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. 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. 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.
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. 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.’” “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.” Subsequent surveys showed the girls’ parents felt their relationships had improved.
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.
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