, 17 of the 39 high-income economies covered have at least one legal differentiation.

In 121 economies studied in the World Bank report, unmarried women have the same rights as unmarried men regarding the first 10 differentiators listed above. But only in 97 economies do married women have the same rights as married men. In seven economies, married women do not have the same property rights as married men.

How does microcredit help lessen the disparity? 

Three-quarters of microfinance borrowers are women. It is, therefore, women who are more likely to benefit when credit bureaus and registries make known information on available microfinance loans. A record of successful repayment enables women to build up credit histories—and these loans pave the way to more conventional financing and access to more capital.

This is what The Third Billion Campaign, along with programs like 10,000 Women, strives to achieve. They launched their decade-long effort last Wednesday, and are committed to opening the eyes of corporations and NGOs worldwide to the massive potential of women in these underdeveloped countries. They are unifying what has been to date a series of very disparate efforts to show commitment to female education and entrepreneurialism.

What do these strides mean for us back home?

Back in the developed world, women have made tremendous strides in the past century towards achieving workplace parity. But the fact remains that women participate in the labor force in a different way than men—and it’s clear from research that that’s partially determined by stereotypes of workplace attachment.

To a certain degree, a stereotype of this nature is not baseless: women are likely to be relatively less attached to their respective employers and jobs compared to their male counterparts, especially during the early part of their careers. Parts of female life just occur relatively early: marriage, childbirth, and family care responsibilities make it more likely that women will experience employment interruptions and gaps (Mincer and Ofek, 1982). It’s not crazy to expect that a woman’s job duration will be shorter than a man’s. This affects both on-the-job training investments and job selection. The gaps and interruptions mean that women are likely to invest less in firm-specific skills and more in general labor market skills that are portable across employers—especially given the inflexibility of many employers across the life events young women experience. The lack of firm-specific training makes women subject to relatively flatter wage-tenure profiles, but the focus on general skills means a higher wage-experience profile compared to men (Munasinghe, 2004).

So it’s really up to us in the next century—the suffragettes have finished their suffrage, but we as a community have not come to a consensus on what rights to demand and what expectations to set with our employers. We learn. We lead. We reproduce. All of these things make us better potential leaders—not worse ones. And now that we’re making the push into the third world to lift women out of poverty using the same techniques our mothers and grandmothers used not so long ago, it’s up to us to set an example of what success truly looks like for female leaders.