Source: TrustLaw
Last week held the International Day for the Eradication of Poverty (October 17^th) and was an opportunity to reflect on what opportunities women’s economic engagement pose for global efforts to make the world a more prosperous place.

Recent research by the World Bank has quantified women’s economic potential: this year’s World Development Report tells us that removing barriers to employment for women would cut the productivity gap between male and female workers by a 30-50 per cent, and raise output per worker by 3 to 25 per cent in some countries. As the head of the World Bank’s Global Indicators and Analysis Office recently summed it up: “The economy suffers when half of the world’s population is prevented from fully participating. It is… no surprise that the world’s most competitive economies are those where the opportunity gap between women and men is the narrowest.”

Yet despite women’s integral role as the stewards of health and prosperity in their families and communities, they are nonetheless at a profound disadvantage in the global economy. Women perform 66% of the world’s work, grow up to 90% of staple crops that feed the world, and yet earn 10% of the world’s income and own less than 2% of the world’s property.

More than 30 years ago ICRW discovered that women-headed households constituted a major percentage of those living in poverty, and yet they were completely ignored in development planning. This wasn’t just a miss for women—who as a majority of people living in poverty certainly deserve an equal share of aid efforts. Critically, failing to see women’s position in poverty also concealed their potential to advance solutions. When women reinvest up to 90% of their resources into the family, compared to 30-40% by men, interventions that target their economic advancement hence bring their families and communities out of poverty with them. Restructuring development interventions to acknowledge—and reach--the formerly invisible people at the center of local economies was a revolution.

Today, we are in need of another revolution. Only it’s not just the development community—it’s the entire global economy. Turn on the news and its jobs, jobs, jobs. Unemployment rates are rising, businesses decry “job-killing” regulation, analysts pointing to indicators of “double-dip” recession. The outlook is grim, but we are not without a way forward.

As before, women are again at the center of the right response. From the World Bank, to the World Economic Forum, to The Economist, institutions at the center of global economic policy tell us that women are THE emerging market to watch. As one Economist headline ran: “Forget China, India and the internet… economic growth is driven by women.”

The time for change is unquestionably upon us: famine, recession, civil unrest. We must change the way we do business, not just because we care about women; but because this is our smartest strategy to get the global economy back on track. As World Bank president Robert Zoellick has become famous for saying, investing in women is smart economics.