• When it comes to identifying the causes of the two major economic problems currently facing the developed world—rising inequality and a slowdown in economic growth—sex is rarely mentioned. 

• Western economy is paying the price of excessive population growth in the world’s poorest economies. 
• An increase in global labor supply exerts downward pressure on the wages of Western working classes, those with whom the world’s poorest compete for jobs, raising inequality and encouraging businesses to pursue cheap labor. 
• The result is a reduced incentive to invest and slower global growth.
• Much of the 19th and 20th centuries, his prediction of economic stagnation did not ring true—at least in the West. 

• As women went to work, became economically independent and escaped early marriage, families got smaller. 
• These smaller families boosted economic growth in numerous ways, including by preventing downward pressure on the average wage. 
• Not only did a higher wage help raise the standard of living of the average family, it also provided firms with an incentive to mechanize, pushing forward industrialization. 
• Plus, smaller families could better afford to educate their children and to save. Malthus became history. 
• With the onset of globalization, the West’s comfortable high-growth, high-wage economic model – one based upon relative freedom for women – has come face-to-face with a very different kind of equilibrium in other parts of the world. As trade barriers have fallen, Western workers have had to compete with an army of low-wage unskilled workers from elsewhere, an outcome of the high fertility rates and low standards of living that tend to exist in countries where women are second-class citizens.

• More than 60 percent of the world’s illiterate population are women. 
• Females earn 24 percent less than male workers. 
• Only a fifth of landowners are women and less than a quarter of all lawmakers. 
• A gender equality index from the Center for Global Economic History shows that while there has been a general improvement in the relative position of women during the past century, we have seen little in the way of convergence between countries. It is this lack of convergence — combined with the opening up of the world economy — that is undermining the equilibrium the West had managed to achieve some time ago.
• In a new working paper from the Center for Global Economic History, the authors argue that this lack of convergence reflects the fact that gender inequality is deeply rooted in family structures. 

Differences in what they call the “female friendliness” of family institutions — 

1. such as the norms of marriage — go all the way back to ancient times, 
2. with early civilizations paradoxically becoming the most patriarchal over time (hunter-gatherer societies were relatively more equal than many of their successors). 
3. Today, low female-friendliness of family structure is most often seen in societies where inequality is most pronounced.

The United Nation’s Gender Inequality Index,