During the 1990s, finance ministries throughout the world took increasing control of all aspects of public policy and economics became the dominant discourse of policy-makers. During the same decade, feminist economics started to make its mark. In 1992, the International Association for Feminist Economics (IAFFE) was founded. IAFFE now has about six hundred members, in forty countries, holds an annual conference and organises sessions on feminist economics at a number of mainstream economics conferences. Since 1995 it has published its own highly respected academic journal __Feminist Economics.__ Feminist economics has been described as the economic theory behind gender mainstreaming.[1] And as the influence of economic discourse has spread to other areas of public policy, feminist economics has become relevant to an increasingly wide area of policy.
Advocates of feminist economics see it as a critique of mainstream economics, concerned with uncovering the underlying gender dimensions of economic processes, and as a political project, ‘a rethinking of the discipline of economics for the purpose of improving women’s position’.[2] They also see it as a better way of doing economics; its insights and methods would improve the analysis and policy conclusions made by mainstream economists. These improvements would include not only replacing gender blindness by a rigorous attention to gender, but also broadening the scope of economics to include domains that have traditionally been seen as outside economics, such as unpaid domestic work and all forms of caring. The practice of feminist economics also introduces new methods - such as talking to economic actors - and new data sources - such as ethnographic data - previously neglected by economists. Finally, insights from
feminist economics should enable economists to become more methodologically self-conscious through becoming aware of where their own discipline is situated, how its existing hierarchies and conventions work against feminist analysis, and how existing practice supports the (gender unequal) status quo.
As in many other disciplines, the feminist critique of economics developed in stages: from combating discrimination in the profession, to criticizing the practice of economics as sexist or gender blind, to engaging with the androcentrism of its fundamental tenets and methods. Initially this was mainly to point out the way in which women were omitted from analysis, for example when data was given only for men, without the omission of women being justified or even acknowledged in some cases. Feminists pointed out that economics operated on the implicit assumption that men were normal and women different. Later feminist critiques focused on the gender blindness of economists who ignore gender difference even where it has a material effect on the topic at hand. For example, in attempting to explain differences in wage rates, many articles made no mention of the fact that a substantial proportion of women’s employment in the UK is part-time, while men’s tends to be full-time. More recently feminist economists have moved on to wide-ranging critiques of the androcentrism of mainstream economics, focusing on its assumptions, methods, findings and policy prescriptions.
These wide-ranging critiques require a ‘thicker’ conception of gender than the relatively thin one used in earlier stages, in which differential effects by gender are uncovered by splitting populations into men and women and examining the differences.[3] Gender analysis using such a thin conception of gender now occurs regularly in mainstream economics. For example, there have been numerous attempts to explain the differences between men’s and women’s pay or labour market participation rates by using multiple regression analysis, a method of taking a large number of variables into account to see which differences between men and women - for example in education, experience or hours of work – have significant effects. Invariably a residual is found, a difference that cannot be explained by the factors considered in the analysis. Mainstream economists would see this residual as the only specific gender effect. Some are willing to label that residual ‘discrimination’; others see it as due to ‘unobserved factors’, that future work might show also not to be due to ‘gender’. Feminist economists point out that ‘explaining’ gender differences in pay or labour participation rates as the effects of differences in other factors simply begs the question of why there are gender differences in those other factors.
The ‘thicker’ conception of gender in feminist economics recognizes structural differences in the positions of men and women in the economy and the forms of agency through which those structural differences are reproduced. Gender is seen as a source not just of incidental differences but of structured inequalities. In the thin conception, gender is a side issue that has little bearing on how the economy as a whole works, nor on how economics is carried out. The thicker conception of gender makes it a systematic, structuring factor for the whole economy and consequently for how we think about economics.
*What is economics?*
Much more than other social science disciplines, economics is dominated by one single mainstream approach, ‘neo-classical’ economics, which attempts to explain economic phenomena in terms of one universally applicable model of human behaviour, known even before feminism gave the name an ironic edge, as ‘rational economic man’ (REM).[4] Rational economic man has a set of preferences over all possible states he could be in, which he uses to decide what to do, choosing whichever of the currently available choices he most prefers. Theorising based on alternative assumptions, or trying to challenge the idea that everything canbe explained by a single model of individual decision-making, are seen simply as ‘not economics’ (though economists have shown no reticence in attempting to use the axiomatic foundations of REM to ‘explain’ phenomena traditionally the subject matter of other disciplines, such as criminal behaviour, marriage patterns and the formation of political parties).[5]
So feminist economists have had to challenge not only the content but also the definition and boundaries of the discipline. One definition found in many standard textbooks is that economics is the __study of choice in conditions of scarcity__ - broadly how people make choices when they cannot have everything that they want. Another more abstract definition, which comes to much the same thing, is that economics is the __study of rational behaviour__ i.e. the study of Rational Economic Man, and his method of decision-making. Most feminist economics would criticise the notion of a methodological definition, particularly since such definitions operate to validate the exclusive use of a particular set of sparse assumptions in building formal models that are highly simplified accounts of the world (though they usually require complex mathematics for working out their results). Feminist economists tend to favour a more problem-oriented approach to definition.
Two less abstract, more content-oriented definitions of economics are that it is the __study of markets,__ or more broadly that it is the __study of production, distribution and exchange.__ Both these definitions have been criticised by feminists for not taking sufficient account of factors that lie outside their domain but nevertheless have bearing on much that goes on within it - for example, gender norms over caring that impact on men’s and women’s engagement in the labour market. These definitions are seen as androcentric, because what they exclude is not a question of chance, and includes much that women do. In particular women’s lives are spent largely on non-market activities and are frequently concerned not with the production of things but the reproduction of people. To omit these aspects of women’s lives is a serious problem, even in work solely focused on the traditional concerns of economists, for the time and resources that go into unpaid and reproductive activities and the results of these activities have significant effects on the market economy, and on how goods of all types are produced, distributed and exchanged.
Julie Nelson argues that economics should be the study of the ‘provisioning’ of the necessaries of life, thus extending a content-oriented definition of economics to include the contributions that women tend to make, including childbirth, caring and domestic and community work.[6] Others argue that if economics is concerned with constrained choice, it should focus more on the nature of those constraints, and should include other socially constructed constraints - such as social norms - as well as those of the market (such norms are often presented as natural rather than social constraints). But more generally feminist economists tend to reject any single definition of their field, preferring to have it defined by their actual practices and the area on which they concentrate.
*Rational Economic Man*
Feminist economists have criticised REM as an erroneous account of human behaviour, and the neo-classical conception of the economy derived from this account as therefore similarly flawed. This models society as made up of autonomous beings guided only by their desire for pleasure, who spring fully formed into existence, complete with exogenously given unchanging preferences. Individual actors do not have any childhood or other period of dependence, nor do they have any dependents. They are assumed to be selfish and to have no impact on each other except through the market. To assume otherwise would be to undermine the theorems of welfare economics that justify neo-classical adherence to laissez-faire policies and market-based solutions to economic problems.
Paula England calls REM a ‘separative self’, an autonomous individual who can be conceptualised and holds preferences independently of his environment.[7] This conception of the individual leaves no room for the ways in which people are shaped by their life experiences, with their preferences changing as a result. Further, the assumption of selfishness is incompatible with how family and much other life is conducted, and fails to reflect the reality of mutual interdependence that characterises all societies. Indeed behaviour compatible with REM is what would normally be seen as pathological.[8]
Feminist economists criticise REM as not a good account of either male or female behaviour, and one which specifically ignores the reality of the many ways in which women can have agency in their lives. Women’s lives are often centrally involved in the nurturance and care of others, but REM neither needs, nor would he give, care. In that sense much of the androcentrism that invades the whole of economics can be seen as resulting from its reliance on REM, assumptions about whom specifically abstract from the concerns of many women. It is quite appropriate then that rational economic man is unusual among abstract models in having an explicit gender.
*Inside the household*
Traditionally the household has been treated in economics as the basic unit of consumption. In the diagram of flows around the economy to be found in nearly every economics textbook, the role of the household is to sell labour, or other factors of production, and to buy consumer goods. This household is taken to act like an individual decision-maker: it is effectively a black box whose members somehow manage to act as if controlled by a single REM, but whose internal workings are outside the domain of economics.
Feminists have made two distinct criticisms of the neo-classical treatment of the household: first, that households have always been sites of production as well as consumption, and second, that a household cannot be treated as a single internally homogenous decision-making unit.
As regards the first point, because much of the domestic and community work that women do is unpaid it is not counted as part of the national product. This is because national accounts, reflecting economic theory, only count services that are marketed. However, as a result of a resolution passed at the World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995, countries have now been charged with producing satellite national accounts which take account of unpaid work and value it alongside GDP. Many countries have now produced such accounts.[9]
Having such data is important because it makes it possible to assess the effects of policy changes on the unpaid economy. It can show the mistake of assuming that work within the household is costless and, in particular, that policies that increase such work may be unsustainable. For example, the increasing participation of women in paid work has restricted the supply of relatives and neighbours who can help with child and elder care, and of community volunteers, and - for those involved in subsistence farming - of family members who produce crops for the household.
Ignoring unpaid labour results in the standard economic measures such as GDP misrepresenting the output of the whole economy, both paid and unpaid. It also means that growth rates of GDP over- or under-estimate the growth rate of the whole economy, to the extent that there are transfers of production between the paid and unpaid economies. In times when labour is moving from the unpaid to the paid economy, growth rates of GDP overestimate the growth of the whole economy; when there is movement from the paid to the unpaid economies GDP rates understate the growth of the whole economy.[10] Nevertheless, economists and policy-makers continue to target their policies on raising GDP growth rates, despite the distorting effects that concentrating solely on the paid economy can produce.
The second point that feminist economists have made about the household is that it is a site of both conflict and co-operation between members with varying amounts of power. Members of a household cannot be assumed to share equally in its resources, enjoy the same standard of living or be equally well-served by its decisions. Methodologically, there is no reason to assume that a household behaves as a unitary decision-maker. In response to this criticism, mainstream economists have searched for reasons why they can continue in their assumptions. Thus Paul Samuelson claimed that, because ‘blood was thicker than water’, family members would agree on joint preferences. Gary Becker proposed a justification more in line with the individualism of REM. He showed mathematically that if one member of a household has sufficiently large an income and is sufficiently altruistic then it is in the interests of all members to behave __as though__ they shared this ‘head’ of household’s preferences. What gives the head this power is not only his greater earning power and his altruism, but the assumption that he has the last word. This model, true to the spirit of neo-classical economics, in practice resurrects the assumptions behind the legal framework of Victorian England. Such a head of household has no explicit gender but is clearly assumed to be the paterfamilias.
This model - if it ever applied - has long become outdated, as women have developed the power and the resources to challenge male authority within households. Empirically it has also been falsified, and shown to lead to poor outcomes when applied in development policy. That economists continue to use such a model demonstrates their dependence on the theorems of neo-classical economics, and/or their woeful ignorance of the realities of modern domestic life. An account that assumes that the major contribution to a household is the financial one made by the implicitly male head of household reconfirms the primacy of paid work and results in conclusions that simply validate existing inequalities and support the traditional male breadwinner family. As feminist economists Nancy Folbre and Heidi Hartmann have pointed out, such models also assume that men have a sort of Jekyll and Hyde character, altruistic in the home and selfish in the marketplace.[11]
*Investigating care*
The area in which feminist economics has made the most significant positive contribution to economics is in the theorisation and investigation of care.[12] Care is a personal face-to-face service that enables others to have their personal needs met. Everyone needs care when they are young, as do many adults, yet caring responsibilities and caring labour are unequally distributed by gender. Feminist economists are particularly interested in exploring the implications of the way in which care transcends categories of mainstream economics (as noted earlier, self-interested and autonomous REM neither needs nor provides care).
Care is intriguing because it is both a motivation (relevant to discussion of choice and agency) and an activity (a choice that might be made) that promotes well-being (an output). Care can be seen as a form of work, in that it is purposeful activity that meets needs, takes time and energy and prevents other uses of a person’s time, but it is different from other types of work in that the relational context in which it is going on is crucial. Care is therefore not only the provision of a service, but at the same time the development of a relationship.
There has been much criticism of unpaid familial care being held up as the ‘natural’ form of care, the form against which other kinds of care are to be measured and likely to be found wanting. This approach has led to the skills that make for good care being devalued, because seen as natural feminine characteristics, effortlessly picked up (by women) in the family rather than as purposively acquired skills. But a variety of different types of skills are needed in caring: as well as formal skills, some tacit and particularistic skills are required: how to care for a particular person needs to be learned and such understanding develops through practice. This again becomes something seen as natural, based on blood ties rather than a relationship built up over time.
Carers pay a heavy penalty for assuming caring responsibilities. Unpaid carers have reduced time for earning an income and suffer labour market penalties if they try to combine paid work with caring responsibilities, since rates of pay for part-time work are considerably below those for full-time employment. Paid care attracts low wages and is seen as unskilled. Further, even compared with jobs requiring the same level of formal education and skill, there is a pay penalty for jobs that involve caring. A 1999 review of studies of pay differentials concluded: ‘We know of no studies that have used a measure of a concept resembling caring work in an earnings regression and not found a negative effect’.[13]
Feminist economists have stressed the importance of social norms in understanding this phenomenon: gendered norms are important in defining who needs care, how much is needed and above all who should provide it. Norms do change over time but men have not taken up caring at the same rate as that at which women have changed their patterns of work. While care is increasingly available on the market, those who most need to purchase care may not be the ones with the resources to do so, especially since women’s pay continues to lag significantly behind men’s. This begs some questions over the future of care: how much care will be performed and by whom? A growing deficit of care could signal a shift away from what many feminists would see as a woman’s view of the norms that characterise a good society towards one in which market norms, traditionally associated with men, come to dominate.
*Gendered processes in the labour market*
The standard neo-classical assumption is that differences in pay reflect real differences in productivity, because unfounded discrimination should be competed away. Any employer that paid a man more when a lower paid woman would be equally productive would have higher costs than competitors who did not so discriminate, and so would eventually be bankrupted. On this logic, the gender gap in pay must reflect real differences in productivity. As we have seen, labour market studies have consistently shown that experience, education and occupation explain only part of the difference between men’s and women’s wages and there remains a persistent unexplained gap. That many labour economists refuse to call this discrimination shows what a strong hold the predictions of neo-classical theory have on economic discourse.
Women’s employment histories tend to be more varied and discontinuous than men’s. Nevertheless much economics is based on an assumption that employment is full-time and continuous. Women are therefore seen as a special case whose peculiarities have to be explained: men are seen as the normal case, free of the special complicating factors that beset women’s employment. Feminist critiques have had a significant impact in this area and few papers these days would fail to attempt to justify (though not always remedy) a concentration on men.
However, there are consequent inadvertent gender biases that remain. For example, skill and occupational classifications are based on male occupations, so there are too few categories for classifying women’s occupations, giving the impression of greater homogeneity and lack of progression in skill for women than is likely to be the case.
Women’s more varied employment history means that more complex skills and new data sources are needed for its analysis. For example data on family and other caring responsibilities that structure women’s labour force participation is needed, but such data is in practice hard to find, not being a standard part of economic data collection.
*Policy*
Because feminist economics is a political project, a large proportion of its practitioners are interested in policy. They have analysed the gender implications of a variety of potential and actual policy changes and argued that all policy proposals, whatever their main focus, should be audited for their potential gender impacts.
One reason for this is in order to see how policies are likely to affect existing gender inequalities, so that those that reduce inequalities can be supported and those that worsen inequalities can either be replaced or their gender impact counteracted by other measures. For example, policies that result in cost saving within hospitals may result in patients needing more home care. Without any counteracting policies this may worsen labour market inequalities if women are more likely to take time out from employment to look after sick relatives. However, combined with a home care service and statutory paid emergency leave for carers, the policy may lose its deleterious effects on gender inequalities. Indeed it may improve them, if the home care service then gets used in other
circumstances.
Considering the gender impact of policies is also necessary because men and women may respond differently to policies. Where the behavioural impact of a policy is gendered, not to take this into account would result in such policy being badly targeted and ineffective in achieving its goals. To take the above example, if the home care service charges a fee and that fee is above most women’s wages, many women will decide not to use it and take time off work instead. This will not only worsen inequalities, it will mean that the home care service is not achieving its goal of reducing interruptions in working patterns. This argument for gender analysis should appeal to all policy-makers, whether or not gender inequalities are the focus of the policies under consideration.
Some overarching critiques of policies have also emerged. For example, policies have been criticised for continuing to be based on a male breadwinner/female carer household, an increasing outdated model. Policies have also been criticised for colluding with a notion that caring activities are their own reward and that an unequal division of caring responsibilities is simply matter of personal choice rather than symptomatic of a structural problem that needs to be addressed.
In all this feminist economics has had some formal success. Many policymakers now give lip service to the idea of paying attention to the gendered outcomes of their policies. For example, politicians in the UK are now less likely to treat as a matter of indifference the question of the person to whom money for children is paid in a household, and are likely to be concerned about the effects of their policies on women’s employment. However, there has been less success in getting politicians to question long held basic assumptions, for example, that everyone in a household lives at the same standard of living, or to question that having a high GDP growth rate should be the long-term aim of economic policy.
Notes:
1. Jill Rubery, ‘Reflections on gender mainstreaming: An example of feminist economics in action?’, Feminist Economics, 11(3), 2005.
2. Myra H. Strober, ‘Rethinking Economics Through a Feminist Lens’, American Economic Review, 84(2), 1994, p143.
3. Ingrid Robeyns, ‘Is there a Feminist Economic Methodology?’ uses these different conceptions of gender to distinguish feminist from mainstream economics, available at www.ingridrobeyns.nl/Downloads/method.pdf.
4. For more on this see Edward Fullbrook’s ‘Post-autistic economics’, in Soundings 29.
5. The Nobel prize-winner Gary Becker is most renowned for these ‘imperialistic’ attempts to spread the use of REM, most notably for feminists in ‘Theory of Marriage’, Journal of Political Economy, (part I) 81,1973 and (part II) 82, 1974; and his Treatise on the Family, enlarged edition, Harvard University Press 1991.
6. Julie A. Nelson, ‘The Study of Choice or the Study of Provisioning? Gender and the Definition of Economics’, in Beyond Economic Man (see note 6).
7. Paula England, ‘Separative and soluble selves: dichotomous thinking in economists’, in Marianne A. Ferber and Julie A. Nelson (eds), Feminist Economics Today, University of Chicago Press 2003.
8. Irene Van Staveren, The Values of Economics: An Aristotelian Perspective, Routledge 2001.
9. These accounts are called ‘satellite’ accounts because they do not replace GDP accounting, but augment it by counting in a separate account the contributions of unpaid labour that GDP accounting ignores. The UK’s experimental household satellite
account uses a particularly innovative approach in attempting to measure the output of the unpaid sector, not just its inputs, as most other countries do. See www.statistics.gov.uk/hhsa/hhsa/Index.html.
10. Barnet Wagman and Nancy Folbre, in ‘Household services and economic growth in the United States, 1870-1930’, Feminist Economics, 2, 1996, show that both types of mistakes have occurred over the past century in the US.
11. ‘The rhetoric of self-interest and the ideology of gender’, in Arjo Klamer et al (eds), The
Consequences of Economic Behaviour, Cambridge University Press 1988. 12. See, for example, Gabrielle Meagher and Julie Nelson, ‘Feminism in the Dismal Science’, The Journal of Political Philosophy, 12(1).
13. Paula England and Nancy Folbre, ‘The cost of caring’, Annals of the American Academy of Political & Social Science, 561, 1999, p43.
During the 1990s, finance ministries throughout the world took increasing control of all aspects of public policy and economics became the dominant discourse of policy-makers. During the same decade, feminist economics started to make its mark. In 1992, the International Association for Feminist Economics (IAFFE) was founded. IAFFE now has about six hundred members, in forty countries, holds an annual conference and organises sessions on feminist economics at a number of mainstream economics conferences. Since 1995 it has published its own highly respected academic journal __Feminist Economics.__ Feminist economics has been described as the economic theory behind gender mainstreaming.[1] And as the influence of economic discourse has spread to other areas of public policy, feminist economics has become relevant to an increasingly wide area of policy.
Advocates of feminist economics see it as a critique of mainstream economics, concerned with uncovering the underlying gender dimensions of economic processes, and as a political project, ‘a rethinking of the discipline of economics for the purpose of improving women’s position’.[2] They also see it as a better way of doing economics; its insights and methods would improve the analysis and policy conclusions made by mainstream economists. These improvements would include not only replacing gender blindness by a rigorous attention to gender, but also broadening the scope of economics to include domains that have traditionally been seen as outside economics, such as unpaid domestic work and all forms of caring. The practice of feminist economics also introduces new methods - such as talking to economic actors - and new data sources - such as ethnographic data - previously neglected by economists. Finally, insights from
feminist economics should enable economists to become more methodologically self-conscious through becoming aware of where their own discipline is situated, how its existing hierarchies and conventions work against feminist analysis, and how existing practice supports the (gender unequal) status quo.
As in many other disciplines, the feminist critique of economics developed in stages: from combating discrimination in the profession, to criticizing the practice of economics as sexist or gender blind, to engaging with the androcentrism of its fundamental tenets and methods. Initially this was mainly to point out the way in which women were omitted from analysis, for example when data was given only for men, without the omission of women being justified or even acknowledged in some cases. Feminists pointed out that economics operated on the implicit assumption that men were normal and women different. Later feminist critiques focused on the gender blindness of economists who ignore gender difference even where it has a material effect on the topic at hand. For example, in attempting to explain differences in wage rates, many articles made no mention of the fact that a substantial proportion of women’s employment in the UK is part-time, while men’s tends to be full-time. More recently feminist economists have moved on to wide-ranging critiques of the androcentrism of mainstream economics, focusing on its assumptions, methods, findings and policy prescriptions.
These wide-ranging critiques require a ‘thicker’ conception of gender than the relatively thin one used in earlier stages, in which differential effects by gender are uncovered by splitting populations into men and women and examining the differences.[3] Gender analysis using such a thin conception of gender now occurs regularly in mainstream economics. For example, there have been numerous attempts to explain the differences between men’s and women’s pay or labour market participation rates by using multiple regression analysis, a method of taking a large number of variables into account to see which differences between men and women - for example in education, experience or hours of work – have significant effects. Invariably a residual is found, a difference that cannot be explained by the factors considered in the analysis. Mainstream economists would see this residual as the only specific gender effect. Some are willing to label that residual ‘discrimination’; others see it as due to ‘unobserved factors’, that future work might show also not to be due to ‘gender’. Feminist economists point out that ‘explaining’ gender differences in pay or labour participation rates as the effects of differences in other factors simply begs the question of why there are gender differences in those other factors.
The ‘thicker’ conception of gender in feminist economics recognizes structural differences in the positions of men and women in the economy and the forms of agency through which those structural differences are reproduced. Gender is seen as a source not just of incidental differences but of structured inequalities. In the thin conception, gender is a side issue that has little bearing on how the economy as a whole works, nor on how economics is carried out. The thicker conception of gender makes it a systematic, structuring factor for the whole economy and consequently for how we think about economics.
*What is economics?*
Much more than other social science disciplines, economics is dominated by one single mainstream approach, ‘neo-classical’ economics, which attempts to explain economic phenomena in terms of one universally applicable model of human behaviour, known even before feminism gave the name an ironic edge, as ‘rational economic man’ (REM).[4] Rational economic man has a set of preferences over all possible states he could be in, which he uses to decide what to do, choosing whichever of the currently available choices he most prefers. Theorising based on alternative assumptions, or trying to challenge the idea that everything canbe explained by a single model of individual decision-making, are seen simply as ‘not economics’ (though economists have shown no reticence in attempting to use the axiomatic foundations of REM to ‘explain’ phenomena traditionally the subject matter of other disciplines, such as criminal behaviour, marriage patterns and the formation of political parties).[5]
So feminist economists have had to challenge not only the content but also the definition and boundaries of the discipline. One definition found in many standard textbooks is that economics is the __study of choice in conditions of scarcity__ - broadly how people make choices when they cannot have everything that they want. Another more abstract definition, which comes to much the same thing, is that economics is the __study of rational behaviour__ i.e. the study of Rational Economic Man, and his method of decision-making. Most feminist economics would criticise the notion of a methodological definition, particularly since such definitions operate to validate the exclusive use of a particular set of sparse assumptions in building formal models that are highly simplified accounts of the world (though they usually require complex mathematics for working out their results). Feminist economists tend to favour a more problem-oriented approach to definition.
Two less abstract, more content-oriented definitions of economics are that it is the __study of markets,__ or more broadly that it is the __study of production, distribution and exchange.__ Both these definitions have been criticised by feminists for not taking sufficient account of factors that lie outside their domain but nevertheless have bearing on much that goes on within it - for example, gender norms over caring that impact on men’s and women’s engagement in the labour market. These definitions are seen as androcentric, because what they exclude is not a question of chance, and includes much that women do. In particular women’s lives are spent largely on non-market activities and are frequently concerned not with the production of things but the reproduction of people. To omit these aspects of women’s lives is a serious problem, even in work solely focused on the traditional concerns of economists, for the time and resources that go into unpaid and reproductive activities and the results of these activities have significant effects on the market economy, and on how goods of all types are produced, distributed and exchanged.
Julie Nelson argues that economics should be the study of the ‘provisioning’ of the necessaries of life, thus extending a content-oriented definition of economics to include the contributions that women tend to make, including childbirth, caring and domestic and community work.[6] Others argue that if economics is concerned with constrained choice, it should focus more on the nature of those constraints, and should include other socially constructed constraints - such as social norms - as well as those of the market (such norms are often presented as natural rather than social constraints). But more generally feminist economists tend to reject any single definition of their field, preferring to have it defined by their actual practices and the area on which they concentrate.
*Rational Economic Man*
Feminist economists have criticised REM as an erroneous account of human behaviour, and the neo-classical conception of the economy derived from this account as therefore similarly flawed. This models society as made up of autonomous beings guided only by their desire for pleasure, who spring fully formed into existence, complete with exogenously given unchanging preferences. Individual actors do not have any childhood or other period of dependence, nor do they have any dependents. They are assumed to be selfish and to have no impact on each other except through the market. To assume otherwise would be to undermine the theorems of welfare economics that justify neo-classical adherence to laissez-faire policies and market-based solutions to economic problems.
Paula England calls REM a ‘separative self’, an autonomous individual who can be conceptualised and holds preferences independently of his environment.[7] This conception of the individual leaves no room for the ways in which people are shaped by their life experiences, with their preferences changing as a result. Further, the assumption of selfishness is incompatible with how family and much other life is conducted, and fails to reflect the reality of mutual interdependence that characterises all societies. Indeed behaviour compatible with REM is what would normally be seen as pathological.[8]
Feminist economists criticise REM as not a good account of either male or female behaviour, and one which specifically ignores the reality of the many ways in which women can have agency in their lives. Women’s lives are often centrally involved in the nurturance and care of others, but REM neither needs, nor would he give, care. In that sense much of the androcentrism that invades the whole of economics can be seen as resulting from its reliance on REM, assumptions about whom specifically abstract from the concerns of many women. It is quite appropriate then that rational economic man is unusual among abstract models in having an explicit gender.
*Inside the household*
Traditionally the household has been treated in economics as the basic unit of consumption. In the diagram of flows around the economy to be found in nearly every economics textbook, the role of the household is to sell labour, or other factors of production, and to buy consumer goods. This household is taken to act like an individual decision-maker: it is effectively a black box whose members somehow manage to act as if controlled by a single REM, but whose internal workings are outside the domain of economics.
Feminists have made two distinct criticisms of the neo-classical treatment of the household: first, that households have always been sites of production as well as consumption, and second, that a household cannot be treated as a single internally homogenous decision-making unit.
As regards the first point, because much of the domestic and community work that women do is unpaid it is not counted as part of the national product. This is because national accounts, reflecting economic theory, only count services that are marketed. However, as a result of a resolution passed at the World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995, countries have now been charged with producing satellite national accounts which take account of unpaid work and value it alongside GDP. Many countries have now produced such accounts.[9]
Having such data is important because it makes it possible to assess the effects of policy changes on the unpaid economy. It can show the mistake of assuming that work within the household is costless and, in particular, that policies that increase such work may be unsustainable. For example, the increasing participation of women in paid work has restricted the supply of relatives and neighbours who can help with child and elder care, and of community volunteers, and - for those involved in subsistence farming - of family members who produce crops for the household.
Ignoring unpaid labour results in the standard economic measures such as GDP misrepresenting the output of the whole economy, both paid and unpaid. It also means that growth rates of GDP over- or under-estimate the growth rate of the whole economy, to the extent that there are transfers of production between the paid and unpaid economies. In times when labour is moving from the unpaid to the paid economy, growth rates of GDP overestimate the growth of the whole economy; when there is movement from the paid to the unpaid economies GDP rates understate the growth of the whole economy.[10] Nevertheless, economists and policy-makers continue to target their policies on raising GDP growth rates, despite the distorting effects that concentrating solely on the paid economy can produce.
The second point that feminist economists have made about the household is that it is a site of both conflict and co-operation between members with varying amounts of power. Members of a household cannot be assumed to share equally in its resources, enjoy the same standard of living or be equally well-served by its decisions. Methodologically, there is no reason to assume that a household behaves as a unitary decision-maker. In response to this criticism, mainstream economists have searched for reasons why they can continue in their assumptions. Thus Paul Samuelson claimed that, because ‘blood was thicker than water’, family members would agree on joint preferences. Gary Becker proposed a justification more in line with the individualism of REM. He showed mathematically that if one member of a household has sufficiently large an income and is sufficiently altruistic then it is in the interests of all members to behave __as though__ they shared this ‘head’ of household’s preferences. What gives the head this power is not only his greater earning power and his altruism, but the assumption that he has the last word. This model, true to the spirit of neo-classical economics, in practice resurrects the assumptions behind the legal framework of Victorian England. Such a head of household has no explicit gender but is clearly assumed to be the paterfamilias.
This model - if it ever applied - has long become outdated, as women have developed the power and the resources to challenge male authority within households. Empirically it has also been falsified, and shown to lead to poor outcomes when applied in development policy. That economists continue to use such a model demonstrates their dependence on the theorems of neo-classical economics, and/or their woeful ignorance of the realities of modern domestic life. An account that assumes that the major contribution to a household is the financial one made by the implicitly male head of household reconfirms the primacy of paid work and results in conclusions that simply validate existing inequalities and support the traditional male breadwinner family. As feminist economists Nancy Folbre and Heidi Hartmann have pointed out, such models also assume that men have a sort of Jekyll and Hyde character, altruistic in the home and selfish in the marketplace.[11]
*Investigating care*
The area in which feminist economics has made the most significant positive contribution to economics is in the theorisation and investigation of care.[12] Care is a personal face-to-face service that enables others to have their personal needs met. Everyone needs care when they are young, as do many adults, yet caring responsibilities and caring labour are unequally distributed by gender. Feminist economists are particularly interested in exploring the implications of the way in which care transcends categories of mainstream economics (as noted earlier, self-interested and autonomous REM neither needs nor provides care).
Care is intriguing because it is both a motivation (relevant to discussion of choice and agency) and an activity (a choice that might be made) that promotes well-being (an output). Care can be seen as a form of work, in that it is purposeful activity that meets needs, takes time and energy and prevents other uses of a person’s time, but it is different from other types of work in that the relational context in which it is going on is crucial. Care is therefore not only the provision of a service, but at the same time the development of a relationship.
There has been much criticism of unpaid familial care being held up as the ‘natural’ form of care, the form against which other kinds of care are to be measured and likely to be found wanting. This approach has led to the skills that make for good care being devalued, because seen as natural feminine characteristics, effortlessly picked up (by women) in the family rather than as purposively acquired skills. But a variety of different types of skills are needed in caring: as well as formal skills, some tacit and particularistic skills are required: how to care for a particular person needs to be learned and such understanding develops through practice. This again becomes something seen as natural, based on blood ties rather than a relationship built up over time.
Carers pay a heavy penalty for assuming caring responsibilities. Unpaid carers have reduced time for earning an income and suffer labour market penalties if they try to combine paid work with caring responsibilities, since rates of pay for part-time work are considerably below those for full-time employment. Paid care attracts low wages and is seen as unskilled. Further, even compared with jobs requiring the same level of formal education and skill, there is a pay penalty for jobs that involve caring. A 1999 review of studies of pay differentials concluded: ‘We know of no studies that have used a measure of a concept resembling caring work in an earnings regression and not found a negative effect’.[13]
Feminist economists have stressed the importance of social norms in understanding this phenomenon: gendered norms are important in defining who needs care, how much is needed and above all who should provide it. Norms do change over time but men have not taken up caring at the same rate as that at which women have changed their patterns of work. While care is increasingly available on the market, those who most need to purchase care may not be the ones with the resources to do so, especially since women’s pay continues to lag significantly behind men’s. This begs some questions over the future of care: how much care will be performed and by whom? A growing deficit of care could signal a shift away from what many feminists would see as a woman’s view of the norms that characterise a good society towards one in which market norms, traditionally associated with men, come to dominate.
*Gendered processes in the labour market*
The standard neo-classical assumption is that differences in pay reflect real differences in productivity, because unfounded discrimination should be competed away. Any employer that paid a man more when a lower paid woman would be equally productive would have higher costs than competitors who did not so discriminate, and so would eventually be bankrupted. On this logic, the gender gap in pay must reflect real differences in productivity. As we have seen, labour market studies have consistently shown that experience, education and occupation explain only part of the difference between men’s and women’s wages and there remains a persistent unexplained gap. That many labour economists refuse to call this discrimination shows what a strong hold the predictions of neo-classical theory have on economic discourse.
Women’s employment histories tend to be more varied and discontinuous than men’s. Nevertheless much economics is based on an assumption that employment is full-time and continuous. Women are therefore seen as a special case whose peculiarities have to be explained: men are seen as the normal case, free of the special complicating factors that beset women’s employment. Feminist critiques have had a significant impact in this area and few papers these days would fail to attempt to justify (though not always remedy) a concentration on men.
However, there are consequent inadvertent gender biases that remain. For example, skill and occupational classifications are based on male occupations, so there are too few categories for classifying women’s occupations, giving the impression of greater homogeneity and lack of progression in skill for women than is likely to be the case.
Women’s more varied employment history means that more complex skills and new data sources are needed for its analysis. For example data on family and other caring responsibilities that structure women’s labour force participation is needed, but such data is in practice hard to find, not being a standard part of economic data collection.
*Policy*
Because feminist economics is a political project, a large proportion of its practitioners are interested in policy. They have analysed the gender implications of a variety of potential and actual policy changes and argued that all policy proposals, whatever their main focus, should be audited for their potential gender impacts.
One reason for this is in order to see how policies are likely to affect existing gender inequalities, so that those that reduce inequalities can be supported and those that worsen inequalities can either be replaced or their gender impact counteracted by other measures. For example, policies that result in cost saving within hospitals may result in patients needing more home care. Without any counteracting policies this may worsen labour market inequalities if women are more likely to take time out from employment to look after sick relatives. However, combined with a home care service and statutory paid emergency leave for carers, the policy may lose its deleterious effects on gender inequalities. Indeed it may improve them, if the home care service then gets used in other
circumstances.
Considering the gender impact of policies is also necessary because men and women may respond differently to policies. Where the behavioural impact of a policy is gendered, not to take this into account would result in such policy being badly targeted and ineffective in achieving its goals. To take the above example, if the home care service charges a fee and that fee is above most women’s wages, many women will decide not to use it and take time off work instead. This will not only worsen inequalities, it will mean that the home care service is not achieving its goal of reducing interruptions in working patterns. This argument for gender analysis should appeal to all policy-makers, whether or not gender inequalities are the focus of the policies under consideration.
Some overarching critiques of policies have also emerged. For example, policies have been criticised for continuing to be based on a male breadwinner/female carer household, an increasing outdated model. Policies have also been criticised for colluding with a notion that caring activities are their own reward and that an unequal division of caring responsibilities is simply matter of personal choice rather than symptomatic of a structural problem that needs to be addressed.
In all this feminist economics has had some formal success. Many policymakers now give lip service to the idea of paying attention to the gendered outcomes of their policies. For example, politicians in the UK are now less likely to treat as a matter of indifference the question of the person to whom money for children is paid in a household, and are likely to be concerned about the effects of their policies on women’s employment. However, there has been less success in getting politicians to question long held basic assumptions, for example, that everyone in a household lives at the same standard of living, or to question that having a high GDP growth rate should be the long-term aim of economic policy.
Notes:
1. Jill Rubery, ‘Reflections on gender mainstreaming: An example of feminist economics in action?’, Feminist Economics, 11(3), 2005.
2. Myra H. Strober, ‘Rethinking Economics Through a Feminist Lens’, American Economic Review, 84(2), 1994, p143.
3. Ingrid Robeyns, ‘Is there a Feminist Economic Methodology?’ uses these different conceptions of gender to distinguish feminist from mainstream economics, available at www.ingridrobeyns.nl/Downloads/method.pdf.
4. For more on this see Edward Fullbrook’s ‘Post-autistic economics’, in Soundings 29.
5. The Nobel prize-winner Gary Becker is most renowned for these ‘imperialistic’ attempts to spread the use of REM, most notably for feminists in ‘Theory of Marriage’, Journal of Political Economy, (part I) 81,1973 and (part II) 82, 1974; and his Treatise on the Family, enlarged edition, Harvard University Press 1991.
6. Julie A. Nelson, ‘The Study of Choice or the Study of Provisioning? Gender and the Definition of Economics’, in Beyond Economic Man (see note 6).
7. Paula England, ‘Separative and soluble selves: dichotomous thinking in economists’, in Marianne A. Ferber and Julie A. Nelson (eds), Feminist Economics Today, University of Chicago Press 2003.
8. Irene Van Staveren, The Values of Economics: An Aristotelian Perspective, Routledge 2001.
9. These accounts are called ‘satellite’ accounts because they do not replace GDP accounting, but augment it by counting in a separate account the contributions of unpaid labour that GDP accounting ignores. The UK’s experimental household satellite
account uses a particularly innovative approach in attempting to measure the output of the unpaid sector, not just its inputs, as most other countries do. See www.statistics.gov.uk/hhsa/hhsa/Index.html.
10. Barnet Wagman and Nancy Folbre, in ‘Household services and economic growth in the United States, 1870-1930’, Feminist Economics, 2, 1996, show that both types of mistakes have occurred over the past century in the US.
11. ‘The rhetoric of self-interest and the ideology of gender’, in Arjo Klamer et al (eds), The
Consequences of Economic Behaviour, Cambridge University Press 1988. 12. See, for example, Gabrielle Meagher and Julie Nelson, ‘Feminism in the Dismal Science’, The Journal of Political Philosophy, 12(1).
13. Paula England and Nancy Folbre, ‘The cost of caring’, Annals of the American Academy of Political & Social Science, 561, 1999, p43.