In a paper to be delivered Aug. 23 in Seattle at the American Sociological Association’s annual conference, Blumberg examines gender inequality, economic development and armed conflict in the Middle East, North Africa and Asia. The former are found in East Asia (Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, southern China) and in South Asia (for example, in many southern areas of India and Pakistan and in Bangladesh). However, “in East Asia, the male-dominated kinship/property system traditionally used women as unpaid family labor; local markets, where women might have acquired resources by own-account trade, were male-dominated,” Blumberg writes. This gave them economic power over and above what they acquired through inheritance via the generally woman-friendly kinship/property system,” Blumberg writes. In that way, they are cutting themselves off from a significant proportion of national income growth, she said.

Source: The North Africa Journal August 23, 2016 18:33 UTC