A spokesperson for the Food and Agriculture Organization provided a citation from a 2009 Nike Foundation-funded report by Plan International, which cites a Nike Foundation media document. The Nike Foundation spokesperson referred me to a book where she believed the citation was found-a black-and-white book of photography of women around the world, called “ Women Empowered: Inspiring Change in the Emerging World.” The citation in the book said “United Nations study,” with no other information. In writing this essay, I reached out to some of the institutions using the statistic, as I continued to seek a source. Thus, if it were true, the purported social and economic return would reflect gender disparities that are deeply racialized in the global imagination. The images were always of poor black and brown girls and women from Africa, Asia, and Latin America. I emphasize “some” because the images of girls and women accompanying the statistic in the policy briefs and program Web sites were never of middle- and upper-class white girls and women from the U.S. If it were, it would reflect the disproportionate burden that some girls and women bear for the well-being of others. Though the foundation collected data to monitor the grantees it funded around the world, it did not conduct the type of research necessary to produce a statistic that could be generalized to all girls and women around the world.īut could the statistic possibly be true? With so many powerful people and institutions citing it, it certainly seemed true. Under the heading “Why Investing in Girls and Women Works,” I found the following: “When an educated girl earns income she reinvests ninety percent in her family, compared to thirty-five percent for a boy.” The Nike Foundation was listed as its source, but from my research on the foundation I had reason to doubt that. The speechwriter wanted me to draft talking points for Clinton on girls and women’s health, economic empowerment, and education, based on statistics that I had been given by another C.G.I. In the week before the organization’s 2009 meeting, I was introduced to Bill Clinton’s speechwriter by my supervisor. candidate at the University of California at Berkeley, conducting dissertation research on the transnational network of philanthropic and development institutions focussed on girls and women. I was first introduced to a version of the statistic a decade ago, when I was a volunteer with the Clinton Global Initiative’s girls and women’s commitment team. (The flip side of this idea is that “third world” men create little value for development, by spending their money on “whiskey and other women,” as Sandberg put it at Davos.) Development institutions such as the United States Agency for International Development, the Gates Foundation, and international N.G.O.s like CARE have taken up this idea and integrated it into their programs on the grounds of both equity and efficiency. This wider narrative was popularized by the Nike Foundation’s viral Girl Effect videos and written into best-selling books, such as Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn’s “ Half the Sky” and Greg Mortenson’s now discredited “ Three Cups of Tea.” Beyond simply capturing audiences, the view of women and girls as the most responsible economic actors in the household has influenced development policies and programs from Liberia to Afghanistan. They will end the so-called cycle of poverty in which individuals, families, communities, and nations get caught. They will supposedly marry later and delay childbearing, and, in doing so, generate economic development, limit population growth, educate their children, improve children’s and women’s health, conserve environmental resources, and control the spread of H.I.V. It is often cited as the key piece of evidence that investing in poor girls and women in Asia, Africa, and Latin America creates a high rate of return.
Over the years, I came across this statistic, again and again, on the Web sites and in the policy documents of the most powerful global development organizations, including the World Bank and United Nations agencies. Sandberg clarified: men spend “thirty to forty per cent.” And men, I think it’s more like forty per cent.” She turned to the former Chilean President Michelle Bachelet, then the executive director of U.N. She explained, “The data is pretty clear that women spend ninety per cent of their income on their children.
Sandberg, who was already famous for her “lean in” philosophy, said that the world would indeed look different. At the World Economic Forum, in Davos, Switzerland, in 2012, the Times columnist Nicholas Kristof asked Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg if the world would look different with greater investments in girls and women.
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