Put simply, men spend their income on self-gratification, such as alcohol and cigarettes, while women spend their income on the home, for instance health and education. Where women have more command over household resources, children are healthier, better fed and more likely to go to school. The policy response to this has been to direct micro-credit to home enterprises run by women. The apparent saintliness of women also extends to how they are deemed to respect the environment more than men. Eco-feminists such as Vandana Shiva suggest that women can empathise with the 'rape' of Mother Earth by masculine capitalism because of their own experiences of assault and rape by men.
A recent report by Matthias Doepke and Michele Tertilt accepts the evidence points in favour of women, but asks if this arises from gender or other factors. In short, are women inherently more sensible then men? They find that it is the position of women in society that may be the factor:
'…we show that a gender wage gap can lead women to specialise in home production and therefore act like they have a higher weight on children relative to their husbands. We also also show that gender differences in investment opportunities can lead women to act like they value children relatively more.'
So women may appear to be less spendthrift simply because they have less opportunities to do so. If gender imbalances in the labour market were corrected, perhaps women would behave more like men. And also, men may have better investment opportunities than women, so narrowly targeting credit schemes at women may actually inhibit local economic development and thus suppress household income, to the detriment (one assumes) of child welfare.
It occurs to me that one reason that women spend on the household while men spend on ciggies and booze could be down to perceptions of surplus. Men perceive that once the household expenses have been allowed for, the balance is bunce, and there is a strong cultural inclination for men to gather together (in bars and clubs) in order to enjoy spending this surplus. Men may not be inherently selfish and a study of men-led single parent households may reveal that men do (of course) spend on education and health first when there is no woman to cover the time and expense of home production. But in households where women take charge of food and childcare, surplus income may be appropriated by the man in the assumption that it is the marginal product of their labour.
Development maven Chris Blattman is inclined to believe that it is biological, rather than structural differences that determines women's apparently superior behaviour. But how do women in more developed countries compare? If it was biological then it would apply to all women everywhere. Industrial working class areas of Britain may in the fairly recent past have been similar to developing countries, with the men down the pub and the woman scraping together the pennies to buy a school uniform. Yet as societies become more middle class these gender differences tend to diminish (I am not quoting any studies, this is speculation on my part), so does this indicate that men are becoming more like women, or vice versa? Or perhaps we are meeting in the middle, in a kind of androgynous compromise. Either way, that would appear to be socially constructed, not biological. If so, the lesson for development managers would be to stop lauding women at the expense of men, and instead consider the institutional conditions that reinforce both the bad and the good behaviour.
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