Victoria Bateman, an economic historian at the University of Cambridge, has an engaging sing-song canter to her conversation, her dark hair in an arched braid across her head like a Jane Austen heroine. An inch shy of five feet, with a gentle, impish smile, she favors prim dresses and business jackets. That is, when she wears clothes.
Sometimes, to highlight economists’ obliviousness to women, she doesn’t, as at a March 2018 meeting of the Royal Economic Society. There she strode in to a gala reception “wearing,” as she puts it, “nothing but shoes, gloves, a necklace — and, of course, a smile.” She was “removed” after about 20 minutes, during drinks but before dinner. But on that night, among those economists, at least one woman was visible. And that was Bateman’s point.
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Victoria Bateman, an economic historian at the University of Cambridge, has an engaging sing-song canter to her conversation, her dark hair in an arched braid across her head like a Jane Austen heroine. An inch shy of five feet, with a gentle, impish smile, she favors prim dresses and business jackets. That is, when she wears clothes.
Sometimes, to highlight economists’ obliviousness to women, she doesn’t, as at a March 2018 meeting of the Royal Economic Society. There she strode in to a gala reception “wearing,” as she puts it, “nothing but shoes, gloves, a necklace — and, of course, a smile.” She was “removed” after about 20 minutes, during drinks but before dinner. But on that night, among those economists, at least one woman was visible. And that was Bateman’s point.
“I didn’t choose,” she recalls, “to appear naked at such an event because it was unseasonably warm (it certainly wasn’t), nor due to a lack of suitable outfits in my wardrobe (I have a sizable collection at home), but because economics has a sex problem. If economists were going to stand up and listen, I knew it would require something more than a short conference speech of the kind I was scheduled to deliver the following day.”
She has also disrobed at recent appearances protesting Brexit in a lecture at a Cambridge theater (“Brexit leaves Britain naked” written in magic marker across her exposed front) and in a BBC interview. She appears au naturel, she says, to celebrate freedom and show solidarity with women — their minds, their bodies, and their vast unacknowledged contributions to prosperity.
Bateman, sometimes referred to as the Naked Don, has just come out with a book on these themes: The Sex Factor: How Women Made the West Rich (Polity Press). “Just because the written and spoken word is the usual means of academic communication, it doesn’t mean that we should restrict ourselves to them at all times,” she writes. “When I think about what has most powerfully affected my own thinking as an economist, on everything from poverty and prosperity to capitalism and the state, it is something else entirely: It is art.”
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If economists were going to stand up and listen, I knew it would require something more than a short conference speech.
And art, or naked protest, is what she calls her unclad appearances, not just in person but in commissioned portraits by the painter Anthony Connolly at the prestigious Mall Galleries. The first of these caused a mild ruckus in 2014. Bateman explained in a Guardian op-ed that the painting was intended “to raise questions about the depiction of women and to challenge the blinkered association between the body and sex; to show that the female figure is something that a woman walks around with every moment in her life — that it is not, therefore, purely sexual.”
The second Connolly portrait (like the first, part of an annual exhibit by the Royal Society of Portrait Painters) was unveiled this month and features the 39-year-old Bateman seated, nude, reading a book. In the background is one repeated phrase: “Women who monetize their brains are denying other women the ability to monetize their bodies.”
That points to a second theme in Bateman’s work: the right of sex workers to make use of what the British sociologist Catherine Hakim calls “erotic capital” in the same way other women use their intellectual capital. This argument arose from the shaming Bateman has received for her nude activism. She was suddenly thrown into direct alliance with other women who dare to publicly and proudly acknowledge their physical selves. As Bateman explains, “my body, my choice” shouldn’t be the mantra only of certain ostensibly enlightened women with regard to birth control and abortion. “If a woman wants to make money from using her body,” she says, “why shouldn’t she?” If she wants to cover it with a burqa, that is her prerogative, as is revealing it in a short skirt or no clothing at all.
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Bateman grew up during the Thatcher era, in Manchester, which had been at the heart of the Industrial Revolution but became part of something like the American Rust Belt by the late 1970s. For generations, her forebears had been cotton-mill workers, but those opportunities had dwindled by the time her parents dropped out of school in their teens. Her dad worked in sheet metal, traveling during much of Bateman’s childhood to fit ductwork in new buildings. He met Bateman’s mom, who worked for the same company, when she was handing out weekly paychecks.
Those jobs, too, vanished, so her dad, inspired by Thatcherite entrepreneurialism, went into business for himself, again in ductwork, and her mom helped out with the administrative side while working other odd jobs and raising Bateman and her two younger sisters. Customers often couldn’t pay Bateman’s father, and the business soon went under. When Bateman was 11 and home sick, she’d go with her mom to clients’ homes begging for them to pay what they owed, sometimes blocking their driveways to help persuade them. At home, however, the family was on the flip side of that ugly equation, several men armed with bats demanding that her parents pay what they owed.
When Bateman was 14, her parents split, and her mom raised the girls as a single mother. “Before long,” Bateman says, “I knew what it meant not only to miss meals but to have to buy clothes from charity shops and to be a family of four sharing a single bedroom.” A bookish girl with long skirts and long socks, she was bullied. Her sisters dropped out of school, one with a teen pregnancy. Although her dad could barely read and write, he encouraged her academic pursuits, as did a history teacher who “lifted me,” she says, “and made me see that if I focus on the long term, working hard at school,” she could escape the Manchester blues.
What she escaped to was Cambridge, “at first as alien to me as earth would be to a Martian,” she recalls. Bewildered by her posh surroundings, she considered dropping out, but soon found that beyond the daunting buildings, the elaborate traditions, she and her classmates, “all from different backgrounds and countries, accepted each other for who we were, all on a level playing field in terms of our minds. … For the very first time in my life, to be honest, I could be myself. That was immensely liberating.”
The experiences of her youth, however, stayed with her. “I was left with a need to answer big questions … What are the roots of economic prosperity? Are boom and bust avoidable? What can be done about growing inequality? And what’s the appropriate balance between the state and the market?”
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To answer those questions, she studied economics, excelled in it, only to discover upon earning her bachelor’s degree that she knew less about it than before she started. Her books described rational agents competing on a level capitalist playing field. In her life, she’d known no such folk. “Unlike many economists,” she says, “I’m not happy living in the illusionary bliss of ignorance. To do so would be to betray my roots.”
Economic history appeared to be a way to stick with the discipline but with a more grounded, realistic approach, so she studied that for her master’s degree at Oxford. She was warned that if she wanted to be taken seriously, she’d need to pursue her doctorate in economics and not economic history. So she did, also at Oxford, although in studying how markets have developed, she sneaked in quite a bit of economic history. Markets didn’t seem to be the key to prosperity, she found. They existed long before England became rich and exist in places that never became rich.
After her doctorate, Bateman “increasingly realized that the books and research I was reading focused pretty much purely on men’s lives” — Isaac Newton, James Watt, and so on. But while men’s lives seemed somewhat varied around the world, women’s varied vastly more. For all the sexism and double standards of Western society, its women, for hundreds of years, have experienced a surprising degree of freedom in comparison with those in China, the Middle East, and Africa.
With that, she was on to her fundamental argument: Women, to the extent that they are free in body and mind, are the secret ingredient of prosperity. That is a long-lost thread of, not a radical departure from, classical economics. As Bateman points out, none other than John Stuart Mill wrote in 1869 that “the subordination of women was ‘one of the chief hindrances to human improvement.’”
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Her argument entails some surprising plot twists. Bateman draws from scholarly literature suggesting that European civilization advanced in part through the Black Death in the mid-14th century. The decimation of one-quarter to one-third of the population, she says, shifted the power balance between landowners and laborers, who were suddenly much in demand. That gave teenage girls more financial independence and greater power to enter into a marriage of equals, giving rise to the modern nuclear family. Higher wages meant more consumption of meat, which shifted emphasis from crop to livestock farming. That lessened the sovereignty of the plow, which had depended primarily on male muscle. Two cheers for the Black Death!
The Industrial Revolution, with its manly factory and mine demands, set women’s workplace progress back, relegating them to a period of closely defined and constraining domesticity. The 20th century, with its automation and office work, and its labor shortages during wars, ended in net gains for women.
Compensation is a different and more consistently depressing story, one intricately tied to the more general tale of inequality, Bateman explains. Women are paid 43 percent less for equal work — a figure starker than the usually cited gender wage gap because it includes women who do not earn. With the demands on them for unrecognized and uncompensated caregiving, women’s social mobility suffers too. Thirty-five percent of men born into the poorest fifth of the population will stay there in adulthood. The comparative figure for women is 50 percent, and that’s a conservative estimate, Bateman writes, because it is based on household income, not factoring in gender inequality within households. “Globally,” she writes, “women perform more than three-quarters of unpaid care, equivalent to two billion people working full time without pay.”
Listen up, world leaders, Bateman instructs: If you want to goose the economy, forget immigration restrictions and trade barriers. Instead, free women and empower them economically. Give them control over their bodies, minds, and fates. If that argument seems antiquated in your gentrified, sophisticated, avocado-toast saturated neighborhood, consider that “globally, one in five girls marry before they are 18.” Once married, many lack access to reliable birth control, a problem exacerbated by the global gag rule, which prohibits countries receiving U.S. health assistance from providing information and referrals, or advocating, for legal abortion services. Forty-four percent of pregnancies worldwide are unintended.
Given the choice of caregiving or pursuing professional careers, many women, and men, might of course still opt for the former. Fine, writes Bateman. Without children there would be no economic future. But to reward caregiving properly, the state probably needs to play a careful but sometimes assertive role.
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That’s where Bateman threads her delicate way between Marxist and free-market ideologies. Progressive Marxism has constructively highlighted how “liberated” Western women’s ability to enter the work force depends on cheap female labor from elsewhere, either directly in the form of low-paid nannies and cleaners or indirectly in the form of cheap labor providing clothing and household goods. Then again, state-controlled markets have proved notoriously oppressive, biased, and exploitative in their own right.
Unfettered free markets provide great opportunities but have hidden biases of their own, like those against uncompensated caregivers. Economists, by largely ignoring what goes on inside the homes that produce workers, mirror those biases. Greater government regulation, and more representation by women, she argues, could help correct some such imbalances and improve our disastrous mismanagement of the environment. Adam Smith’s invisible hand, she suggests, works better if aided by some visible ones.
In a review in The Guardian, Zoe Williams finds parts of Bateman’s argument suspicious. Bateman wants to explain women’s value beyond statistics, Williams writes, but uses statistics to do it. When she “sets out to measure gender freedom with straight numbers — age of marriage for women; number of witches burned at the stake, percentage of them female; market participation by women — the reader could be forgiven some skepticism. Isn’t it attempts to count the truth,” asks Williams, “that led us up this cul-de-sac in the first place?” (Bateman responds that she has no problem with using statistics to measure women’s value. Her point, rather, is that economists don’t, and that the tools to measure such value are grievously underdeveloped.)
Bateman faces skepticism elsewhere, too. Even when dressed, she is an outsider several times over, says her colleague Carolina Alves, a fellow Cambridge economist who has known Bateman for a decade. Bateman is a woman in a male-dominated profession, an economic historian among economists, an iconoclast kept at a distance by both resolute free-market and leftist colleagues, and a feminist who has alienated not just many mainstream economists but different stripes of feminist peers as well over her naked protests and her championing of sex work.
Economics, in other words, has been “not so welcoming,” Alves says.
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Others have called Bateman’s unclothed anti-Brexit-campaign “low exhibitionism,” or even a form of derangement syndrome. “There is a naked woman on Good Morning Britain right now,” a viewer tweeted. “Is this what Brexit is doing to us as a nation?” One rightist pundit, Jack Buckby, citing what he calls inconsistencies in Bateman’s messaging, postulated that “this woman just likes getting naked in front of people.” A woman weighing in on the BBC appearance, wrote, “Well after THAT stunt everyone will definitely not take her seriously... she’s undermined herself.”
Such umbrage, though, may also be seen as proof of success. Tweeted a more supportive onlooker: “So many comments saying she’s attention seeking ... I think that’s somewhat the point! We’re all here hearing her message and sharing it around — seems like her strategy was pretty successful.”
At any rate, Cambridge’s Gonville and Caius College, where the adolescent oddball Bateman first found the ease to be her true self decades ago, where she met her husband, James, while cramming before a Cambridge entry exam, remains her kingdom of solace. There, say Alves and Karenjit Clare, a fellow at the college, Bateman is embraced and appreciated by colleagues and students alike for her approachability, her down-to-earth sensibility, and her sense of humor.
And if she hasn’t been warmly escorted by the economics elite to their academic Mount Parnassus, Bateman says, that’s OK. She knows who she is.
Her dad, now in his 70s, still works in duct fitting, traveling about in his van. Her mom was in a bad car accident 10 years ago and is on disability. One of her sisters went to night school and has pulled together a career for herself, but the other still struggles mightily. And Victoria the hungry, bullied lass still counsels Victoria the celebrated if controversial Cambridge don.
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Her next book, she thinks, will drill down on questions about how societal attitudes affect policies that restrict women’s freedom. She wants to learn more sociology to understand why, “if anything, we are moving backwards.”