On Christmas Day in Dimi village, a remote farming community in Malawi, everyone had gathered to celebrate the day except for one woman, Patricia, who was in a field a mile away, kneeling on the damp earth in her half-acre farm plot, planting groundnuts.
As the rest of her village shared food and festive conversation, Patricia worked with exacting care, making sure her seeds lined up in perfect double rows—75 centimeters between each row, 10 centimeters between each plant.
Six months later, I visited Patricia at her farm plot and told her, “I heard how you spent Christmas Day!” She laughed and said, “That’s when the rains came!” She knew her crops would do better if she planted them when the ground was still damp, so that’s what she did.
You’d think that someone with Patricia’s dedication would be hugely successful, but for years, she had struggled. In spite of her painstaking work, even the basics had been out of reach for her and her family. She didn’t have money for school fees for her kids, the kind of investment that can help break the cycle of poverty, or even money to buy a set of cooking pots, which can make life a bit easier.
Farmers need five things to succeed: good land, good seeds, farming supplies, time, and know-how. There were barriers standing between Patricia and every one of these things, simply because she was a woman.
For one, and this is common in sub-Saharan Africa, Malawian tradition in most communities dictates that women cannot inherit land. (Recently passed laws in Malawi give women equal property rights, but customs are slower to change.) So Patricia didn’t own her plot. She paid to rent it. It was an expense, and it kept her from investing in the land to make it more productive.
Also, because Patricia is a woman, she didn’t have a say in the family spending. For years, her husband decided what the family spent—and if that didn’t include farming supplies for Patricia, there was nothing she could do about it.
Her husband also decided how Patricia spent her time. She did a funny impression of him ordering her around: “Go and do this, go and do this, go and do this, go and do this, all the time!” Patricia spent her days cutting firewood, fetching water, cooking meals, cleaning dishes, and caring for the kids. It gave her less time to spend on her crops or take her produce to market to make sure she got the best price. And if she wanted to hire help, laborers wouldn’t work as hard for her as they would for a man. Men in Malawi don’t like taking orders from women.
Remarkably, even the seeds Patricia was planting were affected by her gender. Development organizations have long worked with farmers to breed seeds that will grow bigger plants or attract fewer pests. For decades, though, when these groups consulted with leaders in the farming community, they would speak only with men, and men are focused on growing only the crops they can sell. Almost nobody was creating seeds for farmers like Patricia, who are focused also on feeding their families and who often grow nutritious crops like chickpeas and vegetables.
Governments and development organizations offer frequent sessions to train farmers. But women have less freedom to leave the house to attend these sessions, or even to talk with the trainers, who tend to be male. When organizations tried to use technology to spread information—sending tips via text message or over the radio—they found that men were the ones controlling that technology. If families had a cell phone, men were carrying it. When families listened to the radio, men were controlling the dial.
When you add it all up, you start to understand how a smart, hardworking farmer like Patricia was never able to get ahead. There was one barrier after another blocking her way because she was a woman.
By the time I met Patricia in 2015, I had come to understand the gender roles and biases that limited her success as a farmer. It had taken me a long time to figure it out—and it began when Warren Buffett gave the bulk of his fortune to our foundation.
Warren’s gift opened up new frontiers for us at the foundation. We suddenly had the resources to invest in areas we knew were important, and where we saw huge promise, but hadn’t yet entered in a big way. We’re a learning foundation. If we see opportunity in an area that’s new to us, we start by making small grants. We watch what happens; we try to figure things out. We look for points of leverage. Then we see if a larger investment makes sense. When Warren told us about his gift, we had been exploring a number of new areas but hadn’t yet made the decision to scale up. His resources drove us forward and would soon lead us to gender equity as an important new focus of our giving.
Bill and I decided that we would use the new resources to move outside global health and begin making direct efforts to reduce poverty. “How do you help people in extreme poverty get more income?” That’s the question we started with, and our first step was to learn more about how they live their lives, how they get their income now. It turns out that more than 70 percent of the world’s poorest people get most of their income and their food by farming small plots of land. This combination presents a huge opportunity: If these smallholder farmers can make their farms more productive, they can grow more crops, harvest more food, enjoy better nutrition, and earn more income. In fact, we believed that helping the poorest farmers grow more food and get it to market could be the world’s most powerful lever in reducing hunger, malnutrition, and poverty.
We decided to put our principal focus on Africa and Southeast Asia. Sub-Saharan Africa was the only region of the world where the crops grown per person had not increased in twenty-five years. If the world could help develop crops that could resist floods, drought, pests, and disease and deliver higher yields on the same land, life would improve for millions of people. So our strategy seemed clear: We would focus on the science, trying to help researchers develop new seeds and fertilizers that could help smallholder farmers grow more food.
That was the approach we set at the very beginning, in 2006, when Rajiv Shah, the head of our new agriculture program, attended a World Food Prize symposium in Iowa and gave a speech to top agriculture experts, explaining our hopes and asking for advice and ideas. The event called for Raj to speak and then hear responses from four eminent figures. Dr. Norman Borlaug was the first to respond. He had received the Nobel Peace Prize for launching the Green Revolution that created a surge of farm productivity and saved millions of people from starvation. The next speaker was Sir Gordon Conway, the chief scientific advisor at the UK’s Department for International Development. Then Dr. Xiaoyang Chen spoke, who was president of South China Agricultural University.
By the time Dr. Chen finished speaking, the event had run long past its allotted time, and there was one person still to respond, a woman, Catherine Bertini, who had been executive director of the UN’s World Food Programme. She sensed that the audience was tired of all the talking, so she came straight to the point.
“Dr. Shah, I would like to remind you of the quote from one of our founding mothers of the United States of America, Abigail Adams, who wrote to her husband while he was in Philadelphia working on the Declaration of Independence, and said, ‘Don’t forget the ladies.’ If you and your colleagues at the foundation don’t pay attention to the gender differences in agriculture, you will do what many others have done in the past, which is waste your money. The only difference will be you’ll waste a lot more money a lot faster.”
Catherine sat down, and the meeting adjourned.
A few months later, Raj hired Catherine at the Gates Foundation to teach us about the links between agriculture and gender.
When Catherine came on board, there was no talk at all of gender at the foundation. It wasn’t anywhere in our strategy. I don’t know what others were thinking at the time, but I’m embarrassed to say that I had not thought of gender in connection with our development work. I’m not saying that I missed the fact that women were the principal beneficiaries of many of our programs. Family planning was clearly a women’s issue, as was maternal and newborn health. To reach more children with vaccinations, we had to target mothers with our message. The gender element in those issues was easy to see. But farming was different. There was no obvious gender aspect to it, at least not to me, and not at the start.
That began to change about the time Catherine joined Raj in a meeting with Bill and me to review our agricultural strategy. Raj introduced Catherine and said, “She’s here working on gender.” That word seemed to provoke Bill, and he started talking about being effective, getting results, and staying focused on that. Bill supported women’s empowerment and gender equity but thought they would distract us from the goal of growing more food and feeding more people—and he thought anything that would blur our focus would hurt our effectiveness.
Bill can be intimidating, but Catherine was eager to have that conversation. “This is completely about effectiveness,” she said. “We want to make smallholder farmers as effective as they can be, and we want to give them all the tools—the seeds, fertilizer, loans, labor—they need to achieve it, so it’s very important for us to know who the farmers are and what they want. Next time you’re in Africa driving in a rural area, look out the window and see who’s working in the fields. They’re almost all women. If you listen only to the men, because they’re the ones with the time and social permission to go to the meetings, then you’re not going to know what the women really need, and they’re the ones who are doing most of the work.”
Catherine left the meeting and said to Raj, “Why am I here? If he doesn’t buy it, it’s never going to work.” Raj just said, “He heard you. Trust me.”
A few months later, Catherine was driving down the road listening on her car radio to an interview Bill was doing on NPR about economic development, and Bill said, “The majority of poor people in the world are farmers. Most people don’t know that the women are doing most of that work, and so we’re giving them new seeds, new techniques. And when you give women those tools, they use them very effectively.”
Catherine almost drove off the road.
What Catherine experienced there, which Raj predicted, is that Bill learns. He loves to learn. Yes, he challenges people very hard, sometimes too hard, but he listens and learns, and when he learns, he is willing to shift. This passion for learning is not just Bill’s approach; it’s mine as well. It’s the central pillar of the culture we’ve tried to create at the foundation, and it explains how we all—some faster than others—came to agree that gender equity should drive the work we’re all trying to do.
The fact that most of the farmers in Malawi are women wouldn’t matter if gender differences and inequalities didn’t exist. But as Patricia’s life shows, gender differences and inequalities do matter—in ways that make it much harder for women to grow the crops they need.
Hans Rosling once told me a story that helps make the point. He was working with several women in a village in the Congo to test the nutritional value of cassava roots. They were harvesting the roots, marking them with a number, and putting them into baskets to take them down to the pond to soak. They filled three baskets. One woman carried off the first basket, another woman carried the second basket, and Hans carried the third. They walked single file down the path, and a minute later, as they all put down their baskets, one of the women turned around, saw Hans’s basket, and shrieked as if she’d seen a ghost. “How did this get here?!”
“I carried it,” Hans said.
“You can’t carry it!” she shouted. “You’re a man!”
Congolese men don’t carry baskets.
Strict gender rules extend to other areas as well: who clears the land, who plants the seeds, who weeds the field, who does the transplanting, who runs the house, cares for the children, and cooks the meals. When you look at a farmer, you’re looking at a mother. Household labor not only takes time away from farming but keeps the woman from attending meetings where she could get tips from other farmers and learn about improved seeds, best practices, and new markets. As soon as you see that most farmers are women, and that women are beneath men, everything shifts.
A landmark 2011 study from the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization showed that women farmers in developing countries achieve 20–30 percent lower yields than men even though they are just as good at farming. The women underproduce because they do not have the access to the resources and information that men do. If they had the same resources, they would have the same yields.
The report said that if we could recognize poor women farmers as clients with distinctive needs and develop technology, training, and services designed specifically for them, then women’s crop yields would be the same as men’s. That would put more income in the hands of women, give them a stronger voice in the household, lead to better nutrition for the children, add income for school fees, and—because of the rise in food production—reduce the number of undernourished people in the world by 100 to 150 million.
The rewards are immense, but so are the challenges. Patricia is not just one woman; she is millions of women. And those millions of women have smaller plots of land than men. They have less access to extension services, to the market, and to credit. They lack seeds and fertilizer and training. Women in some areas are not allowed to hold bank accounts or enter into contracts without the endorsement of a male family member.
If you’re working to help women change their lives and you hit these gender barriers, it could make you step back and say, “Culture change is not our role.” But when you learn that women are more than half of all farmers and can’t get what they need to make their plots productive, and as a result their children go hungry and their families stay in poverty, it forces you to choose. You can keep doing the same thing and reinforce the biases that keep people poor. Or you can help women get the power they need to feed their children and reach their potential. It’s a clear choice—challenge the biases or perpetuate them. Politically, it’s a tricky question. Morally, it’s easy: Do you submit to the old culture that keeps women down, or do you help create a new culture that lifts women up?
Fighting for gender equity in agriculture was never our plan. We had to spend some time trying to take it all in. That is one of the great challenges for anyone who wants to help change the world: How do you follow your plan and yet keep listening for new ideas? How can you hold your strategy lightly, so you’ll be able to hear the new idea that blows it up?
We started out thinking that poor farmers just needed better technology, such as new seeds that would allow them to grow more crops on the same land in harsher weather. But the potential for a farming revolution was not only in the seeds; it was in the power of the women who plant them. This was the huge missed idea. This was the new plan. If we want to help farmers, we have to empower women. Now, how do we get everyone on the team to see it that way?
As I saw it at the start, the goal of empowering women was not in addition to, but on behalf of, more food, better nutrition, and higher income for the poorest people in the world.
Gender equity is a worthy goal for its own sake. But that was not how it was going to be sold in our foundation. Not back then. This was a new idea, and there were skeptics. One highly placed person shut down a conversation by saying, “We don’t do ‘gender.’” Another person pushed back, “We are not becoming a social justice organization!”
When we started, we were mindful of the resistance. Even the most passionate advocates wouldn’t talk about empowerment. That term put people off and obscured the core message, which is “you have to know what the farmer needs.” We simply had to remind people working on agriculture that the farmers were often women. That meant that the researchers had to start gathering information from women, not just men. It meant that the scientists working on new seeds needed to talk to women.
Here’s an example. When agricultural researchers want to improve a new rice seed, they often leave their labs and go talk to the farmers about the traits they want to see in an improved seed.
This is a great idea. But many of the researchers are men, and they often talk only to male farmers. The woman farmer very often isn’t part of the conversation because she is too busy on other tasks in the household, or because it’s culturally inappropriate for a male professional to speak with a woman, or because the researcher doesn’t realize how critical her input is.
Often, then, what happens is that the researchers tell the men about the traits of an improved seed, and the men like what they hear. So the researchers go back to the lab and finish the seed and help get it to market. The men buy it, and the women plant it, and then the women (who do most of the harvesting) see that the rice stalk grows too short, and they have to stoop over to harvest it. After a while, the women tell their husbands they want a taller plant that doesn’t break their backs during harvest. So the farmers don’t buy the seeds anymore, and a whole lot of time and money and research has been wasted that could have been saved if only someone had talked to the women.
The good news is that the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) has learned that women and men farmers have some differences in what they’re looking for in a good rice variety. Both men and women prefer traits like high yield; obviously, they want to produce more crops if they can. But because women’s jobs on the farm include harvesting and cooking, they also prefer rice varieties that grow to the right height and don’t take as long to cook. So the IRRI researchers make a point of talking to men and women when they consult with farmers on the traits they want in the improved seeds. They know that if input from both men and women is included in seed development, farmers are more likely to adopt that seed in the long run.
Once we were armed with these lessons, we began to make grants that could break down the barriers women farmers faced in getting the improved seeds, fertilizer, and technology—and the loans—they needed to be productive on the farm.
One of the early grants we made was beautifully simple: We wanted to get technical assistance to farmers in rural Ghana, so our partner decided to air a radio show telling women farmers how to grow tomatoes, and they did a lot of research to make sure the show would have the greatest possible reach. They’d decided on radio as the best medium because many people couldn’t read and most people had no TV. Once a week was the right pacing, since it lined up with the pace of new tasks for the growers. Tomatoes were the best crop because they were relatively easy to grow, and they were a cash crop that would also improve nutrition for the family. The last thing they had to figure out was what time women listened to the radio—because if they put the program on when the man controlled the radio, the woman wasn’t going to learn a thing about growing tomatoes.
That’s the kind of thinking that began to take hold in the foundation; people became very tuned in to gender differences and social norms in programs where they mattered. We began the shift in a low-key way, with just a few gender experts at the foundation talking to people who wanted to hear how a gender focus could help them achieve their goals. And they spoke softly. One of the early leaders, Haven Ley, who now is my top policy advisor, jokes that she “worked in the basement for three years.” She scarcely ever said the words “gender equity” or “women’s empowerment.” Instead, she explained to people how paying attention to gender differences would make an impact. “You can’t just come in there and talk about your concerns,” Haven says. “No one cares. You have to figure out what success looks like to people, what they’re scared about failing at, and then you can help them get what they want.”
Progress was steady, but it was too slow for me. People were still speaking softly about gender at the foundation, sometimes in whispers, not quite wanting to come forward. I could see how even some of the strongest advocates were tiptoeing around it, how in meetings they’d raise it but not push it—careful not to say too loudly what they knew to be true.
For an agonizingly long time, I couldn’t give them the lift I wanted to give them. I was watching, but I was not ready. It wasn’t the right time. The foundation wasn’t quite ripe; my command of the data wasn’t good enough. I didn’t have the time to take on a huge new project—I was working hard on family planning. I had three kids at home. I was figuring out equality in my own marriage. There were so many things in the way. But then the moment came and the timing was right. I was ready. I had the conviction, the experience, and the data at hand. The foundation had the staff. So I decided to write an article for the September 2014 issue of Science in which I would set out our foundation’s commitment to gender equity.
In the article, I acknowledged that we at the foundation were latecomers in using gender equity as a strategy. “As a result, we have lost opportunities to maximize our impact,” I wrote. But our foundation would now “put women and girls at the center of global development,” because “we cannot achieve our goals unless we systematically address gender inequalities and meet the specific needs of women and girls in the countries where we work.”
I wrote the article for our partners and for funders and others involved in the work. But principally, I wrote it as a message to everyone who works at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. I felt the need to state loudly and publicly our strategy and priorities on gender equity. It was the strongest lever I ever pulled to direct the focus and emphasis of our foundation. It was time to move out of the basement.
Six months after the Science article ran, I took a trip to Jharkhand, a state in eastern India, to visit a grantee of ours called PRADAN. PRADAN was one of the first organizations we invested in after we saw the central role of women farmers.
When PRADAN began its work in the 1980s, its leaders didn’t start with a focus on empowering women; they figured it out as they went along. In the spirit of pradan—“giving back to society”—the group began placing committed young professionals in poor villages to see if they could help out. When the new recruits arrived in the villages, they were shocked to see how the men treated the women. Husbands would beat their wives if they left home without permission, and everyone—even the women—thought that was acceptable. Naturally, these women had no standing in the community: no resources, no bank accounts, no way to save, and no access to loans.
So leaders at PRADAN began talking to the husbands, getting permission for their wives to meet in groups of ten or fifteen to talk about farming. The deal with the husbands was “if you let your wife attend these groups, she’ll increase your family’s income.” So the women began to meet regularly and save their money together, and then, when one of them needed to make an investment, she could take out a loan from the group. When the group got enough money, it would connect with a commercial bank. This helped a great deal with the financial aspects of farming. But the women soon also demanded the same agricultural training the men got. They learned how to identify the seeds and grow the crops that would allow them to feed their families, sell the surplus, and make it through the hunger season.
That was the background of the group, so when I attended a meeting, I was prepared to be impressed, but even I was surprised when the group leader said, “Raise your hand if—before you joined the self-help group—you could grow enough food to last your family the full year.”
Not a single hand went up.
Then she said: “Raise your hand if you had a surplus to sell last year.”
Almost every hand went up.
Empowerment never confines itself to categories. When farming advice and financial support began to make a difference for the women, they started looking for new battles to fight. When I visited, they were lobbying to get better roads and clean drinking water. They’d recently put in an application with the local government for the village’s first toilets. They’d started a campaign against their village’s alcohol abuse problem—calling on the men to stop drinking, pressuring government officials to enforce the laws, and even working with the local women who sell alcohol to help them find new ways to make a living.
And there was another sign of empowerment—the way the women carried themselves. When I meet women who’ve faced heavy gender bias, I often see it in the way they look at me. Or don’t look at me. It’s not easy to unlearn a lifetime of being meek. The posture of these women was different. They stood tall. They spoke up. They weren’t afraid to ask questions, to tell me what they knew, what they thought, what they wanted. They were activists. They had that look. They had been lifted up.
The empowerment approach taken by PRADAN is central to our foundation’s strategy. We help connect women to people who can advise them on farming and connect them to markets. We also help women access financial services so they can save money and get loans. When women get the money for their work deposited into their own bank accounts, they earn more and save more. They also are more respected by their husbands, and that begins to shift the power in the household.
This is the kind of work we’ve been accelerating since I wrote that article in Science, and we’ve changed the foundation so we can pursue it. We’ve hired more gender experts. We’re getting data on the lives of women and girls so the things that matter get measured. And we’re supporting more organizations like PRADAN that take an overt and intentional approach to empowering women. Increasingly, we are seeing the results that come from putting women and girls at the center of our strategy.
Patricia, the farmer who was planting her seeds on Christmas Day, saw her life changed by the empowerment that came through membership in a group. Let me tell you the rest of her story.
Patricia joined a program called CARE Pathways, an organization that teaches conventional farming tips but also teaches farmers about equality. The group asked Patricia to get her husband to join the sessions, and she was a bit surprised and gratified when he agreed. In one session, Patricia and her husband were told to role-play their life together at home but to switch places—the wife would play the role of the husband, and the husband would play the role of the wife, just like the exercises I described in the chapter on unpaid work. Patricia got to order her husband around, just as he’d been doing to her: “Go and do this, go and do this, go and do this!” And her husband had to do what she said without complaint.
The exercise opened his eyes. Afterward, he told her he realized that he hadn’t been treating her as a partner. In another exercise, they drew the family budget like a tree, with roots representing their sources of income and branches representing expenditures. They discussed together which roots could get stronger and which branches could get pruned. As they discussed Patricia’s farm income, they talked about her farming supplies, and whether maybe they should be a higher priority.
Patricia told me these exercises changed her marriage. Her husband began listening to her ideas and working with her to help make her farm plot more productive. Soon after the sessions, an opportunity came that made all their decisions pay off.
CARE Pathways, concerned that there weren’t very many quality seeds for the kinds of crops women tend to grow, began working with a local research station to design a groundnut seed that produces more nuts and does a better job resisting pests and disease. They developed a good seed, but they didn’t have nearly enough seeds to supply them to all the women farmers in the area. They first needed to find farmers to grow these seeds into plants that produce more of these perfected seeds. Only after the seeds had multiplied enough could they be sold to other farmers.
This process is called “seed multiplication,” and it requires even more care and attention than typical farming. Only the best farmers are selected to be seed multipliers—and Patricia became one of them. When I asked her how she could produce at the high level needed to be a seed multiplier, she said, “I have a supportive husband now.”
That supportive husband agreed that he and Patricia should take out a loan to buy the improved seeds. That’s what Patricia was planting on Christmas. By the time I met her, she’d had her first harvest. The half-acre plot produced so much that she could supply seeds to other farmers and still plant two full acres of her own the following season, four times what she’d planted the year before. And from that harvest came not only plenty of food for her family but enough income to cover her children’s school fees and also pay for those cooking pots!
Farming is not the only area of the economy that is stunted by gender bias. Recent reports from the World Bank show that gender discrimination is encoded in law nearly everywhere in the world.
In Russia, there are 456 jobs women cannot perform because they’re deemed too strenuous or dangerous. Women there can’t become carpenters, professional divers, or ship captains, to name just a few positions. One hundred and four countries have laws that put certain jobs off-limits for women.
In Yemen, a woman can’t leave the house without her husband’s permission. Seventeen countries have laws that limit when and how women can travel outside the home.
In Sri Lanka, if a woman is working in a shop, she must stop by 10:00 P.M. Twenty-nine countries restrict the hours women can work.
In Equatorial Guinea, a woman needs her husband’s permission to sign a contract. In Chad, Niger, and Guinea-Bissau, a woman needs her husband’s permission to open a bank account.
In Liberia, if a woman’s husband dies, she has no right to her family’s assets. She herself is considered part of his property—and, as people in some rural communities will explain, “property cannot own property.” Thirty-six countries have rules limiting what wives can inherit from their husbands.
In Tunisia, if a family has a daughter and a son, the son will inherit twice as much as the daughter. Thirty-nine countries have laws that keep daughters from inheriting the same proportion of assets as sons.
In Hungary, men on average are paid a third more than women in managerial positions—and this does not violate the law. In 113 countries, there are no laws that ensure equal pay for equal work by men and women.
In Cameroon, if a wife wants to earn additional income, she has to ask her husband’s permission. If he refuses, she has no legal right to work outside the home. In eighteen countries, men can legally prohibit their wives from working.
Finally, discrimination against women is perpetuated not only in laws that exclude women but also in the absence of laws that support women. In the United States, there is no law ensuring paid maternity leave for new mothers. Worldwide, there are seven countries where women are not guaranteed paid maternity leave. The ideal, of course, would be paid leave for any major family health situation, including parental leave for new dads. But the lack of paid maternity leave—and paid parental leave—is an embarrassing sign of a society that does not value families and does not listen to women.
Gender bias does worldwide damage. It’s a cause of low productivity on farms. It’s a source of poverty and disease. It’s at the core of social customs that keep women down. We know the harm it causes and the good that comes from defeating it—so how should we fight it?
Should we fight it law by law, sector by sector, or person by person? I would say “all of the above.” Also, instead of just working to undo the disrespect, we should find the source of the disrespect and try to stop it there.
An infant boy at his mother’s breast does not disrespect women. How does that feeling get hold of him?
Disrespect for women grows when religions are dominated by men.
In fact, some of the laws I mentioned above are based directly on scripture, which is why it is so difficult to undo them. It’s not a standard political debate when an argument for equality is called blasphemy.
Yet one of the strongest statements I’ve seen on the danger of male-dominated religion comes from a man steeped in religion. In Jimmy Carter’s book A Call to Action: Women, Religion, Violence, and Power, he calls the deprivation and abuse of women and girls “the most serious and unaddressed worldwide challenge,” and he lays the principal blame on men’s false interpretation of scripture.
It’s important to remember when taking in Carter’s message that he is a passionate and dedicated lifelong Baptist who has been teaching Sunday School at his Maranatha Baptist Church in Plains, Georgia, since 1981. His life-saving, ground-breaking work over four decades at the Carter Center is a testament to the power of his faith to inspire acts of love. It’s especially notable, then, that Carter would write the following:
“This system [of discrimination] is based on the presumption that men and boys are superior to women and girls, and it is supported by some male religious leaders who distort the Holy Bible, the Koran, and other sacred texts to perpetuate their claim that females are, in some basic ways, inferior to them, unqualified to serve God on equal terms. Many men disagree but remain quiet in order to enjoy the benefits of their dominant status. This false premise provides a justification for sexual discrimination in almost every realm of secular and religious life.”
It would be impossible to quantify the damage that has been done to the image of women in the minds of the faithful as they’ve attended religious services over the centuries and been taught that women are “unqualified to serve God on equal terms.”
I believe without question that the disrespect for women embodied in male-dominant religion is a factor in laws and customs that keep women down. This should not be surprising, because bias against women is perhaps humanity’s oldest prejudice, and not only are religions our oldest institutions, but they change more slowly and grudgingly than all the others—which means they hold on to their biases and blind spots longer.
My own church’s ban on modern contraceptives is just a small effect of a larger issue: its ban on women priests. There is no chance that a church that included women priests—and bishops and cardinals and popes—would ever issue the current rule banning contraceptives. Empathy would forbid it.
An all-male, unmarried clergy cannot be expected to have the empathy for women and families that they would have if they were married, or if they were women, or if they were raising children. The result is that men make rules that hurt women. It is always a temptation when you’re making rules to put the burden on “the other,” which is why a society is more likely to support equality when “the other” is not just sitting next to you at the table as you write the rules, but actually writing them with you.
The Catholic Church tries to shut down the discussion of women priests by saying that Jesus chose men as his apostles at the Last Supper, and therefore only men are allowed to be priests. But we could as easily say that the Risen Christ appeared first to a woman and told her to go tell the men, and therefore only women are allowed to bring the Good News to the men.
There are many possible interpretations, but the Church has said that the ban on women priests has been “set forth infallibly.” Putting aside the irony of leaving women out of the leadership of an organization whose supreme mission is love, it’s demoralizing that men who make rules that keep men in power would be so unsuspicious of their own motives.
Their claims might have been more convincing in past centuries, but male dominance has lost its disguises. We see what’s happening. Some parts of the Church come from God, and some parts come from man—and the part of the Church that excludes women comes from man.
One of the weightiest moral questions facing male-dominated religions today is how long they will keep clinging to male dominance and claiming it’s the will of God.
Encouraging the voices of women of faith is not an explicit part of my philanthropic work. But the voice of male-dominant religion is such a cause of harm—and the voice of progressive religious leaders is such a force for good—that I have to honor the women who are challenging the male monopoly and are amplifying female voices to help shape the faith.
But women can’t do it alone. Every successful effort to bring in outsiders has always had help from insider activists who do the work of reform from within. Women need male allies. They know this, and so in every religion where men have unequal influence, women are raising questions that make men uneasy. Who are the men who will stand with the women? And who are the men who will keep quiet out of obedience to rules they know are wrong?
The number of Catholic priests I’ve talked to who support ordaining women, combined with the institutional Church’s absolute opposition to women priests, convinces me that morally, in some cases, institutions are less than the sum of their parts.
It may strike you as a little odd that a chapter that opens with gender in farming would close with a discussion of religion, but we have a duty to trace women’s disempowerment up the stream to its source. Women around the world who are trying to reshape their faith, who are wresting the interpretation of scripture from the grip of a male monopoly, are doing some of the most heroic work for social justice and economic opportunity in the world today. They’re on the edge of a new frontier. These women and their male allies, especially the men working for reform inside ancient institutions, deserve our gratitude and our respect.