Women making their way in patriarchal societies down the ages have always had to wield their meagre economic power deftly. New evidence from a fascinating research project in Zambia suggests that's a skill that can be learned.
A team of female US academics have been gathering data for more than a decade, which shows that teaching young women to negotiate better can have a long-term impact on their prospects.
Groups of 12- and 13-year-old girls were given 12 hours of negotiation classes, over three weeks – delivered by local young women who had completed their schooling and had been closely involved in developing the curriculum.
Follow-up analysis suggests the girls who took these lessons are continuing to reap economic benefits, more than a decade later.
Measured against a control group, who were given “empowerment†classes by the same coaches, but without the negotiation work, the young women tended to stay in school longer; were more likely to graduate from college; and less likely to marry a much older man.
Prof Corinne Low, whose day job is teaching economics at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, has been involved in the project from its inception. She says back then that the Zambian government was interested in understanding what was preventing girls from attending secondary school.
Low and her colleagues carried out focus groups, suspecting they might hear that girls found school boring. Instead, participants told them they were keen to attend, but unable to convince their parents or other relatives to pay the fees.
“There was misunderstanding in the relationships that they had – it would be, ‘I know that my son is going to help support me,' or, ‘my son is going to look out for the family, but my daughter, she's going to get into trouble with boys.'â€
That convinced Low and colleague Nava Ashraf that the girls could benefit from similar negotiating skills to those taught, in a very different context, to sharp-elbowed MBA students in the US.
The most important insight in the six two-hour classes, she says, is that instead of seeing the person you're negotiating with as an enemy, a more successful approach is to understand their perspective, and tackle problems together.
“We really emphasised this sort of understanding somebody else's interests; understanding somebody else's problems,†she says.
It's an idea that would be familiar to former trade union negotiators Louise Haigh and Angela Rayner, now two of the most powerful women in the UK government.
“You can't just go in and tell these girls: ‘You have to stay in school.' You need to give them tools that are actually going to change the outcomes here,†Low says.
Perhaps counterintuitively, given the ultimate aim is female empowerment, the content of the curriculum also leant heavily on the need for respecting the reality of existing hierarchies – for now at least.
“In Zambia, there was a lot of generational hierarchy and it was really important to show respect for parents. We talked to the girls and said: ‘If you're going to approach your parents to ask them for something, what are some of the ways you show respect?' And they said: ‘Oh well, I might kneel down, and I might address them formally, and I might wear a traditional wrapper – a chitenge.'â€
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“The irony is, right – what kind of empowerment programme is teaching girls to kneel down?†she laughs. But she adds: “The reality is that these girls do not have the power in their household and we can't pretend that they do.â€
Subsequent surveys showed the girls' parents felt their relationships had improved. “The parents recorded that the girls were more respectful, were more likely to do chores around the household, that they were more understanding,†Low recalls.
She and her colleagues are now working towards a 15-year follow-up with that original cohort, now women in their 20s; but their approach has since been incorporated into the Zambian curriculum, and replicated in several other countries.
Most recently – and strikingly – the NGO Free to Run has been using an adapted version of the material in online classes that have recently reached about 1,200 girls in Afghanistan, whose lives and opportunities have been brutally curtailed by the Taliban.
While almost all prospect of economic advancement for them is blocked, Sana Mahmud, the charity's global programmes manager, says the curriculum is helping young women to manage their mental health, and to achieve small freedoms in the grim context of the regime.
“It's a very useful skill inside the household to negotiate with parents, even if it's small things like permission to visit a friend,†she says.
And she adds: “Sometimes the young women would leave their homes to go out in the market or do errands, and some of them have even been stopped by members of the Taliban to ask: ‘Why are you here? What are you doing?' and we realised that the skill of negotiation is probably the best for them to safely talk about what they're doing, why they're there.†The course is taught by four Afghan women, and feedback from participants has been “amazingâ€, Mahmud says.
Of course, the wider economic and political system matters far more than each woman's success in navigating her way through it, and the situation in Afghanistan is bleak. We should all be working towards a world in which the patriarchy is – as the placards and pin badges have it – smashed.
But giving more girls skills that might help them further their own interests in the world as it is today seems a wise investment in that future.
