When I was little, one of my favorite things to do while riding in the car was to create wildly outlandish stories about the people I could see outside my window. That lady with a baseball cap and a poodle? She had just returned from the international poodle breeders conference in France where she met a famous American baseball player. They fell in love on the 13th floor of the Eifel Tower and plan to return in six months for their honeymoon.
Though I don't make up stories like I used to, I never outgrew my fascination with people and my desire to understand them. On my way to work this week, I passed Pasos De Fe Iglesia Christiana, a church with chipping blue paint and litter that fills the gaps in the crumbling sidewalk. A line of families wrapped around the exterior as tired feet shuffled inside for fellowship and a free meal. I found myself wondering what today's chapter of their life would look like.
I am a firm believer that everyone gets to choose how they tell their story but we don't always get to choose what goes into it.
The "birth lottery" refers to the idea that individuals have no control over the family and socioeconomic background into which they are born. People have the power to shape their destiny to some extent but the reality remains that many aspects of life, such as family size, socioeconomic status, location, and sex are beyond anyone's control.
Last week, I started writing my technical paper for the gender and youth equality team at IICA. I am researching the relationship between food insecurity and the unequal distribution of labor (between genders) in the Latin American care economy. I know. That's a pretty lengthy title with a lot of terms even I was not familiar with before I joined the team. I will spare you my rough draft (which is already ten pages). Instead, I will provide some context and quick definitions.
Food Security: When all people, at all times, have physical and economic access to sufficient safe and nutritious food that meets their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life.
Remember when bestie Norman Borlaug told us that "Food is the moral right of all who are born into this world,"? This is the concept that he was referring to.
A recent global report from the Food and Agriculture Organization disaggregated data based on gender and discovered that there were 84.2 million more women and girls who were food insecure than men and boys (FAO, 2023). This disparity is known as the gender nutrition gap.
Gender Nutrition Gap: How women and girls’ unique biological needs, disparities in access to food and services, and harmful social norms have a bearing on their health and economic outcomes (Gender Nutrition Gap, 2023).
The Care Economy (the Purple Economy: Activities aimed at improving the physical, social, mental, and emotional well-being of care-dependent groups, such as children, the elderly, the sick, disabled individuals, adolescents, and others (UNDP). It includes both paid and unpaid work through which care is provided for others.
Women spend between 6.3 and 29.5 hours more per week than men doing unpaid care work, which can be further broken down into direct and indirect unpaid care (International Labor Organization, 2023).
Direct Unpaid Care: Unpaid labor services are provided directly to dependents on a face-to-face basis.
Ex: breastfeeding, homework, transmission of traditional knowledge related to sustainable agricultural practices, emotional support, bathing, accompanying to doctor’s visits, etc.
Indirect Unpaid Care: Unpaid labor services that are inputs into direct care but do to necessarily involve personal interactions.
Ex: the feeding, breeding, harvesting, collecting, and processing of fish, sheep, cattle, goats, pigs, rabbits, and avian species for self-consumption, care of the family garden, bodies of water, forests, other ecosystems, and traditional crops, etc.
A woman engaging in a form of indirect care.
Essentially, I am identifying social norms in Latin America that dictate how individuals participate in the care economy. From there, I will identify how specific actions are perpetuating the gender nutrition gap. My thesis has two components. The context piece, which I just shared with you, and policy recommendations. Of course, context is important, but just talking about something will never fix the problem.
"Actions speak louder than words. Inaction speaks louder than both of them." - Matthew Good
Social issues are incredibly complex. There are a LOT of factors at play which means that a multitude of actions are required. Issues like this one require a top-down and bottom-up approach to happen simultaneously. NGOs, non-profits, academic institutions, and the government can do their part. But, it's also up to YOU to engage in self-reflection and hard conversations. This week, here's a question I've been wrestling with that may be some good food for thought:
How can we ensure that an individual’s worth or access to opportunity is not determined by something (like sex) they have no say in?
That's the million-dollar question, isn't it?