Arabo Ewinyu: Growing up with Gender Inequality – my experiences in Kenya and South Africa 

⬤ What is your background and how did you become interested in global inequality?

My initial interest in global inequality was sparked as I followed the proceedings of the Fourth Women Conference held in 1995 in Beijing. As a ten-year old, it led me to question why women would require a separate forum to advocate for their rights while men did not. During this conference, I also recall hearing men making several derogatory comments about “Beijing Women” and how you should be careful that the Kenyan female representatives did not return and “fill the heads of their women with these feminist ideas”. Such rhetoric stood in sharp contrast with the highlights of poised female representatives attending different sessions cast on the daily evening news. Although it took me years to contextualise and vocalise this, I realise now that this was my introduction to the fact that certain systemic inequalities existed within and across societies.

I was born and raised in Nairobi, Kenya as the last child in a family of five girls at a time when the Boy child was favoured for the mere fact of being male. Kenya in the 1980s was a country in flux as various shifts occurred. Politically, the late President Daniel Moi survived a coup in 1982 and was limiting press and democratic freedom making Kenya more autocratic. Economically, various structural adjustment policies had been instituted resulting in mass privatisation, increasing unemployment and/or the expansion of precarious types of employment as firms sought to reduce costs. This had direct bearing on family life as increased poverty and despair served to strengthen very strong patriarchal beliefs and thoughts as disenfranchised men sough to exert their authority in the allocation of household resources and in the interpersonal relationships with their wives.

In the late 1990s, I saw how such patriarchy led to young girls being ejected from schools to get married, to care for older and younger family members, or in poorer homes, to focus meagre resources on their brothers’ education. Personally, although I went to a progressive primary school, female students including myself, were often pulled out of class to practise songs and dances to entertain visiting donors and other high ranking (male) guests.

In sharp contrast, within my own family I could see how increased access to education across the generations had changed the opportunities provided to me and all my sisters. My paternal grandmother, born in 1924 in rural Eastern Uganda, had two years of schooling. Despite being widowed at a young age with two sons, she pushed my father to study and obtain post-high school training. My mother also qualified as a nurse and together my sisters and I all attended university. In the course of three generations, the opportunities afforded to us were different and the results are visible through the birth of fewer and healthier children, increased post-retirement savings and greater freedom to pursue employment across various higher paying international labour markets.

This micro study of my own family and upbringing sparked an interest in studying Economics in order to understand how inequality manifests itself and is perpetuated across generations, countries and genders, and to consider the types of interventions that can shift this trajectory. Hence, I completed an undergraduate degree, Bachelor of Science (Economics), at Daystar University in 2007 and worked for a year before undertaking my postgraduate studies at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa.

I am currently working at the Southern Centre for Inequality Studies (SCIS), a research unit at the University of the Witwatersrand Johannesburg South Africa. My current research interests revolve around various gender issues both within the labour market and at the household level.

⬤ What is global inequality?

Global inequality refers to the divergence in the distribution of resources across various nations and the impact this has on opportunities or individual outcomes’ in poorer or less powerful countries.[1]

To understand global inequality it is important to distinguish between inequality of outcomes and inequality of opportunities. The former is measured by metrics such as income, wealth, assets or expenditure. Income (or expenditure) inequality is the most commonly used measure of inequality in outcomes and often compares the Gini coefficient of the gross or net incomes earned by individuals or households.[2]

Inequality of opportunities is measured by comparing health, education and human development outcomes by income group, or by examining access to basic services and opportunities. These differences are viewed as often being out of the individual’s’ control. These include gender, race or ethnicity, location of birth and other family characteristics for instance, the education level of your parents.[3]

Recent work in understanding inequality has focused on asset-based living standard indicators to measure multidimensional inequality. The approach is a combination of ownership to household assets and access to basic services.[4] This is a useful measure where data on income and/or expenditure are unavailable or difficult to access.

What makes me particularly interested in global inequality is that as a focal theme, inequality takes on different formats across countries, regions and across various divides. This therefore requires a more nuanced understanding of the topic to observe global trends and then observe how they become manifest at the local level.

In 2008, I left Kenya and moved to South Africa for postgraduate studies. These two cities have influenced my view and perception of global inequality.

Growing up in Kenya after the Beijing 1995 conference, I was able to benefit from the myriad policies that were enacted to bridge the access and performance gender-based gap. This has made me a firm believer in the role of policy and education to reverse what sometimes feels like a pre-determined inequality path. Using fertility trends as an example, we see that the average woman in Kenya in 1982 had 7.2 children. In 2018, this number has more than halved to 3.5 births per woman.[5]

Living in South Africa, the most unequal country in the world, has also exposed me to visible inequalities across race, gender and space. On a daily basis I am confronted by the fact that the domestic helper who works in my house, spends almost an hour in a minibus to commute to my house and back to her own home.[6] Racial disparities are evident by the fact that the majority of the higher paid individuals across most formal workplaces are still male and white, with the majority of the lower skilled individuals being primarily female and African.[7]

The experience of living and working in South Africa has increased the scope of my knowledge and expectations which has made me a more engaged inequality researcher and empathetic individual.

⬤ What are the main historical causes of global inequality?

Centuries of unequal progress has entrenched inequality. A key driver of this uneven progress is the history of colonisation as colonised countries have seen their resources exploited and the benefits accruing only to the colonising country.

In pre-colonial time, land was a key asset that provided security to the family and a source of income whether from the sale of produce or through the rearing of livestock. Traditional land tenure systems were displaced by the discriminatory land laws that often gave settlers access to prime land and surplus labour to work the land at little to no cost. Land inequality is a bedrock of “long-run persistent wealth and asset inequality.”[8] Not only did land inequality affect wealth distribution in precolonial times, but also the types of post-colonial institutions that were developed. Following Kenya’s independence in 1963, several violent tribal clashes[9][10] have erupted as displaced tribes fought with “outsiders” who they felt benefitted unjustly from unjust colonial land policies. Particularly at election times, land ownership forms the basis of campaign manifestos for various political parties who, once elected, often ignore it. 

Furthermore, such colonised nations have lacked the power and the requisite institutional capacity to meaningfully participate in trade and global supply chains post-independence. Consequently, this initial inequality between nations is now embedded by the increasing role of technological advancement. In the last forty years, many countries have increasingly taken advantage of technological advancements to lower production costs, access foreign investment and gain access to global value chains.[11]

An additional downside to this technological shift is the impact on the labour market. Globalised labour markets are attractive and accessible to highly skilled individuals who enjoy greater mobility and wages. Low skilled individuals and unskilled workers are excluded from these high-paying, international jobs.

It is widely acknowledged that while increased technological advancements are good for human advancement and the eradication of societal ills such as poverty and certain diseases, the development of global technology firms such as Facebook, Apple and Amazon, to name a few, cannot continue unchecked as returns to a few individuals and investor firms is a source of widening income and wealth inequality.

⬤ What are the most pressing contemporary challenges concerning global inequality and how do we deal with them?

There are various issues, I will deal with two.The first is the observed trend of declining poverty and rising inequality in some countries such as India and China. This results in income polarisation as the share of formerly poor and vulnerable are faced with a greater probability of falling back into poverty. At the middle to upper end of the income distribution, we observe significant gains to the share of income of these income groups.[12] Increasing access to opportunities such as education and health could result in greater gains for the lower income individuals and could with time result in greater returns to these groups.

Secondly, in some countries we observe the institutionalisation of inequality resulting in successive generations replicating previous trends. For example with regard to racial outcomes in countries such as South Africa and America. The same is also true of labour wage inequality as owners of firms continue to be richly remunerated[13] relative to their employees as evidenced in the growing disparity in the ratio of the CEO pay to the lowest earning employee. Given the global unrest and rising unemployment, it is important to consider alternative forms of ownership and possibly restructuring the firm or the corporation. Some of these could include increased or mandatory worker representation on management boards in order to ensure that the interests of all relevant stakeholders are considered.

References

To cite this source, kindly cite as follows:

Arabo Ewinyu, “Growing up with Gender Inequality – my experiences in Kenya and South Africa,” in Key Questions on Global Inequality, edited by Christian Olaf Christiansen, Mélanie Lindbjerg Guichon, Oliver Bugge Hunt & Priyanka Jha, online version February 22nd 2021, http://global-inequality.com/interview-series-arabo-ewinyu

⬤ What is global inequality?

Global inequality refers to the divergence in the distribution of resources across various nations and the impact this has on opportunities or individual outcomes’ in poorer or less powerful countries.[1]

To understand global inequality it is important to distinguish between inequality of outcomes and inequality of opportunities. The former is measured by metrics such as income, wealth, assets or expenditure. Income (or expenditure) inequality is the most commonly used measure of inequality in outcomes and often compares the Gini coefficient of the gross or net incomes earned by individuals or households.[2]

Inequality of opportunities is measured by comparing health, education and human development outcomes by income group, or by examining access to basic services and opportunities. These differences are viewed as often being out of the individual’s’ control. These include gender, race or ethnicity, location of birth and other family characteristics for instance, the education level of your parents.[3]

Recent work in understanding inequality has focused on asset-based living standard indicators to measure multidimensional inequality. The approach is a combination of ownership to household assets and access to basic services.[4] This is a useful measure where data on income and/or expenditure are unavailable or difficult to access.

What makes me particularly interested in global inequality is that as a focal theme, inequality takes on different formats across countries, regions and across various divides. This therefore requires a more nuanced understanding of the topic to observe global trends and then observe how they become manifest at the local level.

In 2008, I left Kenya and moved to South Africa for postgraduate studies. These two cities have influenced my view and perception of global inequality.

Growing up in Kenya after the Beijing 1995 conference, I was able to benefit from the myriad policies that were enacted to bridge the access and performance gender-based gap. This has made me a firm believer in the role of policy and education to reverse what sometimes feels like a pre-determined inequality path. Using fertility trends as an example, we see that the average woman in Kenya in 1982 had 7.2 children. In 2018, this number has more than halved to 3.5 births per woman.[5]

Living in South Africa, the most unequal country in the world, has also exposed me to visible inequalities across race, gender and space. On a daily basis I am confronted by the fact that the domestic helper who works in my house, spends almost an hour in a minibus to commute to my house and back to her own home.[6] Racial disparities are evident by the fact that the majority of the higher paid individuals across most formal workplaces are still male and white, with the majority of the lower skilled individuals being primarily female and African.[7]

The experience of living and working in South Africa has increased the scope of my knowledge and expectations which has made me a more engaged inequality researcher and empathetic individual.

⬤ What are the main historical causes of global inequality?

⬤ What are the most pressing contemporary challenges concerning global inequality and how do we deal with them?

There are various issues, I will deal with two.The first is the observed trend of declining poverty and rising inequality in some countries such as India and China. This results in income polarisation as the share of formerly poor and vulnerable are faced with a greater probability of falling back into poverty. At the middle to upper end of the income distribution, we observe significant gains to the share of income of these income groups.[12] Increasing access to opportunities such as education and health could result in greater gains for the lower income individuals and could with time result in greater returns to these groups.

Secondly, in some countries we observe the institutionalisation of inequality resulting in successive generations replicating previous trends. For example with regard to racial outcomes in countries such as South Africa and America. The same is also true of labour wage inequality as owners of firms continue to be richly remunerated[13] relative to their employees as evidenced in the growing disparity in the ratio of the CEO pay to the lowest earning employee. Given the global unrest and rising unemployment, it is important to consider alternative forms of ownership and possibly restructuring the firm or the corporation. Some of these could include increased or mandatory worker representation on management boards in order to ensure that the interests of all relevant stakeholders are considered.