The Double X Economy: The Epic Potential of Women's Empowerment

“Linda Scott shines a light on women’sessential and often invisible contributions to our globaleconomy—while combining insight, analysis, and interdisciplinarydata to make a compelling and actionable case for unleashingwomen’s economic power.” —Melinda Gates, author of The Moment ofLift: How Empowering Women Changes the WorldA leading thinker's groundbreaking examination of women's economicempowermentFor the past fifteen years, the scholar and activist LindaScott has played a central role in the rise of the women’seconomic empowerment movement. A coalition made up of activists,multinational corporations, global NGOs, and governments, it arosein the mid-2000s in response to new global data sets that revealedsobering conclusions about women in the economy, namely that genderinequality is a global problem, and that women’s economicsubordination drags down national economies and fosters globalcrises, from severe poverty to human trafficking.In The Double X Economy: The Epic Potential of Women'sEmpowerment, Scott argues that women’s systematic exclusionfrom economic participation has created an alternate system thatshe calls “the Double X Economy”: having suffered from a consistentlist of severe and worldwide economic exclusions applied throughouthistory, women have been shaped into an entirely different economicpractice. Yet while the women’s economy, taken as a whole, isrestricted and constantly under threat, when empowered it is morecareful, cooperative, and focused on long-term outcomes than theeconomic order under which the world lives now.Building on the momentum of the female empowerment movementscurrently mobilizing worldwide, The Double X Economy presents anentirely new conceptual schema for women’s rights based on economicliberty. Accessible and convincing, Scott’s groundbreaking study isan assessment of women’s historic subjugation, a demonstration ofhow that subjugation has resulted in myriad intractable problems,and a call to action to once and for all place women on an equalfooting with men in order to create a better world.