Magic Marriage!

Aditha Dissanayake

The day his cousin, Emma Wedgwood, accepted his marriage proposal an ecstatic Charles Darwin wrote in his diary “The day of days!,”. But the 29-year-old scientist was not always as exuberant as this, when it came to marriage.

Just a few months earlier, he had scribbled on the back of a letter a carefully considered list of pros (“constant companion,” “charms of music and female chit-chat”) as well as cons (“means limited,” “no books,” “terrible loss of time”). Once, in utter despair, wishing he could avoid marriage altogether, he wrote “It is intolerable to think of spending one’s whole life, like a neuter bee, working, working, and nothing after all.”

Little would Darwin have known when he wrote this last sentence two centuries ago, he was voicing the thoughts of many a woman of the 21st Century. Today, in a world where women earn almost 60 percent of all bachelor’s degrees and more than half of masters and Ph.D.s, where women have careers and earn equal salaries, only two choices seem possible when it comes to marriage; either no marriage at all or a marriage plus career, plus housework; in other words life after marriage for the modern woman is similar to the life of a neuter bee. Work, work and more work.

No wonder most educated women who are no longer forced to choose between a husband and an education, who have careers and a sense of independence postpone marriage for as long as possible. Especially so, because unlike in the days of Mrs. Bennet, of Pride and Prejudice fame, when marriage was almost the only way for a woman to ensure her financial security and get the father of her children to look after the family, the situation has changed drastically.

Today, 40 years after the feminist movement established women’s rights in the workplace, when women like Dr. Condoleezza Rice have made ‘singledom’ admirable, marriage seems at least from a legal and practical standpoint, no longer necessary. Why then, should women, and men too for that matter, continue to enter into an institution that sociologists famously describe as “broken.”

For men, the answer has always been clear and static. Most men need marriage; probably because they were the ones who invented it in the first place. Matrimony helps them even as it thickens their waistlines. According to Jeffery Sobal, an associate professor of nutritional sciences at Cornell University, ‘Marriage has a beneficial effect for both men and women, but the effect is much stronger for men. Men may resist, they may kick and scream about getting married, but then it does them a world of good.’ Dr. Sobal and his colleagues at Cornell have calculated that men gain more weight as a result of being married, yet they still outlast the confirmed bachelors.

The opposite seem to apply for women. According to Jesse Bernard in ‘‘The Future of Marriage’’ wedding bells sound the death knell to a woman’s well-being. She presents data indicating that while married men scored higher than single men on measures of mental health like depression, the opposite was true for women.

Since 1972, when Bernard wrote the book, other researchers have come to similar conclusions, and to this day the belief persists that the ranking of personal satisfaction runs from married men at the blissful peak, followed by single women, married women and, lastly, by single men.

Not everybody, though, agrees with this view. According to Dr. Linda J. Waite, a sociologist at the University of Chicago, the early studies were too limited and did not show the right picture. ‘‘When you broaden the psychological outcomes that you look at, you see that marriage is good for both sexes,’’ says Dr. Waite. ‘‘It helps men on this dimension, women on that dimension, but there’s no difference in the sum total of benefits.’’

In Dr. Waite’s view, a strong marriage is a wonder drug. She cites evidence from a recent cross-cultural survey, which found that married people in 17 countries reported feeling significantly happier than their unmarried peers. In another study, researchers analyzed 11 measures of psychological well-being in a group of people at the beginning and end of five years. During that time, some subjects got married, others were widowed or divorced and still others stayed married. On nearly all 11 variables, the still-marrieds outperformed everybody -- except the recently married.

‘‘There’s something about being married that makes people work better,’’ says Dr. Waite. ‘‘We are group-living animals, and we are hard-wired to bond.’’

All in all, whether you are brave enough to take the plunge seeking love, companionship, and the pure joy of living with that significant other through a sound marriage, whether you are brave enough to defy convention and remain single, you win.

Fortune always favours the brave.

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The case for educated women as good wives

Here is how a physician explained the problem in the Popular Science Monthly in 1905: An educated woman developed a “self-assertive, independent character” that made it “impossible to love, honor and obey” as a real wife should.

Postwar dating manuals advised women to “play dumb” to catch a man — and 40 percent of educated women in one survey said they actually did so. As one guidebook put it: “Warning! ... Be careful not to seem smarter than your man.”

If you hide your intelligence, another promised, “you’ll soon become the little woman to be patronized and wed.”

Insulting as it may have been, such advice was largely sound. Studying national surveys on mate preferences, David M. Buss, a psychologist at the University of Texas, and his colleagues found that in 1956, education and intelligence were together ranked 11th among the things men sought in a mate. Much more important to them was finding a good cook and housekeeper who was refined, neat and had a pleasing disposition. By 1967, education and intelligence had moved up only one place, to No. 10, on men’s wish lists. But over the past 30 years, these prejudices have largely disappeared. By 1996, intelligence and education had moved up to No. 5 on men’s ranking of desirable qualities in a mate.

The desire for a good cook and housekeeper had dropped to 14th place, near the bottom of the 18-point scale. The sociologist Christine B. Whelan reports that by 2008, men’s interest in a woman’s education and intelligence had risen to No. 4, just after mutual attraction, dependable character and emotional stability.

Invisible subsidies: women’s undervalued contribution to the economy

Dileni Gunewardena

This article looks at the variety of ways in which women subsidize the rest of society, summarizing economic theory and presenting some supporting evidence, and exploring the theme for Sri Lanka by looking at women’s invisible subsidy to one sector in Sri Lanka’s economy, namely the education sector.

The idea that women subsidize men by their unpaid work has been around for a long time. Women’s unpaid work includes such work as growing crops in a home garden, helping out at the family “boutique” or kade, or similar unpaid work in a family enterprise. But, what about the housework and child-rearing that women typically do? This work, too has been long recognized by social scientists as unpaid work. The following example from Achieving Broad-Based Sustainable: Governance, Environment and Growth with Equity by economists Jim Weaver and Mike Rock and sociologist Ken Kusterer, (Kumarian Press, West Hartford, CT,1997, p. 196-7), illustrates the point very nicely. They take the example of an ordinary egg, laid by a hen, it “takes the work of many people to get the egg from the hen to its consumer.” So, where, they ask, does the production process end and consumption begin? Did production stop when it was bought in the shop? But someone must take it home. Is transporting it from shop to home very different from transporting it in the earlier stages of its journey? At home, someone must unpack it.

Is this work? “It was, when the egg was put into storage two or three times before, so it must be work now”, say Weaver, Rock and Kusterer. “Later, someone takes the egg out of kitchen storage and makes herself an omelet. Is that production or consumption? What if a woman who doesn’t even like omelets makes it for her husband? In both cases, it’s still processing, still adding value, still production. Once finally readied to eat, the food must be served…Even when the food is set on plates in front of their faces, some members of the household, infants and the infirm, need more work from someone before they can consume it.” University of Amherst Professor of Economics and New York Times columnist Nancy Folbre puts it more succinctly:

“Marry your butler (or your research assistant) and share your income equally instead of paying him by the hour. The size of G.D.P. will shrink. Divorce him, and G.D.P. is likely to expand.” (New York Times, May 28, 2012). Gender Discrimination, Occupational Segregation and invisible subsidies

However, this is not the only way in which women subsidize the rest of society. They do so when they are paid less than they ought to be. Empirical studies in economics that examine wage gaps for evidence of discrimination are based on the idea that people with similar job-relevant characteristics (schooling, experience, training) will receive similar wages in the absence of discrimination.

If the wages of one group (e.g. women, blacks) is systematically lower than the wages of another group (e.g. men, whites) who are otherwise identical in terms of things that matter to wage determination, this group is considered underpaid, and the precise amount by which they are underpaid can be calculated using econometric methods.

A more subtle way in which women (and other groups) are underpaid is through occupational segregation. This term is used by economists to refer to a situation where the representation of certain groups (e.g. women, minorities) is disproportionately high in a particular occupation.

Usually there is no discrimination between groups (e.g. women and men) within the occupation, rather, wages for all in that occupation are low if there are relatively more women than men in it. The classic textbook examples are of teaching and nursing, where low wages co-exist with a high proportion of women in these occupations.

Invisible subsidies in the education sector in Sri Lanka

In a carefully researched and analytically tight article (The Island, August 2, 2012), Prof. Carmen Wickramagamage argues that women in Sri Lanka have benefited immensely from state investments in education. Prof. Wickramagamage points out (supported by research highlighted in this column, July 12, 2012) that along with the gains in female life expectancy, free education provided the impetus to families to educate their female children. As a result, women outnumber men in almost all levels and spheres of education (with some notable exceptions).

While this is an achievement to be proud of, it would also be interesting to examine to what extent women have subsidized the provision of general education in this country, and how effective this subsidy might be. Sri Lankan women have higher educational attainments than in many countries around the world (more girls complete compulsory schooling than boys and more girls are enrolled in secondary school than boys). They also have very low labour force participation rates. In fact, Sri Lanka had the lowest female labour force participation rate (35%) out of fifteen countries including Cuba (43%), China (68%), Kenya (61%), Malaysia (44%), Maldives (55%), Thailand (64%), Uruguay (55%) and Zimbabwe(83%) that have similar youth female literacy rates to Sri Lanka (World Development Indicators, 2009 and 2010). A 35% labour force participation means that almost two out of every three women over the age of 15 in Sri Lanka engages in unpaid work at home.

There is also a high likelihood that this mother has completed the compulsory schooling cycle and had some secondary education, and therefore to be the primary educational caregiver (e.g. helping children with homework, etc.).

A recent impact evaluation by the World Bank and EFA-FTI Secretariat (2011) of a Programme for School Improvement (PSI) which controlled for parents education found that mother’s education had a stronger impact on Grade 4 Test Scores of Math and English, than father’s education. This suggests that the benefits that women get from education spill over to the next generation, and provides some support for the speculation that there is an invisible subsidy in terms of women’s unpaid work in supporting primary education at home.

While there is no evidence of gender discrimination among teachers, in Sri Lanka, as in many countries, women form the majority of teachers in government schools (which comprise 91 percent of all schools in the country) who are poorly paid. This was confirmed by Minister Bandula Gunawardena who noted recently that principals and teachers do not receive big incentives compared with other state employees, they only receive self-satisfaction. (Daily News, August 3, 2012).

The extent to which teachers are poorly paid is clearly depicted in the accompanying graph which shows that compared to other government sector employees, the real value of teachers’ salaries have deterioriated drastically in recent times (World Bank, Treasures of the Education system in Sri Lanka, 2007, p.48).

What are the consequences of gender segregation in the state education sector? Does lower pay also suggest lower productivity? Do the women who provide “subsidized” education provide lower quality education during school hours in order to earn private tuition after-school? Do women who get transferred to remote schools use the opportunity to get out of their transfer by conveniently timed pregnancies? While these are some of prevalent perceptions, whatever evidence that exists to support these suggestions is anecdotal.

However, recent World Bank reports on Education that examine the quality of school education provide some evidence that school quality is poor (though improving), and that remote areas which face shortages of teachers also do worse in terms of educational outcomes.

In addition, a 2008 National Institute of Education study assessment of GCE O/L teachers in schools with poor GCE O/L Maths results found that as many as 36 percent of teachers from the Western Province and 51 percent of teachers in other provinces failed to get more than 50%; a 2010 Dept. of Examinations test of GCE O/L Maths teachers found that while the majority passed Paper I, only 42.5% were able to score over 80 out of 100 on paper II.

What does all this mean? Do teachers really provide an implicit subsidy to the rest of society, by being underpaid? Or is society paying for it in terms of poor educational outcomes? Is it a case of “pay peanuts and you will get monkeys”? Will the converse work? Will higher salaries attract better teachers? Or do the existing teachers simply need more training (teachers trained at National Colleges of Education performed the best in the DOE study cited above) and better facilities and other inputs? This column raises more questions than it answers, but it is clear that these are questions worthy of our attention.

Dileni Gunewardena is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Economics and Statistics at the University of Peradeniya.