 Hi, I'm James. And I'm Anthony. And this is Words and Numbers. So this weekend we're talking about International Women's Day, which comes around as it always does in early March this year, March 8th. That's right. International Women's Day when we celebrate as a world the achievements and opportunities for women. And this ties in interestingly to economic freedom of all topics. Of all topics. Imagine that. Right. But, you know, you usually when we talk about things like International Women's Day, what we end up doing is celebrating women through the lens of government and statism. But we're going to take this in a decidedly different direction today. Yeah, we've been looking at some data from the Frazier Institute on economic freedom. They measure things like the extent to which people can make decisions for themselves within a society as opposed to government making decisions for them. But wait, there's more. If you act now, you also get data from? Oh, we also get data from World Bank and the United Nations, which measures things are relevant to women like gender equality, female income versus male income, female education rates, literacy rates versus versus males. What we end up looking at are some disparate data sets. Right. They have nothing to do with one another. But when you start cross-referencing the data, all kinds of clear and obvious patterns start to emerge. Yeah. So that's worth underlining. The Frazier Institute, when it thinks about economic freedom, completely ignores issues like gender equality. And when the UN thinks about gender equality, it completely ignores issues like economic freedom. And yet, what you see is that now there are exceptions, mind you. But across the world and across time, societies that are more economically free in those societies, women are more equal economically, socially, in terms of education. So if we're talking about women who live in these countries that we're considering, what does it actually mean? What it means is if you're a woman living in a country that is more economically free, you are more likely to have an income that is closer to that of males in your country, you're more likely to have a level of education similar to males in your country, you're more likely to have a position of power, be it in parliament or on boards of corporations. All of those things tend to go with countries that are economically free. Right. And it probably gets even a little deeper than that, right? Because the obvious rejoinder here is, well, sure, in places where women enjoy a certain amount of economic freedom, well, you know, that's just the rich country effect that we end up seeing. But right, it's not the case. It's absolutely not the case. Yeah. And this is an interesting counter argument. The rich country effects as look, in countries that are rich, women have higher incomes, they have more education because, you know, the country is more wealthy. And also countries that are rich have the leisure to think about and be concerned about things like freedom. So maybe what's going on, it's not that economic freedom contributes to gender equality. It's just that countries that are rich happen to have more gender equality and also happen to be more economically free. Right. So what happens when we only consider the poor countries? Yeah. This is the beautiful thing. So what you do here to address this criticism is you say, fine, let's only look at the poorest countries on the planet. So you look at the poorest countries on the planet and you separate them into two groups, the poor countries that are more economically free and the poor countries that are less economically free. And lo and behold, you find the same pattern there. Countries that are more economically free but poor have better gender equality than countries that are economically unfree but also poor. So what we end up finding is that just about anywhere we can look, economic freedom yields greater gender equality. Yeah. Yeah. And I think it's worth remembering that it's not true in every case. Right. This is an economic truth and economic truths are random. Right. You can always point to examples that fit what you're saying and examples that don't. What's interesting, though, is that on average, this is true. On average, societies are more economically free, be they rich or be they poor, tend to have better gender equality. So come to find out freedom is a good thing. Yeah. And isn't that fascinating? You know, I mean, we go around saying, well, you know, it's our birthright to be free, which is absolutely correct. But then you find that, oh yeah, there are all these wonderful things that come about because of it. Yeah. No good outcomes in addition to a birthright makes for a very powerful combination when it comes right down to it. So that's all we've got this week. Thanks for joining us. And if you're interested in this sort of thing, be sure to click through onto fee.org and subscribe here and have a look at the other offerings that fees got on the website. We'll see you next week. See you next week, James.