Missing: One Hundred Million Women
My favourite internet feminist, Twisty Faster, refers to the patriarchy and worldwide oppression of women as a "humanitarian crisis". The biggest humanitarian crisis there is, in fact. I've occasionally smiled knowingly to myself at this charming hyperbole, confident in the knowledge that while things for women are bad, and unfair, and frustrating, and infuriating, surely they're not as bad as all that...
Turns out my somewhat smug optimism was not so much misplaced as laughable. The oppression of women is a humanitarian crisis, one that has claimed more lives than any other preventable phenomenon in the last couple of centuries.
According to this article by economist Amartya Sen[1], the systematic neglect of women's health, the deprioritization of their medical and other survival needs, the discrimination in allocating resources and attention to their wellbeing, as well as violence, infanticide and selective abortion (but to a lesser extent than the former three) have meant that one hundred million women have either died prematurely or not been born at all.
That was in 1990. What is the death toll now?
There is a pretty strong correlation between economic standing and female survival, where economic standing is defined as either a) an independent income from work outside the home, b) recognition of economic contribution for work inside the home (e.g. in agriculture), or c) individual rights to property ownership.
Of course correlation is not causation; but when we consider that economic status almost inevitably goes hand in hand with freedom of movement, allocation of resources, and financial ability to procure proper care and nutrition, it's not a far fetched hypothesis to say that personal economic standing is a survival issue for women in developing countries (and some nominally developed ones like China).
Of the three contributing factors to personal economic standing, the latter two are difficult to change, and the avenues of change are not clear. Inheritance traditions are extremely deeply ingrained and intimately tied up with national, tribal and cultural identities. Legislation could support independence for women who are lucky enough to have inherited property by some secondary means, and disallow - at least in principle - the seizure of that property by male family members/spouses etc., and on paper such laws could even be enforced; but effective monitoring of the attitudes towards the woman's "right" to that property, and her ability access it and profit from it, would be extremely difficult if not impossible.
As for widening recognition for work performed in the home, women right here in the West (where they do not suffer disproportionate mortality) are neither compensated nor valued for the labour they put in to lubricating the "real" economy of starched shirts and neatly packed lunch boxes. Quite apart from the difficulty of exporting our values to other cultures, this is a value that we don't even have.
Taking a quick survey of different cultures (say, pre-Industrial England and 20th Century Brazil), it seems as if work for cash outside the home becomes a possibility, non-cash earning labour inside the family sphere is severely devalued, and eventually stops being counted as "work" at all. This principle operates on men as well as women, and goes some way towards explaining the movement towards slum-bound urbanization and such phenomena as Chinese cockle pickers and Indian construction workers in Dubai.
So what we're left with is paid work outside the home for women. Far from being the self indulgent luxury of middle class mothers "leaving their children to be raised by strangers" in pursuit of a selfish desire for empowerment and self actualisation, it turns out that paid work is, literally, a life saver.
[1] Hat tip - it's in the comments section.