PODCASTS

Women and Geopolitics on International Women’s Day

Mar 7, 2018 | 21:32 GMT

Iranian Women Demonstration

ATTA KENARE/AFP/Getty Images

From parental leave and women in the workforce to the economic fate of nations, we mark International Women’s Day in this episode of the Stratfor Podcast with a discussion on women and geopolitics.

Stratfor Vice President of Global Analysis Reva Goujon sits down with Senior Science and Technology Analyst Rebecca Keller and Middle East and North Africa Analyst Emily Hawthorne to examine the evolving social, economic, cultural and political roles women play around the world today as well as ongoing challenges they face.

Related Reading:

The Geopolitics of Postmodern Parenting

The Geopolitics of Parental Leave

Harassment: A Problem of Geostrategic Proportions

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Transcript

Emily Hawthorne [00:00:00] I'm Emily Hawthorne, a Middle East and North Africa Analyst at Stratfor, and this podcast is brought to you by Stratfor Worldview, our premiere digital publication for objective geopolitical intelligence and analyses. Individual team and enterprise memberships are available at worldview.stratfor.com/subscribe.

Reva Goujon [00:00:30] Aging demographics and rapid technological progress are creating a lot of pressure and the answer to many of these states is to increase female labor participation.

Ben Sheen [00:00:47] Welcome to the Stratfor Podcast, focused on geopolitics and world affairs from stratfor.com. I'm your host, Ben Sheen. Increasingly, women worldwide are playing a leading role in the social, economic, cultural, and political achievements of nations. In many cases, their contributions are now seen as the key to a country's economic future. In this episode of the Stratfor Podcast, we celebrate International Women's Day by inviting three of the leading minds here at Stratfor for a discussion on these issues and broader geopolitical implications from their unique perspectives. Stratfor Vice President of Global Analysis Reva Goujon sits down with Senior Science and Technology Analyst Rebecca Keller, and Middle East and North Africa Analyst Emily Hawthorne to explore both the challenges and opportunities for women working to shape tomorrow. Thanks for joining us.

Reva Goujon [00:01:37] Hi, I'm Reva Goujon, and today I am joined by my colleagues, Emily Hawthorne and Becca Keller on the occasion of International Women's Day. Welcome, Emily and Becca.

Emily Hawthorne [00:01:45] Hi, Reva.

Rebecca Keller [00:01:46] Hey, Reva.

Reva Goujon [00:01:47] Emily, Becca, on Women's Day, of course there are going to be a lot of issues discussed globally on women's empowerment, the #MeToo movement, all important issues, and for the next few minutes, what we'd like to focus on is the geopolitical context around women in the workforce, and just in the course of preparing for this podcast, we've gone from identifying the identity politics over post-marriage name changes in Emily's case to Becca having to step out for a phone call from her daycare, and so these are, are the things that we, you know, go back and forth between everything from Saudi reforms and global trade wars to the latest thing that happened in our child's sleeping patterns, you know, so, it's a part of our daily lives, and of course we all have personal stakes in these issues, but the geopolitical context is something important for us to discuss here. Now, something that I realized over the course of my maternity leave in the past year was that this issue of parental leave is an issue of massive geopolitical significance, no matter if you're actually a mother or an aspiring mother, or someone who sympathizes with mothers, this is an issue that is relevant to anybody because when we look at the level of angst that we see globally when it comes to aging demographics, when it comes to technology displacing labor in the workforce, when it comes to the economic strain on governments trying to support aging populations and a less productive workforce,

Reva Goujon [00:03:28] these are all issues that cause huge economic and social strain, which then creates this debate that we're seeing in a lot of countries over how to boost the female labor participation rate, and central to that issue is the policy of parental leave, and of course in the United States, we're in a unique position in which the United States is the only OECD industrialized country without mandated paid parental leave. In fact, globally, we only join Suriname and Papua New Guinea, you know, with that status. And basically, it's a struggle for many mothers in this country to keep up with a competitive career and at the same time fulfill any aspirations of having children and multiple children at that, which is all the more important when we consider that 42% of American mothers are the primary breadwinners, and 22 and a half percent or so are co-breadwinners with their spouses. When you factor in things like the exorbitant cost of childcare and the struggle of unpaid maternity leave or partially paid maternity leave. This is something that, you know, we see policies severely lagging behind, especially when we look at that global comparison. And so, Becca, this is something that you have also paid attention to a lot when we look at other countries that are facing that demographic crunch, Japan in particular, and some of the cultural obstacles to a paid parental leave policy in trying to overcome this economic struggle.

Rebecca Keller [00:05:16] Yeah, absolutely, and the parental leave and the maternity leave is the start, but there's this societal expectation, once you get back to work. Having an employment environment that allows for a work-life balance and sometimes that's not the way a society operates, and that's sort of the problem we saw Japan run into in trying to use parental leave and increase maternity leave to try to encourage female participation in the workforce, and it didn't work as well as they had planned, in part because of the corporate culture in Japan which demands long hours which, you and I both know as working mothers, is a difficult balancing act as it is in a job that almost caters to that, and if the job doesn't, even when you come back from maternity leave, that's the hard part, in my opinion. Once you're back and you're trying to balance everything, having a workforce that understands that need to balance is a societal shift that we just aren't always seeing throughout the globe.

Reva Goujon [00:06:17] And that's the key. We say parental leave, as opposed to maternity leave, because when you get to the notion of parental leave, where responsibility is shared between the mother and the father, in the early months and years of a child's life, then the female is not seen as a liability in the workforce. That's really the key point that countries like Sweden have focused on to overcome that cultural aspect that you're speaking of, Becca, that Japan has yet to overcome, but where they figured out through trial and error how to encourage more men to actually participate in that parental leave, which does seem to be having some success. The interesting thing about the European case is some American mothers may look at European mothers with envy saying, "Oh, wow, the Europeans, they get a year or more of leave," but it's really not all that positive when you consider that those really long maternity leaves or parental leave policies can actually work against the female employee where you can get easily sidelined for promotions and for raises if you're just seen as someone who's going to be gone, as a liability for the company for a long time. The answer is not necessarily just longer leave. It's a more balanced leave policy between the mother and the father.

Rebecca Keller [00:07:45] It's a cultural shift, and I think we're seeing it, to some extent, but it's not going to happen overnight by any means. Even my husband, I'm going to enter a personal anecdote here... Even my husband and I who try as hard as we possibly can to hit 50/50 percent, don't hit that, as you heard. I got the call from daycare, I'm the primary contact on the parent, on the daycare sheet, because my job, it's easier for me to leave, and that's in part, my husband's a professor, and that really plays into it, and we can get into this a little bit later, but how the STEM fields, the science and technology, engineering and mathematic fields... There's still a big hurdle there for women to participate, especially at the higher level and I think that's going to become a lot more geopolitically relevant in the future as we start to see greater and greater technology incorporation, especially in the computing, in AI and robotics, moving forward.

Reva Goujon [00:08:40] That's interesting, Becca, because on the one hand, in the United States, we're not going to necessarily adopt Sweden-like model toward parental leave. Ee can pretty much forget that that's going to happen, but we are seeing some interesting things at the state level. We're seeing out of California, New Jersey, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Washington D.C., states starting to roll out paid parental leave policies, and I would always look at the tech sector, , the Amazons and Facebooks and Googles on more progressive parental leave policies, but you are bringing another point here that in fact while that may be true on some level, female participation in the STEM fields is still a big challenge.

Rebecca Keller [00:09:29] Yeah, absolutely, if you look at the statistics, if you look at bachelor's degrees, females account for roughly half, if not a little bit more, of all bachelor's handed out in the STEM fields. That number declines as you get to the higher and higher degrees and it's actually dominated a lot by the life sciences and the biological sciences. Ehen you're looking at the computer sciences and at information services which are going to become hugely important and are already starting to, you see incredibly low fractions of female participation and even at that low level, women leave these fields earlier. I'm actually an example of this. I have a PhD in chemistry, but I left the field a little over a year after I got my PhD because it was not an environment I felt would be conducive to a lifestyle that I wanted which was mainly to become a mother eventually, and that's not true for everyone. I don't like to impart my experience there, but that's the reason a lot of women leave the science and technologies. It's the very intensive sector, and that intensive nature that can, it's often not supportive. It can be described as an old boy's club at times. It's not conducive to keeping a high retention rate of women. Roughly half of the women who enter the field, leave within, in the first five to 10 years of being in the field. There's also the retention problem. If we're going to look at women in the workforce moving forward, and they're not participating in the STEM fields,

Rebecca Keller [00:10:58] that's an increasingly large portion of our workforce as we become more automated, and that becomes incorporated into daily life.

Reva Goujon [00:11:05] That's really the conundrum that we see a lot of governments facing, where, again, you take an example like Japan which recognizes that it needs to boost female labor participation and there have been all kinds of different consultants and studies that show that Japan can break out of this, this economic stagnation by increasing that labor participation for females and increasing their GDP as a result. If you bring more women into the workforce and into very intensive careers and you're not at the same time creating the space for women to have children, you're undermining your original goal. This is the challenge when we look at childcare costs, when we look at just rational parental leave policies and what states are having to contend with and try to learn from different examples. I really think in the United States' case, this is something that's going to come from the corporate level where you're going to have more people that will be discussing at the executive level, what are our company's leave policies? That's a question that I think should be asked not just by aspiring mothers, but men whether or not they have children, but in the interest of having more progressive leave policies for a more sustainable workforce to retain talent. I have friends of my own, in a variety of industries who are just more vocal about these issues in their respective careers and that perhaps is where we could see

Reva Goujon [00:12:51] more change mobilized through those corporate channels.

Ben Sheen [00:12:57] We'll get back to the second part of our conversation marking International Women's Day, including motivations behind cultural shifts on women's rights in the Middle East, in just one moment. And if you're enjoying the conversation, be sure to read some of our related columns, contributions, and analyses on Stratfor Worldview. These include columns such as, The Geopolitics of Postmodern Parenting, and The Geopolitics of Parental Leave. We'll include some links in the show notes. And if you're not already a Stratfor Worldview member, you can learn more about individual, team, and enterprise access at worldview.stratfor.com/subscribe. Now on to part two of our conversation with Stratfor's Reva Goujon, Rebecca Keller, and Emily Hawthorne.

Reva Goujon [00:13:40] That's the case that we see in much of the developed world, in the United States, in Europe and Japan, but let's shift over to a part of the world that's not exactly known for progressive policies toward women, in fact, quite the contrary. Yet, Emily, as someone who both covers the Middle East analytically and as someone who has worked in the Gulf region, we are seeing some very interesting examples of reform when it comes to empowering women.

Emily Hawthorne [00:14:12] Right, when we're talking about this global context for International Women's Day and some of the big shifts that are happening, it's natural that a lot of the media coverage is going to Saudi Arabia. A lot of people are aware that in June, women will be allowed to drive for the first time in Saudi Arabia, to get licenses, and there are a lot of other changes that are happening that I'm not sure people are aware of, as well. The Shura Council, a governing council in Saudi Arabia that has a lot of clout with the ruling family as well as with the clerics that run a lot of the sort of social mores in the kingdom, they are discussing an end to that guardianship system that prevents women from conducting business by themselves, traveling by themselves, getting visas by themselves, so there actually is a real discussion happening right now that would end that guardianship system. Already this year there was a decision that said that women can now own a business, with some stipulations, but without a guardian, and this is huge, and this gets to how this discussion about Saudi really plugs into the conversation that you and Becca were just having, is that Saudi Arabia is in the midst of a lot of economic reform plans. They're unrolling a lot of ambitious vision plans, and a huge goal is to increase national participation in the labor force, as well as to increase GDP and to diversify the economy. Well, women are a huge part of that, and there is already an entrepreneurial spirit

Emily Hawthorne [00:15:35] in Saudi Arabia that the government is trying to tap into, so we're seeing more and more women being appointed as CEOs and leaders of organizations in Saudi Arabia. It's still certainly a significant minority compared to men at the top of organizations and that's probably not going to change for many, many, many years.

Reva Goujon [00:15:51] And culturally, Emily, how does that actually play out in practice? Because, the idea of a female superior in a very patriarchal society like Saudi Arabia, I imagine, could create a lot of social tension.

Emily Hawthorne [00:16:08] That is certainly the case. I'm not a woman from the Middle East, but I did live in the Middle East and I did encounter some of the same issues when you request a meeting with a male CEO or a male chairman, and you're a young woman, there is an extra barrier to cross there. I can only imagine the type of work that Saudi women have been doing and the groundwork they've been laying in order to be accepted into boardrooms and be accepted as CEOs, but, if you look at some interviews from some of these women who have made it to the top of some of these organizations, Samba Financial Group, the Tadawul Stock Exchange, Citibank Middle East, they have said that they knew the task at hand, which was to do the work, and they ignored a lot of the societal barriers, that they simply pushed through it. They are opening doors that other women are going to be able to push through, and notably, they're opening doors that women who were educated in Saudi Arabia are going to be able to push through, because one of these really prominent women actually went to university in Saudi Arabia, and some of the women who have held prominent leadership roles in countries like the United Arab Emirates, which is, has a more progressive view on social issues and rights for women and the ability of women to be at the top of an organization. A lot of those women were educated abroad, in Europe, in the United States, and right now there's this mix of young Saudis

Emily Hawthorne [00:17:31] who were educated abroad but also educated at home, and there's a mix happening of sort of what they saw worked abroad and bringing that back home. Now with the young crown prince at the top of the food chain in Saudi Arabia, he is pushing for allowing for some of that change to happen. It's happening amid a much broader rash of social changes in the kingdom at large.

Reva Goujon [00:17:52] And we'll need to see, given the concerns of the religious establishment in Saudi Arabia, which so far has been relatively contained, but moving forward, the more Mohammad bin Salman keeps trying to push with these reforms and really,testing a lot of societal norms, that is something that we could see arrested to some degree, by that pushback.

Emily Hawthorne [00:18:18] Absolutely, and one thing about women's rights in Saudi Arabia or really anywhere, 50% of the global population does not think about these issues in the same way. There's not going to be one position that women are advancing in Saudi Arabia. There's different levels. We're seeing that especially in Iran right now, just across the Persian Gulf, where we're seeing groups of women campaigning to access soccer stadiums. That's another thing that recently changed in Saudi Arabia, women are allowed to go to soccer stadiums. Still not the case in Iran, but there are vocal groups of women that are pushing for that to change. There are a lot of young Iranians that want that to be the case, but there are also Iranians that are not ready for shutting down or changing some of the social practices they've become used to, so that's also a dynamic of this, is that people think about it in different ways. The conversation has to bring a lot of different people to the table.

Reva Goujon [00:19:09] And it's amazing, the speed at which we're seeing these changes take place. I remember just last year, you and I were talking about an article that was discussing how Saudi women, given that they're not, they weren't able to drive, previously, would basically have very high participation in bumper car venues, where it would just be women only nights and that was the time for women to enjoy the sensation of driving.

Emily Hawthorne [00:19:40] Or even to learn to drive. And that was a great, there must have been some great coverage of that in Saudi Arabia and I used to live in Dubai and there are plenty of Saudi women that are driving in Dubai, and so they learned to drive in other places.

Reva Goujon [00:19:54] And a lot of this, the regulation toward women in the workforce in Saudi Arabia, is in some sense acknowledging a reality that's been there for quite some time.

Emily Hawthorne [00:20:05] Absolutely, there have been women at the top of certain organizations, there have been women that are really the leaders of families, of structures, women that are at the top of certain offices within ministries, women that are at the top of certain economic sectors, there are female truckers in Saudi Arabia that the people know about in rural areas that have flouted the driving ban for years, but it's gone under the radar. The government hasn't really regulated it because it hasn't really been a big problem, but now you're talking about codifying and really legalizing a lot of big changes and making sure that everyone can take part in it. That's why it's a really big societal shift for a country of over 30,000,000 people, and which is the bastion of conservative social mores. Everyone should pay close attention to everything that happens in Saudi Arabia this year.

Reva Goujon [00:20:54] It seems like the underlying thread to each of these issues, is the economic imperative underlying each of these states and looking at what countries need to do to remain economically competitive in an era where aging demographics and rapid technological progress are creating a lot of pressure on the state. The answer to many of these states is to increase female labor participation, but the economics of childbearing still need to make sense at the end of the day. There needs to be rational policy toward incorporating women into the workforce. You can't have women entrepreneurs in Saudi Arabia who, at the same time, can't drive, or can't fill out their own paperwork and so the legislation has to catch up to reality in some sense. That may be the real geopolitical significance when we look at parental leave policy, when we look at women in the STEM fields, when we look at, you know, reform in areas like the Middle East, that are just now staring to really acknowledge women's role in the workforce.

Rebecca Keller [00:22:10] Yeah, exactly, Reva, and what you're saying begs the question, if we're looking for a societal shift, are we starting to see the beginnings of that? Is it the #MeToo movement, is it, is it the changes we're seeing in the Middle East, or is it something that's still to come? That's what we'll continue to look for.

Reva Goujon [00:22:27] Yes, we are seeing that early awareness toward the need to increase female labor participation around the world. The question that we're still testing is whether that acknowledgement will actually turn into action, and rational policy at the end of the day. Thank you, Emily and Becca, for joining me in this very important discussion today.

Emily Hawthorne [00:22:48] Thank you, Reva.

Rebecca Keller [00:22:49] Thanks.

Ben Sheen [00:22:59] And that concludes this episode of the Stratfor podcast marking International Women's Day. If you're interested in reading more on this topic, be sure to check out our related columns and assessments on Stratfor Worldview. You'll find several links in the show notes. Worldview members can also contribute to the conversation and engage with Stratfor's analysts, editors, and contributors in our members-only forum. If you're not already a member, learn more about individual, team, and enterprise access at stratfor.com/subscribe, or even if you have an idea for a future episode of the podcast, you can email us at podcast@stratfor.com. We really appreciate your feedback. And also consider leaving a review on iTunes or wherever you subscribe. For more geopolitical intelligence, analysis, and forecasting, that reveal the underlying significance and future implications of emerging world events, follow us on Twitter @Stratfor.