Working as a photographer for a charity a few years back, I was travelling through Malawi and stopped overnight in a mining town. It was a Wednesday, and myself (plus the local charity workers I was travelling with) headed out to a bar. Other than a woman serving at the bar, everyone else there was male. Some were playing pool. Some were drinking, but most were doing neither. I asked the bargirl why there were no women in the place. Responding as if I was slightly dim, she explained: “the men get paid on Friday”. On the surface, in a mining town, the gender pay gap is huge, with the vast majority of money officially going to men. And yet, by Saturday morning, much of the cash has been transferred to bar owners, prostitutes, girlfriends and wives. A privileged observer might suggest that women in such a town should be ‘liberated’ to earn their own money. But the point is that they are. While most would agree that women should be free to take mining jobs if they choose, it’s unlikely that many women would want such gruelling, dangerous and unhealthy work when being a bar prostitute, a girlfriend or a wife to a miner is available as an alternative.
The total value of the sex trade could be said to be the value of the net transfer of wealth from men to women. How can we begin to value an industry this big, ancient and diverse, especially when much of it – probably most of it – is undocumented and untaxed?
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