The Girl Effect: A Neoliberal Instrumentalization of Gender Equality

Over the past ten years, ‘The Girl Effect’–the discourse and practice of investing in third world girls’ education—has ascended to the top of the international development agenda as the ‘highest return investment strategy’ to end poverty. This paper interrogates the trend by investigating the genealogy of ‘The Girl Effect’ as The Nike Foundation’s flagship corporate social responsibility campaign and the theory of change it is based on. A literature analysis of The Nike Foundation’s most recent intervention projects—“The Girl Effect Accelerator” and ‘Girl Hub’ pilot projects in Ethiopia, Nigeria, and Rwanda—will elucidate the underlying investment logic and serve as a representative sample of the broader emerging practice. While claiming to advance “gender equality” and “women’s empowerment”, I argue that The Girl Effect accomplishes the opposite by reinforcing gender inequity on both the micro and macro levels. Feminist grammars are instrumentalized as window dressing to exploit third world females as prospective (1) debtors in the expansion of credit markets, (2) exploits in the expansion of consumer markets, and (3) the ‘untapped resource’ for cheap labor. An epochal look at second wave feminism will show how ‘The Girl Effect Paradigm’ is a second wave of neoliberal exploitation—a parallel of its first female-led development era (1980s-1990s). This paper warns that as this phenomenon grows in hegemony it is insidiously displacing feminism as a political project and neutralizing the need for a truly transformational agenda. Without a counterbalance of vigilant public scrutiny and debate, we risk letting it crystallize Western- patriarchal-capitalism even more deeply in an unyielding global glass ceiling

Quantifying written ambiguities in tone languages: A comparative study of Elip, Mbelime, and Eastern Dan

Whether tone should be represented in writing, and if so how much, is one of the most formidable challenges facing those developing orthographies for tone languages. Various researchers have attempted to quantify the level of written ambiguity in a language if tone is not marked, but these contributions are not easily comparable because they use different measurement criteria. This article presents a first attempt to develop a standardized instrument and evaluate its potential. The method is exemplified using four narrative texts translated into Elip, Mbelime, and Eastern Dan. It lists all distinct written word forms that are homographs if tone is not marked, discarding repeated words, homophony, and polysemy, as well as pairs that never share the same syntactic slot. It treats lexical and grammatical tone separately, while acknowledging that these two functions often coincide. The results show that the level of written ambiguity in Elip is weighted towards the grammar, while in Mbelime many ambiguities occur at the point where lexical and grammatical tone coincide. As for Eastern Dan, with its profusion of nominal and verbal minimal pairs, not to mention pronouns, case markers, predicative markers, and other parts of speech, the level of written ambiguity if tone is not marked is by far the highest of the three languages. The article ends with some suggestions of how the methodology might be refined, by reporting some experimental data that provide only limited proof of the need to mark tone fully, and by describing how full tone marking has survived recent spelling reforms in all three languages.National Foreign Language Research Cente

Conformational inversion processes in phytic acid: NMR spectroscopic and molecular modeling studies

NMR spectroscopy and computational studies show that phytic acid undergoes pH- and ion-dependent conformational inversion from the lax/5eq form to the 5ax/1eq form. The kinetics and energetics of the conformational inversion process are discussed