Sex and the CIA

The CIA’s World Factbook is to our mind, an unsung hero of the internet. It’s a treasure-trove, revealing hidden insights about … well, pretty much any country you can think of. Its beauty lies in the depth and breadth of its data. On national economies, natural geography, religion, demographics, health and much more. And it’s all free.

The demographic stuff is particularly rich; it delivers fundamental and important contextual clues about the kinds of lives people live, their aspirations, their tensions and the dynamics affecting these. If, for instance, you need to understand the odyssey of women in a particular market, the Factbook can tell you recent Fertility Rates, Female Labour Force Participation, Age at 1st birth, National rates of contraceptive prevalence and much more. And what’s even better, is that for many parameters, you can get a comparative understanding of where one country stands relative to others. As with all statistics, it only becomes meaningful when you apply some inference and imagination…

You might infer with reasonable confidence that a country with a low fertility rate, high female labour force participation, higher age at first birth, and higher prevalence of contraception, is one where women are relatively in control of their destinies. In the sense that there are more possibilities for them in life than simply bearing and rearing children. Whilst the author is a white man from a developed economy and caution is in order in arriving at these conclusions, considering these indices together delivers an imperfect yet useful impression of relative ‘female empowerment’ from one country to another*.  Niger has a fertility rate in excess of 6 (highest in the world), female labour force participation at around 67% (which must mean many, many women both rearing large families and toiling in fields), mean age at first birth is 18 (lowest in the world), and contraceptive prevalence at 16.9% (among the world’s lowest). It would be hard to argue that women here have visions to aspire to beyond motherhood and agricultural labour. They are clearly not empowered to develop their own paths.

France, on the other hand, has a fertility rate of 2.1, female labour force participation at 61%, mean age at first birth 28, contraceptive prevalence at 83%. Relative to the average Nigérienne, she is in control of her reproductive potential and her professional progress.

None of this is suprising: one is a poor, developing, agricultural economy. One is among the richest, most sophisticated and developed economies in the world. The Factbook gives us plenty to go on here too, with figures on the relative shares of agriculture, industry and services in each country’s output and how the labour force is allocated between these sectors.

You’d think, then, that women are always relatively “empowered” (as per our rough and ready impression) in rich economies where most people are working in services and few in agriculture. So what happens if we map a few countries on those dimensions?

There are some interesting conclusions. Firstly,  that high levels of reproductive control and labour force participation don’t always look like ‘empowerment’ to a Western audience. (This is where our ’empowerment index’ becomes a bit dodgy). And secondly, that in some emerging economies, still weighted towards agriculture, women are racing ahead in terms of “empowerment.”

Japan, a rich, high services economy, where women have (not very many) children late and have reasonable participation in the labourforce, looks like an empowering place for women. It’s not. What these nationwide statistics don’t tell you is that young women tend to be very empowered.  They work, they marry late, and mostly live in cities which happen to have some of the best nightlife in the world.  Many have a whale of a time.  Empowered they are; so much so that many of their male peers are either terrified of them or trying to be more like them!   But if “she” does have children (and on average, she will be past 30 when she does so), any career advancement becomes very tough; she’ll have little access to affordable childcare and her husband will be required in the office for most of his time, so she’s likely to be tied to the home. In practise, developing a career may mean deciding not to have children.

You’d guess that countries would be arranged in a neat line from South-West to North-East on the map. But they’re not. Bangladesh confounds those expectations. Almost half the population are working in agriculture. Industry and services are, relatively speaking, in their infancy. Women there marry and have children young (mothers’ mean age at first birth is just over 18). But fertility rate is barely higher than France’s and contraceptive use is very prevalent (significantly more than in the other subcontinent nations). Whilst female labour force participation is low, it’s on the rise. We can expect urban women here to have real aspirations; in tension perhaps with traditional patriarchal values.

Vietnam stands out even further. Like Bangladesh, almost half the workforce is in agriculture. Industrial and service output is growing but from a low base. Yet on all those important indices, Vietnamese women have much in common with women in Western economies. They are heavily involved in the labour force, contraceptive usage is more prevalent than in the US, and fertility rates are around the same as Australia’s. Of course, these statistics are nationwide and there’s no such thing as an average woman anywhere. Yet these numbers suggest a cohort of women with a real desire to take control of their destinies, and it may well be the urban women leading the way here. Their sense of themselves and their role in the world is sure to be nuanced and complex and, again, in tension with traditional Confucian values which value family and the male line.

There are some high profile role models for these women… In a political world dominated by men, Nguyen Thi Kim Ngan, Chair of the National Assembly is the third most powerful politician. Le Hong Thuy Tien, together with her husband, runs Imex Pan Pacific, a luxury goods conglomerate with real estate and retail interests worth $1bn. Nguyen Thi Phuong Thao controls budget airline Vietjet and is now the richest woman in the country. She’s referred to as the country’s first self-made billionaire.

The latter two, both born in the 70s, are emblematic of the spirit and energy of women in Vietnam. Up to three million Vietnamese died in the war, many of them male soldiers who left behind wives and young children (although women fought and died, too). When the war ended, collectivisation policies plunged the country into hardship. Single mothers supported their families with clandestine household commerce and raised their daughters to be equally resourceful.

This female resourcefulness, passed down through the maternal line, seems to run deep.  And it may explain why Vietnam often seems to be a cultural outlier in any study of South Eastern markets.

*The author, a white British man, is aware of the attendant problems in proposing relative measures of “female empowerment” in countries around the world, but hopes that this loose and necessarily imperfect construction will nevertheless be thought-provoking and interesting.