Leadership Quote by Barber B. Conable, Jr.

Conable’s line isn’t trying to poeticize inequality; it’s trying to make it mathematically undeniable. The blunt arithmetic (two thirds, one tenth, less than one percent) works like a moral audit: if the inputs are labor and the outputs are income and property, the system is rigged. As a politician - and, notably, a World Bank-era voice - he’s deploying the cold language of percentages to force a hot conclusion: gender inequity isn’t a niche social issue, it’s a core economic malfunction.

The specific intent is pressure. Not just on governments, but on development institutions and market ideologues who prefer to treat “growth” as neutral. Conable’s subtext is that the world economy is quietly propped up by women’s undercounted labor: caregiving, subsistence farming, informal work, domestic production. Much of it isn’t “unpaid” so much as rendered invisible by the way states and markets record value. When he says women “own less than one percent of the world’s property,” he’s pointing to the real lever of power: assets. Wages can rise and still leave women dependent if land, housing, and capital remain locked behind inheritance laws, credit access, and patriarchal custom.

The final sentence sharpens the stakes. “Among the poorest of the world’s poor” reframes poverty as gendered, not accidental - a predictable outcome of rules about who can own, borrow, inherit, and be counted. It’s rhetoric built for policy: once you accept the ledger, you’re cornered into structural remedies, not charity.