This country has more serious things to worry about than period pains.
I was in Melbourne last week. The headlines there were all about mining, banking capital adequacy ratios and tax cuts. Then I came back and over here and the mainstream public discourse seems to have been mainly taken up with a discussion about period pains.
Bravo. At the risk of being that smug git at the end of a hot thread on Facebook who says "Aw shucks, let's all be reasonable, folks", isn't it a bit of a joke that the most passionate discussion we have had about New Zealand's productivity is about, ew, menstrual cramps?
For what it's worth, a paper in the American Economic Journal in 2009 found in most countries women are absent from work more frequently than men.
"Using personnel data, we find that the absences of women below the age of 45 follow a 28-day cycle, while the absences of men and of women over the age of 45 do not. We interpret this as evidence that the menstrual cycle increases female absenteeism." Whatever.
But surely girls taking to their beds with Naprogesic and a hot water bottle isn't what is causing New Zealand's productivity growth to be pants?
It seems to me, far from women being the slackarses of the workforce, twenty and thirtysomething chicks are often the responsible "grown-ups" who work harder than their boyfriends. Judging by anecdotal evidence, men in this age group are suffering from premature midlife crisis syndrome, rendering them interested in things such as gratuitously risky sports, oonst-oonst music and Top Gear type tomfoolery.
Young women are often more career-focused. But I am doing the very thing I was determined not to - getting into a stupid sex war debate when really we have bigger fish to fry. I suppose PMT and slutwalks are more sexy to write about than the fact our economy is moribund.
If only we could get as passionate about solving our productivity paradox as we are about lynching Alasdair Thompson.
But it is much harder to work out why "a country that seems close to best practice in most of the policies that are regarded as the key drivers of growth is nevertheless just an average performer" as the OECD puts it. Easier to blame it on hormones.
The scholarly theory, from Professor Phillip McCann, is that economic geography is to blame. Because of the intense competition for talent and capital from power-house "global cities" on the Pacific Rim such as Shanghai, Singapore and Sydney, second tier cities, like Auckland or Adelaide, miss out.
Professor McCann says we have no choice but to actively strengthen the existing web of inter-relationships that bind us together on a sub-regional basis.
He says enormous reductions in capital flows during the recession have only added urgency to addressing the challenge of regionalisation. I would imagine we could do this by trying to share in whatever conversation is going on in Australia, rather than focusing on our own petty embarrassments.
Only I'm not quite sure how you do that. I have been a journalist for more than 20 years in New Zealand but know more fellow hacks in Britain than I do across the ditch. I imagine a lot of other sectors are the same.
I'm not sure how you solve this, but when it comes to our productivity, I'd wager it is a more important question to be asking than whether women are incapacitated by the curse. Sorry folks.
dhc@deborahhillcone.com
