How many wives earn more than their husbands in the US?

Back in 1987, only 17.8 percent of American wives outearned their husbands, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Even though the situation is gradually improving, it quite rare to find a wife that takes home more money than her husband. In 2013, 29.3 percent of American wives were the main breadwinners in US families (where both wives and husbands have earnings).

This chart shows the % of US wives earning more than their husbands from 1987 to 2013.

From the International Monetary Fund:

• Countries need to make plans now for implementing the post-2015 agenda
• Increasing access to finance—particularly for women—will be vital
• Given collective nature of many issues, international cooperation is key

Marueen Burke writes:  Governments must take action at the country level and the collective level to mobilize resources and partner with the private sector if they are to attain the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, panelists said at a seminar.

“You really have to approach it in a comprehensive way,” noted Joseph Stiglitz of Columbia University. As such, he said, each country ought to have a national dialogue about its own development goals and the interaction between these different goals.

For Magdalena Andersson, Sweden’s Minister of Finance, revenue mobilization was seen as essential.

Akinwumi Adenisa, the newly appointed President the African Development Bank (AfDB), concurred. “Africa needs roughly $100 billion for investment in infrastructure. But right now we have only about $50 billion,” he observed. Multilateral development banks should be doing more to promote risk-sharing instruments that allow the private sector to lend significant amounts without shouldering excessive risk. “Risk sharing is what permits the AfDB to partner with the private sector,” he said.

While panelists agreed that private-public partnerships were a key factor in low-income countries’ development, some also noted that governments did not have to rely solely on external funding sources. “There is a lot of potential revenue in the country that countries could tap,” said IMF Deputy Managing Director Min Zhu, noting that the IMF has devised a new “revenue gap analysis” tool that helps countries understand where the gaps are in their revenue collection.

There are ways of improving the tax efficiency by reducing tax exemptions and broadening the tax base, as Vietnam and Tanzania have done successfully.

Realistically, though, you can’t tax very poor people. Giving potential entrepreneurs access to finance is critical to giving a “leg up” to people in low-income countries.

Claver Gatete, Rwanda’s Minister for Finance and Economic Planning, also zeroed in on the role of governments in ensuring that women are active participants in the economy.

Beyond mobilizing revenue and facilitating the economic participation of women, there is still more to be done, said Tony Elumelu, a successful Nigerian entrepreneur. His country has benefitted from external resources by way of aid and by way of private flows, he said. While aid has helped address some of the continent’s issues, it has not helped significantly alleviate poverty or create jobs.

The answer, he said, is private investment—and preferably partnerships between local investors and international ones.

Zhu noted that the IMF is active in several ways. It has put more resources on the table by allowing low-income countries to borrow up to an additional fifty percent from the IMF’s concessional facilities at an interest rate of zero percent. It is also intensifying its policy dialogue with member countries and strengthening its efforts to help increase their institutional capacity, particularly in the context of the sustainable development goals.

As for the World Bank, Managing Director and Chief Financial Officer Bertrand Badré Badre explained:  “We have to work together. We can create additional resources, we can share innovation, and we have to make things easier for investors.”

Harm Bengen / East Friesland
www.w-t-w.org/en/harm-bengen
www.harmbengen.de

First, we have to remember that women often get the top job when a company is in trouble.  Note HP and GM in the US>

Megam McArdle writes:  Justin Fox notes that HP was in a hard place, Jeffrey Sonnenfeld argues Fiorina seems indisposed to admit to and learn from her failures. Fiorina wasn’t the best CEO in history, she certainly wasn’t the worst, either.

Critiques of Fiorina’s tenure seem excessively focused on the outcome. People are far too prone to confuse outcomes with good decision-making. Too many of Fiorina’s critics pointed out that the company lost shareholder value, then settled back with a satisfied QED.

The merger Fiorina spearheaded with Compaq was costly and did not noticeably improve the company’s competitive position. The company stock price certainly did fall a lot from the time she started there to the time she finished (something that unsurprisingly happens to a lot of CEOs before they’re forced out). A lot of employees were laid off in the process of making a larger, less profitable company.

This does not mean that Fiorina did a bad job. Fox makes this point: The strategy she started paid off much better after she left, but she gets no credit for it. I’d like to make a different, if related point: Sometimes, CEOs don’t really have any good options.

At the time Fiorina took over, HP made a fine server and a nice workstation and a very good printer.  But it had become clear that the hardware business wasn’t such a great place to be. In fact, that had been true for a while, but until the late 1990s, there was some hope that things would shake down to a few players, prices would stabilize, and things would get better, as had happened in the automobile market. 

Did Fiorina manage to fix this problem? Not really. But it’s far from clear to me that anyone else could have fixed it, given that she presided over a difficult business model during the Great Tech Meltdown and the recession that followed. Her idea to merge with Compaq, in order to give the company enough scale to take on IBM in the corporate market, didn’t work out as she’d hoped, but while that’s obvious in hindsight, it was undoubtedly a mite harder to see at the time.

Failure doesn’t always mean that you made the wrong decision. It might just have meant that there were no good options, or that you got unlucky. 

Fiorina could be the best CEO in the world, or the worst, and that wouldn’t give us much insight into how she’d do as president.

We’re in the midst of a great outsider boom, from Bernie Sanders to Donald Trump, to populist parties in Europe and the election of a far-left Labour backbencher as leader of the party in the U.K. Much of the appeal seems to be that we need someone to shake things up who’s not beholden to the same tired, focus-grouped, compromised, corrupt political culture. On the left, this appetite seeks out radical firebrands who promise they won’t sell out to the neoliberal consensus; on the right, it looks to business leaders (or maybe surgeons), who have proved they are competent in a competitive domain utterly unlike the political system.

This is another way of committing the fundamental attribution error. Politicians are the way they are because they operate under serious constraints. 

The closest job is either head of another government (most of whom are not legally eligible to run for U.S. president) or governor (few of whom have any foreign policy experience).

The problem, in other words, is not the people or the “culture” they live in; it is the system. And at least politicians know how to get results out of that system, however puny those results may seem next to our grand dreams of wholesale change. They do this largely by means of the very things we hate about them: staying within fairly narrowly plausible lines, compromising, trading favors, catering to single-issue interest groups, focus-grouping and poll-testing everything to death. An outsider may not do any of those things. But if not, they won’t do much else, either.

While speaking on the sidelines of a meeting in the Turkish capital Ankara in early September, Christine Lagarde, the International Monetary Fund chief, declared that India’s GDP would be 27 per cent higher if the country had as many of its women working as men.

India is not the only country failing to tap women’s productive potential for its overall economic growth and prosperity. Ms Lagarde also said Turkey’s per capita income would increase 22 per cent if it achieved gender parity in the workforce, and even Japan and the US could increase their GDP by 5 and 9 per cent respectively with workforce gender parity.

“The SDGs are very aspirational,” says Poonam Muttreja, executive director of the Population Foundation of India. “Only if we have high, high aspirations can we ever begin to have a sense of inequality being tackled.”

The SDGs predecessors, the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), committed the international community to “promote” gender equality and empower women, as well as separately to improve maternal health, to reduce the number of women dying in childbirth each year.

In some areas, progress was impressive. According to a UN report, the number of girls in school — the main measure of progress in “promoting” gender quality in the MDGs — has increased substantially over the past 15 years, as about two-thirds of the world’s developing countries achieved gender parity in primary school enrolment.

In south Asia’s primary schools, for example, 103 girls are now enrolled for every 100 boys, compared with just 74 girls for every 100 boys in 1990. This was partly a result of India’s huge school building boom, and midday meal schemes, which made schools more accessible to girls in rural areas and provided an incentive to attend.

In contrast preventing women from dying in childbirth — and sparing them from unwanted pregnancies — has been tougher. Worldwide, the maternal mortality rate has fallen 45 per cent since the 1990s, from 380 deaths per 100,000 live births to 210 deaths per 100,000. But it remains stubbornly high compared with middle-income countries such as Thailand, which has a maternal mortality rate of 26 per 100,000.

About 71 per cent of global births are attended by a skilled health worker, up from 59 per cent in 1990s. Use of contraceptives remains limited, with just 64 per cent of sexually active women of reproductive age using them, up from 55 per cent in 1990.

The SDGs are meant to build on progress made towards the MDGs, but they are also much more far-reaching in their ambitions. The third goal, for example, is “promoting healthy lives for all, and wellbeing for all at all ages”.

As part of that, it sets a target of reducing maternal mortality to below 70 per 100,000 live births by 2030, ensuring universal access to reproductive and sexual health services, and bringing gender parity to higher — as well as primary — education.

But in the quest to achieve gender equality, the SDGs call not just for the provision of stronger services, but for the changing of patriarchal attitudes and practices, such as child marriage and female genital mutilation.

Other targets call for ending all discrimination against women and girls and all violence against women. In India, that would presumably include ending the widespread practice of sex-selective abortions to prevent the birth of daughters. It also calls for propelling more women into leadership roles at all levels of decision-making in political, economic and public life.

Gender perspectives and special indicators for women have also been woven into many of the other SDG goals, including in such areas as education and access to employment. “The SDGs will force countries to look at gender-disaggregated data for all the issues,” says Ms Muttreja.

While the many targets pertaining to women’s lives outlined in the SDGs may seem too diffuse to lead to tangible results, Ms Muttreja believes the goals will be a big step towards tackling the constraints on women’s lives.

Christine Lagarde says gender parity can boos workforce by 27%.  India’s GDP can expand by a whopping 27 per cent if the number of female workers increases to the same level as that of men, International Monetary Fund’s chief Christine Lagarde said today.

This is much higher than the positive impact a 50-50 gender parity in workforce can have on the economies of the US and Japan at 5 per cent and 9 per cent respectively.

Speaking at the launch of W20, a grouping of women leaders from the world’s 20 largest economies including India,

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Gina Glantz writes:  When is “celebrating” women not all that good for women?

Let’s face it. Something tagged exclusively for or about women is all too often a revenue generating strategy alongside a way to deflect criticism about the lack of attention to women and an opportunity for the powers-that-be to say, “look what we do for women.” Unfortunately, often, what they “do” is not much.

Politico’s opening news release about “Women Rule” said, “More so now than ever, women are driving the conversation in the political, business and advocacy arenas. . . . Women Rule is meant to recognize those women and share the innovative ways they are influencing some of the nation’s most important issues.” After waxing on about the influence of women, they then could only find 21 women they called “thinkers, doers and dreamers” as part of “The Politico 50,” which was made up of 81 individuals.

Food & Wine magazine touted its January “all-women’s issue” but could only find two women to feature among their 11 “best new chefs” in 2015.

CSIS featured Penny Pritzker and Samantha Power among others in their Smart Women/Smart Power series, but in 2014 they could only find one woman to speak at their premier forum titled, naturally, “Statesmen’s Forum.”

And what about TED? Despite great women appearing at TEDWomen, one can only find 33 out of 102 participants who appeared at this year’s main event. Maybe there should also be a TEDMen and the best of both should be featured at a TEDEverybody.

Design Dieter Huthmacher
@wtwfinance