Michelle Obama: It's Up To Us As Mothers To Give Girls The Support That Keeps Their Flame Lit

Image: Lawrence Jackson

BY MICHELLE OBAMA

PEOPLE MAGAZINE
In honor of Mother’s Day this year, Michelle Obama shares memories of her mom, Marian Robinson, and women who shaped the extraordinary life of the girl from Chicago’s South Side who would grow up to be America’s First Lady. In a special personal essay, excerpted here, for the new issue of PEOPLE, Obama reflects on what she learned about parenting from her own mother:

My mother is a woman who chooses her words carefully. She’ll sometimes speak in clipped sentences, her wisdom packed into short bursts and punctuated with an infectious smile or a wry laugh. It’s a style that makes her a favorite of everyone she meets — a sweet, witty companion who doesn’t need the limelight.

As I’ve grown older, I’ve seen how her manner in conversation also reflects her approach to parenting. Because when it came to raising her kids, my mom knew that her voice was less important than allowing me to use my own.

That meant she listened a lot more than she lectured. Growing up, she was willing to endure endless questioning from me — Why did we have to eat eggs for breakfast? Why do people need jobs? Why are the houses bigger in other neighborhoods? She didn’t chide me if I scrapped with some of the neighbor kids or challenged my ornery grandfather when I thought he was being a little too ornery. She listened intently to the lunchtime conversations I had with my schoolmates over bologna sandwiches, and nodded patiently along to tales of my contentious piano lessons with my great aunt Robbie.

In today’s world, it’s easy to hear all that and think that Marian Robinson was bordering on negligent, that she was letting the kids rule the roost. But the reality was far from that. She and my father, Fraser, were wholly invested in their children, pouring a deep and durable foundation of goodness and honesty, of right and wrong, into my brother and me. After that, they simply let us be ourselves.

… I see now how important that kind of freedom is for all children, particularly for girls with flames of their own — flames the world might try to dim. … It’s up to us, as mothers and mother-figures, to give the girls in our lives the kind of support that keeps their flame lit and lifts up their voices — not necessarily with our own words, but by letting them find the words themselves.

For Mrs. Obama’s complete personal essay on motherhood, pick up the new issue of PEOPLE on newsstands Friday.

Women’s Unpaid Work Must Be Included In GDP Calculations: Lessons From History

Image via The Conversation

BY LUKE MESSAC

SOUTH AFRICA (THE CONVERSATION)--It’s been nearly 80 years since British economists James Meade and Richard Stone devised a method of national income accounting that would become the global standard. Today, we call it a country’s gross domestic product (GDP).

Their method was intended to provide a comprehensive and up-to-date picture of an entire national economy, by estimating the monetary value of all “economic” production that took place in a country in a given year. Like most economic statisticians of the day, Meade and Stone focused almost entirely on measuring the value of goods and services that were actually bought and sold.

But a problem quickly emerged, thanks to the experiences and observations of a 23-year-old woman named Phyllis Deane. She was hired by Meade and Stone in 1941 to apply their method in a few British colonies. In present-day Malawi and Zambia, Deane realised that it was an error to exclude unpaid household labour from GDP.

In a research paper I published recently on the history of the GDP, I write that Deane believed this convention excluded a great share of productive activity – especially in rural Africa. She argued that it was “illogical” to exclude the economic value of preparing and cooking food and collecting firewood. She contended that such kinds of labour had historically been excluded because they were commonly viewed as women’s work.

To decide which activities to include in her GDP calculations, Deane spent months conducting village surveys in order to measure, and include in GDP estimates, particularly burdensome activities like the collection of firewood.

She concluded that if governments wanted to formulate policies that increased aggregate national income and ensured an equitable distribution of that aggregate, the contributions of all producers – including rural women – had to be counted.

Over the next seven decades, GDP calculations would not generally include unpaid (and mostly female) labour. But Deane’s work shows us this was not the only way to measure economic production. As GDP calculations come under increasing criticism, we should look to her research for a way forward.

Invisibility of female labour
Richard Stone paid little attention to Deane’s recommendations. In 1953, he oversaw the publication of the United Nations’ first System of National Accounts. This report provided detailed standards for calculating GDP.

The system ignored Deane’s call to include unpaid household labour. And because UN technical assistance programmes sought to ensure that low and middle-income countries followed the system’s standards, Stone’s method had global consequences. Activities which were central to every day life in low-income African countries – like fetching water, grinding corn, and weaving mats – were not included in national accounts.

This invisibility of female labour in national income accounting eventually provoked a backlash. While pushing for female domestic labour to be economically quantified, scholar-activists like the Italian-born philosopher Silvia Federici, who taught for many years in Nigeria, argued that male “economic” production was impossible without women’s uncompensated “non-economic” labour.

For instance, without a wife to tend to the children and the home, how would a male factory labourer have the time or the energy to fulfil his stereotypical role as the breadwinner?
Time rather than money

Some feminist economists held a different view. In 1999 the New Zealand-born economist Marilyn Waring articulated concerns about including unpaid labour in national accounts. Rather than using economic activity to measure the value of labour, Waring called for a different indicator: time.

Time, she explained, was “the one investment we all have to make”. Drawing on research she conducted in rural Kenya, she argued that time-use surveys would demonstrate “which sex gets the menial, boring, low-status, and unpaid invisible work”.

Such surveys would show how targeted interventions, like access to clean water and efficient cooking stoves, could alleviate the drudgery of domestic labour and allow billions of women to gain greater freedom in how they spend their days.

In 2008, the authors of the newly updated System of National Accounts responded to their feminist critics by way of a compromise. They agreed to include the production of all goods – whether these were sold or not – in GDP calculations, so activities like weaving mats or brewing beer would be included.

However, they continued to exclude most unpaid household services, like cooking and cleaning. And the revised system ignored both Deane’s and Waring’s calls for more data on the distribution of time-use by gender. This has caused ever more criticism to be levelled at the system.

In recent decades, the work of feminist economics has shown how the methods of calculating GDP render much of women’s labour invisible. Meanwhile, surveys and time-use studies show the toll this has taken on women’s lives, particularly in the Global South. One recent report found that hundreds of millions of women worldwide have to walk more than a 30-minute round-trip to reach clean water for their families.

Future of the GDP
A 2009 report commissioned by then French President Nicolas Sarkozy stated that because GDP is “treated as a measure of economic well-being” it “can lead to misleading indicators about how well-off people are and entail the wrong policy decisions”.

More recently, the World Bank pointed out that GDP only measures flows of income but doesn’t tell us whether health care, education, and the wealth of the natural world are being built up or plundered. The Economist called for a “new metric” of economic progress that included “unpaid work in the home, such as caring for relatives”.

None of these insights are new. But they do mark a renewed appreciation for the economic indices and policies that feminist scholars have long favoured. For instance, Silvia Federici’s insistence that household labour should be paid has been at least partially realised in the spread of cash transfer programmes across Africa.

If we want to really bring women’s work out of the shadows and overturn the stereotypical gender roles that relegate women to more than their fair share of household labour, we must first take the blinders of the GDP.

African Woman: Taiye Selasai

No question, a woman's good looks captivates a man's mind and especially when that is combined with some brilliant stuff. Selasai has combined  her looks with talent and the sky is ultimately the limit. Born of a Nigerian mother, a pediatrician; and a Ghanaian father, a surgeon, and raised in Boston, she shuttles in-between cities where she calls home but lives in Rome. In 2011,  Granta published her short stories which was selected for the Best American Short Stories. In March 2013, Penguin Press published her first novel "Ghana Must Go." Image: Donatella Giagnori,

African Woman: Dambisa Moyo Responds To Bill Gates' Personal Attack Against Her

Dambisa Moyo is a Zambian-born economist and author of Dead Aid: Why Aid is Not Working and How There is a Better Way For Africa (2009). Moyo holds a Doctorate (D.Phil.) in Economics from St Antony's College, Oxford University; her 2002 dissertation is titled "Essays on the determinants of the components of savings in developing countries". In 1997, she earned a Master of Public Administration (M.P.A.) from Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government.She also earned a Master of Business Administration (M.B.A.) in Finance and Bachelor of Science (B.S.) in Chemistry from American University in Washington D.C.Moyo worked for the World Bank as a Consultant and at Goldman Sachs where she worked in the debt capital markets and as an economist in the global macroeconomics team.

Illustration of Dambisa Moyo by Anthony Jenkins/Globe & Mail

On May 28th, 2013 during a Q&A session at the University of New South Wales, Bill Gates, co-Founder of Microsoft and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, made some shocking and inappropriate ad-hominem attacks against me and my book Dead Aid.

In this video excerpt, Mr. Gates answers a question about Dead Aid: Why Aid Is Not Working and How There is A Better Way for Africa by claiming that I “didn’t know much about aid and what it was doing” and that my work is “promoting evil”.

I find it disappointing that Mr. Gates would not only conflate my arguments about structural aid with those about emergency or NGO aid, but also that he would then use this gross misrepresentation of my work to publicly attack my knowledge, background, and value system.

I would like to take this opportunity to address both of Mr. Gates’ claims here:

1. I wrote Dead Aid to contribute to a useful debate on why, over many decades, multi billions of dollars of aid has consistently failed to deliver sustainable economic growth and meaningfully reduce poverty. I also sought to explicitly explain how decades of government to government aid actually undermined economic growth and contributed to worsening living conditions across Africa. More than this, I clearly detailed better ways for African leaders, and governments across the world, to finance economic development. I have been under the impression that Mr. Gates and I want the same thing – for the livelihood of Africans to be meaningfully improved in a sustainable way. Thus, I have always thought there is significant scope for a mature debate about the efficacy and limitations of aid. To say that my book “promotes evil” or to allude to my corrupt value system is both inappropriate and disrespectful.
2. Mr. Gates’ claim that I “didn’t know much about aid and what it was doing” is also unfortunate. I have dedicated many years to economic study up to the PhD level, to analyze and understand the inherent weaknesses of aid, and why aid policies have consistently failed to deliver on economic growth and poverty alleviation. To this, I add my experience working as a consultant at the World Bank, and being born and raised in Zambia, one of the poorest aid-recipients in the world. This first-hand knowledge and experience has highlighted for me the legacy of failures of aid, and provided me with a unique understanding of not only the failures of the aid system but also of the tools for what could bring African economic success.

To cast aside the arguments I raised in Dead Aid at a time when we have witnessed the transformative economic success of countries like China, Brazil and India, belittles my experiences, and those of hundreds of millions of Africans, and others around the world who suffer the consequences of the aid system every day.

In conclusion, I am disappointed that Mr. Gates would choose the route of personal attacks rather than a logical counter argument about the role of aid in modern Africa. Such attacks add no value in the important discussions on the challenges the world faces to deliver economic growth, eradicate poverty, combat disease, and reduce income inequality, to name a few.

As I have always maintained, I respect the views of others and am open to having logical and meaningful debates with the ultimate goal of finding sustainable solutions to Africa’s economic problems.

Thank you,

Dr. Dambisa Moyo

African Woman: Phuti Malabie, Woman Of Substance

Phuti Malabie has been described by Wall Street Journal as one of the women to watch towards overclass status in the corporate world as more female corporate elites sprangs up.

Born in South Africa and graduated with a degree in Economics from Rutgers University, New Jersey and a Masters Degree in Strategic Management from De Mont University, Leicester, UK, Malabie started working for Fieldstone, an international boutique investment firm that focuses on energy companies and manager, Project Finance for Development Bank of Southern Africa before sitting on the executive board of several companies.

She is the Chairperson of Gigajoule Africa (PTY) Ltd; Managing Director of Shanduka Energy and Executive Director Mondi Shanduka Newsprint.

She loves reading, travel and golf. She was awarded "Top in Project Finance" by the Association of Black Securities & Investment Professionals (ABSIP) in South Africa in 2003, and nominated "Young Global Leader 2007" by World Economic Forum in Switzerland in 2007.