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WOMEN’S STATUS AND WORLD-SYSTEM POSITION 154 blocks of nations that are structurally situated in similar positions in the world-system. The ten blocks are summarized in Table 2. Table 2. Summary of Kick et al.’s (in press) World-System Position (WSP) Measure and Women’s Status. WSP block (N) Nations with largest populations 1. Center Core (6) United States, Germany, France, United Kingdom 2. Western European (16) Brazil, Turkey, Spain, Poland, Greece, Portugal 3. Asian (12) China, India, Indonesia, Pakistan, Japan 4. Eastern European (11) Russia, Romania, Czech Republic, Hungary 5. Southeast Asian/Middle Vietnam, Nepal, Saudi Arabia, East (6) Cameroon 6. Former Soviet (14) Ukraine, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Belarus 7. Middle East (9) Bangladesh, Egypt, Iran, Morocco, Sri Lanka 8. South American (27) Nigeria, Mexico, Colombia, Argentina, Kenya, Algeria 9. African (31) Ethiopia, Sudan, Uganda, Ghana, Madagascar 10. South Pacific/Middle East Laos, Papua New Guinea, (5) Eritrea, Mongolia, Fiji Overall women’s status block mean (rank) .819 (1) .701 (2) -.029 (5) .555 (4) -.629 (9) .597 (3) -.541 (8) -.098 (6) -.813 (10) -.393 (7) Note: The number of nations in each block is presented in parentheses in the first column. Here we are considering only the nations for which there are data for the overall women’s status variable, not all of the 160 nations included in Kick et al.’s (in press) analysis. We regressed the five women’s status indicators on the world-system position indicator, dummy-coded into the ten blocks. In Table 3, we present R 2 values from these analyses. Note that we do not present the full set of regression coefficients since we are focusing on the strength of association, which is the relevant issue with regards to assessing the extent to which these factors are confounded. However, a sense of the differences across blocks can be gained from the different mean values of the overall status of women by block presented in Table 2. It is clear that there is a fairly strong association between world-system position and women’s status, as indicated by the reasonably high R 2 values. For example, world-system position explains more than half of the variance in overall women’s status. We also regressed the five women’s status variables on GDP per capita (purchasing power parity) for the year 2000 (World Bank 2007), and report the R 2 values from these models in Table 3. These associations are reasonably strong,
155 JOURNAL OF WORLD-SYSTEMS RESEARCH although it is noteworthy that women’s status is even more closely connected to world-system position than it is to GDP per capita, particularly for economic/labor status and educational status. Table 3. Strength of Association (R 2 ) Between Indicators of Women’s Status and Kick et al.’s (in press) World-System Position (WSP) Measure (ten blocks) and GDP per capita. WSP R 2 GDP p. c. R 2 Overall status .525 .404 Educational status .444 .168 Economic/labor status .432 .060 Political status .383 .293 Health status .709 .600 Note: All associations are significant at the .05 level. Results are derived from OLS regression. In the case of the WSP measure, the ten blocks were dummy-coded. Sample size varies across models. Due to the reasonably strong associations between women’s status and both worldsystem position and GDP per capita, statistical models using world-system position variables or GDP per capita as independent variables may suffer from confounding if they do not include indicators of women’s status. Stated differently, some effects that may in truth stem from women’s status may be erroneously attributed to economic factors or world-system position. These strong associations suggest that there are good reasons to consider including indicators of women’s status in a substantial variety of quantitative macro-comparative analyses, since many dependent variables of interest to world-systems researchers may well be affected by gender relationships. Of course, women’s status is affected by world-system position, and, therefore, to some degree the effects of women’s status on other factors may indirectly reflect world-system effects. However, clearly the status of women within a nation is not reducible to world-system position, and stems from multiple forces including local cultural traditions. In fact, even though the association between women’s status and world-system position is fairly strong, clearly there is a substantial amount of variation in women’s status across nations that is not explained by worldsystem position or modernization. As can be gleaned from Table 1, there is substantial variation in women’s status within world-system blocks. For example, within block 2, Sweden has the highest level of overall women’s status out of the 139 nations for which there are sufficient data, whereas Brazil is ranked 82 nd . Similarly, within block 10, Mongolia is the 10 th ranked on the overall status measure while Papua New Guinea is 136 th . This indicates that world-system position and indicators of modernization cannot be used as proxies for measures of women’s status. Therefore, it is clearly important to separate the effects of gender relationships from those
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Journal of World-Systems Research V
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James Rice—New Mexico State Unive
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BOOK REVIEW ESSAY 236 Review Essay:
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INTRODUCTION: THE WORLD-HISTORICAL
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