The "women as saviors" trope promotes the idea that integrating women into the economy solely for economic growth, but it overlooks the complexities of gender dynamics through failing to address issues of reproductive labor and embodiment-disembodiment processes.

The best clue to a nation’s growth and development potential is the status and role of women.44 The second, and interrelated, “women as saviours” trope builds on the idea that access to finance will help integrate women into the economy as workers and entrepreneurs, as well as consumers who can use credit to buy goods and accumulate assets. This will ultimately have the effect not just of empowering women, but also of stimulating stagnating national economies post-GFC, particu- larly in the Global South, where women’s labour remains a vast and “untapped resource”. As World Bank President Robert Zoellick argued in 2010, a “host of studies suggest that putting earning in women’s hands is the intelligent thing to do to aid recovery and long-term development”.45 Echoing this sentiment at an Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) High-Level Policy Dialogue on Women and the Economy, former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton suggested that “[t]o achieve the economic expansion we all seek, we need to unlock a vital source of growth that can power our economies in the decades to come. That vital source of growth is women”.46 The “women as saviours” argument is evidenced in the WEF Gender Gap Index, which puts forth the argument that women are key to economic recovery, particu- larly in the so-called emerging BRIC economies (Brazil, Russia, India, China).47 The WEF reports draw on literature published by a handful of banks, investment and accounting firms that seek to empirically document the women as saviours effect. The name of Ernst & Young’s series, Groundbreakers: Using the Strength of Women to Rebuild the World Economy, is explicit in this regard, as is Goldman’s Sachs’ “Womenomics” and Deloitte’s “Gender Dividend” (more below). The business press has also picked up on this line of argument, publishing articles with titles such as “Women: Saviors of the World Economy?” and “Fixing the Economy? It’s Women’s Work”.48 This discourse further intersects with arguments that suggest that more women at the helm of the world’s leading banks and finan- cial firms would have prevented the GFC by reining in the excessively risky testos- terone-driven behaviour of men.49 If it is the case, as the historical materialist literature on financialisation suggests, that part of what has driven the expansion and deepening of finance is a crisis in profitability in other parts of the economy, then women’s bodies seem to have emerged as an important terrain upon which to displace the contradictions of capi- talist accumulation. However, as with other “spatio-temporal fixes”, as they are described by David Harvey,50 the positioning of women as “underutilised resources” ripe for exploitation by global capital ultimately reproduces further con- tradictions, not least because it ignores the vast amount of biological and social reproductive labour that takes up much of women’s time and energy. As Diane Elson put it over a decade ago, in the context of debates over the structural adjustment policies (SAPs) being imposed by the International Financial Insti- tutions (IFIs), women are an “over-utilized rather than an under-utilized” resource.51 At the same time, drawing on the third theoretical premise, which is that finan- cial deepening differentially produces bodies, this trope can be seen as working to produce women in the Global South as “people of the body”. This is done in ways that contradict the erasure of bodies and embodied forms of difference that takes place through the spread of credit rating and risk assessment tools in places with more developed financial systems. In other words, whereas much of the discourse surrounding the need to extend finance to women (and certain racialised min- orities) in the advanced capitalist world—think, for instance, of Margaret Thatch- er’s “Ownership Society” in the UK and its replication in the US under Clinton and George Bush—is based on the idea that gender does not matter in economic decision-making, when referring to the Global South, gender is precisely what makes women better financial risks. This argument relies on an observation made by David McNally that “[a] central feature of bourgeois thought [ ... ] has been its othering of the body and its embody- ing of the other”.52 McNally’s observation (which itself draws on the work of Marxist feminist Himani Bannerji) is ultimately pointing to the differential pro- duction of bodies through processes of embodiment-disembodiment. It is also a key point from which one can identify the contradictory tendencies inherent between the “women as saviours” argument and the argument that has been raised in reference to financial deepening in the developed world, which asserts that finance erodes gender difference by removing the body entirely from decision-making. This latter discourse is well captured by the senior vice-president of small business banking at one of Canada’s large banks, who recently explained that what has happened “is that we have moved to a very standardised risk model, like a grid, where you look at a standard set of factors like credit rating, debt service coverage, and the value of any security a borrower is providing”. This means that ultimately, “the human element has been removed and, along with that, the risk for gender bias has been removed”.53 Whereas in Canada (and elsewhere), the “financing gender gap” is presumed to be best addressed by allowing technological progress and market forces to disap- pear the body, in the Global South it is the mothering/nurturing body that is privi- leged. Again, the contradiction here is not simply theoretical but rather actively produces embodied forms of social differentiation as the altruistic and maternal roles of certain groups of women are “re-traditionalised”. This then exacerbates what Sylvia Chant has called the “feminisation of responsibility and/or obligation” while leaving socially constructed masculine behaviour intact.54